Prophet's Prey

by Sam Brower

  After talking with the sheriff, I remained at my computer keyboard to monitor the developments in Texas when my “no-coincidences” rule took another sharp jolt. I had received an e-mail from still another FLDS girl asking for help: “I can’t call the cops it would only make it worse … (It involves missing persons.)”

  Unlike the anonymous caller, I knew this contact extremely well. The message had been sent by none other than Candi Shapley, the one-time child bride whose grand jury testimony had once rocked the entire FLDS and precipitated Warren Jeffs’s run as a fugitive. I had worked hard to help prepare Candi emotionally to actually take the witness stand against the prophet and against her abusive former husband, but at the critical moment, she had backed down, apparently coerced by the church and her parents into keeping silent. Nevertheless, I had stayed in touch, because I try never to burn my sources. When I read her comment about “missing persons” in the e-mail, I immediately thought about her twins and considered the possibility that the FLDS was once again using her children as hostages to make sure that Candi remained muzzled.

  I wrote back that if she wanted my help, I was on her side. The answer came back immediately:

  OK so what if I was to tell you my girl is missing and I don’t know where she is? I’m not saying she is … What would I do? Where would I start?

  I wrote, “If my daughter was missing, I would kick over every rock and look behind every bush until I found her, and if that did not work, I would get mad-dog mean. But everyone’s circumstances are not the same. If you really, really want to find her, trust me and let me help you find her.”

  She e-mailed back that she was undecided about what to do. We both had been through this before. I understood the pressure on her. Candi knew that if she summoned the courage to “make a stand,” that there would be a price to pay. She stated that “all hell will break loose. My Family will 4ever despise me, and threaten me in some way.” She knew it was now or never. “Their so called teachings and training (known as brainwashing) really mess with ones mind.”

  Candi signed off, leaving me alone with my thoughts. Why was she contacting me right now, at this particularly anxious time, after months of silence? I also thought it curious that the urgent e-mails from someone as plugged into the FLDS as Candi Shapley had not mentioned a word about what was happening at the YFZ Ranch, which was by now international news. The timing seemed more than accidental. Was she somehow involved with the Texas situation?

  Sheriff David Doran was watching part of his own personal nightmare come true. The authorities had found much more than they had anticipated, and while the situation remained peaceful, it had not gone well and was not yet over. State resources were being stretched to the brink.

  The authorities had been exceedingly careful, knowing that it is a traumatic experience for everyone involved when victims of abuse must be removed from their homes. None of the cops or the experienced social workers had ever imagined having to deal with such intense trauma on the vast scale that confronted them as Friday drew to a close.

  It was time for the Child Protective Services specialists to make some crucial decisions. Having been met with such confusion and lying, the CPS workers needed to get all of the children together if there was to be any hope of sorting out who was really who. That would be impossible while everybody remained at the ranch. Transportation was arranged and by the end of the day, 162 FLDS children were moved away, many to a temporary shelter at the Eldorado civic center, where cots and beds were set up. They were later taken to the old restored Fort Concho in San Angelo, to be housed until arrangements could be made for temporary foster care or group homes.

  Another decision was a shocker for me. Swayed by emotion for the distraught kids, the CPS allowed mothers to accompany their children to serve as buffers because the fearful kids had never lived in the outside world. Allowing possible abusers to stay with their victims was unprecedented. The FLDS leaders seized the opportunity and let only some of the mothers go—those capable of keeping the kids from spilling their guts about what actually went on at the ranch. The chosen moms brought along cell phones and cameras and stayed in constant touch with the FLDS leadership.

  No less alarming to me was learning about the press access that was being allowed by the FLDS. The entire religion loathed outside attention, but now the church instructed those mothers to go against their lifetime of training and actually be nice to the reporters and photographers of the gentile media.

  When I heard about the decisions, I could predict with near certainty what would happen next because it had happened before. If the FLDS women were giving interviews and providing pictures of weeping, frightened kids, the Texas operation was at risk of being a replay of the infamous ’53 Raid in Arizona. The FLDS propaganda machine had swung into operation with a public relations gambit that would prove to yield immense benefits for the church. Opening their secret lives to the hungry media was extremely rare, and the reporters jumped at the chance for exclusive information.

  Rod Parker, the longtime lawyer for the FLDS who had been fired by Warren, was back on the job, this time to help frame the church message. Although he is not a Mormon, Parker was likely very aware of the importance to the FLDS of the old 1953 Arizona raid, and how that story could be spun to match what was currently happening in Texas. Once again, the child abuse of the organization was about to be buried beneath an avalanche of media coverage, orchestrated by the claims of a twisted church and its spin doctors claiming governmental abuse.

  The attention of much of the country was riveted on the pictures of mothers and children. Most of the media played the story straight, but some had bought the FLDS lies: Heartless cops and government workers were snatching babies from their loving, polite, clean, and God-fearing families in defiance of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion. In the age of the Internet, people from all over the globe joined the conversation.

  That the Constitution does not give anyone permission to engage in criminal activities under the guise of “religion” was mostly ignored. Worshipping God is much different than raping children and breaking families apart.

