Prophet's Prey (8 page)

CHAPTER 11

Diversity

Shortly after being hired to investigate the FLDS in early 2004, I received a disconcerting phone call from Carson Barlow, one of Warren Jeffs's more ardent supporters and a business associate from my construction days. We had always had an affable relationship and I thought highly of him as a hard-working family man. But he had recently been kicked out of the church, losing everything he had, and I could not imagine the inner turmoil he must be enduring. Carson was furious—but not with Warren; with me. “I'm just warning you. Get off the case or you are going to get hurt.” Getting a little testy, I asked if it would be him or Warren Jeffs administering the hurt. My bitter, broken friend kept ranting until I asked why he was still following a madman. The shock of my question quieted him for a moment, then in a quavering voice that sounded ready to cry, he said, “I reverence Warren Jeffs the same as I do God.”

I had gotten to know special agents in the Salt Lake City office of the FBI, and I gave them a taped copy of the thinly veiled threat from Barlow. After my initial introduction to Short Creek, I was already in the habit of keeping them informed of what was happening, and of notifying them in advance when I was heading down to the Crick, just in case. I wasn't worried about some conspiracy within the church leadership to take me out, but a troubled member who had been cast out of the FLDS just might try something on his own in order to get back into the good graces of the prophet. It was better to be careful than sorry.

Barlow would have been much more upset had he known what we were really doing.

Normally, a lawsuit seeks justice in the form of monetary compensation for wrongs committed against the plaintiffs. This case was different. Our clients were not after money. Most just wanted to renew the relationship with their parents and siblings instead of being forced to live as sinful outcasts. If that could not be accomplished, then they hoped to eliminate or reduce the possibility that other young men and women would be subjected to the pain, humiliation, and loss they had endured.

Not all of them had been kicked out just for having a shirt button undone; the FLDS burrowed much deeper than that. A number of them had left home of their own accord, although out of fear that if they did not go away peacefully, something terrible would befall the family—a sister might be married off to an old lecher, or the parents would lose their home. It was not that they were wicked bad apples; they just ran out of options. It was a subtle but highly effective form of extortion.

So our lawsuits would not be just the usual attack on polygamy; in fact, polygamy had nothing to do with it. We were going after Warren and the FLDS and the United Effort Plan in civil court but would name them as defendants for criminal acts: the rape of Brent Jeffs, and racketeering violations under the Utah version of the federal RICO statutes (spelled out in the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970). The Feds had created this tool to fight the Mafia; now it could be used in the lawsuits against the FLDS, which I considered to be a criminal organization.

For many of the Lost Boys, the only beacon of help was the Diversity Foundation and an extraordinarily kind man by the name of Dan Fischer, a brother of my new client, Shem Fischer. Dan had once been a polygamist with three wives, but he had abandoned the practice and left the FLDS fold more than a decade before we met. He now had only one wife, but as honor dictated, he continued to help support the other two. During that decade, Fischer had become financially successful by inventing and patenting teeth-whitening systems, and he had created a nonprofit organization known as Smiles for Diversity. The organization recruited dentists and orthopedic surgeons to fix the teeth of children in Third World countries.

Because of Dan's reputation for helping people, desperate Lost Boys began finding their way to his doorstep. With Dan, they didn't have to explain; he understood what they had been through and wanted to help. At first, he fed and clothed the shattered youngsters and gave them a safe place to sleep, and when all of the bedrooms of his home were filled, he converted a big maintenance garage into apartments for extra capacity. He helped them gain a sorely needed education and life skills so they could begin to understand the outside world, become independent, and move on.

When the constant exodus of boys being exiled from their FLDS homes eventually got too big for Fischer to rescue them all on his own, he turned Smiles for Diversity into the more wide-ranging Diversity Foundation. An untold number of lives—hundreds, and perhaps thousands—have been put back together through the food, lodging, educational opportunities, and friendship provided through Diversity, under the leadership of Dan and Aleena Fischer.

For aiding the castaways and exposing many abuses within the fundamentalist culture, the FLDS and its controlling hierarchy hated Dan Fischer with a special passion. Dan refused to reciprocate the animosity, despite an FLDS campaign of smears against him. The board of directors of the Diversity Foundation was not as forgiving. They decided that something stronger was needed from a legal standpoint to protect the children, and they hired Baltimore attorney Joanne Suder.

