CHAPTER 9
LeRoy Sunderland Johnson became a beloved figure in Short Creek, although he was not loved by everyone. The leadership of the polygamist movement had been unsettled for a number of years, and “Uncle Roy” was almost defrocked in 1979 when he suffered a debilitating case of the shingles, which left him bedridden and vulnerable to opponents who branded him a false prophet. Because of Rulon’s closeness with Uncle Roy, his own influence and future also were in jeopardy, but he stuck by his friend and mentor. The old man was comforted with large doses of morphine and slowly recovered. The wilderness years came to a dramatic end on February 12, 1984, when Uncle Roy was helped to the pulpit and challenged his major foes, J. Marion Hammon and Alma A. Timpson.
“The Lord gave you men five and a half years to change your thinking on this principle of having one man holding the sealing powers in the earth at a time, and you have made a mess of it,” Johnson told them in front of the congregation. Hammon and Timpson were expelled.
Among those in attendance on that momentous day was the twenty-nine-year-old headmaster of the Alta Academy, Warren Jeffs. He likened the experience to a holy wind rushing through him, and was so thrilled that he wept with joy. That was the way to lead! That was how he would do it!
Hammon and Timpson did not exactly leave town. They just started their own rival fundamentalist sect only two miles away on the other side of Highway 59.
To ease some of the confusion between the uneasy neighbors, Colorado City and Hildale became known within the FLDS faith as the First Ward, and the new group of Hammon-Timpson dissenters in “Centennial Park” would be the Second Ward. It was all still the Crick.
Uncle Roy died two and a half years later, in November 1986. This time, there was no question of succession. Rulon Jeffs and Uncle Roy had laid down the law of one-man rule within the fundamentalist movement, and Rulon grabbed the golden ring, becoming the new “prophet, seer, and revelator.”
Rulon’s most fervent supporter was his son Warren, who was by then in full manhood at the age of thirty-one. Warren had spent his entire career since graduating from high school—thirteen years—teaching and being the principal at the academy. He already had the addictive taste of power on his own lips.
Alta Academy was not only a school for elementary school children, but also a learning institution where Warren would hone his skills as a predatory monster.
Each day started with Warren’s flat, hypnotic monotone either being delivered in person in the gathering hall or being broadcast over speakers to classrooms. The children would be quizzed on what he said. The FLDS educational process was so totally skewed toward strict religious dogma that many kids graduated still unable to speak or write in whole sentences. For most, the ability to properly read a list of food ingredients or a tape measure at a construction site was deemed adequate. Many teachers were hired based on their loyalty to the extremist faith and obedience, rather than credentials of a college education. There was no need to be certified by the state in an FLDS private school. Some of the students would roll right into the position of teachers, perpetuating the low educational standards and toeing the religious line. The instructors taught that the outside world was devoid of honor and not to be trusted, and gentiles were, of course, excluded from the faculty. Gentiles were bad, but apostates were worse. Students must “keep sweet” no matter what they were required to endure, even physical abuse. It was not education, just a thorough theological brainwashing.
The academy had several labor and delivery rooms on the second floor designated for the use of a midwife to attend the births of new babies, which reduced the need to expose fundamentalist wives to the prying eyes of gentile medical staff members in public hospitals, where family names and dates of birth were routinely sought. It was symbolic of how the breakaway fundamentalists withdrew from the scrutiny and norms of the world.
A former student by the name of Mike recalled for me the day when he was eleven years old and Uncle Warren singled him out for punishment. The youngster was made to stand in front of the classroom and drop his trousers to his knees so Warren could savagely beat him with a yardstick. Other former students echoed Mike’s experience with their own stories of what happened in the downstairs room containing the baptismal font. If a yardstick broke, Warren would continue beating them with the remaining portion. He spouted religious diatribes about committing his young victims over to the judgment of God as he circled the boys, ogling and brushing up against them.
My contacts among Jeffs’s former students would reveal that it wasn’t just the boys being subjected to his psychotic behavior. Warren was the self-appointed dress code enforcer and young females would recall standing numb and frightened beside the principal’s desk as he pretended to check their dress length to see if it fell to the appropriate height above the ankle. While doing so, Uncle Warren’s hands wandered over their bodies and beneath their clothing.
Total obedience was mandated. If a child dared to complain about the abuse at school, the parents would most likely take the side of Warren against their own children. In interviews with parents who had left the religion, I would discover that most of them could not fathom what kids had to endure within their culture. They would continually struggle with the fact that they had been complicit in the abuse and hadn’t recognized what was going on around them. Any parents who forgot that Warren was the favored son of Prophet Rulon Jeffs and dared to protest could count on incurring Warren’s enmity for many years to come, the potential for future public humiliation compounding like interest in a bank.
The more parents and former students I spoke with, the more I heard the same story over and over again. For Warren Jeffs the Alta Academy was more like the mountain chateau of the Marquis de Sade than a school. The only person who really learned anything there was Warren Jeffs, who earned himself a post-graduate degree in the use of unchecked power.
My first personal look inside Warren Jeffs’s shop of horrors came shortly after I was hired by Joanne Suder in 2004. It was even worse than I had imagined.
This particular case involved the family of Ward Jeffs, one of the prophet’s many brothers. Ward was among those who had been banished years earlier by their father, Rulon, but he had refused to give up his family. Although once a polygamist, he now lived only with his wife Susan. They were waiting for me at their home, along with their three grown sons: Brent, Brandon and David.
