by Sam Brower
But fueled by recent events, they are firm in their belief that Warren will eventually prevail. They point to the fact that the prophet was never even tried in Arizona, though he was faced there with multiple charges of sexual misconduct with a minor. When he was extradited from Utah to the Mohave County Jail in Kingman, Arizona, in February 2008, he found that he preferred the Arizona accommodations over the tougher Utah State Prison. His attorneys dragged out the pretrial proceedings, relentlessly badgering the witnesses and victims.
More than two years later, Mohave County judge Steven Conn pointed out that Jeffs had spent twenty-eight months incarcerated in Arizona, waiting for trial. That meant that even if he was now convicted, he had already served more than the maximum amount of time for the offenses charged. The court would allow credit for the time already served, and Arizona would have no further claim on him. The victims agreed to allow Warren to return to the Utah State Prison in the hope that he would soon be extradited to Texas to face much more serious charges.
I did not consider the Arizona decision to be crucial, since the Utah conviction, based on the Elissa Wall trial, remained strong and the Arizona charges were comparatively minor. It was a wise move on the part of the prosecutors and victims to get Warren to Texas where he could do some serious time. But in Short Creek, the believers felt that their faith was being vindicated, just as it had been when Texas gave back the kids. The town became meaner and more openly aggressive.
The inevitable result of generations of intermarriage within such a small community that intentionally excludes outsiders has been incest and near-incest.
Rulon and Warren Jeffs’s obsessive desire to create a pure Priesthood People has resulted in a closed, corrupted gene pool, and Short Creek today is a reflection of its own decades of inbreeding.
Down in the Crick, the offspring of cousins, half-siblings, and other family members are now paying the price, with the border FLDS community carrying the world’s largest population of verifiable cases of the genetic disease known as Fumarase Deficiency.
The recessive gene for that particular disease traces directly back to one of the founders of Short Creek, the late Joseph Smith Jessop, and his first wife, Martha Moore Yeates. One of their daughters married John Yeates Barlow, a relative, and their family bloodlines have been preserved over the decades. Joseph Smith Jessop left behind 112 grandchildren, and the surnames of Jessop and Barlow are among the most common within the FLDS. Nearly every Short Creek family today, no matter what their surname, can be traced back to those two families. Given that there are only about a dozen or so family last names, it doesn’t take long to see the frightening possible impact of inbreeding.
In the small religion-inspired petri dish of Short Creek, Fumarase Deficiency erupted and grew. The closed loop of relationships increased the chances that both parents would carry a single copy of the mutated gene, and therefore show no sign of the disease. But when they had a child, they could pass the gene along and the baby would have the abnormality.
Fumarase Deficiency results in an interruption of the Krebs cycle, a metabolic function that enables the body to process food at the cellular level. An infant with the mutated gene may be born with an abnormal brain inside a small head, or be unable to grow at a normal rate as his or her nervous system is attacked. Development is stunted, physical deformities are frequent, some organs do not function properly, and seizures can sometimes be so powerful that the child may be bent backward like a pretzel. Most victims do not survive beyond a few months. Any stricken babies who do grow will be dogged by illness, unable to care for themselves, and mental retardation will usually limit them to just a few words.
It is currently estimated that more than half of the children in the entire world who suffer from Fumarase Deficiency live in Short Creek. There is no cure. Of course, the church members rationalize that when such a child is born, perhaps with a large part of its brain missing, it is only another of God’s tests. In my opinion, it is another intolerable example of child abuse, propagated through a misguided reliance on faith. Church members have been approached by medical professionals trying to convince them to be tested for the offending gene before marriage, but church leaders will not have the gentile world interfering with the will of God when it comes to marriage and procreation. So the disease continues to spread.
A troubled Short Creek resident named Ruth Cook had a daughter who was among the stricken children. When the little girl was about two years old, Ruth took her twisted, agonized child, whose spine was breaking from the backward convulsions, to the FLDS staff at the Hildale medical clinic. Hospitalization was out of the question, because gentile doctors would ask questions. The clinic staff did nothing, deciding the baby was “too pure a spirit to be on earth anymore.” The baby eventually died.
That was one more incident contributing to Ruth’s mental instability in a town where every tragic event seems to lead to another. Her father, a brute named Jack Cook, had molested all of his daughters. The Washington County authorities prosecuted him and he spent five years in the Utah State Prison. In a television interview upon his release, Cook was asked about the molestations. With a smarmy look he wisecracked, “I was just doing what a dad does. Don’t they all do that?” He is now dead, but his daughter Ruth lives on, a damaged girl who became a damaged adult with damaged children.
There is no place in Short Creek for people like Ruth Cook; the townspeople don’t want her around. She had married one of the Barlows, only to be sent to a mental hospital for complaining about the FLDS priesthood and about various church members molesting one of her daughters. When released, she was homeless and broke and returned to Short Creek, where she survived in an old pickup truck and was openly despised.