My job for her was case preparation and process serving. The intense secrecy of the FLDS would make proving the case extremely difficult, but not impossible. There were scores of victims and eyewitnesses; I knew the evidence was out there, and I intended to find it.

Joanne warned me the investigation would be a wide-ranging one that would require meticulous work, and also that she hated surprises. Like all of the attorneys with whom I work, she demanded that an investigator provide all the facts, good or bad. It is always a relief for me to hear that; it saves me from having to turn down the case. No matter what is found, it is always imperative to keep an open mind to all possibilities. In the words of Sherlock Holmes: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable
, must be the truth.

However, professional objectivity did not mean that I was not personally shocked and appalled by things that would come to light in the course of my investigation, such as Warren raping children, child abandonment and neglect, and the ordeals of underage brides and families being ruined. I was not devoid of an opinion; very much to the contrary. But I draw a firm line between personal views and professional responsibility.

Since Joanne was operating out of Baltimore, she needed an on-site attorney who could act as local counsel. She brought aboard prominent Salt Lake City lawyer Patrick A. Shea. He was a graduate of Stanford University, a Rhodes scholar, held a law degree from Harvard, and was politically connected. Shea had run unsuccessfully for both governor and senator in Utah and had served as head of the Bureau of Land Management under President Bill Clinton. Since returning to Utah from Washington, he had taught at colleges and universities and had written extensively on legal matters.

Shea had his own private investigator, a local in Salt Lake City, and we got together to make sure that I had everything that he did. I found the guy to be a TV-style P.I., who regaled me with tales of rich and famous clients and pointed out his ten-thousand-dollar camera over here and his ten-thousand-dollar computer over there. Everything in his office apparently cost ten thousand dollars. I didn't care. What did he actually have on the case? He handed over a three-ring binder enclosed around an inch of paper. Most of the material was straight off the Internet, available to anybody who knew how to type. The P.I. was excited. “This is going to be a big case. Jon Krakauer is on it.”

“Who?” Never having paid much attention to famous people or bestseller lists, I wasn't even sure who Krakauer was. This was a time for hard, sweaty digging, and I had too much legwork to do to be getting involved with celebrities.

He gave me a disbelieving look. “He's just one of the top five authors in the country. Jon is going to pick me up in a private jet, and we're going to go find Warren.” The man apparently was not really familiar with Krakauer. As I would later learn, jets and celebrities weren't Krakauer's thing any more than they were mine.

Jon Krakauer had been returning from a climbing trip in 1999 when he stopped for gas near Short Creek and noticed the settlement on the other side of the highway, a hazy hodgepodge of half-built houses and trailers in the distance. It seemed like something out of a Steinbeck novel. Curious, Krakauer decided to take a closer look.

Crossing over the highway and going into town, he quickly began to realize that he had wandered into a different kind of place. Women working in their vegetable gardens were covered from their necks to their ankles in pioneer-style dresses that reminded him of Muslim burqas. All of the men wore long sleeves and their collars buttoned tight, and both men and women wore the same cheap sneakers. Then out of nowhere, a large 4 × 4 pickup with darkly tinted windows loomed into his rear-view mirror and began aggressively tailing him.

Krakauer is an athletic outdoorsman who loves to explore new places and is not easily spooked; he had climbed Mount Everest and had managed (barely) to make it off the mountain with his life. However, any uninvited stranger is likely to be unnerved by a Short Creek welcome. Krakauer couldn't shake the vigilantes following him and they became increasingly aggressive. The globe-trotting author had never experienced anything like it, at least not in this country, and he later described that first confrontation with the FLDS as having “scared the shit out of me.” He left town in a hurry.

Since there is nobody to call for help in Short Creek, Krakauer drove on until he found a National Park ranger and reported what had happened. The ranger shrugged it off. “You were in Short Creek, the largest polygamist community in the country. That's the way it's been out there forever,” he explained.

