Prophet's Prey

by Sam Brower

  The next day, Elissa’s sister Theresa Wall Blackmore testified, recalling how the “sad, hopeless, depressed” Elissa had telephoned her the day after her wedding, crying throughout the conversation. “She hated to be near him,” Theresa said of Elissa’s feelings for Allen. The defense did not question her.

  Becky Wall, another sister, followed and underlined Elissa’s testimony. She also attempted to define the treacherous “keep sweet” policy within the FLDS: “Even when it hurts, you were to act happy … That was how you conquered the evil inside of you.”

  I blanched at that and flashed back to a conversation with one of my sources. The man had been summoned to the Jeffs compound to meet the prophet himself and had found Warren in a posh office, seated in what was described as a “tricked out” massage lounger with built-in speakers. Reclined in comfort, Jeffs delivered a “training” about the man having a dark heart and how he was no longer worthy to hold priesthood and be in the church. On the bottom of Warren’s fancy left boot was written the word KEEP, and on the right one was SWEET. He then cast the man out of the church and community, broke up his family and devastated his life from the comfort of his fancy recliner.

  The final witness for the state was almost an afterthought: Jane Blackmore, a veteran midwife in Canada and first wife of Winston Blackmore before leaving the faith and her husband. She had delivered hundreds of babies and had treated scores of FLDS girls below the age of eighteen for pregnancies that were terminated due to complications. Among those unfortunate girls was Elissa Wall, who had suffered a miscarriage while visiting family members in Canada during the time she was pregnant with Allen Steed’s baby.

  The defense put on a case that had little meat to it. Warren Jeffs did not testify in his own behalf, so Walter Bugden and Tara Isaacson were relying on Allen Steed, who spoke so softly that he was admonished by the judge several times to speak up. Out of frustration, Steed ended up standing in the witness box to deliver his testimony so he could be better heard, but really only succeeded in looking foolish. The prosecution had delayed filing charges against Steed until after Warren’s case had been decided, to prevent the FLDS and the press from discovering Elissa’s identity. Now that secrecy was no longer a factor, Steed realized that he was trapped. He knew that it was illegal in the state of Utah to have sex with a fourteen-year-old girl, no matter what the circumstances, so to admit to sex with Elissa in any fashion would be tantamount to admitting to a crime. It was obvious that a rape charge would soon be heading his way, so he lawyered up with a little-known Salt Lake City defense attorney by the name of Jim Bradshaw. Bradshaw seemed to be out to make a name for himself in a very high-profile case.

  It did neither of them much good. Any competent defense attorney would urge that his client not say anything that may be incriminating, a constitutional right guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. But Steed either got bad advice or didn’t listen to his lawyer; he repeatedly admitted under oath to having had sex with the girl.

  Both sides rested their cases on Friday and the jury began deliberations, but was granted a weekend break after a few hours. For Elissa and the prosecution team, that meant holding our breaths in anticipation. Nobody had been able to read the faces or body language of the stoic jurors. I had no idea which way they would go, and things wrapped up so quickly that it had seemed surreal.

  On Tuesday, September 25, 2007, the trial ended with total vindication for Elissa Wall. Warren Jeffs was found guilty on both counts of being an accomplice to the rape of a minor. Allen Steed was charged with rape the day after the Jeffs verdict.

  In November, after two months of a presentencing investigation, Judge Shumate gave Jeffs the maximum penalty under Utah law. Each count carried a five-years-to-life prison sentence, to be served back-to-back. In addition, there was a cumulative fine of $37,000.

  I stood in the parking lot of the Washington County attorney’s office after the sentencing and watched a helicopter take off to ferry the prophet straight from the courthouse to the Utah State Prison at Point of the Mountain, some twenty miles south of Salt Lake City. There, Warren Jeffs, in shackles, hobbled into his new world. It was a good day.

