CHAPTER 29
On her wedding day, July 27, 2006, Merrianne Jessop was only twelve years and twenty-four days old. She had a blazing mane of bright red hair and a smile that reached across her freckled face from ear to ear. In the outside world, she would have been a sixth grader.
When she was only nine, Warren Jeffs commanded her father, his loyal lieutenant Merril Jessop, to fetch the girl to R-17 in Texas, where she could mature and begin receiving “trainings” on becoming a “heavenly comfort wife” for the prophet. Now the time had come, and Merrianne was summoned by her mother, Barbara. She was told to hurry and clean up, because something important was about to happen.
After a shower, she put on a fresh set of the long underwear required by her religion and slid into baggy sweat-suit pants before adding stockings up to her knees. Her best dress, a simple garment with a pretty crocheted collar that buttoned modestly around her neck, came next. Her mother brushed the girl’s long hair and fixed her plyg-do. Now, clean and dressed and with her hair appropriately styled, Merrianne was escorted to a place she had never seen before: the inside of the temple of the YFZ compound, where she would be “spiritually placed” with fifty-year-old Warren Jeffs as another child concubine.
One minute the child had been out with the other kids and an hour later she was being sealed in marriage “for time and all eternity” to a fugitive who was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.
The event was more than just another instance of Warren Jeffs grabbing up another preteen girl as a wife. It was a three-bride ceremony that gathered the FLDS elite into a power-sharing tribal ritual in which they intentionally bound themselves together in a criminal act with the exchange of underage girls who were called “Daughters of Zion,” one of whom was not yet a teenager. Slathered with a veneer of religious-sounding hocus-pocus to make it seem that it was all God’s doing, the triple wedding was a sham, and each one was illegal.
It was also a perfect example of the “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” arrangement among the like-minded villains of the three-member First Presidency that ruled the FLDS: President Warren Jeffs, First Counselor Wendell Nielsen, and Second Counselor Merril Jessop. The prophet knew he was pushing the envelope with the preteen Merrianne, but he was a genius at getting others to share in the culpability of his crimes. The fathers, and the mothers, would all get their hands dirty right along with him. None could accuse another without implicating themselves.
Bishop Merril Jessop had contributed his twelve-year-old daughter Merrianne to marry the prophet. Warren Jeffs contributed one of his own daughters, Teresa, who had turned fifteen the previous day, to marry thirty-six-year-old Raymond Merril Jessop, one of the bishop’s sons, who was already a polygamist. Wendell Nielsen chipped in his own fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, LeAnn, to be a bride of Merril Leroy Jessop, age thirty-three, another of the bishop’s sons. Family, fortunes, and fate were being knitted together in a huge criminal conspiracy.
None of the girls had to be dragged to the altar. The children were filled with the belief that these marriages were good and pure, and they understood the prestige that would come from being placed with such important men.
Wendell Nielsen said the opening prayer, then Warren took over as presiding “mouth”—the authorized speaker—and performed the first two ceremonies. The prophet would happily report in his journal that he then made Merril Jessop “mouth,” temporarily granting him authority, and assumed his place beside his petite bride-to-be for his own grotesque ceremony. The top of the diminutive Merrianne’s head came up to about the middle of the torso of her lanky husband, who stood six feet four.
The marriage delighted him, and he exuberantly admitted one of his most heinous crimes to his scribe for the Priesthood Record: “There was sealed Merrianne Jessop to Warren Steed Jeffs. That’s me!”
Merrianne was given to the care of Warren’s favorite concubines, Naomi and Millie, for further training, and two weeks later, the child was led to the ceremonial temple bed that had been designed to the prophet’s specifications. There, she was sexually assaulted by the panting, praying Warren, assisted by Naomi and at least one other wife, in a mockery of a loving marital union.
The event was recorded on audio tape and later transcribed.
“That feels good. Now repeat the words from your mouth … How do you feel, Merrianne?” Warren prompted as he violated the little girl. A timid child’s voice replied, “Feels good.” Ever obedient and keeping sweet.
There is the sound of rhythmic, heavy breathing from the prophet, who then says, “Everyone else let go of me. Back away a little.”