Krakauer thought a lot about the desert town as he finished the long drive to his home in Colorado. Then he did some research into the FLDS Church and realized he had stumbled onto some prime material for his next book. Krakauer spent the next four years investigating and writing
Under the Banner of Heaven
, the story of a couple of fundamentalist religious zealots who had stabbed a woman and her baby to death, believing that God had commanded them to commit the murders. The bestselling book would portray Short Creek as it really was, a place without joy that is run by a Taliban-style theocracy. It might never have been written if the xenophobic people of Short Creek had not run him out of town.

CHAPTER 12

Blood Atonement

The longed-for end-of-the-millennium day of doom finally arrived, and once again, nothing happened. Word came again from the saddened prophet in Salt Lake City, relayed through his son, that the people were still too sinful to be worthy of entering God's sight.

Again, they accepted the explanation. No matter what went wrong, the membership was at fault and the poor, stricken prophet would no doubt have to suffer even harsher consequences to atone for their sinfulness. The end-of-the-world date was recast once more, this time for 2002, when gentiles from all over the world would descend on Utah for the Winter Olympics based in Salt Lake City.

Meanwhile, the world lived on, and so did the stricken Uncle Rulon, with his scheming son at his side.

Rulon had been something of a diplomat who had often ventured forth from Salt Lake City to visit the flock in Short Creek and in Canada. Some trips would be made aboard a chartered jet, others in luxury cars or a large mobile home, and after his mix of strokes, he traveled in a long white Lincoln Town Car towing a portable toilet on a trailer.

The autocratic Warren lacked such diplomatic skills, but he was a shrewd politician who could count noses. Only a few hundred FLDS members still remained in Salt Lake, while thousands resided in Short Creek. If Warren was to consolidate his power and fight off future challengers, he needed to be nearer the heartbeat of the religion; a move to Short Creek would be required. Luckily, the Lord had given everyone an additional two years to prepare for Armageddon, which was plenty of time for him to engineer an exodus.

All FLDS members in Salt Lake City were told to sell their homes and businesses, even if it meant taking substantial financial losses, to go into debt, to max out their credit cards because they would never have to repay them anyway, and herd together down in Short Creek. Alta Academy was closed, shuttered, and sold.

One of my sources, Debra Dockstader, who eventually bolted from the religion, recalled for me how her family had been ruined by that decision. Her husband and his three wives had docilely obeyed the order, gathered their children, sold everything, run up debt, and moved from their nice house in Salt Lake to a mouse-infested singlewide mobile home in Short Creek, where they lived crammed together and destitute. Such was not the case for the Jeffses. Rulon and Warren moved into a spacious new walled compound that was built for them covering an entire city block in Hildale, on the Utah side of the Crick.

The overall effect of the FLDS abandonment of Salt Lake City was to slide the members even farther away from the rest of civilization and build a wall of empty miles between themselves and the rest of America. Warren settled in and got back to solidifying his position. He was the first counselor, but he quietly chafed at the popularity enjoyed by the second counselor, the amiable Fred Jessop, the bishop of Short Creek. Uncle Fred had accumulated a lot of influence during his long lifetime; and he was a calm listening post in sharp contrast to the mercurial Warren, who had to consider Fred a potential rival as a successor to Uncle Rulon. A formal photograph of the three men from that time shows Rulon seated in the middle, with Uncle Fred to his left, while at the prophet's right hand sat Warren, the unquestioned arbiter of all affairs. Fred would prove to be no match for the vigorous, much younger Warren.

A more serious challenger, in Warren's mind, was Winston Blackmore, the bishop of the 1,000-person FLDS enclave up in Bountiful, British Columbia, just over the U.S.-Canadian border and about 900 miles north of Short Creek. Blackmore had an almost rock-star status within the religion, in which he was known as “Uncle Wink.” With a large family of his own, an unshakeable faith, an outgoing personality, and a loyal following, he tried to live as an example of what he believed the FLDS was really all about. In sharp contrast to the Jeffses, Bishop Blackmore eschewed any extravagant lifestyle.

Winston had been a close friend of Uncle Rulon for many years, and he answered only to the prophet. He was not about to give in to Warren's strong-arm tactics. The two men were on a collision course that would play out across many months, and the issue was one of life or death for a teenage girl.

