CHAPTER 7
I vividly remember my grandfather’s stories of leaving his home in Farmington, Utah, and riding the rails to San Bernardino, California, in his search for work during the Great Depression: Wall Street had crashed, thousands of banks had closed and wiped out the savings of millions of people, industrial production collapsed, and farmers throughout America lost their land. Utah’s citizens were trying to survive, but times were hard in this rugged state. There was a great exodus of men looking for work.
However, returning to Utah from England about that time was a tall, neatly dressed twenty-three-year-old man with a nice smile and dark hair who had escaped the ruination that had been suffered by so many. His name was Rulon Timpson Jeffs. He arrived not in a boxcar but on a passenger train, and he was a loyal, practicing member of the mainstream Mormon Church. Born in 1909 in Salt Lake City, Jeffs, a highly intelligent young man, became valedictorian of his LDS high school class in 1928 and delivered the graduation address in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, which he recalled as a “knee-knocking” experience.
Mormon young men are encouraged to undertake a proselytizing mission for the church as they mature from adolescence to manhood. It requires that they set aside their own wants and needs and devote two years of their lives to spreading their beliefs through personal example. Brigham Young once said those called to the position must have “clean hands and pure hearts, and be pure from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet; then live so every hour.” LDS missionaries continue to be an extraordinarily successful means of spreading the Mormon message around the world, and multitudes of people have responded to the words and deeds of the devoted young “saints.”
Rulon Jeffs began his own mission on June 1, 1930. He was sent to London, where he became a secretary at the mission headquarters. Two years later, he was home again and was given a secure job with the Utah State Tax Commission, a salaried government position that included an office in the capitol building in Salt Lake City. In June 1934, his fortunes grew even more when he married Grace Zola Brown, the daughter of influential LDS apostle Hugh B. Brown. That gave the ambitious Rulon a direct link to leadership and influence. He and Zola had two children.
As I plunged into the daunting task of figuring out the structure and history of the FLDS and its leadership, it was apparent that understanding the enigmatic Prophet Rulon Jeffs would be necessary before there could be any hope of grasping the madness of his son, Prophet Warren Jeffs. Was Warren an extension of his father’s eccentricities and deviant behavior? Between them, the two men hijacked the fundamentalist movement, established a position of unchecked power, and sowed chaos and perversion in their wake for fifty years.
The Mormons’ incredible record-keeping system would prove to be invaluable as I assembled the puzzle. The genealogy and family histories of millions of individuals, soon to be billions as more databases come on line, are available through LDS resources. I have even found and read my polygamist great-grandfather’s personal diary, digitized and available online in its original form. Starting the investigation, I began to amass material gleaned from legal documents, the churning of online search engines, books and papers available in libraries and private collections, private law enforcement databases, public business transactions, and information from personal interviews and conversations. This is the kind of project that I find particularly intriguing as an investigator; I love this stuff.
The problem was that the fundamentalists were no less enthusiastic about their own records. They were intensely paranoid about their illegal lifestyle and did a thorough job of hiding their accounts. For a researcher, that created an occasional black hole. I felt the information must be out there somewhere, beyond my reach, secreted away in barns or cubbyholes, behind false walls or in locked rooms. I would fantasize that at some future place and time I would find my way to that hidden trove of information, or it would find its way to me.
The “Hallelujah” moment for Rulon Jeffs, his introduction to Mormon fundamentalism, came on September 25, 1938, when he took his father, David Ward Jeffs, out for a birthday dinner. David had been a closet polygamist for years, so deep underground that Rulon had been born “in hiding” to David’s second wife. The boy lived for the first ten years of his life under the fake name of Rulon Jennings, although in such a society, it is doubtful he ever questioned his name change. The practice was not uncommon in other families that he knew, and that was just how things were. David allowed his son to become a faithful mainstream Mormon, perhaps because being discovered as a polygamist could have meant a jail term for the father. Now, at his father’s birthday dinner, it was time for Rulon to know everything, and David presented his son with a copy of the Truth magazine, an underground publication put out for those maintaining the covert and illegal practice of plural marriage.
In his memoirs, Rulon wrote, “I asked Father, ‘What is this?’ He told me it was put out by Joseph W. Musser. I said, ‘By what authority?’ So he told me, and he took me to see Brother Musser [who] received me like a father into the work, and I got well acquainted with him.
