Prophet's Prey (28 page)

CHAPTER 34

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Once the authorities were inside the FLDS compound, they discovered that the inhabitants had been busy while the roadside negotiations were dragging on. The faithful had used the time to come up with plans designed to foil the efforts of the law officers, and confusion reigned.

It was obvious from the start that the number of residents at the ranch had been grossly underestimated. Hundreds of the FLDS faithful were there, and none would cooperate. The sterility of the place, as evidenced by the total absence of ordinary kids' possessions like bicycles or dolls, surprised the outsiders. When the police gave some of the more curious children rides in the big armored personnel carrier, FLDS adults reprimanded the youngsters and ordered them away.

As the law enforcement team continued talks with Jessop and other leaders, the Child Protective Services workers set about trying to find Sarah, the girl who had made the calls. At first, they requested that all of the girls at the compound be brought to a central location, which was identified as a school. The FLDS responded by selecting only girls who were well briefed and unlikely to give up any secrets. The stymied interviewers then decided to fan out into other buildings and homes to search for the rest of the girls. The CPS workers were escorted by police officers, but also by FLDS “guides” who were the eyes and ears for the church and served to intimidate anyone who was questioned.

CPS worker Tina Martinez interviewed LeAnn Nielsen Jessop, who appeared to be about sixteen. When Martinez asked her age, LeAnn did not answer, but looked up at her husband, Leroy Jessop, who was present during the entire interview. “You are eighteen,” Leroy coached. The girl then quickly attempted to convince Tina that she was indeed eighteen, that her birthday was March 23, 1991. She had a ten-month-old baby and was Leroy's fourth wife. As the investigators went about their business, young girls in their long dresses began investigating them right back. A friendly kid who looked about thirteen approached a ranger.

“Hello,” she smiled, and shyly asked, “What's your name?”

The ranger looked down from beneath the brim of his big cowboy hat at the typically well-groomed FLDS girl who was carrying a journal. “My name's John,” he replied, pleased at her cordial manner.

The girl scurried off some distance and scribbled in her little book, then came back. “What's your last name, John?”

“Smith,” the ranger answered, hoping to strike up a conversation.

The kid ran off again and wrote some more. Then she spun around so fast that her skirt flared in a circle, and all traces of politeness disappeared. She thrust an accusing finger at the Texas Ranger and shouted, “John Smith, in one year, you will wither!”

“What?” he blurted, dumbfounded. The charming child had turned into a soothsaying harridan in the blink of an eye.

“In one year,
you will wither
!” the stern little voice repeated. Then she ran away and disappeared into the meandering flock of other neat little girls in long dresses. The ranger told me later that the kid had really creeped him out.

The CPS interviews were proving to be equally disturbing and distorted. A girl might give one name, saying she was sixteen, and confirm that she was married, only to deny it all later. The teenager might then give an entirely different name, vow that she was not married, give a different age, and daintily disclaim any knowledge of a photograph on a nearby table that showed her with an older man and a baby. All of the girls stuck to the church script and insisted that no age was too young for them to be married.

While the interviews were going on, fifteen-passenger vans belonging to the church shuttled children from place to place. Girls who had not been interviewed were whisked from homes that had not yet been entered by authorities and taken to places that had already been searched and cleared. Children would lie, claiming that they had already been interviewed, when they had not. Tension was growing.

Compounding the identification problem was how few surnames there were within the group. Jessop and Barlow are even more common within the FLDS than Smith and Jones are in a telephone book in Seattle or Atlanta. The different combinations of FLDS first, middle, and last names, with no records to prove which are correct, defy logic. It is not unusual to find children who are named after the prophet, Warren Steed Jeffs, or have various reworks such as Warren Jeffs Steed or Steed Warren Jeffs, although they may be related only distantly to the prophet, or not at all. With females, the names change through marriages and when they are reassigned to new husbands, at which time their children's original names also change, no matter how old they are. Generations pass, but the same names echo over and over again. It makes things exceedingly frustrating for any outsider trying to make sense of the Byzantine FLDS genealogy.

As the hours went by, there was still no sign of the Sarah who was the object of the search. There were some Sarah Barlows and Sarah Jessops, but not the Sarah Jessop Barlow they sought. Nor did they find any sign of the alleged abuser, Dale Evans Barlow. But as the night dragged into the early morning hours, everyone understood the investigation was no longer about helping just one girl; it was clear that multiple children had been abused and forced into polygamous sexual unions.

Despite the deception and misinformation, within the first six hours authorities found eighteen girls between the estimated ages of twelve and sixteen who were in various stages of pregnancy or had given birth. The law enforcement people could not ignore such an abundance of evidence that crimes had been committed.

While the search continued in Texas, I plunged into working my contacts involved in the various investigations of the FLDS and found the entire network of church members was on edge as the police probed around the nooks and crannies of the Texas compound and interviewed its residents. The search at the YFZ Ranch was regarded as an existential threat of the highest order.

Sooner or later, the searchers would be faced with breaching the sacred white limestone temple that dominated the compound, something the FLDS leadership had no intention of allowing. Law enforcement was trying to be sensitive to the group's religious beliefs, but the authorities had learned that the FLDS could not be trusted. It was made clear to Merril Jessop that the temple had to be searched, and the officers were ready to use whatever force necessary to carry out their lawful duty.

The moment of truth would arrive when the search moved into the temple proper.

Following the developments from my office in Utah, I realized that something was out of whack. I was always dubious about coincidences. I had been drawn into the long dialogue that Flora Jessop was having with a sixteen-year-old abused FLDS girl named Sarah, and now I had learned that the authorities in Texas also had been speaking with a Sarah who also claimed to be sixteen. The alleged abusers in their stories were different—a husband versus a father—as were the locations, a Texas ranch or an Arizona house. The chances that the cases were not somehow related looked pretty slim.

I telephoned Sheriff Doran down in Schleicher County to alert him to the similarities between what he was doing and what was happening at my end. By the time I was able to get through to him at the ranch, the sheriff, who had been without sleep since the raid began, was clearly frazzled. He knew that I would not be calling in the middle of that mess if I did not think it was important, so he listened for a few minutes before his attention was abruptly snatched away. “Yeah, e-mail me those recordings,” he said, his voice quickening. “I gotta go, man. They're starting to take kids out of here.”

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.