Still, she wanted to do the right thing because she remained a believer, and the FLDS was the only life she had ever known. I frequently see Ruth trying to clean up the town by gathering trash, or riding around on a bicycle, a woman in her forties, singing “I’m a Child of God” and announcing that she wants to marry Uncle Warren.
After a late meeting in town one night, I got into my car and Ruth, who was sweeping up at the gas station, came over for a chat. She was standing about six feet from where I sat behind the wheel when a man named Samuel Bateman drove past in his big diesel pickup truck, then stopped and backed up so that the rear end pointed at her. Bateman hit the gas and the big tires dug into the road, spraying Ruth with rocks and dirt, as if she were being peppered by a shotgun.
Ruth refused to leave her hometown. A February 2010 report to the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office states that she was arrested by officer Hyrum Roundy and clapped in handcuffs while picking up trash around the meeting house. Claiming that court was already closed for the day, he drove her several miles outside of town, let her out, and told her not to return because she was not wanted in Short Creek. She walked back anyway, only to be picked up again, taken back out, and dumped off with a warning that she had better never come back. “We don’t need your kind,” the cop said.
Ruth again trudged back toward the lights. This time, she told the police that the same Dale Barlow who had been a target of the Texas raid and was a convicted sex offender showed up with one of his buddies and beat the hell out of her. Mohave County police took a report. The problem with pursuing the matter was that Ruth would be an unreliable witness in court. About a month later, an unknown assailant shot her in the head with a high-powered air rifle. The slug penetrated her skull and landed her in the hospital, unconscious. She could not identify the attacker, because in typical cowardly Short Creek style, the assailant had shot from behind. Nobody will be held accountable.
The cocky confidence that they can get away with anything, and that the prophet is being martyred by the evil government, was rewarded again during the summer of 2010 in a stunning court decree. The full Utah Supreme Court had considered the appeal of Warren’s conviction in the Elissa Wall case, and Justice Jill N. Parrish decided the lower trial court had made a mis
take by giving an erroneous instruction to the jury. Therefore, the judge ruled, Jeffs was entitled to a new trial.
This decision rocked everyone involved. Such a narrow point of law was at the root of the decision that even many lawyers could not understand her reasoning. CNN’s senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin commented on television that he had had to read the decision twice before he could understand it, and he called the court’s decision shameful. The “answer them nothing” prophet had gamed the system once again.
Warren had been sent back to the Utah State Prison from Arizona before ever facing trial there, and now his Utah conviction—of two consecutive sentences of five years to life for being an accomplice to rape—had been overturned. As of that moment, Warren Jeffs no longer stood convicted of a single thing.
CHAPTER 40
The Telephone
I had no sympathy at all for the frail Warren Jeffs on the morning of November 30, 2010, when a pair of Texas Rangers shuffled him across the tarmac in Utah, wearing handcuffs and leg chains and shivering in the cold, and put him on the plane for Texas. The mousy-looking man in the thick glasses did not look like much of a threat, but I knew differently.
During his time spent in prison, Jeffs had just about fallen apart. After getting up off his cot in the morning, and pulling a thin prison bathrobe around himself, he would spend most of the day just sitting on the toilet, hour after hour, staring at the walls. At times, a feeding tube was stuck in his nose and left in place for an extended period because he refused to eat and had to be force-fed. His knees were ulcerated from kneeling on the cement floor. He was uncooperative, unresponsive, drooled like a baby, and required constant attention and care. It appeared that he was failing fast, both physically and emotionally.
It would be good to finally get him down into the stern criminal justice system of Texas, and within the jurisdiction of the efficient Judge Barbara Walther, where he faced charges of sexual assault of a child, aggravated sexual assault of a child under the age of fourteen, and bigamy. The charges were all first-degree felonies that carried maximum life sentences. I was more than satisfied with the crisp way in which Judge Walther had run the previous trials, and with the tenacity of the Texas prosecutors. In Texas, I believed, things would be different—closure might finally be near at hand.
After all, the other Texas trials against FLDS men had proceeded nicely. The perpetrators probably would have received lighter prison sentences had they admitted guilt and remorse, but they would not do that. FLDS defense attorney Randy Wilson summed it up: “These were not predators hanging around a playground. They were instructed by their prophet to do something and they did so.” Their inexcusable position was that Warren told them to do it, therefore it was right. Where did it stop?
Leroy Jessop, the remaining groom from the triple marriage ceremony, fared badly when his turn in court had come in May 2010. DNA tests had proven paternity for his child and underage bride, and as he sat in court with a cocky smirk on his face, he was crushed with a harsh sentence of seventy-five years.
It was during the Leroy Jessop trial that my ears had perked up when the FLDS went a step too far and his lawyer filed a motion to declare Leroy indigent, asking that the state pick up the tab to appeal his conviction. Texas refused, and the matter went before the judge for a hearing.
A frequent question throughout the investigation has been, “Where are the Feds?” Now FBI special agent John Broadway, who had participated in serving the YFZ search warrant, appeared on the witness stand and provided a ray of hope that the bureau might be working the case after all.