  The once powerful religious fanatic had become a very small fish in a very large pool of sharks, subject to regular prison protocol. All of the special privileges were stripped away as he went into lockdown, shattered by the sudden realization that the heavens had once again failed to intervene on his behalf. Despite the money, the influence, the high-powered lawyers, and the devotion of his flock, Warren had lost everything because of his crimes. An attorney tried to take his deposition in prison and reported that Warren was so mentally out of it that he had been chained to a wall for his own safety. His only communication with the outside world was through his attorneys.

  A few months later, in February 2008, he was extradited from Utah to the jail in Kingman, Arizona, to await trial on four counts of sexual misconduct with a minor, four counts of incest, and one count of conspiracy to commit sexual conduct with a minor.

  Warren Steed Jeffs received two life sentences for his crimes in Utah, had been extradited to Arizona to face additional charges there, and had a federal fugitive charge waiting in the wings after the state charges were completed to seal his fate. It began to appear as if Warren may finally have been taken to task. But five months later, an emotionally disturbed young woman picked up her telephone and dialed the New Bridge Family Shelter in San Angelo, Texas, claiming to be an abused teenage bride named Sarah who was being held prisoner at the YFZ Ranch.

  CHAPTER 32

  Sarah

  On March 29, 2008, Alisa Thomas at the New Bridge Family Shelter in San Angelo, Texas, listened carefully to a sobbing, breaking young voice on the crisis hotline, hoping to establish some sort of personal bond that would persuade the troubled caller to trust her. This one seemed a little different; perhaps the caller was a little more desperate, but it was a challenge getting the details from her. Information emerged only in bits and pieces, and the hotline veteran was convinced the caller was a terrified victim of child abuse. After forty-two minutes, including several long pauses, the conversation finally came to a tenuous close. The girl promised to call again. Thomas was dubious. She had heard that same promise many times before from other girls looking for help, and that second call seldom came.

  This one did. In fact, over the next two days, the same girl telephoned frequently and would stay on the line anywhere from a few moments to more than an hour. Jessica Carroll, another experienced hotline volunteer, pitched in to field some of the calls. Working around the caller’s bouts of uncontrollable weeping, the women pieced together a shocking but disturbingly familiar tale.

  Victims of child sexual abuse are smothered by fear, guilt, embarrassment, and shame. As a general rule, the perpetrators of the crime are skilled at keeping their victim quiet by keeping them too terrified to reveal their dark secrets. Hotline workers are trained to break that stranglehold and convince the anonymous callers to take a giant leap of faith and believe they will be safe in exposing the harm that has befallen them. In this new case, enough details seeped out during the meandering conversations for the workers to begin a preliminary profile of the victim. The caller said her name was Sarah. She claimed to be sixteen years old and said she had been placed in a polygamous marriage when she was only fifteen. She already had one baby, was pregnant again, and her husband, who was forty-nine, beat her.

  When coaxed to give her location, Sarah said that she was confined to one of the buildings at the fortress-like religious compound called the Yearning for Zion Ranch outside of Eldorado, Texas. The caller insisted that the prophet Warren Jeffs himself had chosen and “sealed” her to her husband, who already had several other wives. She had been at the ranch for three years. Her parents did not live there.

  The mention of Warren Jeffs and his YFZ Ranch rang loud alarm bells with the hotline workers. Everybody in the area knew about the polygamous YFZ compound and knew that Jeffs and his cu
lt believed their eternal salvation depended upon the practice of plural marriage, including placing little girls with much older men.

  Even though six months earlier the prophet had been convicted in Utah of being an accomplice to rape, and now was in jail in Arizona awaiting trial on additional charges, Sarah nevertheless was still clearly terrified.

  Carroll and Thomas finally had heard enough. They pressed a speed dial button that connected their phones directly to the Texas Department of Public Safety—the Texas Rangers.

  A few days later, on April 1, 2008, my own telephone rang at my office in Cedar City. “Sam, I need your opinion on something.” It was Flora Jessop, and if Flora was calling, I could be sure that the subject would have something to do with the FLDS.