“When I was told about the Priesthood Council, I said, ‘Father, who is the head man?’ [and the reply was] ‘Well, he has to be in kind of hiding.’ I said, ‘I want to see him.’ So I finally got to see Uncle John over on 809 East, 700 South, met him in his home there. My heart leaped for joy finding the Prophet.”
“Uncle John” was John Y. Barlow, the acknowledged leader of the secret movement, who had been excommunicated by the LDS Church. After those meetings, Rulon Jeffs fully embraced the fundamentalist philosophy, casually discarding the religious faith he had practiced his entire life.
After joining the flock, he hung out with his new friends at “cottage meetings” around Salt Lake City, where they spoke fervently about the plural lifestyle and how to mold this idealistic “Priesthood Order” to oversee the breakaway faith, which was called “The Work” by its adherents.
“Priesthood” may best be described as the spiritual glue that binds together the FLDS power structure. Usually, when a boy is about twelve years old, he is ordained within the fundamentalist religion into a preparatory level called the Aaronic Priesthood. It is a means of taking on responsibility and commitment and is not too different from similar practices, under other names, with the youth in other churches. Any comparison ends there. Elsewhere, priesthood is about service; in the FLDS it is about power and control, and even the Aaronic Priesthood would be swept into that black vortex. The higher up the ecclesiastical ladder a man climbed, the more priesthood powers he enjoyed. In the hands of Prophet Warren Jeffs, “priesthood” was wielded like a magic wand. It meant whatever Jeffs wanted it to mean, and he used it as a handy camouflage and justification for his dreadful actions. To lose priesthood was to lose everything.
When Rulon told Zola in 1940 that he had found a shopgirl that he wanted to marry as an additional wife, she balked. Polygamy was no longer part of Mormon doctrine and anyone found practicing it would be excommunicated. This simply had not been part of the deal when they got married. For Zola, as with the vast majority of Mormons, polygamy was a thing of the past. Her father, the LDS Apostle Hugh B. Brown, came to the house and issued an ultimatum for Rulon to either give up his heretical ideas or be kicked out of both the LDS Church and the Brown family. Having already surreptitiously taken his new bride, Rulon refused, and both threats came to pass. The divorced Zola took their sons and moved to California. Her departure did not really bother Rulon. In the coming years, he replaced her with a harem of dozens of wives.
Polygamy had been illegal for more than sixty years by the time Rulon decided it would be his life’s calling. Back in January 1879, the United States Supreme Court had heard the case of George Reynolds, a Mormon resident in the Utah Territory, who was charged with having two wives—Amelia Jane Schofield and Mary Ann Tuddenham. In a unanimous decision, the high court found Reynolds guilty of violating the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act. The Reynolds case set the stage for the Mormon Church to discontinue the practice of polygamy and for Utah to become a state. Wilford Woodruff, the fourth LDS prophet, issued what became known as the 1890 Manifesto, which made monogamy official church doctrine.
Special provisions were eventually made into law allowing those who were already in plural marriages at the time to continue them without disruption, but no new plural marriages could be performed. That was the situation under which my pioneer great-grandfather lived, although he was occasionally hassled by the authorities for “cohabitation,” or living with a woman to whom he was not legally married. He paid $150 on one cohabitation charge and noted that it was “a lot of money.”
Eventually, polygamy faded from the mainstream church as most Mormons busily assimilated into the growing United States. However, the deep divide had been created with the Manifesto. A handful of die-hard polygamists refused to go along with the new direction, arguing that the church had abandoned “God’s will” and that a man must possess numerous wives. The dissidents were excommunicated and driven into secrecy.
By splitting away, the fundamentalists found themselves shorn of the right to set foot in any LDS temple—and temples are extremely important to Mormons, who use them as places for special worship such as formal marriages, in which everlasting vows are taken. The rebels could reasonably substitute meetings in private homes for their normal church services, but they had nothing that resembled a temple, and this created a big hole to fill in their new brand of religion. They came up with the novel excuse that since they were the true Mormons, they were of a higher order than everyone else, and therefore did not need a temple at all. Over time, that rationalization would become a point of stubborn pride with them.
