CHAPTER 12
The longed-for end-of-the-millennium day of doom finally arrived, and once again, nothing happened. Word came again from the saddened prophet in Salt Lake City, relayed through his son, that the people were still too sinful to be worthy of entering God’s sight.
Again, they accepted the explanation. No matter what went wrong, the membership was at fault and the poor, stricken prophet would no doubt have to suffer even harsher consequences to atone for their sinfulness. The end-of-the-world date was recast once more, this time for 2002, when gentiles from all over the world would descend on Utah for the Winter Olympics based in Salt Lake City.
Meanwhile, the world lived on, and so did the stricken Uncle Rulon, with his scheming son at his side.
Rulon had been something of a diplomat who had often ventured forth from Salt Lake City to visit the flock in Short Creek and in Canada. Some trips would be made aboard a chartered jet, others in luxury cars or a large mobile home, and after his mix of strokes, he traveled in a long white Lincoln Town Car towing a portable toilet on a trailer.
The autocratic Warren lacked such diplomatic skills, but he was a shrewd politician who could count noses. Only a few hundred FLDS members still remained in Salt Lake, while thousands resided in Short Creek. If Warren was to consolidate his power and fight off future challengers, he needed to be nearer the heartbeat of the religion; a move to Short Creek would be required. Luckily, the Lord had given everyone an additional two years to prepare for Armageddon, which was plenty of time for him to engineer an exodus.
All FLDS members in Salt Lake City were told to sell their homes and businesses, even if it meant taking substantial financial losses, to go into debt, to max out their credit cards because they would never have to repay them anyway, and herd together down in Short Creek. Alta Academy was closed, shuttered, and sold.
One of my sources, Debra Dockstader, who eventually bolted from the religion, recalled for me how her family had been ruined by that decision. Her husband and his three wives had docilely obeyed the order, gathered their children, sold everything, run up debt, and moved from their nice house in Salt Lake to a mouse-infested singlewide mobile home in Short Creek, where they lived crammed together and destitute. Such was not the case for the Jeffses. Rulon and Warren moved into a spacious new walled compound that was built for them covering an entire city block in Hildale, on the Utah side of the Crick.
The overall effect of the FLDS abandonment of Salt Lake City was to slide the members even farther away from the rest of civilization and build a wall of empty miles between themselves and the rest of America. Warren settled in and got back to solidifying his position. He was the first counselor, but he quietly chafed at the popularity enjoyed by the second counselor, the amiable Fred Jessop, the bishop of Short Creek. Uncle Fred had accumulated a lot of influence during his long lifetime; and he was a calm listening post in sharp contrast to the mercurial Warren, who had to consider Fred a potential rival as a successor to Uncle Rulon. A formal photograph of the three men from that time shows Rulon seated in the middle, with Uncle Fred to his left, while at the prophet’s right hand sat Warren, the unquestioned arbiter of all affairs. Fred would prove to be no match for the vigorous, much younger Warren.
A more serious challenger, in Warren’s mind, was Winston Blackmore, the bishop of the 1,000-person FLDS enclave up in Bountiful, British Columbia, just over the U.S.-Canadian border and about 900 miles north of Short Creek. Blackmore had an almost rock-star status within the religion, in which he was known as “Uncle Wink.” With a large family of his own, an unshakeable faith, an outgoing personality, and a loyal following, he tried to live as an example of what he believed the FLDS was really all about. In sharp contrast to the Jeffses, Bishop Blackmore eschewed any extravagant lifestyle.
Winston had been a close friend of Uncle Rulon for many years, and he answered only to the prophet. He was not about to give in to Warren’s strong-arm tactics. The two men were on a collision course that would play out across many months, and the issue was one of life or death for a teenage girl.
Most FLDS members and leaders are superstitious to the point of mysticism in their beliefs. Legends and old wives’ tales are passed down among families as truths. Poultices are preferred to doctors, and the members even have a formal ritual for the blessing of the brakes of their pickup trucks. Taking an archaic notion out of history and molding it to suit their skewed agenda is common practice. One of the most brutal elements handed down over the generations, “blood atonement,”—the doctrine that states a sinner must pay for his or her offense by shedding his or her own blood—has been around for many years. I believe it is still practiced today within the FLDS.
