Authors: Sam Brower
One regular visitor to the jail was Warren's brother Nephi, and the scene of Warren admitting to him once again that he was not, and never had been, the prophet was caught on the jail's surveillance tape. Nephi disagreed, insisting just as strongly that Warren
was
the prophet and this was only another of the Lord's tests. “Just a minute,” Warren replied, as a blank stare settled over his countenance. He momentarily looked away from his brother, apparently receiving a strong and clear voice that no one else could hear. “This is a message from God,” he insisted, still listening to the communication from on high. “THIS-IS-NOT-A-TEST!”
As sad as it was, I broke out laughing while watching the pitiful scene on video. When the jailer took Warren from the visiting room, the shocked Nephi remained motionless for several minutes, his hands over his face, weeping.
Despite being locked up, Warren was still able to manage the affairs of the church. According to his records he was able to smuggle out documents and communications which skirted jail security including a detailed schematic of Warren's jail cell, and its location inside the Purgatory facility. There also were detailed instructions to his counselors, directions to kick some FLDS members out of their homes, move some others to places of refuge, and assign routine household chores to various wives. Warren, at least for a little while, was back in form.
I got the chance to see the prophet in person when I accompanied attorneys Roger and Greg Hoole to a deposition in May 2007, at Purgatory. It involved a new client named Wendell Musser, who Warren had kicked out and was determined to prevent from visiting his own infant son.
Musser had been ordered by Warren to be the caretaker for several of the prophet's wives at a hideout near Florence, Colorado, while the prophet was on the run. When Musser was arrested for driving under the influence on his way back to the safe house one evening, Warren was furious. The incident might have tipped off the police to the refuge location where his wives were hidden. Wendell was told to go away and repent from a distance, which he did. After a couple weeks the separation from his family became unbearable and he tried to return to see his wife and son, only to find the house had been abandoned and his wife and child gone. Warren had assigned them to another man. Wendell was beside himself, broke with the prophet, and started legal proceedings to at least get legal visitation rights with his son. Musser turned out to be a world of information on the inner workings of some of the FLDS hierarchy.
The day of our visit, the prophet was extremely gaunt and the green-and-white striped jail uniform hung on him. Beneath the short-sleeved pullover, he wore thermal long johns with long sleeves, despite the fact that it was midsummer. He had made a point of showing his followers that he was sticking to the religious mandate of covering his flesh. The shorts and T-shirt in which he was photographed when arrested were explained away as having been a necessary evil to blend into the gentile world.
He knew exactly who I was, and he gave a polite “How are you?” when we were introduced. I was pleased that he was looking better than the last time I had seen him in the courtroom. Richard Wright, Warren's Nevada attorney, was present and on the advice of counsel Warren exercised his right not to answer Roger and Greg's questions for fear he might incriminate himself. He refused to answer even the most benign and elementary of questions.
After about thirty minutes of listening to Warren plead the fifth, we decided to leave. As I stood up, Warren unexpectedly thrust his hand out to me, and without thinking, I automatically took it. I immediately felt that I had made a terrible mistake. I had no desire to shake hands with someone that I knew to be the perpetrator of such heinous crimes against children. I had lost sleep over the brutality that Warren had inflicted on children and on his own people, and felt that the custom might intimate some sort of tolerance for his atrocities. I would rather have kept things on a strictly formal basis, minus the handshake. At least I did not get the treatment that my buddy Gary Engels got when he first met Warren. The prophet had surprised Gary, too, by telling Engels that he forgave Gary for persecuting him. Jeffs didn't lay a surprise blessing on me, but as I left the jail, I felt the overwhelming need to wash my hands.
The prophet was aware that we intended to report his noncooperation to the judge and that we would seek a contempt of court order, but that wasn't much motivation for someone who was already in jail to answer our questions.
