CHAPTER 18
Warren Jeffs blew into Texas on a lie. A single entity buying more than thirteen hundred acres of land at once was bound to draw attention, even in rural areas of Texas. A curious neighbor who watched the new activity while leaning on the fence at the eastern boundary was told that a private hunting lodge for rich men was to be built on the ranch and that construction workers and their families were coming in to get things under way.
The first time that Warren went walking alone on the Texas property, on Sunday afternoon, January 4, 2004, he followed a dirt track to the northeast and got lost in the sprawling, empty sameness of it all. He wandered back south and was gone for two hours, until found by an FLDS man driving a dump truck. The next day, undertaking a wider exploration with a guide, he bounced along aboard a small and rugged four-wheeler and got a better lay of the land. Zion blazed in full glory in his churning imagination, as he charted out where God wanted the temple to be built, as well as the houses, the barn, the dairy, and the manufacturing and agricultural areas. He saw deer and antelope and got the worst case of hay fever he had ever had.
But he could not linger. Claiming to have an important Saturday Work Meeting to conduct back in Short Creek, he headed back to Mancos, Colorado, leaving behind his hand-picked cadre of twenty-five men, twelve women, and sixteen children to start the Texas project. They would live for now bunched into a large camper trailer, a motor home, and four tents. The motor home had a bathroom and the tent dwellers shared a portable toilet. The living conditions were really much too Spartan for a man of Warren’s delicate sensibilities.
An eerie scene unfolded shortly after dawn on January 10, 2004, at the cavernous LeRoy S. Johnson Meeting House in Short Creek. The tall, slender Prophet Warren Jeffs had arrived in the empty hall at 6:40 A.M. and was standing alone at the speaker’s platform when the FLDS faithful began to show up. He was not smiling. God had finally identified his enemies and shown how they were to be handled. On this day, Warren would prove to the FLDS, once and for all, that it was he who held the reins of power in their lives.
As usual, it was an FLDS members-only affair. But over time, and through many interviews, listening to tape recordings of Warren’s monotone tirade, and finally reading his own version of events in the Priesthood Record, I was able to piece together exactly what happened that morning, and the hazy initial reports smoothed into crystal clarity. Warren manhandled them.
Dan Barlow, the town’s mayor and fire chief, was one of the early arrivals at the meeting house, and he approached Jeffs and shook his hand. The prophet edged Barlow to the side and quietly confided that he had been instructed by the Lord to deliver a public correction to Barlow; the mayor could either stay in the audience or listen in private from an adjoining room. Barlow chose to stay. A number of other men received similar quiet, personal warnings as they arrived with their families, and they also chose to remain in the big central chamber.
The women and girls were as usual dressed modestly in long, pastel-colored prairie dresses, and their long hair was swept up in the unique fashion that is standard within the religion, but that outsiders call a “plyg-do.” The men and boys wore their long-sleeved shirts buttoned at the wrists and collar, for any display of skin would be frowned upon. The children were well-behaved and squeaky clean.
Jeffs conducted the service with authority, reading forcefully from church doctrine that men who would spread even the least doubt among the faithful must be cast out. For an hour and a half, he flailed them in a voice that carried no more inflection than the drone of an air conditioner. One by one, he expelled seventeen men, dropping his ax on many whose families had carved the town out of the wilderness before Warren was even born. He commanded everyone to rise.
“The Lord has revealed to me that these men no longer hold Priesthood. They have been tested of God and found wanting and Heavenly Father, through the Prophet, will have me handle these men in order to begin a cleaning up of his kingdom before the great and dreadful day of the Lord. We love these brethren and await the day that we can welcome them back into the brotherhood of the Lord but until they have been sufficiently humbled before God and bow before the Lord with a broken heart and contrite spirit, the Lord God will have me send them away to repent from a distance!”
There was a pause as the congregation seemed to be holding its breath as they soaked up the startling decision. Warren pushed ahead.
“All those who can validate this action as the will and word of God, please so manifest by raising your arm to the square. Any in opposition may so manifest in the same manner.” Of course, there were no dissenting votes. All in attendance raised their hand in support of the prophet. Even the surprised victims reacted with reflexive obedience and raised their right hands as if swearing in court, to affirm the decree. He then dismissed the exiled men from the meeting, with instructions to return to their homes and prepare to leave Short Creek as soon as possible. They accepted the abuse like meek little lambs.
Among those Warren expelled were four of his own brothers: David (who was confined to a wheelchair due to polio), Hyrum, Brian, and Blaine. In the complicated Jeffs family tree, Blaine’s youngest wife was also his stepdaughter.
(As strange as it seems, that is not an uncommon practice within the FLDS. When a man is thrown out of the church, the prophet automatically dissolves all of the transgressor’s previous marriages. The freed wives and children are assigned by the prophet to someone else, so new kids are frequently being brought into established families. The prophet may later reward the new father for displaying great obedience in taking on the responsibility of someone else’s family by assigning one of the new stepdaughters to be another wife. The girl thus becomes a sister-wife of her own mother and is available for sex with the man who is her new father.)
