Prophet's Prey (33 page)

With so many other developments in the case since the raid, I had put those events aside, but I had never lost interest in whether there had been some link between the two women. Since Candi seemed to have drifted back under the influence of the FLDS after collapsing as our witness in Arizona, my only hope of answering that question was to find Rozita and try to piece the puzzle together with her help.

About a year and a half after her original calls, I made an effort to locate her. It had to be done carefully to be sure that I would not be interfering with any ongoing police investigation. She had also made a 911 call for help to the police in Denver, claiming to be an abused little girl who had been able to get her hands on a cell phone. The whole city of Denver had been looking for that nonexistent child. Rozita had been charged with filing false reports in Colorado before the Texas raid and had voluntarily spent some time in a mental hospital, but now she was free.

I arranged to meet her at a public place in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and we spent a few hours getting to know each other. I found Rozita to be an intelligent and fascinating young woman who had managed to make it through a childhood that was a living hell. She was surprisingly open and recounted what she could recall about how she had gathered information on the FLDS. She seemed deeply remorseful for any trouble that she may have caused as a result of the Texas raid.

It did not take long to understand that Rozita was almost incapable of telling an outright lie, and equally incapable of telling the whole truth. By her own count, she is beset by at least fifteen different personalities.

Her mind had started forming new personalities to cope with the abuse her father, a convicted murderer who has denied accusations of abuse, had inflicted on her starting when she was only two years old. Rozita's other personalities are repressed most of the time, but when one of them is released by some unknown trigger, she is usually unaware of any actions that follow. The real Rozita is repressed somewhere within the inner reaches of her mind, and memories of events involving other personalities are marginal at best.

But was there a link between Candi and Rozita? It is a fact that there was a photograph of Candi Shapley on Rozita's computer. She also had done so much research on the FLDS, it was safe to assume she had read of Candi's saga.

But I felt there was something stronger in the mix. Warren Jeffs kept several places of refuge and safe houses in Colorado Springs, and Candi had personally told me how she had been lured to Colorado Springs during the ugly episode in which the FLDS sought to prevent her from testifying against the prophet in Arizona. I concluded that it was quite possible that during that time, the two women may have shared neighbors or acquaintances, and perhaps had been drawn to each other with their similar stories of abuse.

For example, both claimed they had been held captive by their abusers. Candi had told me that after her unsuccessful attempt to run away from Randy Barlow, he had confined her to a room that she was not allowed to leave unattended. Rozita claimed to have had similar experiences that were woven into her story when she became the fictitious Sarah Barlow in the telephone calls to Texas and Laura during the calls she made to Flora Jessop.

So, in my view, perhaps it was the FLDS leadership's compulsion to protect their prophet from prosecution in Arizona that brought the two young women into proximity in Colorado, and that may have culminated in the law enforcement intervention in Texas.

Such a possibility seems just as plausible as the lottery-winning-size chance that the two victims of such similar abuse just happened to be at the same place at the same time, both of them entwined with the FLDS, and that they would not have touched each other's lives in some way. The arrival of Candi's e-mails asking for my advice about her children came at the same time Rozita was reaching out by telephone with her story of abuse in Texas. I do not think it was a coincidence.

Since Candi Shapley's e-mails during the intervention at the YFZ Ranch, I have not heard from her. She probably is trying to get on with her life, but I think that sooner or later she will surface again. Candi knows way too much, and I don't feel that she is yet finished being a victim of the FLDS.

That there was no badly abused girl named Sarah Barlow identified at the YFZ Ranch was a good thing. That the compound was entered by the authorities and hundreds of abused children were discovered as a result of Rozita's hoax telephone calls also must be viewed as a positive development, although it was totally unexpected. The hope is that the strange actions of a mentally disturbed young woman will have beneficial consequences for potential victims of abuse for generations to come.

CHAPTER 39

Town Without Pity

In the corkscrewed view of the FLDS, Warren Jeffs's incarceration is a badge of honor for him; he is seen as a martyr and the defender of the faith by his followers, who are reminded of their prophet's plight every time they set foot inside the huge LeRoy S. Johnson Meeting House. Only the faithful are allowed to enter the building, and as they do, they must walk through grim replicas of Jeffs's former Arizona jail cell that have been erected just inside the two entryways. The mockups are a somber reminder that it was their lack of faith that put Jeffs in such a horrible place—that God is requiring his noble prophet to suffer and atone so the rest of them can attain salvation. It is a guilt trip that keeps the flock obedient and the money rolling in.

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 mistake 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.