Rulon Jeffs rapidly became a big frog in the very small fundamentalist pond and rose steadily in power. He was soon an apostle, then a patriarch, and then he held one of the seven positions on the Priesthood Council (or the “Council of Friends”), who shared power and control over their loosely formed organization and everyone in it. They controlled everything. Rulon also was the protégé of President John Y. Barlow.
A demonstration of the status he was acquiring came in 1942, when the fundamentalists created a rather dreamy socialist scheme called the United Effort Plan Trust (UEP), in which they pooled their resources with the notion that everyone would share the wealth equally. While that practice had been a part of early Mormon life as the religion struggled to survive during their long westward migration, it was eventually abandoned in favor of tithes given to the church and a storehouse from which supplies could be given to the needy. The fundamentalist version would turn that original good deed on its head.
Not just tithes, but all real estate holdings and other assets would be pumped into their UEP, and its trustees would decide how to dole out the assets, as well as doling out entitlements from their own version of a “bishop’s storehouse.” Rulon, the financially shrewd tax accountant, was appointed a trustee of the UEP. The United Effort Plan Trust became the financial arm of the church, and grew to be worth millions of dollars. Since the United Effort Plan had no bank account—having an account might have opened the records to legal scrutiny—that fund was controlled primarily through the private Rulon T. Jeffs Trust, for which he had sole authority. The storehouse for the needy instead became plunder for the loyalists.
As Rulon prospered in Salt Lake City, a colony of polygamists under the guidance of the Priesthood Council settled in an isolated little town called Short Creek, at the far southeastern end of Utah, along the Arizona Strip. It had been mostly rough cattle ranching country up until polygamists started using it as a hideout after the Reynolds Supreme Court decision. “The First City of the Millennium” was a hundred tough miles from Kingman, Arizona, in the days before automobiles and airplanes, and was shielded on the south by the Grand Canyon. It defined raw isolation. The polygamists, anchored there by the rapidly reproducing Barlow and Jessop clans, found a home at the foot of the massive and strikingly beautiful Vermillion Cliffs, which were rechristened with a more fitting biblical name, “Canaan Mountain.”
The large rebel settlement on the border and the underground movement remaining in Salt Lake City shared the same ideals, but they were far from consolidated. An effective central leadership was impossible, and there were frequent challenges between factions, when each side would “excommunicate” their rivals, flinging the term “apostate” at each other like arrows. The losing group typically would drift off and settle somewhere else, with the result that there are pockets of polygamy all over the West. Even today, fundamentalists always seem to be in organizational disarray and turf wars are frequent. The only things that all of the mutinous groups agree upon are their mutual belief in plural marriage and contempt for the mainstream Mormon Church.
John Y. Barlow died in 1949, setting off a battle for succession. There is no orderly procedure by which to promote someone to the ultimate position in the fractured religion, and Barlow had tried but failed to maneuver his own candidate, LeRoy S. Johnson, into the chair. The next prophet was Joseph Musser, and when he too sought to name his own successor years later, he also failed. Finally, LeRoy Johnson took over as president and prophet, and Rulon Jeffs was his right-hand man. They ushered in a new era of stern control, because they had both witnessed the problems that could be caused when too many people had the ability to interfere with what the prophet wanted. Uncle Roy and Rulon Jeffs became the champions of a no-questions-allowed policy called “One-Man Rule.” The seven-member Priesthood Council was on its way to oblivion, leaving no system of checks and balances.
For the man who personified polygamous unions, Johnson actually had encountered problems getting married for the first time. He recalled that when he was young, he had made proposals to many women. “They all turned me down,” he confessed to Joseph Musser, according to the official FLDS version. Musser responded, “Well, I will promise you this, Brother Johnson, you won’t have to go out and solicit them from now on. They will come to you.”
Uncle Roy made his home down in “the Crick,” which had become incorporated as Colorado City in Arizona on one side and Hildale, Utah, on the other side.