  CHAPTER 35

  Seizure

  Bishop Merril Jessop was out of his league. After decades of intense internal power struggles, the FLDS had abandoned any pretense of shared leadership in favor of “one-man rule.” Warren Jeffs made almost every decision, but in this time of ultimate crisis, he was sitting in an Arizona jail cell, and the bishop could not reach him. The police were on the doorstep of the sacred temple and Uncle Warren was unable to call the shots. Jessop, the on-site ranch manager, was now forced to make decisions on his own, a situation that carried serious repercussions should the prophet later believe Jessop had made the wrong choices.

  Jessop had to do something, because despite all of the dodges and lies, the police were connecting the dots as children and young wives were taken away for further questioning.

  Meanwhile, Ranger Brooks Long was putting together an expanded search warrant to supplement the original one, a section of which vividly described why things were so complicated. Long told how a CPS worker interviewed a girl named Arta Jessop Barlow, who was pregnant and had a two-year-old child and claimed she did not know her own age. The worker then interviewed another girl, eight-year-old Viola Barlow, who contradicted that story. Viola said that Arta had four children and was not even sixteen! According to Viola, Arta was “spiritually united” to Richard Jessop Barlow, who happened to be Viola’s own father. The mother of Viola was Richard’s first wife, Susan Black Barlow. Arta was the second wife, and both were still married to Richard. That was only one of the many convoluted stories being uncovered—tales that were strange to begin with and were further complicated by determined FLDS efforts to deceive.

  Ranger Long also was able to cite having personally seen a document that showed one man being married to more than twenty wives. CPS workers had interviewed a number of underage girls who were m
arried to much older men, and some of those girls were already mothers themselves. Veda Keate had been married to Warren Jeffs at the age of thirteen and had conceived her child at fourteen. Veda was now nineteen, and her daughter was four. Around each corner, the investigators seemed to uncover a new piece of evidence that would alarm them even more, including the very notable disparity in number between males and females at the ranch: There were twice as many girls as boys.

  With most of what they were finding, a new warrant would not have been required because the new evidence fell under what is known as the “open fields doctrine.” If a peace officer observes a syringe and a spoon in the back seat of a car during a routine traffic stop for a broken tail light, he is justified in conducting a more thorough search of the vehicle to look for other evidence of a crime unrelated to the original reason for stopping the vehicle. At the YFZ Ranch, police had crossed that legal threshold almost immediately upon entering the grounds.

  After three days of searching and uncovering fresh evidence, their probable cause was building, and with the church leaders proving untrustworthy and deceitful, it was clear that the ranch was a hotbed of criminal activity. The police were now prepared to go after the temple itself and a smaller adjoining annex, and specifically any records and data that were stored inside. Long wanted the contents of locked safes, locked desk drawers, locked vaults, computers, and computer peripherals that may contain information verifying child abuse. There was overwhelming evidence that multiple incidents of child abuse had taken place on the ranch and a new warrant was prepared and signed by Judge Walther. This time the FBI also showed up with a warrant of its own.

  Merril Jessop was still operating under an oath to “keep sacred things secret.” As bishop he probably knew what was inside the temple, and he understood that if law officers breached the inner sanctum, many of the church’s most sensitive secrets would be at risk. But the doors were still locked, and while the kids and many of the women were gone by the night of April 5, the men were still there—loyal, dedicated, ferociously faithful men who would do whatever they were told. They would resist if called upon to do so.

  But there was a counter-balancing force at work on Merril Jessop, an unusual woman I will call Lorraine to respect her privacy. Lorraine had been a wife of the late prophet Rulon Jeffs. After his death she was hounded by Warren to become another one of his wives, but she refused and left the church. She still maintained close ties to many of the people within the religion, people she had known her whole life and was anxious to help if she could. She had been invited to go to Texas to stand by as a sort of cultural translator and help shed light on some of the religious practices and family histories. When things began to heat up at the temple site, Lorraine remembered that she still had the bishop’s number in her phone. As tensions escalated, she made the decision to try to contact and reason with the only man that had the authority to avert violence.

  To her surprise, Merril Jessop answered the call. He did not want to talk to her, but Lorraine was persistent, and he was so desperate for guidance that he reluctantly listened. Lorraine became a calming voice as the crisis unfolded, urging Merril to carefully think through this potentially dangerous situation and not do anything rash. Don’t let it turn ugly, she said. Since Uncle Warren was not around, Merril felt reasonably safe talking to Lorraine, and her warning carried some weight, whether he wanted to admit it or not.

  As the cops prepared to enter the temple, the behavior of the FLDS men took on a more menacing tone. They spread out until one of them was positioned every sixteen feet or so along the perimeter of the wall that surrounded the five-acre temple property. They would periodically hold their arm to the square and pray loudly for God to bring down “whirlwind judgments” upon the heads of the police, the defilers, and strike them dead. Dozens of harmonized deep voices were begging for the Lord to intervene and punish the unbelievers.

