Prophet's Prey (27 page)

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 cult 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.

Everyone was on edge. The plan was to negotiate a soft entry into the compound, keeping things as low-key and friendly as possible. Nobody on the search team wanted this to blow into a repeat of Waco, the infamous 1993 violent standoff between the federal government and the Branch Davidian religious cult led by another maniacal prophet, David Koresh. Brooks Long, who had been at the Waco siege, remembered all too well that before it was over some fifty-four adults and twenty-one children had died. Waco was only a two-hour drive to the east, and it was very much on the minds of the investigators approaching the YFZ Ranch.

This time, Long made certain that advance security precautions had been taken, a prudent measure because of the ranch residents' unpredictable nature. The police and CPS professionals had managed to keep such a tight lid on things that even the families and close friends of the officers involved were unaware of what was about to happen. An unmanned aerial surveillance drone from a federal agency did a fly-by and took photographs providing an up-to-date, accurate layout of the compound. Things appeared normal.

Even with the recon flight, the exact number of people at the ranch remained uncertain. Sheriff Doran, relying upon church leaders and personal visits, estimated the FLDS population to be between one hundred and one hundred fifty. I have a lot of respect for the sheriff, but he and I were in sharp disagreement about those numbers. I knew the FLDS inhabitants routinely hid when any outsiders came around, and there was always a transient population of FLDS workers being brought in for specific construction projects.

It would be futile to simply ask any church member, “How many people are here?” FLDS members could be expected either to stay quiet or to lie with smooth and practiced ease. My own guess was that there were at least five hundred people at the ranch.

Even a group the size of the sheriff's low estimate would be much too large for a handful of deputies and rangers if something went wrong, so several dozen officers from various agencies had been put on alert. If immediate backup was needed, a Quick Reaction Force was stationed just out of sight at an abandoned federal anti-missile facility that once had been part of the “Star Wars” missile defense program. It was now the command post for the police operation at the FLDS compound.

Sheriff Doran had established a civil relationship with the people at the ranch and their on-site leader, Bishop Merril Jessop, over the past months. Both Doran and Long had been allowed on the ranch property without incident to deal with minor matters ranging from environmental issues to home schooling inspections to a vehicle accident involving the death of a child. Those earlier meetings had been touchy, but cordial.

If anyone stood a chance of getting past the front gate without igniting an incident, it would be them. In fact, they had considered just this sort of scenario for years as part of their normal “what-if” planning; the sheriff's office was too small to handle a major confrontation, so the ranger had accompanied the sheriff on previous visits, hoping to get the lay of the land in the event state assistance might someday be needed.

This trip was of a much more serious nature than anything they had undertaken before at the ranch. Their plan was just to talk to Bishop Jessop and try to win his permission to peacefully let them do their jobs. The search team would be looking for sixteen-year-old Sarah Jessop Barlow, her child, and Dale Evans Barlow, the man purported to be her abusive husband. The search warrant allowed them to go into every building on the 1,691 acres of the YFZ Ranch, because the people they sought might be anywhere.

Significantly, the warrant would allow them into the huge temple that was the centerpiece of the entire property. Church leaders were certain to consider that to be a major encroachment onto sacred ground by gentiles, and could be expected to oppose having the law paw through the building that was the heart of their secretive society. But the Texas lawmen were professionals who were used to having their way in matters of public safety. One way or another, they were determined to carry out their duties.

The sedans slowed and stopped at a metal gate off County Road 300 that was secured by a chain and padlock. Beyond this cattle gate, a dirt road stretched for another mile to the primary entrance of the main compound, where an interior guard station with tinted windows squatted ominously, its roof bristling with communications antennae, satellite dishes, and spotlights. Sheriff Doran called Bishop Jessop and asked him to come out for a meeting.

The gate barring the entrance into the ranch lands had been dented by a propane delivery truck and hung somewhat askew. It remained firmly locked, even after Jessop emerged to speak with Doran and Long. He listened politely, then entered into a time-consuming stall that went nowhere, telling them that he needed to make some calls to gather more information, and then contriving excuses as to why access was impossible. He told the officers that only about two hundred fifty men, women, and children were on the ranch—a lie.

The authorities tolerated the charade in hopes of keeping things calm. One reason for the secrecy of their arrival was to avoid the media. It was hard enough keeping everyone safe and negotiations on an even keel without having to attend to the press as well. They wanted to wrap things up before the reporters found out what was going on and descended on the scene.