Rulon Jeffs remained in Salt Lake City, as befitted a man of his stature: a professional accountant, founder of Utah Tool & Die, on the board of many companies, and president of an insurance company. He settled into a new home in Little Cottonwood Canyon outside of Salt Lake City. The main house, with columns at the front, sprawled over 8,300 square feet per floor, and featured two kitchens, twenty-three bedrooms, and ten baths, as well as the Jeffs’s Sunday school, which had a baptismal font. An adjacent “smaller” place had another twenty-two rooms, and the entire property was enclosed by a huge concrete wall, a reminder for the rest of the world to keep out.
Warren Steed Jeffs was Rulon’s miracle child, delivered two and a half months premature on December 3, 1955, in Sacramento, California, after a difficult pregnancy that jeopardized the lives of both the infant and his mother, Merilyn Steed, one of Rulon’s four current wives. He kept his other three in hiding, spread out in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico to confound the law. Rulon was in Salt Lake City when he received word that Merilyn and the baby were in danger, and he rushed to Sacramento, arriving in time to actually help bring the boy into the world.
By itself, the birth could not have been regarded as a significant event. After all, the boy was Rulon’s third child that year, and number fourteen overall, including the two by his divorced original wife, Zola. There would be many more children to come, but Warren would outshine them all. From his first breaths, Warren was favored by his forty-six-year-old father.
The spindly, far-sighted boy was born during a particularly turbulent time within the movement. Only two years earlier, in 1953, the politically ambitious governor of Arizona sent more than a hundred police officers into Short Creek to put a stop to the illegal practice of polygamy. Dozens of men were arrested and 263 children were swept into custody. The ensuing national publicity that included photographs of policemen snatching crying children from their mothers tilted national sympathy to the side of the polygamists, who claimed they were just an innocent religious minority being persecuted by an oppressive government. Like an ebbing tide, the Arizona government had retreated from Short Creek. The FLDS, however, never forgot the lessons of the “’53 Raid.” Although Rulon’s base was in Utah, and therefore exempt from the Arizona action, the constant fear of government was the primary reason that he scattered his wives over several states.
Even as a child, Warren automatically had a special standing within the fundamentalist community through his powerful father. Some recalled him as a spoiled brat and a tattletale, the golden boy who could do no wrong. Beyond the walls of the family compound, however, the skinny and fragile boy had a difficult time. One of his aunts described for me the day during his first year of middle school when Warren had to go to the bathroom, but was too timid to raise his hand and ask permission. He wet his pants. The telltale wet spot drew the attention of other students, who taunted him unmercifully. Such incidents contributed to his already introverted behavior.
As he grew, Warren was petrified when it came to girls. When some of his brothers tried to drag him outside to talk to some girls on a visit to a relative’s ranch, he broke down crying, ran away, and locked himself in the family pickup truck. Although fearful of personal encounters with the opposite sex, young Warren was definitely interested in them, just not in normal, healthy adolescent ways. By the age of eight, he already had developed a reputation as a voyeur.
I interviewed a female relative who told me that her household had a special routine they put in motion upon receiving word that Warren would be coming for a visit. All of the girls and women taped newspapers over their windows to prevent him from peeping in, and they stuffed towels beneath their doors because Warren would try to slide a mirror underneath in hopes of catching them in various stages of undress. “He was notorious for that stuff, even at that age,” she told me.
The host family could not scold the boy and order him to stop peeping. He was the favorite son and off limits to criticism, something that would become another lifelong trait. As Carolyn Jessop recalled in Escape, her penetrating book about her life in the FLDS, “No one stood up to Warren.”
While not the physical equal of many others in public school, he was brighter than most, and he graduated with honors from high school, skilled in math and science. Warren’s graduation was perfectly timed, perhaps a little too perfect to be coincidental, because his father at that moment made a decision to build a private school specifically to meet the educational needs of the growing mass of children from fundamentalist families in the Salt Lake area. Too many things that were taught in public classrooms were religiously unpalatable and in stark contrast with what the kids were learning in their homes, such as the nonsense that man had walked on the moon. In 1973, Rulon Jeffs had one of the larger buildings within his walls turned into an FLDS school with a proper, fundamentalist curriculum. It was called the Alta Academy, and it would become Warren’s launching pad.
Without a college education or teaching credentials, he was hired into the original faculty of the academy and was soon elevated to the position of principal, a promotion that carried an astonishing amount of personal power for someone who had yet to see his twenty-first birthday. Inside that building, the headmaster could do as he pleased, so he did.