  The police cleared a path through the chanting men, who stood their ground and simply would not get out of the way. The cops wrestled a huge battering ram into position at the temple’s massive oak front door, and the FLDS prayers for death turned into hymns, with a defiant, all-male chorus singing old Mormon songs of faith. The chant of the hymn “The Spirit of God” rang out as the battering ram smashed against the big door with a booming, cannon-like thunder. The ram was so heavy that officers had to take turns handling it, and the doors were so thick and sturdy that it took police more than an hour to break through. All the while, the FLDS men sang out and prayed, chanting for the destruction of the officers, their voices rising like a demented choir. Even some longtime policemen and Texas Rangers were shaken by the unrelenting calls for divine intervention. “Really weird,” observed one. When the door eventually cracked, the watchers moaned in shock and dismay.

  The battering continued, and soon a second crack appeared, which increased the calls for God to rain down the ultimate punishment on the intruders. When the ram made a third large split, the twelve-foot doors flew apart with an echoing boom and the entrance to the cavernous temple was finally breached.

  All around the wall, the men of the church collapsed like marionettes whose strings had been cut. Some dropped to their knees in disbelief, others fell prone and scrabbled in the dirt, and still others stood sobbing like children with their faces buried in their hands.

  Loud, agonized cries ripped the air, the sound of shattered faith. Through a life of conditioning, the men immediately accepted their own blame; it was their own unworthy thoughts and actions that had precluded God’s direct intervention from saving their temple. In response to other failures, such as when predictions for the end of the world had failed to materialize, the prophet had always preached they were at fault, being unfit for the Lord’s use. Now, once again, the prophet himself, already in prison, would have to magnanimously shoulder the blame and suffer and atone even more for the sins of his slothful followers.

  Most of the police felt sorry for the wailers, but there was no time to waste. They fanned out into teams for the temple search.

  The search was long and tedious and each room, from the basement to the Holy of Holies on the top floor, had to be scoured for forensic evidence. The rangers had received intelligence from former members that secret passageways and hidden rooms were common in FLDS buildings, so the search meticulously plodded along in case something had been overlooked. Finally, one tired ranger went into an office and when he saw nothing unusual, leaned against a large bookshelf. He felt it give a little. He recalled the briefing about hidden rooms in other FLDS compounds and so he began to push and shove, then his fingers felt a latch, and when he freed it, the bookshelf came away from the wall. Behind it was a large door constructed of heavy oak with steel security locks.

  The door led into a hidden underground passage with more, still heavier doors blocking the path. Along the way, rangers discovered empty gun safes, and tensions escalated considerably. Trained dogs would later be brought in to sniff around the property, and they located a cargo container buried beneath the home of Isaac Jeffs, the prophet’s brother, containing thirty-three weapons stashed inside: pistols, Israeli military industry–made weapons, military-style Bushmaster AR-15s, and even a powerful Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifle with a precision Unertl scope. All were legally registered. A cop who looked at that arsenal gave a low whistle and said, “They could have held us off for a month with this stuff!” Maybe having the cover of an armored personnel carrier as backup had not been a bad idea at all.

  Meanwhile, the underground search had turned up some interesting file cabinets and the suspicious gun storage lockers, but no smoking gun. Continuing through the corridor, they moved into the area at which the temple was connected to the smaller temple annex and discovered the final door, a bank-grade Class 1 Hamilton safe door with a thickness of more than eighteen inches of solid steel.

  The foundation walls were four feet thick and also were reinforced with steel, and together with the door, they provided a nearly imp
enetrable barrier. Whatever was behind all of that was well protected. Professional locksmiths were stymied. Workers hacked at the thick concrete beside the door, trying to create a hole, before realizing they would need specialized equipment to break through. Trucks bearing heavy-duty drills of the sort used on oil rigs were summoned, and roughnecks came along to operate them. A drill was set up outside the annex building and the roughnecks began grinding through the foundation at a spot identified on a blueprint.

  The crews underground inside, and the crews outside above ground, worked simultaneously, and the outside group finally punched a small hole that they managed to widen enough so that a very small man might make it inside. Ranger Sergeant Jesus Valdez, small to begin with, made himself even smaller by removing most of his clothes, then, armed with a flashlight and his pistol, he wiggled in. The thick foundations had blocked radio contact between the two teams and when the drillers from inside broke through a short time later, they were totally surprised to look in and find Jesus Valdez in the vault looking back at them. Their first thought was that maybe the FLDS had stationed a small, tattooed man with a gun in there. It took a second for it to sink in that both crews had broken through.

  Finally, in that sealed vault, the police uncovered the kind of evidence about which I had only fantasized: volumes of documents and marriage records, computer disks and hard drives, audio recordings and flash drives loaded with dictations by Jeffs, in his own voice. It apparently was being kept secure in the underground bunker until the temple vault was completely ready and dedicated. In that cache of documents was the daily “Priesthood Record of the Prophet Warren Steed Jeffs,” containing evidence that would almost certainly keep Uncle Warren behind bars for the rest of his life and lead to the incarceration of many of his lieutenants, as well.