Most FLDS members and leaders are superstitious to the point of mysticism in their beliefs. Legends and old wives' tales are passed down among families as truths. Poultices are preferred to doctors, and the members even have a formal ritual for the blessing of the brakes of their pickup trucks. Taking an archaic notion out of history and molding it to suit their skewed agenda is common practice. One of the most brutal elements handed down over the generations, “blood atonement,”—the doctrine that states a sinner must pay for his or her offense by shedding his or her own blood—has been around for many years. I believe it is still practiced today within the FLDS.

More than two decades earlier, in a legal action to strip Short Creek marshal Sam Barlow of his badge, polygamist Harold Blackmore had sworn in an affidavit:

While being instructed in our duties and responsibilities, we were taught the “Divine Law of Retribution,” commonly called “Blood Atonement.” I listened to Guy H. Musser teach this doctrine with a quivering and doomful voice to a large assembly of men as follows: “You brethren, you have got to learn to give strict obedience to every request made of you by this priesthood council. You have to prepare yourselves to the point where you will shed the blood of any one of your brethren if we tell you to for the sake of his salvation as atonement for his sins and to prove your faithfulness.”

… I have listened to Rulon T. Jeffs … preach along the same line with passionate fervor:—“you brethren, you have got to learn to submit and take direction. You have got to learn to obey anything we tell you to do without the slightest mental reservation—right or wrong!”

Without exception, every single former FLDS person I have interviewed concerning the practice has expressed the unequivocal belief that it is considered a true principle of the religion. By the same token, I have yet to talk to anyone who has actually witnessed such a bloodletting. But I believe, just as the Utah attorney general's office did, that Warren Jeffs wanted, but failed, to have a father bring his daughter home and face death in a religious ritual in the year 2000.

That they totally believed in the bizarre ritual is beyond doubt. A widow of Rulon Jeffs described for me a time that she and one of her sister-wives came across a passage they did not understand while studying a book that Rulon had written, “Purity in the New and Everlasting Covenant of Marriage.” It was mandatory reading for all wives, and in it, Rulon claimed that Brigham Young had announced in a sermon more than a century earlier that some sins were so heinous that even the atonement of the Savior was insufficient to pardon the transgressor and gain salvation. The only possible remedy that might bring redemption would be for the offender to shed his or her own blood.

Rulon wrote that blood atonement was an act of love and duty. He left no doubt that he was not talking about pricking a finger, but about murder. “I could refer you to plenty of instances where men have been righteously slain, in order to atone for their sins. I have seen scores and hundreds of people for whom there would have been a chance [for salvation] if their lives had been taken and their blood spilled on the ground as a smoking incense to the Almighty, but who are now angels to the devil, until our elder brother Jesus Christ raises them up—conquers death, hell and the grave. I have known a great many men who have left this Church for whom there is no chance whatever for exaltation, but if their blood had been spilled, it would have been better for them … This is loving your neighbor as yourselves; if he needs help, help him; and if he wants salvation and it is necessary to spill his blood on the earth in order that he may be saved, spill it.”

This was heady material for the two wives. Fortunately, while they sat puzzling over the book on the stairs inside Rulon's home, Warren came walking past and they asked if he knew anything about it. Yes, he replied. It was “a true and correct principle.” He not only endorsed it, he described his vision of the ritual for them in frightening detail.

The sinner had to be bound to an altar of stone, preferably in a sacred place such as a temple. A rope of a specific size would be blessed by a ritualistic prayer, and then tied to certain areas of the body in the manner with which Abraham lashed down his son Isaac when God had commanded Abraham to slay the boy as an offering.

As he warmed to the impromptu lecture, Warren told the women that everything was done in accordance with holy ordinances, and each step of the process had a special meaning. For instance, special ropes and knots were required, and the event should be done in a basement to signify the subject rising from the terrestrial kingdom and overcoming hell.

When the subject was secure, a mask was placed over the face of the condemned person, and a special knife was used to cut the throat of the victim in a proscribed manner. After that, some of the blood was saved to be drunk by priesthood members in attendance, to seal their oaths to keep the sacred procedure a secret, even if it meant their own lives. The rest of the blood was to be burned so that the smoke could rise to the heavens as a burnt offering and hopefully be accepted there by God.

