CHAPTER 4
I was hooked. The drive home to Cedar City in the freezing dark of that winter night was almost dreamlike and somewhere along the road I crossed the imaginary divide that separates Short Creek from the United States. The episode that I had witnessed that Saturday would not appear in the morning paper, nor on the evening news, because even if the editors heard about it, they would not deem it important enough to dispatch a reporter to cover. And for the Short Creek inhabitants like Ross, it was not really news at all; it was just another day in the Crick. Happens all the time, he said. That and worse. The difference this time was that a gentile who worked with law enforcement had been on the scene to witness it. By now, my doubts and hesitations had evaporated like mist rising from a field with the dawn; something was very wrong down there. I reminded myself not to let emotion get ahead of professionalism. My primary concern was still to keep the Chatwins in their place; it was no longer their house, but the lower floor of a duplex, a basement apartment. But sooner or later, I understood that whatever I uncovered was going to end up in a court of law. I would dot every i and cross every t to make the case watertight.
A few days later, I paid another visit to Short Creek, once again prepared to be greeted by the reception committee. Sure enough, as soon as I got into town, the plyg-rigs emerged out of nowhere and were on me. This time, when they closed in and started to buzz around like big mosquitoes, I let them force me to the side of the street, at which point I suddenly stopped, threw open my door, and jumped out. In my hands was a 35-millimeter still camera with a long black lens, and I brought it up and started snapping pictures of license plates and startled faces, bounding toward them like a determined Hollywood paparazzi after a starlet. I yelled, “Hey, get out and come on over here and talk to me!” Click-click-click. “Come on, guys. Let’s talk!”
There was a long moment of hesitation. They had not been instructed about anything like this and just sat there, dumbfounded, in their trucks with the big engines idling as they realized the game had changed. Then they hit their gas pedals and scattered like chickens. I lowered the camera and allowed myself a chuckle as I began to realize how scared they were to be photographed. I could almost envision them speeding over to some place like the friendly Vermillion Cliffs Café, and trying to figure out what had happened over a cup of coffee. The guy had a camera! He took our pictures! Like most bullies, they were mostly about posturing, and if you faced up to them, they didn’t know how to react. My camera was scarier to them than a gun. Eventually, I grew used to their antics; after all, when you go to the circus, you expect to see clowns.
I took some groceries over to Ross and Lori and their kids. They no longer had any source of income, and they were living like refugees trapped in a town that treated them as if they had the plague. No work, no money, no food, so I would try to help when I could. My dad had taught me that when you help others, you are really helping yourself, and it gave my spirits a boost to see the family hang tough while the FLDS tried to crush them.
In return, the Chatwins became my guides into the tangled lore and skewed history of the FLDS. Through them, I began to meet other FLDS dissidents, the apostates, who had heard about the private investigator who was standing up to the cops and the thugs. As I developed additional sources, all paths eventually led to one person. The border towns were completely under the thumb of FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs. I listened carefully, but I wasn’t there yet. I had never even seen Jeffs in person. My job was to find ways to help Joan Dudley fight the eviction, and to help the Chatwins keep their home.
In long conversations with the Chatwins and my growing circle of apostate sources, I found an unexpected nugget of legal leverage, a precedent that had been decided less than a year earlier, in May 2003. After three years of litigation, the case, United Effort Trust v. Milton Holm, had ended with a half-a-loaf victory for both sides. The court ruled that the UEP did rightfully own the property, but also that Holm had made substantial improvements to it over the years and the UEP would be “unjustly enriched” by taking it without proper compensation for the work and money Holm had put into the 3,600-square-foot house. The FLDS refused to pay a cent, so Milton Holm was granted a “life estate” in the property, which meant his family could continue living there for the rest of his life. When he died, the family could be legally evicted.
That was definitely something to pass along to the lawyer, Joan Dudley. It was a recent legal decision that applied to the Chatwin case. But there was more to the story than just property rights. As Ross related what had happened in his calm voice, it left me reeling in disbelief. The property title dispute faded almost to an afterthought as I was swept up in the tragic saga of the Holm family. What had happened was so unbelievable that I couldn’t just take Ross’s word for it. It took some time for me to piece the facts together with a lot of background work and interviews with other people. Incredibly, Ross had been right all along. It was all too true.
The story involved child abuse, rape, kidnapping, extortion, smuggling minors across international borders for sexual purposes, and the astonishing fact that law enforcement agencies all the way up to the state level, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had known what was going on and had looked the other way.
