In the middle of my packing for my flight to Texas, Ben had nearly forbidden me from going.
“What’s the deal, Beck?” he said. “Have to go off and save the world again? Testifying hasn’t given you enough attention?” Swearing he wouldn’t give me one red cent to get to Texas, Ben made it clear I might not have a home to come back to. I thought long and hard. These were our sisters and brothers and nieces and nephews, their lives and families at stake. And as Mother Becky and Grandmother Becky, I’d been sister-wife, mother, and grandmother to many of them. I was being offered the chance to help them. I had to take it.
Descending the stairs onto the tarmac in San Angelo, I looked up at the night sky. I had never seen so many stars. Sheriff Doran and another officer had come to pick me up, along with Elissa, who had arrived the day before. She’d found out I was going and asked if she could help, too.
In the car, Doran caught me and Elissa up to speed: sixty FLDS mothers had voluntarily left the ranch to be with their children, and none of the men were allowed to leave the ranch during the investigation. So Saturday afternoon had been tense as the rangers, sheriffs, and their team, armed with a battering ram, prepared to breach the huge oak doors of the temple.
As he was explaining this, we neared Eldorado and were just north of town. The sheriff zoomed close to the perimeter of the YFZ ranch. There was no mistaking the FLDS temple, lit up with huge spotlights. My heart was pounding as I took in the monolithic white building I’d seen only in photos.
The sheriff said softly, “You know, after those initial interviews in the schoolhouse, Merrill suddenly disappeared. He was still on the ranch, but other than a couple of brief phone conversations, he hadn’t been in contact. So on Saturday, we had yet to find Sarah, or this ‘Dale Barlow’ that Sarah mentions as the husband who has been beating her. Then Flora calls me and says her sister got a call from this Sarah and she says she’s being forced to stay in a cold, dark place. That could be anywhere, but we’re concerned it might be the temple basement.”
The sheriff pulled up next to the gate and showed his badge to the officers guarding the perimeter. We parked just off the road, and the sheriff continued.
“So when I was told that it was time to go into the temple, Captain Caver asked if I wanted to be part of it, and I said yes, being that this whole thing is taking place in my community. I was also hoping we’d find Sarah, once and for all.
“We geared up, in helmets and heavy-armored vests, but I didn’t have any type of weapon as I was helping with the battering ram. As we approached the gates, the FLDS cut off all communication with us. In fact, they totally quit cooperating, which was not a good sign. We’d heard that Willie Jessop was saying the men should defend that temple with their very lives.”
I shuddered.
“The FLDS attorneys told us their men wanted to do a silent protest about us entering their temple, and they stationed their men all the way around the temple walls, praying. When we breached the gate, the FLDS men stationed around the temple cried out. I’ve never heard anything like it. They were absolutely bawling with grief.”
“You weren’t struck by lightning like they thought you would be,” Elissa said.
“Exactly,” he continued. “They cried out that they were not faithful enough, not holy enough. It broke my heart. Anyway, we stepped onto the temple grounds and approached the stairwell. The higher we went, the more men we could see standing on top of vehicles and houses and gathering in small crowds to watch us. We knew that anything could happen, and had officers stationed to make sure nothing would. We had to walk up a helluva lot of steps in the back with the battering ram, while having to watch for attack or bombs from inside. Suddenly at the back steps, the locksmith had this panic attack and had to be given oxygen. Then it was time for us to use the battering ram.”
He paused for a moment, looking up at the temple again.
“We rammed in that beautiful heavy oak door, and every time the ram hit, you could hear the reverberations half a mile away. It was so big and heavy, we had to swap guys out. We make it through those doors, and there was another heavy set behind it. We got through that, too.”
He shook his head, and looked over at me. “If they had walked in with us, we could have been in and out of there in an hour or less, but every single door was locked. That looks very suspicious, and so of course, we have to force every door open, even every cabinet door. One SWAT officer cracked his wrist on one of the heavy oak suckers and had to receive medical attention. It took us three, maybe four hours to search that temple. So the team was doing what they have to do, clearing rooms. As we secured one floor, we’d be off to the next.
“All I got to say is that we felt like shit going into that special, sacred place of theirs. Most of our men are Christian or believers. We felt sick about it…” He paused and looked me in the eyes.
“… that is, until we reached the third floor.”
My heart shuddered. The weekend had been particularly rough on every FLDS member: April 6, which would have been a day of historical remembrance and celebration, had seen families torn apart and their temple desecrated. In addition, their closely held secrets were quickly unraveling. Instinctively I knew I would be seeing some of those secrets in the temple the next day.