  Over the past four years while I had been chasing Jeffs and working on legal actions involving the FLDS and the United Effort Plan Trust, I had stayed in contact with Flora, whose activism against the church that had misused her as a child was unrelenting. She always had her ear to the ground. Jeffs was in prison, but the church remained strong, isolated, as suspicious of outsiders as ever, and extremely secretive. I had believed for some time that things were approaching some kind of tipping point, and whatever it was probably was going to involve that fortress temple down in Texas.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “A young girl is calling me. She says her name is Sarah, and she claims that she is being kept against her will by the FLDS. She sounds like she wants to get out, but I’m not completely sure.” It is not uncommon for a scared FLDS girl to call Flora for help, but most of them vacillate at the moment of truth and change their minds, unable to let go of the demented life that has been thrust upon them.

  “So what can I do for you?” Flora knew the drill as well as anyone: Get the facts, call the authorities. She asked if I would listen in on the next call and help assess the situation: Was this really a little girl in trouble, or was something else going on? The Short Creek police had threatened to arrest Flora for helping other girls escape from the FLDS, and she needed to be sure this wasn’t some sort of setup.

  Before long, the mysterious Sarah made contact again, and Flora brought me on the line to let me eavesdrop, a perfectly legal action in thirty-eight states, including Arizona and Utah, with the consent of only one party to the call. To keep from spooking the caller, I muted my phone and listened over the speaker, turning on a tape recorder to capture the conversation. I heard a shaky voice relating still another sad and disturbing story from inside the church; and I listened with an investigator’s neutral, professional ear, because I had heard similar stories, this bad and worse, from many other girls.

  After only a few minutes, my impressions began to take shape. This kid used FLDS terminology, a certain style of speech unique to Short Creek, like calling the pizza place “Craigo’s” or the grocery store the CMC. She knew Mormon religious terms, used FLDS idioms that an outsider would not know, and provided accurate information about Short Creek, from the medical clinic to the local store. My conclusion after that first call was, “Dang, she’s got a lot of information.” However, it would be imprudent to listen in on a call that came in out of the blue, from someone I don’t know and can’t interview, and just take it at face value. As an investigator, and as I accumulate more information, I am in the habit of not only evaluating, but constantly reevaluating every story and piece of evidence that I come across. Until I am able to actually see and personally assess the person on the other end of the line, I will always have a certain degree of doubt concerning the veracity of the caller.

  My impression was that she was probably a member of the FLDS or at least somehow involved. If the call to Flora was a setup, hoax, or just some sort of practical joke, the person on the other end of the line was damn good at it, and she had done her homework. The jolting centerpiece of her story was the assertion that she was only sixteen years old and had been abused by her own father, had been made pregnant by him and had a miscarriage. An FLDS doctor had been summoned to the home but had refused to take her to the medical clinic for treatment. That was a match, because the FLDS uses public hospitals only as a last resort and she knew the name of the doctor, Lloyd Barlow. She said she had been forced to clean up the mess herself.

  Sarah avoided saying where she was; she seemed afraid and unwilling to commit to have someone go and help her. That reaction was also totally consistent with the situation, since all FLDS children are taught to distrust the outside world. I was privy to several calls over the next few days, as Sarah fleshed out her ever more riveting narrative. It was becoming impossible not to lend credence to the precise details. Everything might not be exactly accurate, but something was going on with her. She was, without a doubt, terrified. Neither Flora nor I had ever set eyes on this mystery caller. We made the decision to turn our information over to a trusted law enforcement agency to carry the information farther through the system.

  The following day, Wednesday, April 2, Leslie Brooks Long, a sergeant in Company E of the Texas Rangers, drove over to see the volunteers at the New Bridge Family Shelter. Long had worn the famed little silver badge with the circled star since 1997, and his turf covered a great deal of West Texas. He had received specialized training on sexual assault against children.