Broadway produced church ledgers and records that had been seized as evidence, and he testified that the FLDS had a “cash distribution system [that] was set up to evade taxes and to lessen the paper trail.” He described the money-laundering scheme, how much the church had paid out in cash, how couriers would arrive regularly at the ranch with stacks of hundred-dollar bills from their far-flung businesses and the constant donations from thousands of members, and how that would be distributed to the hierarchy. With millions of dollars in the pipeline, Leroy Jessop could well afford to pay his own lawyer.
In the days of mobster Al Capone, bootleg whiskey was illegal, and Capone’s mob committed crimes such as murder and extortion to support their illegal operation. Capone was tripped up by evading taxes. I think that may very well be the same low-key approach being taken by the Feds as they probe the inner workings of Warren Jeffs’s church.
With the FLDS, the Feds are facing one of the largest organized-crime syndicates in the history of this country. Some ten to fifteen thousand members support a religion that participates in child abuse, interstate and international sex trafficking, and other crimes in support of their religious dogma. It is a much bigger gang than Don Corleone ever had in the Godfather movies. I have often pondered how the public would react if the same sort of ritualistic crimes that I have investigated within the FLDS had instead centered on a congregation of Satan worshippers. The only difference is that Satan worshippers know without a doubt that they are going to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law if they get caught raping a virgin. If the FLDS crimes had been put in proper perspective, outraged citizens and lawmakers would have demanded action years ago.
The problem is bigger than Utah, bigger than Arizona, and even bigger than Texas, which was blindsided by the enormity of bringing the FLDS to justice. The federal government must remain in this fight, for we cannot tolerate such blatant, massive abuse in this country, and no other entity has the resources to take on thousands of unapologetic fanatics.
As the shift to Texas was made, Warren still remained the uncontested leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but it was a distant leadership, as he became more frail. If he should die, the mantle of prophet would transfer to another man, but the immediate future was murky. Who would lead if he were disabled and ultimately convicted, unable to communicate?
That question was a popular topic of conversation among observers outside of the church. Up for grabs were millions of dollars in church assets, the ability to raise seemingly endless amounts of cash, and control over thousands of lives.
The contest seemed to pit the Old School against the New School. The Old School was led by the tattered First Presidency: First Counselor Wendell Nielsen and Second Counselor Merril Jessop. Warren had resigned when he was sent to prison as president of the church’s corporation and he placed Wendell Nielsen in his stead. With Warren’s communications limited from the prison, he needed someone to handle the day-to-day affairs of the church. But neither Nielsen nor Merril Jessop was considered a likely long-term candidate. They were getting old, had chronic health problems, and had been under immense pressure from Warren to fund his extravagances and get the Texas YFZ ranch built. In addition, they both were under indictment for committing felonies and faced possible long jail time themselves. Even a few years in prison could have ended up being a life sentence for these aging counselors.
The New School was led by three men. The inside track apparently was held by Warren’s brother Lyle Jeffs, who, according to Brent Jeffs, was a close associate of his brother at the Alta Academy. Lyle had become one of Warren’s most trusted unofficial lieutenants and was installed in the influential position of bishop of Short Creek. He was not the mysteriously charismatic leader that Warren was, but he possessed the same unrelenting determination and the right pedigree; somebody named Jeffs has been the FLDS prophet since 1987. Over the course of my investigation, I interviewed a couple of computer technicians who had been brought in to work on Lyle’s computer. It seemed the problem was Lyle’s apparently insatiable addiction to porn. One of the misconceptions held by outsiders is that the FLDS are a very straightlaced, pious people. The fact is, people like Lyle have just become very adept at hiding their behavior.
The second member of this group was Nephi Jeffs, the brother and confidant who had been the liaison between Jeffs in jail and the world out
side. He was present when Warren had his “I am not the prophet” meltdown.
The third candidate, and the most startling of all, was Willie Jessop, who forced his way into the top leadership by becoming the public face of the outlaw religion. At an FLDS rally he organized at the courthouse in St. George, Utah, a crowd of several thousand people turned out, and they parted like the Red Sea before Moses when Willie strode through their midst, basking in their applause. The same people who once considered him nothing more than a rude bully now fed his ego, although the prophet still refused to allow him to live within the sacred gates of R-17.
In my opinion, none of the potential candidates would be any better than Warren and any of them could be quite possibly worse.
Upon his arrival in Texas, the prophet was taken to the Reagan County Jail, located sixty-five miles west of San Angelo, where his trial was scheduled to be held. The jail is a holding tank that handles the overflow inmate population from several surrounding counties. Big Lake sheriff Jeff Garner pledged that Jeffs would receive no special treatment in the ninety-six-bed facility.
What was unmentioned was that the Reagan County Jail is a for-profit facility and provides a telephone in the cell of every prisoner who can pay a service fee and the toll charges. The jail sells calling cards in its commissary and collects a commission on collect calls. The prophet probably could not believe his good fortune.