The following morning, my sister and I awoke in our hotel knowing that both the FLDS and the state of Texas were under enormous pressure. We hoped we could make a difference. The sheriff requested that Elissa and Shannon Price, a spokeswoman for Uncle Dan Fischer’s Diversity Foundation, help out at CPS. That weekend, the women and children had been bused again, this time to San Angelo, fifty miles from Eldorado. They were placed in temporary housing at historic Fort Concho, under much more controlled yet somewhat primitive circumstances. By Sunday CPS realized that on a ranch supposedly supporting a total of two hundred people, well over four hundred children had been discovered!
CPS had another dilemma. Under Texas law, once a child is removed from his or her home, the child must be returned home within two weeks unless investigators can prove abuse. If a case involves one or two children—even one or two families—that two-week window isn’t usually a problem, but they had cleared out children from an entire small city, so things would become exponentially more difficult.
Carmen Dusek, a brilliant estate lawyer whom I would later meet, was also known as a passionate family-law case volunteer. The previous Friday, Judge Walther had asked her to find family law professionals to serve as guardians ad litem to represent the twenty-five children in court. By that Friday evening, the number of children had risen to 108. On Sunday, Carmen and fellow attorney Randol Stout were told that as many as 463 children needed representation for what was undeniably the largest CPS case in Texas history. That weekend, Carmen pulled out all the stops, calling upon family members, friends, professional associates, church communities, and even strangers. Some of these volunteers were estate or contract lawyers; some had never taken a family-law class. It would take a miracle to provide representation.
“How in the world can we pull this off?” Carmen later told me she murmured on her way to the church that had donated the space to gather volunteers. “Dear God, please help us protect those children and their rights.” When she pushed open the door, she witnessed the great hall overflowing with volunteer law professionals ready to represent FLDS children.
I was struck by the vast numbers of Texan volunteers coming out of the woodwork, not just attorneys. Meals were brought in from families, businesses, and churches across the state. Bedding and clothing were donated by the truckloads. Medical personnel had arrived to care for all of the women and children. I felt like I had after the fire in my childhood home, when people’s caring attitudes changed my views forever. I hoped it might do the same for the women and children now in San Angelo.
Doran asked me to work the law enforcement command post on the ranch that day, and reminded me that for my safety, and to preserve the integrity of the investigation, I would have to be escorted by a sheriff or ranger wherever I went. On our way over, Doran added that they were still looking for children in hiding, and he was visibly discouraged by the fact that they still hadn’t located Sarah. The antics of the FLDS people as workers attempted to catalog families were also getting to him.
“We’re trying to keep them together… Why do they tell us so-and-so is this child’s mother, but she runs to another woman when she’s afraid? Or they identify the mother of an infant and a toddler, but she’s stooped and gray to her toes!”
“Sheriff,” I said gently but firmly, “prepare for this to be the pervasive attitude. It’s honorable in their society to make everything difficult for law enforcement, who they believe is persecuting the Priesthood of God.”
He described several kids being nasty and defiant, but then spoke of some that were curious and even relieved at their presence. “We had these red-headed boys that were inquisitive about the armored ambulance. So a couple of the SWAT guys let them check out the controls and even punch a coupla buttons—safe ones, you know—and they just grinned until an adult came and told them to get out. Another time, one of the girls got off the bus to get her shoes, and on her way back on, she whispered into one of the officer’s ears, ‘Thank you for coming.’ ” He seemed moved by that.
“We’ll be glad to have your help today. The FLDS culture is more foreign than we anticipated, and there are several documents I’d like you to help us identify.” We had arrived at the compound, and the sheriff drove me around the perimeter of the property to keep me under the radar. I was fascinated to see the ranch for the first time in the light of day, but a little unnerved to see such familiar workmanship firsthand. By looking at a certain building, I would know precisely who had built it, or who was meant to be living in it—or both.
At the command post, Doran introduced me to several Texas Rangers, pleasant enough but all business. Their faces were tired and worn. The sheriff had explained to me that the Texas Rangers had earned their trademark white hats—which they’d traded in this case for SWAT gear—from countless years of service in law enforcement, their skills in investigation, and their ability to defuse volatile situations. Many of them had traveled hundreds of miles to get here, and most of them had been working thirty-to thirty-six-hour shifts with only a few hours’ sleep in between.