  He interviewed Carroll and Thomas independently and listened to the tapes of the soft voice on the recorded hotline. The caller had finally identified herself as Sarah Jessop, with a date of birth of January 13, 1992. She said she was the mother of a baby who was eight months old. Ranger Long did the math: if that birthday was correct, then Sarah was sixteen. And if the baby was eight months, Sarah could not have been more than fifteen when the child was conceived. Now she was pregnant again.

  Sarah had told the hotline volunteers that she had lived at the YFZ Ranch since she was thirteen, and that Jessop was her maiden name. She had been placed with an FLDS man whom she identified as Dale Barlow, who she said hit and hurt her, both physically and sexually. The ranger knew that a fifteen-year-old girl could not legally consent to sex in the state of Texas. According to the law, Sarah also was too young to be the legal spouse of Dale Barlow or anyone else.

  Sarah’s dark story had spun out through more calls to the hotline, and she had been asked about the possibility of escaping her captors. Sarah was terrified at the consequences of getting caught if she tried to escape the only life she had ever known. There was a manned guard tower at the main entrance to the YFZ Ranch, as well as mounds of slag and debris piled high in strategic locations that provided sentries with a view of the entire compound and beyond the fences that enclosed it. With guards always around, she was even torn in her decision to seek help. She wavered, changed her mind, switched from promising the hotline workers that she would try to escape to asking them to forget that she had ever called.

  Momentum was building, though. A child in distress draws a strong and immediate response from law enforcement. If the girl was in danger, the ranger realized that time was of the essence. He ran a check on Barlow through law enforcement databases and found that an FLDS member named Dale Evans Barlow had been convicted in Arizona of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor and as part of his sentence had been given three years of probation, beginning in August 2005. That probation was still in effect, a fact that added validity to Sarah’s claim.

  Long decided that there was probable cause to obtain a warrant to search the YFZ Ranch, and a major investigation began to take shape as he prepared the legal steps needed to search the compound for the distressed teenager identified as Sarah Jessop and to arrest Dale Evans Barlow on the charge of sexual assault of a child in violation of Texas Penal Code Section 22.011. Since a child was involved, he conferred with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to have some of their specialists involved in the investigation.

  On Thursday, April 3, Judge Barbara Walther of the Fifty-first District Court signed a search warrant.

  I had learned over my years as a P.
I. that things are not always as they seem, and my caution lights continued to blink as I listened to more calls from Sarah to Flora. Until enough evidence is available to say for certain that something is a fact, I will not take a position one way or the other. Although the girl was persuasive with her general story, discrepancies would occasionally pop up, including the way she had begun to sometimes shift from using the name of “Sarah” to calling herself “Laura,” and saying that Sarah was her twin sister down in the Texas compound. Scared, mixed-up kids often stumble through their stories and this one was fairly accurate given the circumstances. I would have liked to have seen some more evidence, but if Sarah or Laura or whatever her name was needed help, time was critical.

  The circumstances had grown compelling enough for me to alert my comrade-in-arms Gary Engels, who could push the information to the authorities in Mohave County, Arizona. I explained to him the saga of Sarah and played some of my tapes of her emotional calls. We brainstormed it for a while, and both of us concluded that some legal wheels needed to be set in motion to investigate the possibility that the girl was being held captive by her father in Short Creek.

  Independently, and without knowledge of each other, authorities, in several western states, including Gary and me, had begun responding to the disturbing calls from a child crying for help. The Texans got to the starting line first.

  CHAPTER 33

  Standoff

  By late afternoon on Thursday, April 3, a short string of dusty government sedans was driving north on U.S. 277 just outside of Eldorado, population 1,951, the only town in Schleicher County, Texas. After less than a mile, they peeled onto a chip seal track called County Road 300. The cars were carrying Brooks Long and three other Texas Rangers, County Sheriff David Doran and two of his deputies, and nearly a dozen specialists from the Child Protective Services Division of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. They were headed for the YFZ Ranch.