Of paramount importance for Warren on that momentous January day of reckoning was the opportunity to “handle” four of the influential Barlow brothers. The family responsible for the unauthorized monument, library, and museum was decimated. Mayor Dan Barlow was on the list. So were prominent businessman Nephi Barlow and Truman Barlow, an important figure financially within the church and in town tax collections and disbursements. The primary target was Louis Barlow, age eighty, who many people had thought should have become the prophet instead of Warren with the death of Rulon in 2002.
Warren accused the Barlows of forgetting God by having erected monuments to man in Short Creek—constituting idolatry—and charged that they had secretly been forming “a counterfeit government.” They were ordered to write letters of confession, leave their homes and families, and to “not come in this community until they receive permission from me, of the Lord.” It was the standard sentence for men and boys who were thrown out of the religion: Repent from afar.
He was not yet finished, and he now instructed the entire congregation of several thousand people to kneel before him. “I raised my arm to the square and pled with the Lord to forgive these people,” he would recall later in his record of events. Then he addressed the families of the banished. “All you ladies married to these men are released from them and will remove yourselves immediately from their presence. If you don’t, I will have to let you go.”
Four more men also would be tossed out soon after that fateful meeting, bringing the total expulsions to twenty-one. They were stunned. Nothing had ever happened on such a scale in Short Creek; with so many FLDS families being destroyed in one swoop, hundreds of women and children were affected.
The dumbfounded congregation was instructed to begin a two-day fast as part of the repentance process. After a closing prayer, Warren brought the extraordinary gathering to a close and calmly strolled to the exit doors to shake hands with the congregants as they filed past. Happy to have dodged the bullet themselves, they eagerly declared their loyalty.
“I love you all,” Warren assured them, projecting an image of unwavering love—“keeping sweet”—while having casually destroyed so many lives. The awful repercussions of that day can be measured in the suicide, death, despair, depression, misery, financial ruin, incest, and immorality that followed. The wives of the expelled men would be “reassigned” to other men, and their children would be forced to call a stranger “Father.”
It was all done in the name of the Lord.
The political rivalry between the Jeffs family and the Barlows stretched back a long time, but the power struggle was now over. Warren believed that he had ended it by ripping the heart out of the Barlow clan, but he would continue to cut them even deeper in the months to come, vindictive in his retribution. There was no mercy because the people needed to understand what happens to those who dared to challenge the Lord’s self-anointed leader.
The Barlows and the other expelled men did not recognize just how serious Warren was about crushing them. They thought their exiles would be temporary, and that after repenting for a couple of weeks, they would be allowed to return to their homes and regain their families. That was not the prophet’s plan at all, and as time passed, my investigation would show that some of the women and children were handed around the “priesthood” like sugar candy at a party; everybody got a turn.
When the expelled Barlow men moved into a house together in another town, Warren attacked again, ruling that if they were ever to regain even the slightest chance of being forgiven by him, they could not keep each other company. If they were together, they might be tempted to commiserate about how they had been wronged and start plotting against the prophet. Once again, they blindly followed Warren’s edict, obeyed his absurd rules, and separated to live alone, with no family contact whatsoever.
The unrelenting pressure, loneliness, and humiliation eventually became too much for the elderly Louis Barlow. Once considered a candidate to lead the entire religion, he now slid into depression and debt, living off his credit cards. The old man decided that no matter what had been decreed, perhaps God might accept him into Heaven after all, so he took his own life. Suffering from congestive heart failure, Louis stopped taking his medications and died of a heart attack in May, four months after having been excommunicated.
Warren even seized that tragedy to further shame his deceased rival and the Barlow clan. He magnanimously allowed a funeral to be conducted at the meeting house and a burial in the town cemetery, but he would not allow the grave to be dedicated, a traditional and vital part of an FLDS funeral service. Jeffs claimed that Louis had not fully repented before death, so was undeserving of his priesthood blessing. At the service, the dead man’s former wives were ordered to sit beside their newly assigned husbands.
There was no longer any confusion about who was in charge of the FLDS and the millions of dollars of riches in its financial arm, the United Effort Plan.
Immediately after the Saturday Work Meeting on January 10, Warren Jeffs disappeared.
Only eleven hours and fifty minutes after delivering his blow to Short Creek, he was back in the Mancos hideout, rushing to lead the church hierarchy into what he called “deep hiding.” Elderly Uncle Fred had been quietly removed to Mancos in the middle of the night, stripped of his title as the bishop of Short Creek, and Warren instructed Fred’s wives that the old man was “gone, not to come back” to the town. Wendell Nielsen, the old ally who had filled Warren’s slot as first counselor in the presidency, would also go underground with Warren and Fred, surfacing only for special missions. Jeffs ordered his own family to scatter, and they piled into waiting vehicles and took off, destinations unknown, some joining him five hours later in Colorado.
