CHAPTER 6
The work in Short Creek brought up some personal and professional considerations for me. The private detective business is just that, a business, and I had to earn a living. I could not just drop everything, and my paying clients elsewhere, to constantly run down to that crazy town. I could only work for so long on a dollar. But likewise, I also could not—would not—give up on my investigation. I had stumbled into an unbelievable place and an entire culture that should not exist in this country, and many of the people I was meeting were fighting for their very survival.
My research and paperwork files were stacking higher with each visit, progress had been made to get a safe haven for the Chatwins, and it was time for me to take a breather. But I knew that I wasn’t finished with the FLDS.
I seemed uniquely qualified to investigate the group. Not only was I a well-educated and trained professional in the law enforcement field, but there was something else just as important in this matter: I was a Mormon. I knew my religion, its traditions, its history, and its texts well, so I could cut through the blather of the FLDS when they tried to wrap their criminal activity with a sacred cloth of piety. Add to that the interesting fact that my great-grandfather served prison time in the late nineteenth century for being a polygamist. My grandmother was the youngest daughter of his youngest wife. When I had heard those stories as a kid, they seemed as outdated as other quirky tales from back in the age of the covered wagon. Now it seemed that I should have paid a little more attention to my mother’s family history.
My mom had made sure that her four raucous sons regularly attended church, and at the age of sixteen, I was ordained to the position of a priest in the Mormon Church in the small Southern California town of Banning, a place that was so quiet and normal that it was like “Leave It to Beaverville.” As a priest, I was able to participate in the duty of blessing the sacrament, something that I took very seriously.
Then one Sunday as I knelt to say the prayer, a woman in the congregation hurried up to our bishop and whispered something. He abruptly stopped the service and announced that a matter needed to be addressed. I was led away from the sacrament table, and everyone in the church stared as if I were some kind of freak during that long trip up the aisle. I had no idea what was happening. I thought my dad had been in an accident or something equally as horrible.
In his office, the bishop said he had just been informed that I had been seen being arrested in front of the church on the previous Wednesday night. “She is sure it was you, and that a highway patrolman took you away in handcuffs,” he said. “If that is the case, then I can’t allow you to bless the sacrament. You have to be worthy, so we’ll need to get someone to take your place.”
I was embarrassed and angry as I explained that the patrolman was Darrell Crossman, the leader of my Explorer Scout troop, and that he had offered me a ride in his cruiser. The bishop should not have interrupted the church meeting to confront me, but he had bought into the busybody’s accusation. Now, he apologized. “Come on, we’ll take you back up on the stand and everyone will see that you haven’t done anything wrong,” he said. As I walked with him back toward the altar, my mind was churning with emotion. I could not continue as if nothing had happened. Why would I want to have anything to do with a church that would humiliate me? I walked out, and I did not set foot in another Mormon church for twenty-six years.
I grew up as a Southern California kid bent on enjoying life.
My dad told me that everything I wanted to know had been written down in a book somewhere, awakening my curiosity and probably giving me a bit of an edge growing up during a very tumultuous period. During the summer when I was eight, I read Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey; plowed through the library’s shelves of biography, autobiography, and history; and then turned to the thirty-two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Still, I was swept up in the counter-culture madness that was California in the 1960s, and I tumbled from gifted pupil to troubled youth. Out of school, out of church, and out of luck at eighteen years old, I drifted from coast to coast, always looking for the next party as I earned a living in the building trades. My motorcycle was my best friend. It had a special sheath in which I kept a pair of crutches, which I needed from having been in so many accidents. But the worst mishap came in 1979, when I was a passenger in a pickup truck that slammed into a huge rock on a mountain road. The collision broke my neck and jaw and a lot of other bones, leaving me in a body cast with steel plates in my head and face holding me together and a future of reconstructive surgeries. The doctors expected me to die. I spent several weeks in traction while undergoing multiple reconstructive surgeries and five months in a “halo,” a medieval-looking metal band that encircled my head, with bolts tightened into my skull with a torque wrench to keep my head immobile. My neck was broken at the C2 vertebra, an injury commonly referred to as a “hangman’s break.” The purpose of the halo was to make it possible for me to move around, instead of being immobilized in a special bed that kept me in traction. The problem was, I had been in bed so long that my muscles atrophied to the point of uselessness and I had to learn to walk all over again. It took two long years to finally get my legs back under me and start feeling whole again.