A fourth son, Clayne, had endured a tormented life that eventually had led to a tragic death by his own hand. Shortly after Clayne’s death, his therapist revealed to his family that he had been treating their son for a horrifying trauma he had experienced as a very young boy. Clayne had confessed to the therapist that he had been repeatedly raped by several of his uncles, including Warren Jeffs. As these tragic details came to light, his brothers Brent and Brandon courageously admitted the secret that had been haunting them for years: They also had been victimized by the same deviant relatives.
During the following week, I interviewed each family member separately, paying close attention to their stories and looking for inconsistencies. I found none. Both young men held fast to their accusations that when they were just little kids, between the ages of five and seven, they had been repeatedly raped and sodomized by Warren and several other uncles for more than a year.
The abuses that I learned about from Brent and Brandon had taken place at the Alta Academy. I had already heard about Warren’s terrifying methods there, and I felt I needed to see the place first-hand. Brent mustered the incredible strength to give me a guided tour, although it meant having to relive his childhood horrors. He has since described it all in his book, Lost Boy.
The Alta Academy had closed shortly before the turn of the millennium and the compound eventually would house a charitable organization known as Common Thread, which provides services to people awaiting organ transplants. It was heartening to learn that the building was no longer linked to the church and had been put to a worthy purpose.
Brent led me downstairs to a room that had been used as a nursery for the young children while the others attended worship services upstairs in the main hall. Behind that door, the disturbing shadow of Warren Jeffs still lingered. Brent painfully recalled how when he was only five years old, his uncle Warren would come into that room and fetch him out by the hand. He would lead the child through the narrow corridors to a children’s bathroom where happy paintings decorated the walls, and in which all of the sinks and toilets were at a low level to be accessible to the kids. Once the bathroom door was locked, the helpless little boy was folded over the edge of the bathtub and Warren and a few more of his uncles, all grown men, took turns raping their nephew. Brent described the pain as being almost unbearable.
Warren would be keyed up tight in his lust and babble continuously that it was part of the boy’s secret initiation into the priesthood. He warned that if Brent ever told anyone about their “sacred rite of passage,” the boy and his entire family would be plunged into hellfire. Decades later, Brent was still struggling to come to grips with the brutality he had endured, but he did not flinch in reconstructing the horrific events.
One of the most painful experiences for victims of abuse is to summon the courage to tell of that abuse, anticipating that a backlash is certain. Sure enough, when Brent told his story, he was demonized by his former friends and family members and called a liar. Defense attorneys for the church used every trick in the book to try to discredit him, but he was no longer a little kid who could be led around by the hand and coerced. He was a grown man who was determined to tell the truth.
It was a disquieting story, to say the least. This wasn’t my first case dealing with child abuse, but as the father of three children, I always find it tough to hear those stories, and I have spent many sleepless nights trying to put them out of my mind. My task, though, was to nail down information for possible litigation, so to substantiate the facts I made another trip to the academy, this time with Brandon, who brought along their other brother, David, for moral support.
There is no such thing as a “typical” victim of child abuse, and Brandon was a good illustration. At twenty years old, he stood six feet four and was solid muscle, a soldier home on leave from the U.S. Army prior to being deployed to the Middle East. But that hard toughness began to evaporate the moment we entered the building and he led me step by step toward that evil bathroom. As he described the horrors he had endured behind that door, tears tracked down his cheeks and his voice shook. Before my eyes, this soldier was reliving those scenes from his childhood, tormented by the memories of what he had endured at the hands of his trusted teacher and uncle. His chilling descriptions were almost identical to those of Brent, but with a few differences, which convinced me that their stories were unscripted.
Finally, it was too much for Brandon. He staggered, sobbing openly, and David grabbed him in a bear hug. Both were crying. Then David looked solemnly at me and admitted, for the very first time, “It happened to me, too.”
Visions of my own children raced through my mind, as well as intense rage for a monster that could do something so unspeakable to any child, much less a family member. I turned away from the scene to avoid losing control of my own emotions. All four boys had been raped as small children by their pedophile uncle: Warren Steed Jeffs. I promised David I would keep his secret and I did until after his untimely death only a year later. Now, two of Warren’s nephews had succumbed to the lifetime of torment inflicted on them by the hideous headmaster of the Alta Academy. To my way of thinking, Warren inflicted a slow and tortuous death on Clayne and David just as sure as if he had plunged a knife into their chests.
The shy and awkward principal’s extreme fear of girls had not improved as he matured. The situation was finally addressed through someone else’s intervention, and it was remarkably similar to the experience of Uncle Roy when he had been a young and single future leader of the FLDS. Warren chronicled what happened.
“When I was eleven, I thought I would never get married. At seventeen, I was sure of it. I got up to twenty-three … and I thought, ‘Oh, well.’ Then father walked down to my bedroom. Knock, knock, knock. He said, ‘Uncle Roy wants you to get married.’ ”
His brother, Lyle, rushed excitedly into the room to offer congratulations. “Warren! Do you know who you are marrying?… She is a dish!”
His first wife was a beautiful girl he didn’t even know. He learned later that her name was Annette Barlow. She was from an independent polygamist clan, and it was an arranged marriage, almost politically feudal in its roots, a joining of the clans. Love was unnecessary. Annette was just the first of his many brides, and her sister Barbara loomed in the wings.
By the time of the rapes of his nephews, Warren was married to two women. Strangely enough, he seemed to feel no remorse; he could go home after raping a little boy and have a calm Sunday family dinner.