He ended the hair-raising lesson by saying it had to be kept a strict secret because the outside world would not understand and would try to stop the practice if it became known.

I got to know Winston Blackmore during the Lost Boys investigation, and he became one of my most knowledgeable guides into figuring out what made Warren Jeffs tick. He would personally tell me the story of a troubled girl named Vanessa Rohbock, a daughter of Uncle Rulon's old dining and drinking buddy Ron Rohbock.

She had been given without her consent to be the third wife of a man in Short Creek. “I about died,” she had confided to Blackmore. “I was only sixteen and I didn't want to marry that guy, but I was told that if I did not do it, there would be nothing more for me … ever. What could I do? When my mouth said ‘I do' my heart was screaming ‘NO! NO! NO!' ”

She ran away to stay with a sister who had already been expelled from the FLDS, then had second thoughts and returned to her father's home. Soon, she began to sneak away again to meet a boyfriend about her own age. He would turn off the lights of his truck and coast up to the house, where Vanessa would jump in, and they would go share a pizza. The couple was followed one night, caught, and hauled before First Counselor Warren Jeffs. He decided that since Vanessa was a married woman, even though she had not wanted to wed, she must bear total blame. It was decided to let her influential father, Ron Rohbock, take her up to Canada for a cooling-off period. The extraordinarily lenient decision was a good example of the benefits that can accrue to a loyalist within the inner circle.

Warren telephoned Winston Blackmore to tell him the teenager would be coming for a temporary visit, adding that she was on antidepressants and had to be considered suicidal. Blackmore agreed to take her in, and soon Vanessa responded to the distancing of herself from the tumultuous situation in Short Creek. She was persuasive enough in her apology that Uncle Rulon extended a further favor to his friend Ron and gave Winston Blackmore permission to forgive the girl's sins through rebaptism, which Winston did.

Vanessa, now with a clean slate, then upset everything by announcing that she wanted to get married again, but to her boyfriend, someone of her own choosing. Warren exploded in rage during a heated telephone call to Blackmore. “There it is!” Warren said. “I told Father, ‘If you let this girl get rebaptized, then the next thing she will want to do is get remarried, and there it is.' ” He could not overturn Rulon's decision to forgive her, but he had a different idea. “Her baptism did not work,” Warren ordered. “She shall not be remarried. There is nothing left for her to do but to come [back] and have her blood shed for the remission of her sins! You are instructed to tell her to gather up her things and to go away. You and Ron [Vanessa's father] are instructed to pray night and day for the Lord to destroy her from the face of the earth!”

Warren was condemning the girl to death. “No trial, no mercy, no defense, and all while Uncle Rulon was in his bed and asleep,” Winston recalled for me in a halting voice. The horrified Blackmore would have no part of it.

Rohbock showed up in Canada, under a strict order from Warren to retrieve his daughter. “Ron Rohbock was the meanest man I've ever met,” Blackmore told me. “He said that he was the one who had brought Vanessa into this world and it was his priesthood duty to take her out of this world. He was ordered to love his daughter enough to carry out the edict in order for her to have a chance at salvation.” Blackmore refused to hand the child over for retribution. He kept her secreted away in a distant house, and her father returned empty-handed to Short Creek.

The confrontation escalated as time passed, and Warren sent Rohbock back to Canada two more times, including a trip on which he was backed up by Warren's brother, Leroy Jeffs. Blackmore not only refused their demands, but notified the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which contacted the FBI and the Utah attorney general's office. The word went out: If Warren did not stop this mad crusade against the child, the law would intervene. Warren backed off, but he never forgot.

Vanessa eventually married the boy she originally wanted, and against all logic, they settled in Short Creek. I have seen that same decision made repeatedly by outcasts, because it is so difficult for residents to give up the only way of life they have ever known. Blackmore observed that so much official attention had been focused on her situation that Vanessa probably was the safest woman in town.

Warren Jeffs would later insist that his words had been misunderstood. However, I am convinced that without the intervention of Winston Blackmore, Vanessa would have been sacrificed in a “blood atonement” ritual.