More than two decades earlier, in a legal action to strip Short Creek marshal Sam Barlow of his badge, polygamist Harold Blackmore had sworn in an affidavit:
While being instructed in our duties and responsibilities, we were taught the “Divine Law of Retribution,” commonly called “Blood Atonement.” I listened to Guy H. Musser teach this doctrine with a quivering and doomful voice to a large assembly of men as follows: “You brethren, you have got to learn to give strict obedience to every request made of you by this priesthood council. You have to prepare yourselves to the point where you will shed the blood of any one of your brethren if we tell you to for the sake of his salvation as atonement for his sins and to prove your faithfulness.”
… I have listened to Rulon T. Jeffs … preach along the same line with passionate fervor:—“you brethren, you have got to learn to submit and take direction. You have got to learn to obey anything we tell you to do without the slightest mental reservation—right or wrong!”
Without exception, every single former FLDS person I have interviewed concerning the practice has expressed the unequivocal belief that it is considered a true principle of the religion. By the same token, I have yet to talk to anyone who has actually witnessed such a bloodletting. But I believe, just as the Utah attorney general’s office did, that Warren Jeffs wanted, but failed, to have a father bring his daughter home and face death in a religious ritual in the year 2000.
That they totally believed in the bizarre ritual is beyond doubt. A widow of Rulon Jeffs described for me a time that she and one of her sister-wives came across a passage they did not understand while studying a book that Rulon had written, “Purity in the New and Everlasting Covenant of Marriage.” It was mandatory reading for all wives, and in it, Rulon claimed that Brigham Young had announced in a sermon more than a century earlier that some sins were so heinous that even the atonement of the Savior was insufficient to pardon the transgressor and gain salvation. The only possible remedy that might bring redemption would be for the offender to shed his or her own blood.
Rulon wrote that blood atonement was an act of love and duty. He left no doubt that he was not talking about pricking a finger, but about murder. “I could refer you to plenty of instances where men have been righteously slain, in order to atone for their sins. I have seen scores and hundreds of people for whom there would have been a chance [for salvation] if their lives had been taken and their blood spilled on the ground as a smoking incense to the Almighty, but who are now angels to the devil, until our elder brother Jesus Christ raises them up—conquers death, hell and the grave. I have known a great many men who have left this Church for whom there is no chance whatever for exaltation, but if their blood had been spilled, it would have been better for them … This is loving your neighbor as yourselves; if he needs help, help him; and if he wants salvation and it is necessary to spill his blood on the earth in order that he may be saved, spill it.”
This was heady material for the two wives. Fortunately, while they sat puzzling over the book on the stairs inside Rulon’s home, Warren came walking past and they asked if he knew anything about it. Yes, he replied. It was “a true and correct principle.” He not only endorsed it, he described his vision of the ritual for them in frightening detail.
The sinner had to be bound to an altar of stone, preferably in a sacred place such as a temple. A rope of a specific size would be blessed by a ritualistic prayer, and then tied to certain areas of the body in the manner with which Abraham lashed down his son Isaac when God had commanded Abraham to slay the boy as an offering.
As he warmed to the impromptu lecture, Warren told the women that everything was done in accordance with holy ordinances, and each step of the process had a special meaning. For instance, special ropes and knots were required, and the event should be done in a basement to signify the subject rising from the terrestrial kingdom and overcoming hell.
When the subject was secure, a mask was placed over the face of the condemned person, and a special knife was used to cut the throat of the victim in a proscribed manner. After that, some of the blood was saved to be drunk by priesthood members in attendance, to seal their oaths to keep the sacred procedure a secret, even if it meant their own lives. The rest of the blood was to be burned so that the smoke could rise to the heavens as a burnt offering and hopefully be accepted there by God.
He ended the hair-raising lesson by saying it had to be kept a strict secret because the outside world would not understand and would try to stop the practice if it became known.