More hurried breathing and then some chanting gibberish is heard, and five minutes into the “ceremony,” he tells Merrianne to prepare “for the greater light, the revelations of God on your behalf.” He has the women tie his hand to Merrianne’s, and then his gasping continues until a silence is noted and the ritualistic rape of a child is completed. The girl has hardly uttered a sound. Warren then issues long, tangled prayers for all involved, and asks his little bride to come up and give him a hug.
The child’s innocence was gone forever, but we had not seen the last of little Merrianne Jessop.
A month later, on the night of August 28, 2006, I left my home in Utah and struck out on I-15 for the five-hour drive down to Kingman, Arizona, to witness the trial of Randy Barlow, who was charged with raping young Candi Shapley. The breathtaking route cuts across Las Vegas and passes Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon before bending back toward Kingman, but my mind was too preoccupied to enjoy the views.
I could think only about how our mercurial witness would do the next day on the stand. Gary Engels had called to confirm that she was indeed going to show up, which was one problem solved, but what might happen next was up in the air. I checked into a small motel in Kingman about 9:30 P.M., had a bite to eat at a nearby restaurant, then climbed into bed and fell almost instantly asleep.
It seemed that I had just closed my eyes when my cell phone rattled to life on the night stand. I blinked awake. The amber numbers on the bedside clock showed that it was about midnight. I groped for the phone and answered, recognizing the excited voice of an FBI special agent from the Utah field office. I had worked closely with him over the years. He gave me the news: “They got him!”
“Got who?” I stammered, still fuzzy with sleep.
“Warren!”
I sat bolt upright in bed. “You’re shitting me,” I blurted.
“I wouldn’t be calling you at midnight to shit you,” he responded.
It was a strange, surreally joyous moment. After all of the months and years and work, the demented prophet had finally been caught. Now it would not matter if he chose not to speak; the evidence and the witnesses would do the talking.
Warren Jeffs’s long ramble around America ended with a blind-luck capture on I-15 outside the town of Apex, Nevada, nineteen miles northeast of Las Vegas. Nevada highway patrolman Eddie Dutchover pulled up behind a new red Cadillac Escalade about nine o’clock that night and could not make out the temporary license plate, which was obscured by a plastic cover. Warren had worried a long time about how overlooking some small detail could potentially trip him up, and it appeared that perhaps one of his revelations had actually come true.
There were two men and a woman in the vehicle. The driver got out and handed over a Utah driver’s license bearing the name of Isaac Jeffs, which sparked something in the officer’s mind. It also stated that Jeffs had a concealed carry permit for a weapon, which earned a second, harder look at the driver, who was finding it hard to stand still.
Dutchover approached the SUV again and spoke with the woman inside, who presented a license in the name of Naomi Jessop. Because nobody in the FLDS has the authority to perform legal marriages, Naomi still carried the surname of her father, Merril Jessop.
The trooper turned to question the second passenger, a lanky man sitting on the right side of the back seat, staring straight ahead and eating a salad. The man studiously avoided looking at the policeman, and when asked for an ID, said his name was John Findley. Asked if he had any written ID, such as a driver’s license, the man produced a receipt from a Florida business for the purchase of contact lenses. Dutchover noticed that the big jugular vein in the long neck was pulsing wildly. “You’re so nervous it’s making me nervous,” the trooper said. “Is everything okay?” He asked the uneasy passenger to also get out, and made the two men stand apart while he continued to investigate. Their stories did not match. The driver, Isaac Jeffs, said they were headed for Utah, while the passenger, John Findley, said Denver was the destination.
Another red flag popped up when it was discovered that the big SUV was registered in the name of still someone else, a John Wayman out of Hildale, Utah, and the two men differed on who Wayman was and why they were using his Cadillac. Dutchover was at a critical point, alert to the possibility that he was dealing with more than just a few tourists passing through the state. He was alone with three suspicious people at the side of a darkened interstate freeway, and one of them was licensed to carry a concealed firearm. Something was very wrong; these guys were acting like drug runners, but so far, he had nothing substantial against them except the unreadable temporary license plate.
To further complicate matters, the computer had crashed at the highway patrol dispatch center, and the trooper had been unable to promptly run the registration. Had he been able to do so, and had it come back clean, he may have been forced to let the three people go on their way. But his training kicked in and he kept them talking, even getting a signed waiver to search the vehicle, thereby maintaining control of the scene while waiting for backup and for the computer to recover.