Four years earlier, on a warm summer morning in 2000, Lenore and Milton Holm, a couple with thirteen children, were summoned to the office of Warren Jeffs for a surprise interview. That alone had set them on edge out of fear that he was going to accuse them of doing something wrong, and they had no idea where they had strayed from being loyal. Instead, the lanky Warren informed them that they were to surrender their fifteen-year-old daughter Nicole to be a wife for Wynn Jessop, who was twenty-three years older, married, and had children.
The wedding was already scheduled for the following day, when Nicole would turn sixteen. The parents, who had not been alerted in advance, were taken by surprise by the instruction but were relieved that they were not being punished for some unknown transgression. They automatically agreed to the decision, just as they had been trained to do.
As they went home, terrible memories flooded back to Lenore Holm of her own forced first marriage. She recalled her first wedding night, to the man to whom she had been assigned before she married Milton, as nothing less than a brutal assault. She couldn’t bear the thought of the same thing happening to her own little girl, and by the time she and Milton arrived back home, they had changed their minds. They solemnly revoked their consent.
Warren was furious. Within ten minutes, he called up Milton and told him that he had “lost priesthood” for allowing his wife to run the family, that they were no longer members of the church, and that they should immediately leave their residence.
Shortly afterward, the Holms began receiving visits from more cordial church leaders who urged them to trust the will of the prophet and yield their daughter in marriage. When they still refused, all pretense of cordiality was dropped and the visits from FLDS leaders became threatening, promising that dire judgments of God would befall the family if they did not (illegally) place their teenaged daughter into servitude. Within minutes of their final decision, the Holms were served with an eviction notice drawn up by the FLDS’s favorite lawyer, Rod Parker of the law firm of Snow, Christensen and Martineau in Salt Lake City, ordering them to immediately vacate their six-bedroom, three-bath house.
Friends and neighbors they had known all their lives ceased speaking to them. The city turned off their utilities and their trash was no longer picked up. The community that had been their whole lives only the week before, now seemed determined to crush them.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Suddenly, Nicole, the pretty little daughter and targeted bride, disappeared as if she had been part of a magic show. Poof, and she was gone without a trace. A distraught Lenore pleaded with the local law, Chief Marshal Sam Roundy, to find her daughter, and he agreed to take a look. Weeks went by before Roundy reported back that he had spoken with Nicole, but did not know where she was. The girl was safe, the chief said, and had voluntarily run away from home. Lenore did not believe him. She believed that her child had been kidnapped and was probably now married to Wynn Jessop.
Lenore notified the Washington County sheriff’s office in Utah, the Mohave County sheriff’s office in Arizona, and the attorneys general of both states. All promised to open investigations, and Nicole eventually was located in the FLDS community in Bountiful, British Columbia, Canada. Lenore knew that her daughter did not have a driver’s license or a passport, so there was no legal way for her to have crossed that international border without parental permission or the appropriate documentation, particularly since she was a minor being transported for the purpose of being married against the wishes of her family. Lenore filed complaints with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada and the FBI in the United States, and once again she was promised investigations into the disappearance of the girl. Nothing came from any of it.
Nicole was indeed in Canada and had been secretly married to Wynn Jessop, to whom she had been presented like a gift. The powerful FLDS had outmaneuvered the family. Nicole, brainwashed since infancy to obey the prophet, did just that, and was convinced that her parents were wrong. She saw nothing unusual about being assigned at her young age to an older man who was already married to someone else. But since Nicole was a child in the eyes of the law, it had not been her decision to make, and if sexual relations were indeed involved, it was clearly rape, no matter what she said or wanted or believed. The church arranged it and then ran interference for her.
Nicole refused to speak to her mother, stating that if any attempt was made to call or contact her, it would not be reciprocated. Expelled from the church for their actions, and ordered to leave their house, the parents sued.
From that came the UEP v. Holm case that had finally been settled the previous May. It was not really about property issues at all. The real crime was that Milton and Lenore had broken an unwritten FLDS law by challenging the word of the powerful prophet. Therefore, they had to be punished.
The Chatwins and the Holms provided a hint at what might lie ahead. Nicole was only fifteen when church leaders tried to place her in a so-called marriage. Ross and Lori had been thinking about marrying a sixteen-year-old until I stopped them. There had always been chatter in the surrounding gentile communities about young girls being married off within the FLDS, but much of it was chalked up to rebellious farm girls tiring of their restricted lives and running away from home in search of love. That happened every day somewhere in this country. But how young was too young? How low would they go within the FLDS when deciding who was ready to be married? And if little girls were involved, what about the little boys? I was just beginning to grasp the true extent of the complexities of the case.