I got to know Winston Blackmore during the Lost Boys investigation, and he became one of my most knowledgeable guides into figuring out what made Warren Jeffs tick. He would personally tell me the story of a troubled girl named Vanessa Rohbock, a daughter of Uncle Rulon’s old dining and drinking buddy Ron Rohbock.
She had been given without her consent to be the third wife of a man in Short Creek. “I about died,” she had confided to Blackmore. “I was only sixteen and I didn’t want to marry that guy, but I was told that if I did not do it, there would be nothing more for me … ever. What could I do? When my mouth said ‘I do’ my heart was screaming ‘NO! NO! NO!’ ”
She ran away to stay with a sister who had already been expelled from the FLDS, then had second thoughts and returned to her father’s home. Soon, she began to sneak away again to meet a boyfriend about her own age. He would turn off the lights of his truck and coast up to the house, where Vanessa would jump in, and they would go share a pizza. The couple was followed one night, caught, and hauled before First Counselor Warren Jeffs. He decided that since Vanessa was a married woman, even though she had not wanted to wed, she must bear total blame. It was decided to let her influential father, Ron Rohbock, take her up to Canada for a cooling-off period. The extraordinarily lenient decision was a good example of the benefits that can accrue to a loyalist within the inner circle.
Warren telephoned Winston Blackmore to tell him the teenager would be coming for a temporary visit, adding that she was on antidepressants and had to be considered suicidal. Blackmore agreed to take her in, and soon Vanessa responded to the distancing of herself from the tumultuous situation in Short Creek. She was persuasive enough in her apology that Uncle Rulon extended a further favor to his friend Ron and gave Winston Blackmore permission to forgive the girl’s sins through rebaptism, which Winston did.
Vanessa, now with a clean slate, then upset everything by announcing that she wanted to get married again, but to her boyfriend, someone of her own choosing. Warren exploded in rage during a heated telephone call to Blackmore. “There it is!” Warren said. “I told Father, ‘If you let this girl get rebaptized, then the next thing she will want to do is get remarried, and there it is.’ ” He could not overturn Rulon’s decision to forgive her, but he had a different idea. “Her baptism did not work,” Warren ordered. “She shall not be remarried. There is nothing left for her to do but to come [back] and have her blood shed for the remission of her sins! You are instructed to tell her to gather up her things and to go away. You and Ron [Vanessa’s father] are instructed to pray night and day for the Lord to destroy her from the face of the earth!”
Warren was condemning the girl to death. “No trial, no mercy, no defense, and all while Uncle Rulon was in his bed and asleep,” Winston recalled for me in a halting voice. The horrified Blackmore would have no part of it.
Rohbock showed up in Canada, under a strict order from Warren to retrieve his daughter. “Ron Rohbock was the meanest man I’ve ever met,” Blackmore told me. “He said that he was the one who had brought Vanessa into this world and it was his priesthood duty to take her out of this world. He was ordered to love his daughter enough to carry out the edict in order for her to have a chance at salvation.” Blackmore refused to hand the child over for retribution. He kept her secreted away in a distant house, and her father returned empty-handed to Short Creek.
The confrontation escalated as time passed, and Warren sent Rohbock back to Canada two more times, including a trip on which he was backed up by Warren’s brother, Leroy Jeffs. Blackmore not only refused their demands, but notified the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which contacted the FBI and the Utah attorney general’s office. The word went out: If Warren did not stop this mad crusade against the child, the law would intervene. Warren backed off, but he never forgot.
Vanessa eventually married the boy she originally wanted, and against all logic, they settled in Short Creek. I have seen that same decision made repeatedly by outcasts, because it is so difficult for residents to give up the only way of life they have ever known. Blackmore observed that so much official attention had been focused on her situation that Vanessa probably was the safest woman in town.
Warren Jeffs would later insist that his words had been misunderstood. However, I am convinced that without the intervention of Winston Blackmore, Vanessa would have been sacrificed in a “blood atonement” ritual.
Ron Rohbock’s failure to deliver his daughter for punishment earned him a place on Warren’s blacklist. As far as Warren was concerned, his father’s old buddy was expendable. Punishment would be years in coming, but when it came, Warren would destroy Rohbock.