CHAPTER 11
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.