But I had an idea for another way to apply pressure. I dug around and found out that Warren's commissary account was kept filled with the maximum amount of money allowed by jail regulations. So we devised a motion for the court to seize that money, and any other assets we could find, for as long as Warren refused to speak to us, and earmark those funds to cover my investigative fees for locating Wendell's family.
Minutes before the commissary account was to be seized, our client's wife and son suddenly showed up at his front door, and Wendell Musser was able to obtain a legal order providing for visitation with the boy. The prophet gave in rather than surrender his ability to buy his jail goodies. The small victories were adding up, and it seemed to make up for the handshake.
CHAPTER 31
A long year passed between the preliminary hearing and the trial of Warren Jeffs in Utah for the two felony charges of rape as an accomplice, but much was happening. The FLDS and its prophet had never before been taken to the mat as they had been over the past few years, and part of my job was to continue staying a jump ahead of them.
During that stretch, we finished our work on the Lost Boys and the Brent Jeffs civil suits. They were won by default because the prophet refused to appear in court. We may have won, but our clients did not want to be put in the position of collecting monetary damages from their own families. They chose instead to make a public statement that their goal was to effect change within the community by bringing to light the rampant child abuse hidden in the shadows. Each client received a token piece of property in Short Creek. A trust fund to help other displaced children remains a future possibility.
One unexpected result of our lawsuits against Warren and the FLDS church led to a parting of the ways between Jeffs and his longtime Salt Lake City attorney Rodney R. Parker. The sandy-haired lawyer tried to convince Jeffs that he could lose everything if he didn't step up and defend it. Warren fired him, answered them nothing, and lost.
Jury selection for the Jeffs trial began on September 7, 2007, and part of my job was to keep Elissa Wall beyond the reach of the FLDS and the media, getting her safely to and from the courtroom. That proved to be a logistical nightmare because the media was stacked up everywhere and I believed the FLDS loyalists hated her enough to endanger her safety.
Chief enforcer Willie Jessop or his buddies would park right in the open directly in front of the glass-fronted entranceway to the building in which Brock Belnap, the Washington County prosecutor, had his office, and just sit there peering in. The silent message:
We are watching
.
So we made careful arrangements with the court, its staff, the bailiff, and the police to maneuver the witness from the secret location where she was staying to the courthouse, which was in the middle of a cordoned-off two-square-block area. Timing had to be precise, for Warren Jeffs also would be moved through the building, and the court wanted no chance encounters. For help, I once again enlisted Jon Krakauer, who had become a good friend that I could trust to move quickly and wisely if things got tight.
The trial began a week later, on September 13, and after Jon and I navigated Elissa through the media madhouse, she took her place in the second row between Roger Hoole and her husband, Lamont. I went to my assigned aisle seat two rows behind her. Reporters filled most of the other seats, but a group of FLDS loyalists sat nearby to support their prophet, glaring at Elissa.
The opening statements were crucial, and Belnap focused the scope of the trial for the jury; it had nothing to do with religion, nor with polygamy. He said the state would prove that the defendant, Warren Jeffs, was an accomplice in the incestuous rape of a fourteen-year-old minor child. The trial was about that, and only that.
Making the defense argument was another member of the FLDS legal team, the impeccably coiffed and dressed Tara Isaacson. She insinuated that “no rape [had] occurred” at all, that any sex that took place had been consensual, and that Elissa had initiated contact. I have been through many trials involving sexual abuse, and the defense almost always launches a rabid attack upon the victim. That strategy would be followed precisely in this trial.
One reason the defense chose Isaacson is that they clearly wanted another female to grill Elissa about intimate details. Isaacson's entire presentation had been carefully built into a computerized PowerPoint presentation that would lead the jury through the events, but when the computer malfunctioned, Isaacson was left stumbling for words without the video guide. She bored in as coldly as possible but did not do a very good job at presenting her argument off the cuff.