The only newspaper in Short Creek is an irregularly published community periodical from the church, but bigger papers had been watching and had developed sources in the town. The Daily Spectrum in nearby St. George and the Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune in Salt Lake City all carried stories on the meeting in their Sunday editions on January 11. Anxious police throughout the area responded with calls to Chief Marshal Sam Roundy to offer assistance in case there was a riot. Warren sniffed at such intrusive attention by the media and the law, since he considered the political massacre to be just an internal “setting in order of the people.” He had dealt with the master deceivers and everything would now be able to return to normal.
That was not to be, for an insignificant Short Creek resident named Ross Chatwin had stormed into the mix. Chatwin had already been expelled for trying to take a second wife without permission, but Warren now learned that Chatwin, instead of being obedient, was fighting back. He had sent out hundreds of letters claiming that Louis Barlow was the rightful prophet of the FLDS. This brand-new enemy had come out of nowhere, and on January 14, the impertinent man held a news conference in which he denounced Warren as a tyrant. Short Creek was invaded by the gentiles—cops and the media—and all of Warren’s hard work to put things in order there seemed to be coming apart at the seams.
Warren told his scribe, “We have no friends on earth.” He canceled a plan to return to Short Creek, using the excuse that people were waiting there to kill him. Instead, he would take a road trip.
Despite the heightened tension, some needs remained constant, according to his Record, and Warren snatched two more children as brides: Gloria Ann Steed and Veda Keate, both only thirteen years old. They were happily given to Warren by their fathers and mothers. And as the storm broke, he married two more—Loretta Jane Barlow, also thirteen, and Permelia Johnson, fifteen. In his own words in the Priesthood Record, Jeffs admitted to marrying four underage girls within a few days. He simply took them. No little girl in the faith was safe if the prophet wanted her.
Accompanied by his wife-scribe Naomi, and with his brother Leroy Jeffs and moneyman John Wayman, Jeffs took off from Mancos on Tuesday, January 27, 2004, in a two-vehicle convoy, a spacious Ford Excursion and a Ford Navigator. He claimed to be on another mission ordered by God, but in retrospect it looks more like a holiday from his troubles. The little group had only traveled across the rest of Colorado and part of Kansas before Warren started making horrendous pronouncements concerning God’s “judgments.” Naomi recorded them: “There is such a dark spirit everywhere of great wickedness. The people on this land are only worthy to be swept off.”
In the cold of winter, Jeffs tracked back to the very roots of Mormonism. Upon reaching the environs of Independence, Missouri, he stepped through a carpet of light snow in fifteen-degree weather to explore the place that once had been set apart as the site for a future temple by the early Mormons, although none was ever built there. Jeffs had first seen it during a three-month coast-to-coast trip the previous year, when he was out sizing up possible places of refuge. The site holds significance to the mainstream Mormon Church, but Warren wanted to rededicate it in behalf of the FLDS. He stood tall with both his arms held out on the square and prayed for the Almighty to strip the land of its current population of hundreds of thousands of people, so Jeffs could build “the New Jerusalem and the temple in Jackson County, Missouri.”
It showed an evolution in his thinking. The FLDS had always clung to the idea that they were far beyond needing anything like a real temple, because they had lost the right to enter Mormon temples when they were excommunicated a century earlier. In the recent decades, however, prophets had made reference to the FLDS still not needing any temple, at least until after the end of the world, when everyone else had perished. Warren was now seriously thinking about that.
While on their trip, they also visited the Carthage Jail in Carthage, Illinois, where LDS Church founder Joseph Smith had been murdered by a mob on June 27, 1844. Warren repeatedly compared himself to Joseph, even claiming that he, too, would one day be called upon to reveal ancient texts that would become canonized into scripture. He surveyed the room in which Smith had been assassinated, saw the bullet hole in the door, and examined the window from which Smith had fallen. What image did he take away from that historic scene? “The room was quite small,” he noted in what would become a persistent, peculiar refrain.
Early on the final day of January 2004, a Saturday, the little caravan crossed the Mississippi River and hurried to Nauvoo, Illinois. The early Mormons, when driven from their homes in western Missouri, had reclaimed this once swampy land and built a thriving city on it. Then it was on to Ohio, where Warren’s troop did some laundry before heading to Palmyra, New York, and the Hill Cumorah, where a large statue of the angel Moroni marks the spot where Joseph Smith retrieved the golden plates bearing the runes that created Mormonism.
But Warren was at a loss as to why God had sent him on this particular trip in the middle of winter. Something continued to gnaw at him: Why did God and the angels and saints appear in humble surroundings? In a fit of clairvoyance and characteristic hubris, he proclaimed in the Record that while God and His messengers sometimes did drop into modest places, the Lord really wanted “a temple where He can appear in honor and glory to His faithful people.”
After that declaration of God’s true wishes, twisted to fit his own dream, Warren headed back west. The breakaway religion that had prided itself on never needing a temple was about to get a monumental one.