The next day was one of the most stressful of my life as I waited to hear what was happening. I didn’t hear from Doran until the following evening, when he called to tell me that they had visited the ranch that day, April 3, with warrants in hand, and closed off the roads going to and from the ranch. So far, there had been no altercations, but it hadn’t gone well.
“Not only did we have a search warrant to find Sarah; Child Protective Services also had a warrant specifically to interview all the girls between seven and seventeen,” he said angrily. “Yet Merrill and his boys forced us to sit at the gates for over three hours before they finally led us onto the property, to a schoolhouse where we could conduct interviews.” Uncle Merrill had joked around with the group, cajoling them as he let three Texas Rangers and the sheriff into the schoolhouse with the CPS workers and one volunteer. Nine watchful rangers stayed outside for everyone’s protection. All of them were forced to wait there for hours until a few girls straggled in.
“They tried to get us to believe that these were the only young girls on the ranch. We kept asking, ‘Is this all of them?’ and Merrill kept saying, ‘Well, yeah, I think so…’ But while we were waiting, CPS was glancing through student journals that were on the shelves at the schoolhouse, and they realized the journals contained specific entries. You know, events like a new baby in the family, or their sisters getting married—some of them at very, very young ages! Yet none of the authors of the journals, nor the girls listed in them, were within the group they brought to us for interviews! But Merrill would say, ‘Oh, yeah… ya know, I forgot about her… We’ll see if we can figure this out.’
“Becky, this happened over and over! Our intent was simply to get in there, find Sarah, her baby, and her husband and get them out. We hoped Sarah would see us and run into our arms. While that hasn’t happened yet, there is much more going on here than we’ve ever been told. The whole place is strange, and there’s a picture of Warren Jeffs on every student’s desk.”
I felt ill just thinking about it.
“And I’ll tell you something else that Merrill lied about. Judging from the journals, there’s a helluva lot more people on this ranch than just one or two hundred!” All of the rumors we had heard of people poofing from FLDS communities, and houses of hiding, made more sense now.
“We’re in for a long night,” Doran said finally, sounding exhausted.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Yes, you are.”
That same night, one of the older patriarchs on the ranch, Sam Roundy Sr., father of Sam Roundy Jr., suffered severe heart pains, and since Lloyd Barlow, the resident doctor, was busy with law enforcement, Sam was taken to a medical center in nearby Eldorado in an ambulance. One of his older wives didn’t dare leave him alone in the outside world, so Deputy Arispe drove her the four miles there. When she got out of the deputy’s car, she looked bewildered.
“Where are we?” Roundy’s wife asked.
“You’re in Eldorado, ma’am,” the deputy said, tipping his hat. He realized that the speculations about the women being smuggled in at night to disorient them might be true. They had reached “Zion,” and unless they’d climbed the watchtower, they would have believed they were totally isolated. All of that desert, for miles on end, would have been more than enough deterrent to any woman or child who thought of leaving.
The nine rangers posted outside the schoolhouse were on high alert. A strict no-fly zone had been established above the ranch, and all roads in and out blocked. A command post had been set up a couple of miles away, manned by sixty or so officers who were also securing a perimeter around the 1,691-acre ranch. The residents quickly realized that there were no escape routes, but rumors flew that some underage girls had somehow been smuggled out. Whatever the case, the rangers on the compound were very tense. They were fully aware that the FLDS had at least a small hunting arsenal of weapons and access to explosives used in constructing the ranch.
To make matters worse, as dusk settled young men from the ranch had scaled nearby trees wearing night-vision goggles. The rangers, equipped with their own night-vision equipment, could tell they were unarmed, though, and they weren’t very good at being surreptitious—one young man actually fell out of a tree near the schoolhouse, injuring himself. The rangers ignored him and kept their uneasy watch throughout the entire night. Doran told me later that thirty-five to forty FLDS men had wandered in and out of the schoolhouse over the course of the night, as a passive-aggressive tactic.
It had been impossible for me to sleep, and I gave up even trying to go to work the next day. My every moment was wrapped in prayers and pleadings. With no word from the sheriff, I turned on the television to find the media had been alerted to the events of the previous night. The closing of the roads and gathering of so much law enforcement alerted local reporters Kathy and Randy Mankin that something was going down at the YFZ. They had cleverly devised a monitoring system to decipher radio signals between officers. Since they were close personal friends with Sheriff Doran, they were very careful about which tidbits they shared with the world, but by that morning, April 4, it had hit the national news. I was seeing only what the world was seeing, and it was disconcerting.
My phone erupted with calls from friends and family, but none of them knew any more than I did. CNN was my only source until the sheriff called around 10:15 a.m. He sounded exhausted. Indeed, their forces had been up all night.