Elissa had been nervous on the drive into court that morning, fussing with her long hair, but once she took the witness stand, she settled in quickly as Craig Barlow from the Utah attorney general's office led her through her testimony. I watched the jurors carefully as they were introduced to the grim life of a girl inside the FLDS. They sat stone-faced as she described the total lack of sex education, the way girls and boys were taught to treat the opposite gender as they would treat snakes, and how a girl would be assigned by the prophet to an older man she might not even know.
As we drove home that evening, she wanted to know if she had done all right, how I thought the jury was reacting, and she worried about the upcoming defense cross-examination. She was expressing normal insecurities, and I gave her comforting words, but I had been unable to read anything into the day. I had learned over the years that the best policy was to be positive, but noncommittal.
That night, we parked Krakauer's car, with a bicycle lashed to the top, inside the sally port at the courthouse and left it there. Then we made sure that everyone saw Elissa arrive for the second day of trial in the pickup truck.
Willie Jessop was up to his old antics, treating the court process as some kind of game and attempting to intimidate our witness. He tried to rearrange the assigned seating in the courtroom so that he could sit directly in Elissa's line of sight during her testimony, and behind her in the courtroom. It was the same intimidation tactic the FLDS had pulled in Arizona during the Candi Shapley testimony. This time, a savvy bailiff picked up on what was happening and gave Willie a warning, which he ignored. The bailiff informed the judge, and two deputies removed Jessop from the courthouse. He was barred for the remainder of the trial.
Elissa testified that day about the impossibility of her leaving Short Creek rather than obey the prophet. She was only fourteen at the time, was not old enough to drive, had no money, and lived in an FLDS community, completely dependent upon the family to which her mother had been reassigned after her father had been kicked out of the church and banished. “I had no options,” she declared. I believed her, and I thought the jury did, too.
Her description of the sham marriage ritual performed by Warren Jeffs at the Caliente motel in Nevada and the eventual rape by Allen Steed was harrowing. In a tearful voice, she told the spellbound court that when Allen, her nineteen-year-old cousin, began to undress her, she begged, “I can't do this, please don't. I was sobbing. My whole entire body was shaking I was so scared. He didn't stop. He just laid me onto the bed and had sex.”
The defense took its turn after the lunch break in court, and Tara Isaacson spent the afternoon lashing Elissa with sharp questions designed to make the witness look like a vengeful adult woman at the time of her wedding instead of a brainwashed underage child who was forced into an illegal sexual arrangement, and into having sex against her will. Elissa had plenty of options, Isaacson declared, but chose not to use them. I thought that was a ridiculous argument, since a fourteen-year-old cannot legally consent to sex in any situation. Left unsaid was that Elissa's entire life up until that point had been one of those “keep sweet” journeys that had intentionally limited her choices.
When it was time to leave at the end of the day, we had a woman member of our team slip into the pickup truck that we had used to come to court in the morning to serve as a decoy for the media and the FLDS. Right behind the pickup, Jon and Elissa calmly drove off in the opposite direction in Jon's waiting car with the bike attached, totally ignored. I was right on their bumper to make sure we were not followed.
The next day, Elissa's sister Theresa Wall Blackmore testified, recalling how the “sad, hopeless, depressed” Elissa had telephoned her the day after her wedding, crying throughout the conversation. “She hated to be near him,” Theresa said of Elissa's feelings for Allen. The defense did not question her.
Becky Wall, another sister, followed and underlined Elissa's testimony. She also attempted to define the treacherous “keep sweet” policy within the FLDS: “Even when it hurts, you were to act happy ⦠That was how you conquered the evil inside of you.”
I blanched at that and flashed back to a conversation with one of my sources. The man had been summoned to the Jeffs compound to meet the prophet himself and had found Warren in a posh office, seated in what was described as a “tricked out” massage lounger with built-in speakers. Reclined in comfort, Jeffs delivered a “training” about the man having a dark heart and how he was no longer worthy to hold priesthood and be in the church. On the bottom of Warren's fancy left boot was written the word KEEP, and on the right one was SWEET. He then cast the man out of the church and community, broke up his family and devastated his life from the comfort of his fancy recliner.