The stall was frustrating. At one point, Sheriff Doran found himself talking on the phone to a man who identified himself as Dale Barlow, the specific target of the warrant. Barlow was adamant that he was not even at the Texas compound, but in Arizona, and insisted that the officials should just take his word as the truth and go away. They refused. Even if this caller was indeed named Dale Barlow, how could they know it was the right one? There were at least two other men with the same name up in Short Creek. Even if this was the correct Dale Barlow, that did not get them any closer to finding Sarah, who was their more urgent priority. Had she been at the ranch with him and then been taken elsewhere before they arrived with the warrant? All the Barlow call did was eat more minutes off the clock on a time-sensitive warrant.

Throughout those fruitless hours, the lawmen and child protection specialists watched the situation behind the gate become more dangerous for them. Pickup trucks had filtered from the ranch compound onto the entrance road, with several FLDS men in each, until nearly the entire mile-long track from the far gate to the security shack was clogged with randomly parked trucks. More than fifty men loitered in and around the approximately twenty vehicles, posing a visible, defiant threat to the safety of the search team. This was a serious development. When the authorities realized their small party was outnumbered by a possibly hostile force, they called back to the Star Wars command center for reinforcements. Tactical teams were dispatched and an armored personnel carrier on loan from neighboring Midland County drove up to the gate. The formidable armored vehicle had SHERIFF written in large black letters on each side and was loaded with heavily armed officers, their bubble-like black helmets sticking out of the hatches. It was there as a show of muscle and for protection, not really to do battle. The hope was to dissuade the FLDS men from making any aggressive moves.

Normally, when Texas Rangers serve a search warrant, they give little more warning than a hard knock on a door, followed by a loud announcement of who they are and what their business is, and then they make entry. Anyone or anything in the way will be moved aside, one way or another. The police at the ranch had a legal search warrant to execute and had been patient long enough. Merril Jessop was given a final warning to get out of the way or be arrested for obstruction of justice and failure to obey the lawful command of a peace officer. If necessary, the police could simply crush right through the blockade. There were no guns mounted on the bulky armored personnel carrier, but it was a combat-style vehicle that could roll right over the pickup trucks. In the face of that ultimatum, the bishop grudgingly stood aside, and the trucks moved out of the way while the authorities drove past the cattle gate and down the long road. It had taken almost three hours to travel that single mile, but they were at last on FLDS property.

The search for Sarah could finally begin.

About ten o'clock that night, my friend Randy Mankin, editor of the weekly
Eldorado Success
, called me, sounding like he was wound pretty tight. “They're out there at the Ranch right now serving warrants,” he said. That got my attention.

I grilled him for more information, but although he was a close friend of Sheriff Doran, he was empty beyond that one tidbit. Over the years, Randy had learned not to allow his obligations as a reporter to interfere with his friendship with the sheriff. They each had a job to do. But the intrepid Mankins had teamed with the owner of the local radio station and rigged a connection to the station's 100-foot-tall antenna, and that allowed them to pick up fragments of police radio conversations originating from the FLDS compound. Anything broadcast in the open was considered fair game. By using secure frequencies for the current operation, the police had kept things silent on the news for longer than anyone thought possible within such a close-knit community. Even the best reporters around had been excluded.

Whatever might be happening at the ranch down in Texas sounded to me like a positive development. At last, the authorities were doing something and there was some hope of holding the outlaw church accountable for its crimes. But at the time I had no idea that the momentous development in Texas had anything to do with the lengthy, disturbing calls to which I had been listening from Flora's source.

After Randy's call, I was up most of the night working my sources, and by dawn, my telephone was ringing off the hook as news media outlets from around the country pounded me for information. I had by then appeared on numerous shows speaking about the FLDS, and good producers never throw away a telephone number. They were under pressure to find someone who knew something, anything, about what was happening in Texas. That I was in Utah did not matter as the media frenzy built. I could not complete one conversation or interview that morning without five more stacking up.

In my view, the Texas authorities actually were doing much more than just refusing to tolerate child abuse. I thought the surprise raid might be the very thing to prevent what everyone most feared—another Waco, or even a Jonestown. In that 1978 massacre, a similar enigmatic prophet, Jim Jones, had created a “People's Temple” in Guyana, murdered a congressman and a reporter, and led 912 followers to their doom by drinking poison. I believe that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior when it comes to religious fanaticism.

Given the right conditions, I felt most FLDS members were fully capable of “drinking the Kool-Aid.” They followed Warren Jeffs's orders without question. I feared the worst.