Dutchover remembered the photo of Warren Jeffs on the FBI’s posters at the Highway Patrol headquarters, and the next trooper on the scene confirmed the likeness, but the tall guy kept insisting he was not Warren Jeffs. Another call got the FBI out there, and a lot more cops were on the way.
When the troopers began searching the Cadillac SUV, and found it filled with computers and other material that would certainly lead to the discovery of Jeffs’s true identity, further denial became futile. An FBI agent asked once again for his real name, and the pale, nervous man finally gave in. “Warren Steed Jeffs,” came the answer, with a sigh of resignation.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation was not going to tolerate a mistake on this one. Earlier that very day, the authorities in Boulder, Colorado, had announced they would not file charges against an itinerant oddball named John Mark Karr, who had been arrested in Thailand and hauled to the States after making a false confession that he had murdered little beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey in 1996. The FBI had not been responsible for the Karr case, but the bungling of the Boulder district attorney’s office had left a cloud hanging over law enforcement nationwide. Nobody wanted another mistake. The FBI was going to be sure of what they were doing.
I spent a half hour on the telephone with the FBI as they tried to pin down Jeffs’s identity with certainty. They had him on “the List,” but neither they nor the Nevada State Police had day-by-day involvement with the case. By contrast, my life had been dominated by Jeffs and his cohorts for years. My office overflowed with documents, transcripts of old court cases, boxes of tapes, files and folders, and thousands of hours of recordings of Jeffs’s droning lectures. My brain was just as full. I probably knew more about the FLDS than most members of the religion did. Without a doubt, this was the prophet.
During the two and a half hours they spent alongside that interstate highway, the authorities pulled an astonishing array of material from the cavernous SUV, everything a man on the run would need for survival: a police scanner, a radar detector, a couple of GPS navigational devices, a bunch of laptop computers, three iPods, better than a dozen cell phones and walkie-talkies; wigs, knives, and sunglasses; twenty-seven bricks of $100 bills, each worth $2,500; about $10,000 worth of prepaid credit cards; a duffel bag jammed with envelopes that contained even more money; the keys to no fewer than ten new luxury SUVs standing by to be exchanged as fresh vehicles whenever the old ones became too hot; a Book of Mormon and a Bible; and finally, a photograph of Warren with his late father, Rulon. The captured computers eventually would yield a trove of evidentiary material, including the audio tape of Warren having sex with Merrianne Jessop.
The police took a picture of a blank, emotionless Uncle Warren after he surrendered on the roadside. He was wearing baggy Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, with short black socks and dress shoes. A loyal woman member of the FLDS would tell me later that the moment she saw that police photograph of him standing by the road, showing his flesh in shorts, she decided to bolt from the cult. “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she said. “It’s not so much that he was dressed in clothes that he has kicked others out of their homes for wearing, but that he was wearing them and he had a tan!”
Warren Steed Jeffs was taken to the FBI office in Las Vegas, and at 5:07 A.M. he was photographed, fingerprinted, and booked into the Clark County Detention Facility. The self-appointed prophet was now behind bars, but for some mysterious and frustrating reason, his traveling companions, Isaac and Naomi, had been questioned and released. That decision caught me off guard.
Isaac and Naomi were apprehended in the same vehicle as one of the most wanted criminals in America, and for many months had been facilitating his continued freedom. I couldn’t understand why they had not been charged with aiding and abetting a fugitive, obstruction of justice, and—I am sure that, with a little head-scratching, there could have been a few more charges. They would most likely have been easy convictions and would have left both Naomi and Isaac facing serious prison time. Perhaps Isaac, the brother, would have stayed silent rather than help prosecutors, but Naomi was different. A shrewd manipulator and Warren’s closest confidante, she may well have turned on him to save her own skin, in my opinion. The information she had would have been valuable beyond measure.
While there was no way of knowing her role at the time, if she had been detained long enough to process some of the evidence found in the car, they would have discovered Naomi’s importance. Instead, they let her go. It was a lost opportunity.
A lot of potential evidence walked out the door when Naomi and Isaac were set free. To this day, I don’t have an answer for why the Feds did not seize that opportunity. An FBI agent who I asked about it later was as disgusted as I, hinting only that they had gotten orders “from upstairs.” It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last time, that law enforcement agencies would make perplexing decisions in this investigation and never explain why.