“You wouldn’t believe this, but we still haven’t talked to most of those girls listed in the journals as new wives or mothers! Merrill deliberately kept most of them away from the schoolhouse, except for ten girls we were able to interview. Do you happen to know who Dr. Lloyd Barlow is?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Lloyd married my mother’s younger sister Faye while he was in med school. Once he graduated, he oversaw the Short Creek clinic and became Rulon’s personal physician. After Rulon’s initial strokes, Lloyd was at our estate all the time, and was at Rulon’s side when he died.”
“Hmm. He seemed like a decent fellow in the beginning,” murmured Doran, “though it quickly became apparent to me he likes to throw his weight around.”
“Well, he’s got big stakes in the FLDS. His father, Alvin Barlow, was the superintendent of the schools in Short Creek and is a survivor of the ’53 raid. Both are descendants of John Y. Barlow and yes-men to the Prophet.”
“Interesting,” Doran said. “You know, he came directly to Brooks Long, one of the head rangers of the investigation, saying that he had ‘issues’ with the search warrant. Brooks had him call CPS. During the conversation, using Brooks’s phone, Lloyd Barlow admitted to delivering babies to underage mothers!
“Also, in the YFZ clinic and birthing center, two of our rangers found records of underage patients whom Barlow had treated for pregnancy. When they reported it, the ranger captains made them go back to gather up that evidence before the FLDS could destroy it all, because during the night, Ruby from CPS smelled something burning and discovered a shredder that had become red-hot from working nonstop. That discovery led us to two industrial-sized garbage bags of freshly shredded documents. Sure enough, when the rangers went back to the clinic, they discovered that some files from the illustrious FLDS doctor’s office had been removed or destroyed. They had to pack up the rest to keep them safe.”
I couldn’t believe the nerve of the FLDS in blatantly destroying evidence.
“And still Merrill doesn’t bring Sarah or the other girls! Meanwhile, CPS had discovered information in the schoolhouse about a Teresa Steed Jessop who was sixteen and already had a baby. CPS asked for Teresa and six more specific girls they had found from the school journals, but only four of them showed up, and one was pregnant at age sixteen. Plus, several girls we interviewed said there is a Sarah Barlow here on the YFZ, but Merrill never brought her to us.”
Due to the large number of pregnant teen girls and the deliberate destruction of evidence, Sheriff Doran and the Texas Rangers commanders felt that it had become necessary to do a house-to-house search. As they started searching houses that morning, Doran told me, they found more pregnant underage girls who unashamedly lied about their ages, most of them looking to their husbands or fathers to supply the investigators with the years of their fake birthdates.
“I gotta tell you something you’re not going to like. CPS is going to have to remove these young women into foster care—they can’t let them return home to their families. Based on what we’ve found so far, CPS thinks that all children under the age of seventeen are in danger.”
Somberly, I hung up the phone and switched on the news again. Neither the rangers nor CPS said much except that they were pleased with the nonviolent nature of the investigation so far. A few hours later, however, news crews showed large buses arriving on the compound to take the young women and children away. I watched members of my extended family and a few of the older children I knew lining up, and I rejoiced to see some of my former sister-wives with child, and others holding the hands of little ones. Motherhood was what so many of them had longed for when Rulon was alive.
Yet the scenes on the screen pulled at my heart. The images were too eerily reminiscent of the ’53 raid. Memories of the terror I’d experienced as a child hearing those stories coursed throughout my body—and here I was, safe in Idaho!
Elissa, Amelia, and I got on the phone together and searched for our mother and sisters in the sea of familiar faces on CNN. We were disappointed that we were unable to locate any members of our immediate family, until we realized why: the missing person reports!
“They’ll do anything to keep Sherrie and Ally from police and media, won’t they?” I said to my sisters. “Otherwise, they’ll have to admit they’ve not complied with a missing person report for three years!” We cried for all of these women, yet we were genuinely grateful to Texas for following through where Utah and Arizona hadn’t had the guts.
Ben, however, was livid with me.
“Why don’t you let it go?” he asked. “That part of our lives is over.” It wasn’t for me, though. I cared about these people, and my sisters were still missing. Sheriff Doran hadn’t exaggerated about the number of people on the ranch. According to news reports, by the end of the evening, 167 children had been removed and were staying at the civic center near Eldorado, where cribs and cots had been set up for them. How the hell could CPS have prepared for this? I watched the Texas Rangers and local authorities, alert in their full body armor and artillery, as they oversaw the process, and was relieved that I never observed any one of them point a weapon at any of the people.
The next day, the sheriff called me bright and early. He and the rangers had worked through the night once again without a break. There was too much evidence of organized crime to ignore.