We parked, and the sheriff walked me through one of the buildings that had been emptied of people. Eerily, there was a picture of Warren Jeffs in every single room, and the aroma in the hallway was so familiar that I started to feel like Mother Becky, with long, braided hair and a prairie dress… until I was interrupted by a voice calling, “Becky—can you come and explain what this might mean?” In one unconscious moment, I had become FLDS. And one moment later I was not. The magnitude of what was about to happen hit me again.
The FLDS would never understand why I was assisting law enforcement. As with Warren’s Utah trial, they would think that my intention was to hurt them. I remembered Warren saying, “The world does not know how to hurt us. It is those who knew the truth and have fallen away that teach the world how to attack us.” And yet, by the time I reached the end of the hallway, a familiar fire pulsed through my bloodstream as I recalled the number of very young, very pregnant girls on my television screen. Then you shouldn’t have done this in the first place, Warren, I thought. Only truth and courage had emancipated me from Rulon’s home and Warren’s clutches. I had to rely on truth and courage again for the sake of the young girls.
Three men were looking at some documents they had found—marriage records, I realized. I remembered collecting them by the hundreds at Rulon’s home during an FLDS census. We had been taught since elementary school about the importance of keeping meticulous family and ordinance records, because “whatever is recorded on earth is recorded in Heaven.” The officers did not understand what they were looking at. I was struck by the sobering realization that what I told these men would forever change the course of my people. Based on what the rangers had seen on the ranch already, these records of marriages would definitely be damning to several of the FLDS leaders—not just the men who married underage women, but also the men who performed the ceremonies and those who gave their young daughters to other leaders.
After leaving that building, I returned to the command post, where two rangers were getting ready to do a more thorough investigation of a home they believed to be Warren’s.
“Is there anything we should look for?” they asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Look for a room—a secret room, something behind a bookshelf.”
They looked at me as if I had been watching too many movies. I noticed that some of the men didn’t seem to believe my answers, despite my being meticulous and refusing to exaggerate. When they returned, though, they looked very serious.
“Hey, what was it again you told us to look for?”
I hesitated. “I’ve never lived here on this compound, but I would be willing to bet there would be a secret room of sorts in that—”
“We found it, ma’am.” They both grinned ear to ear. “It’s filled with boxes of documents and even safes.”
I noticed several others perk up at that news, and pretty soon some of the officers who had ignored me came over with more questions.
That afternoon, at my request, a ranger quietly escorted me out to watch, from a distance, the last of the women and children being bused off the ranch. My heart leaped with joy as I recognized many of the women I knew and loved, but when I saw the looks of fear and uncertainty on their faces, I longed to comfort them. I couldn’t help but notice how considerate and respectful the guards and SWAT members were, even as some of the women were blatantly nasty to them. Some of the other women seemed incredulous, and I realized that they had never been treated respectfully by a man before, and certainly hadn’t expected it from an armor-clad government officer.
As the buses drove away, I walked back to the command post, where a ranger came to tell me that I was going to meet Brooks, the Texas Ranger in charge of the investigation. Sheriff Doran had coached me, saying, “He’ll call a spade a spade, and a snake a snake. He’s under a lot of pressure, so don’t take it personal if he snaps or barks.”
I waited there until a broad-shouldered man with a strong, angular jaw and a name tag saying “Long” approached me.
“Are you Miss Musser?”
“Yes.”
“Come with me, please.” He began walking briskly toward the temple. As I hurried to keep up with him, he asked me a few brief questions. After fumbling a bit, I realized that he was Brooks—Brooks Long.
“Wow, you’re nicer than I thought you would be,” I sputtered, and instantly placed my hand over my mouth.
As we neared the temple, I thought about what it would feel like to live here among the FLDS again. Sheriff Doran had told me that the women had likely never left the property. What would the women’s schedules be like? I wondered about the structure of their days, how they socialized and conducted worship.
“Are you okay, ma’am?” Brooks’s concerned voice interrupted my thoughts. “Am I walking too fast for you?”
I stared wide-eyed at Brooks, who was now in front of me. Twice now, I’d unconsciously stepped in line behind him. I had always walked behind Ben and Wendell. I had always walked behind Dad. Behind Rulon Jeffs. Behind Warren, behind Seth, or any other Priesthood leader. Even in mainstream society, I’d received the subtle message that a woman must be subservient, that she must follow and obey. It dawned on me that for the very first time in my life, I was being treated like an equal by a man!
I’m sure Brooks was unaware as something from my unconscious suddenly exploded into the light of day. That moment crossing the temple lawn would change me forever.