That close call allowed me to believe I had been given a second chance with life, a rare opportunity to start anew, and I decided to change course. I started to really grow up, got married, and settled down to start a family. But when our kids were born, my wife and I began to realize that Southern California probably wasn’t the best place to raise them. For a variety of reasons, none of them having to do with religion, we decided to move to Utah. I still had no religious affiliation, and my wife knew little about Mormons.
But when my partner in a construction business in Riverside, California, learned of our decision to relocate to Utah, he was bewildered and concerned. “Be careful,” he warned. “The place is full of polygamists.”
“Well, we have Crips and Bloods out here, Gene,” I said. “The cops just found the body of an eight-year-old girl who had been brutalized and tossed alongside the freeway just a few blocks from my home—and you think I should be afraid of a few polygamists?” I was sick of hearing remarks about polygamists and Utah. Polygamy hadn’t been practiced for more than a hundred years out there—or so I thought.
So we headed for Cedar City, a place that now seems to have been picked for us by fate. When we pulled up to our new house, people we had never seen before came over to help us unload, bringing food and instant friendship. There were Mormons and non-Mormons alike. One introduced himself as Brig Young. My wife, holding a plate of cookies that had just been brought over, blurted out, “Oh, come on—!!” Brig chuckled and said, “Yep, it’s true. The first-born son is always named Brigham. It’s a family tradition.” He was a direct descendant.
After leading cautious lives in what had turned into a high-crime area of Southern California, we were pleased to be among friendly neighbors. Six years after our move, I graduated from Southern Utah University with a 3.87 grade point average and a degree in criminal justice with an emphasis in criminalistics and a minor in chemistry. It had taken a long time for me to get through college while working full time and raising a family, but I never give up.
Then I got down to business. Right after college, I teamed up with a friend who was a private investigator in Cedar City. The town’s growth had inevitably been accompanied by an increase in crime and drugs, and I saw an opportunity in the bail bond industry, which would, I hoped, provide some additional income. Along with that, I also became a bounty hunter, legally tracking down people who had had some sort of brush with the law and returning them to the custody of the sheriff to await a court appearance.
My state license as a bounty hunter proved to be a potent tool. In most states, bounty hunters do not even need permission or probable cause to enter a dwelling, unannounced, to make an arrest. And through reciprocity agreements, if a case originates in Utah, I could follow it across state lines and go into other cities with the same authority I had at home. I became good at finding people who didn’t want to be found. I learned a lot about tenacity and seeing a difficult assignment through.
Among my first jobs was a self-assigned cold-case project back in California. Even before we moved to Utah, Larry Wheelock, one of my best buddies, had been murdered in a home invasion robbery, and the killer had never been caught. I dug out the files, pestered detectives, and discovered some new evidence by using new technologies. Within six months, Larry Donel Page was arrested for the murder. At twenty-six years, it had been the oldest cold case to be solved in Orange County history.
Because an adversarial situation plays out in just about every case, I have made a decision to be armed most of the time. I have come to the realization that it would be foolhardy to find myself—or worse, my family—in circumstances that might require having to protect ourselves against the threat of serious injury or death, and not have the means to do so. I refuse to let that happen.
As I settled more into our new home and life, I began to feel an obligation to my children, and myself, to contemplate the value of some sort of spiritual life. After years of exploring many religions, I was converted, along with my family, to the mainstream LDS Church. I had returned to my Mormon roots.
By the time I drove down to Short Creek to meet Ross Chatwin for the first time in 2004, I already had a lifetime of experience dealing with hard cases. Little did I know that I was on a collision course with Prophet Warren Jeffs and the breakaway, mysterious sect called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.