Doran reported fifty-two girls ranging from six months to seventeen years were removed from the ranch, many of them visibly pregnant. It was enough for Ranger Brooks Long to visit District Judge Barbara Walther with another affidavit requesting an additional search warrant. (While the first affidavit listed thirty pages of documentation from Sarah’s calls, this one detailed multiple crimes of abuse and bigamy and ran hundreds of pages. The ranger had no way of knowing this would likely become the most highly scrutinized search warrant in U.S. court history.)
CPS workers finally interviewed some of the young girls who had given birth to one or more babies, but they were having great difficulty getting straight answers, even from the ones who seemed most willing to be honest. When workers asked if the girls had had sex, they’d answer no, even if it was clear they’d given birth.
“Why would they answer that way, Becky?” Sheriff Doran asked me, chagrined and exhausted. “Are all these young girls lying, too?”
“Not necessarily,” I said carefully. “Although I’m sure they’ve been coached. The problem is the word sex.”
“Yeah,” he said, perplexed. “That’s what makes the babies, right?”
“No one uses the word sex in that culture—except maybe a few older adults, and only referring to what other people do in the outside world. These girls won’t know what you mean.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Tell the workers to ask them if they have had ‘marital relations’ with their husbands.”
This clarification in language worked, and the social workers were finally making a little more headway. Throughout the day, I continued to receive calls from the sheriff, asking me to explain scenarios, situations, and the significance of particular words that were flummoxing the workers.
Every development became international news, and the media were clamoring for the story, but Brooks Long and his commanding officer, Captain Barry Caver, issued an order of silence to their ranks. They needed their officers engaged in organizing and preserving the evidence they had found rather than informing swarms of reporters. Sheriff Doran, too, refused to speak to anyone except occasionally the Mankins. Lawyers for the FLDS had already begun a campaign of protest and counterpublicity, calling the raid unjust.
Later that day, the sheriff sounded worse. “My God, Becky, we had no idea of how big of an operation this was going to mushroom into! At every turn we encounter major resistance. Get this: each time we enter a house, kids slip out the back doors and windows—going back to houses we’ve already searched! Now they’ve resorted to behaviors and rude comments that we normally wouldn’t put up with on the street. And tell me, what’s the deal with the little kids with notebooks and pens?”
I puzzled over his question for a moment, then exclaimed, “Oh my goodness! Are they asking for your names?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly what they’re doing.”
“They’re keeping track of the damned,” I said. I couldn’t help but grin at the audacity of these cheeky little kids, chronicling the names of the rangers for restriction from Heaven. “You see, Sheriff, you are not only Gentiles, but they see you as persecuting God’s chosen people. Your names will be kept in a book of records of those who will be destroyed in the last days.”
“Well, that’s a little creepy,” he said, not finding the humor in it. “Today, there was this van that kept circling the compound, always as far as possible from our surveillance vehicle. We weren’t sure what we would find in it. Men with an arsenal? Bombs? Cameras? When we finally pulled it over, guess what it was filled with?”
“What?” I asked, worried.
“Pregnant teenage girls! Several of them! Sadly, none of them admitted to being Sarah Barlow.”
I was still uncomfortable. What if the rangers had been convinced the people in the van were a threat? Thank God the officers were more careful and compassionate than I had given them credit for.
“Becky?” the sheriff asked suddenly. “Do you think you could come down here? I’m in over my head. We all are. I think what we’ve got here is the biggest child custody case in the history of this nation. We’ve gotta have someone who understands these people.”
I quickly agreed. We discussed possible scenarios for my arrival, and I prepared to get off the phone to make my travel arrangements. Suddenly the sheriff interrupted me.
“I have to tell you something important first. We’re going to have to go into their temple.”
“What?”
“We don’t know what or who they have in there, and they’re refusing to open the doors voluntarily! We know it’s sacred to them. The last thing we want to do is barge in. But their refusal could mean any number of things, none of which sound good to us.”
I was silent. How long had the people dreamed of a temple? As with the early saints, it was a symbol of their devotion to their God.
“They keep tying our hands, Becky,” he said sadly. “They keep tying our hands.”
Later that night, a friend still closely tied with Short Creek called me to tell me that an armored ambulance had been sent out to the ranch just as the officers were preparing to go into the temple. The ambulance had the ominous appearance of a tank, and I knew officers would send it only if it seemed necessary.
I was frightened of how the FLDS would react to law enforcement breaching their temple, and I felt completely helpless. I tried calling the sheriff back a couple of times that evening to see if anyone was hurt. He didn’t answer. In desperation, I finally called Uncle Merrill shortly before 9:30 p.m., pleading with him to cooperate and be honest with law enforcement. He talked to me for a few minutes about his views on the raid, and I was relieved he didn’t say that Warren wanted the men to defend the temple with their lives. Perhaps there was hope for a bloodless raid after all.