The final witness for the state was almost an afterthought: Jane Blackmore, a veteran midwife in Canada and first wife of Winston Blackmore before leaving the faith and her husband. She had delivered hundreds of babies and had treated scores of FLDS girls below the age of eighteen for pregnancies that were terminated due to complications. Among those unfortunate girls was Elissa Wall, who had suffered a miscarriage while visiting family members in Canada during the time she was pregnant with Allen Steed's baby.
The defense put on a case that had little meat to it. Warren Jeffs did not testify in his own behalf, so Walter Bugden and Tara Isaacson were relying on Allen Steed, who spoke so softly that he was admonished by the judge several times to speak up. Out of frustration, Steed ended up standing in the witness box to deliver his testimony so he could be better heard, but really only succeeded in looking foolish. The prosecution had delayed filing charges against Steed until after Warren's case had been decided, to prevent the FLDS and the press from discovering Elissa's identity. Now that secrecy was no longer a factor, Steed realized that he was trapped. He knew that it was illegal in the state of Utah to have sex with a fourteen-year-old girl, no matter what the circumstances, so to admit to sex with Elissa in any fashion would be tantamount to admitting to a crime. It was obvious that a rape charge would soon be heading his way, so he lawyered up with a little-known Salt Lake City defense attorney by the name of Jim Bradshaw. Bradshaw seemed to be out to make a name for himself in a very high-profile case.
It did neither of them much good. Any competent defense attorney would urge that his client not say anything that may be incriminating, a constitutional right guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. But Steed either got bad advice or didn't listen to his lawyer; he repeatedly admitted under oath to having had sex with the girl.
Both sides rested their cases on Friday and the jury began deliberations, but was granted a weekend break after a few hours. For Elissa and the prosecution team, that meant holding our breaths in anticipation. Nobody had been able to read the faces or body language of the stoic jurors. I had no idea which way they would go, and things wrapped up so quickly that it had seemed surreal.
On Tuesday, September 25, 2007, the trial ended with total vindication for Elissa Wall. Warren Jeffs was found guilty on both counts of being an accomplice to the rape of a minor. Allen Steed was charged with rape the day after the Jeffs verdict.
In November, after two months of a presentencing investigation, Judge Shumate gave Jeffs the maximum penalty under Utah law. Each count carried a five-years-to-life prison sentence, to be served back-to-back. In addition, there was a cumulative fine of $37,000.
I stood in the parking lot of the Washington County attorney's office after the sentencing and watched a helicopter take off to ferry the prophet straight from the courthouse to the Utah State Prison at Point of the Mountain, some twenty miles south of Salt Lake City. There, Warren Jeffs, in shackles, hobbled into his new world. It was a good day.
The once powerful religious fanatic had become a very small fish in a very large pool of sharks, subject to regular prison protocol. All of the special privileges were stripped away as he went into lockdown, shattered by the sudden realization that the heavens had once again failed to intervene on his behalf. Despite the money, the influence, the high-powered lawyers, and the devotion of his flock, Warren had lost everything because of his crimes. An attorney tried to take his deposition in prison and reported that Warren was so mentally out of it that he had been chained to a wall for his own safety. His only communication with the outside world was through his attorneys.
A few months later, in February 2008, he was extradited from Utah to the jail in Kingman, Arizona, to await trial on four counts of sexual misconduct with a minor, four counts of incest, and one count of conspiracy to commit sexual conduct with a minor.
Warren Steed Jeffs received two life sentences for his crimes in Utah, had been extradited to Arizona to face additional charges there, and had a federal fugitive charge waiting in the wings after the state charges were completed to seal his fate. It began to appear as if Warren may finally have been taken to task. But five months later, an emotionally disturbed young woman picked up her telephone and dialed the New Bridge Family Shelter in San Angelo, Texas, claiming to be an abused teenage bride named Sarah who was being held prisoner at the YFZ Ranch.