I was ecstatic that Warren had been caught, but it meant an almost sleepless night of phone calls and e-mails in my motel room in Kingman. I wasn’t the only one awake. The news instantaneously swept through not only the FLDS and the refugee community but the national media as well. By the time I walked through the grove of tall trees flanking the main entrance of the columned Mohave County Courthouse on the morning of August 29, I was exhausted.
Candi looked a lot better. She had long before rejected the FLDS dress code, and it seems that as soon as a woman leaves the cult and tastes that newfound sense of freedom, one of the first things she does is get a new hairdo and update the stale wardrobe. In her appearance before Superior Court judge Steven Conn, Candi was a stylish twenty-year-old young woman whose wavy red hair complimented the black pants, tailored vest, and black heels.
Her mother, Esther, wore a drab brown ankle-length prairie dress and sat on the defense side of the courtroom, right next to the mother of the perpetrator on trial, Randy Barlow, in a silent show of solidarity. Barlow, whose bail had been posted by Willie Jessop, was facing two Class 6 felonies for sexual conduct with a minor, as well as the more serious charge of rape, because Candi had told the grand jury that he had raped her twice after she was forced to marry him when she was only sixteen. Barlow sauntered into court wearing jeans and a gray shirt, seemingly unconcerned for a man who could be sent away for several years in prison if convicted. I wondered if he knew something we didn’t.
Barlow was actually the second of eight FLDS men who would be tried in Arizona’s crackdown on underage marriages. The first, Kelly Fischer, had been convicted and got forty-five days in jail and three years of probation, a disappointing sentence. Judge Steven Conn’s rationale for such a light sentence was that it was normal for a first conviction for statutory rape. The judge apparently didn’t take into consideration the fact that Fischer was a loyal FLDS member and might well reoffend if called upon by his church leaders to do so. Five of the eight men indicted were eventually convicted.
Soon after Candi took the stand, I had the sinking feeling that this trial was over before it even started. Only a few minutes into the general background opening questions from Mohave County prosecutor Matt Smith, I saw Esther rise. She moved all the way across the courtroom and took a new position, directly in Candi’s line of sight, as if the witness was not already painfully aware of her complex family situation. The church hierarchy was using Esther to play on that weakness. It reminded me of something out of the Godfather movies.
Smith asked Candi how she had learned she was being placed with Barlow. She remained cool, and after a long pause looked right at him. I was stunned to hear the words that followed from her mouth. “I have nothing else to say,” she told the prosecutor. I cringed, almost able to hear Warren Jeffs’s “answer them nothing” mantra rolling around in her head.
Smith had not expected such explicit opposition. Everything he had was flying right out the window as the prime witness and victim deliberately defied the court. He pressed forward, and she became adamant and her stare hardened. “I have nothing else to say.”
Judge Conn instructed her to respond or face the possibility of contempt of court. Candi remained firm: “I am not willing to answer any more questions.”
She crashed and burned before our eyes. Following the courtroom disaster, the state tried to salvage something from the wreckage.
There was a little more legal wrangling, but it was over. After Candi balked, the man who she claimed under oath had savagely raped her walked out of court a free man. It was unbelievable. She was ruled in contempt of court and sent to a shelter for abused women on a thirty-day sentence. It was later shortened to two weeks when Matt Smith felt there was no need to continue victimizing the victim.
Having gotten to know Esther, I was not surprised by her strange actions. The church leadership had backed her into a corner, and I didn’t expect her to have the courage to defy them. But I was highly disappointed with Candi. At least she didn’t lie; she just refused to answer. The charges against Warren in Arizona remained in place, but if Candi would not even testify against Barlow, there was no chance that she would take the stand against the prophet.
Of the other three Arizona men who ended up not being convicted of the charges against them, Rodney Holm, the former deputy marshall, remains a convicted felon and registered sex offender in the state of Utah. His Arizona charges were dismissed. The indictment against Terry Barlow was dismissed and Donald Barlow was acquitted.
I wouldn’t allow Candi’s and Esther’s performances in court that day to alter my relationship with either of them. I never burn my sources, no matter how frustrating. Who knows what the future might hold?