Matt Hart

“Prophet's Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints” by Sam Brower

Published in 2011 by Bloomsbury USA
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00669V1PW
Date Finished: Nov 26, 2016
How strongly I recommend it: 7/10
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A gripping, though sometimes repetitive, account of the Mormon private investigator who exposed the alarming evidence of child abuse being perpetrated by Warren Jeffs and the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS).

My Notes:

paranoid theocracy, run by a madman whose lust for power and compulsion to prey on children were his signature traits.

He was thirty-five years old, and had only about an eighth-grade education, which was not unusual in Short Creek. I would eventually discover that most boys were pulled out of school at about that age to work on construction sites, but even while in the classroom, their private-school curriculum was more focused on the history of the FLDS and an individual member’s duties to the church and its leaders than it was on reading, writing, or arithmetic.

Only the prophet had the authority to decide who married whom, so by pursuing the matter on their own, they were treading on dangerous turf and teetering on the brink of heresy.

The forty-eight-year-old prophet, at the pinnacle of the FLDS hierarchy, could and did marry at will; and he had a large harem of his own at that time, estimated at about fifty “ladies,” a number that was growing fast.

Living in their little theocracy had blinded them to the values and laws of our society.

viewed as a minor annoyance; I assumed that grown women were making a conscious decision to marry a man who had other adult wives, all living according to the precepts of their shared faith. Weird, but not really a big deal.

It was well known that in FLDS schools, teachers trimmed pictures of people of color out of the textbooks. Joan was African American. In the FLDS, women are always subservient. Joan was in-your-face aggressive. Women were not to be highly educated. Joan was smart as a whip.

was a disturbing and unreal sight. In that other world, where the rest of America lives, police cannot just show up and send people into one’s home without a warrant and have them literally tear the house apart. This was breaking and entering, vandalism, trespassing, and about a half dozen more criminal offenses, but worst of all, it was a violation of what most Americans consider to be their absolute constitutional right to be secure in their persons, places, and things.

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.

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.

FLDS’s favorite lawyer, Rod Parker of the law firm of Snow, Christensen and Martineau in Salt Lake City,

They were cocky. They were arrogant and disrespectful. They were the FLDS, on a mission from the prophet.

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.

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.

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.

FLDS doctrine teaches that it takes three wives to reach the highest kingdom of heaven.

The more wives a man is assigned, the richer he will become both on earth and in the hereafter. Women and children are considered chattel and the measure of a man’s success.

Extensive testing has shown that most of the Lost Boys are lucky to leave school with a third-grade education.

At a time when normal parents would give their kids extra support and work with them through mistakes, the church leadership looks for opportunities to expel the young offenders.

It is hard to imagine the terror of a youngster without much education, and with very few coping mechanisms or life skills, deliberately abandoned by his parents and his church and flung into a world he barely knew existed and has been trained to fear and hate.

Many females produce twelve or more children within a fifteen-year time period. They are always churning out new generations. It is a baby mill; a human assembly line.

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.

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.

Gentiles were bad, but apostates were worse.

It was not education, just a thorough theological brainwashing.

British historian Lord Acton wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

As his secret drinking became more noticeable, the prophet sought to condone it by redefining a long-standing Mormon doctrine known as the Word of Wisdom. Rulon declared the Word was only a guide, and that drinking, in moderation, was acceptable.

If they strengthened their beliefs, the new millennium could really be the end of the planet, spelling death and destruction for everyone who was not a member in good standing of the FLDS church.

Most FLDS members and leaders are superstitious to the point of mysticism in their beliefs. Legends and old wives’ tales are passed down among families as truths.

members even have a formal ritual for the blessing of the brakes of their pickup trucks. Taking an archaic notion out of history and molding it to suit their skewed agenda is common practice. One of the most brutal elements handed down over the generations, “blood atonement,”—the doctrine that states a sinner must pay for his or her offense by shedding his or her own blood—has been around for many years. I believe it is still practiced today within the FLDS.

While his mind might be slipping, the stroke-crippled Rulon still had a sexual appetite, or at least imagined that he did, at ninety-two years of age. Sometimes, a new wife would be shocked to get a wet French kiss from the old man after the evening meal.

Since there is no such thing as sex education within the FLDS culture, when a young girl was placed with a depraved older man, it would usually be a confusing and crushing experience.

Another myth that has come down in FLDS lore is that the final destruction of the earth will be so complete that “not a yellow dog will be left to wag its tail.”

killed the family’s baby boy. Soon afterward, at the meeting house, Uncle Fred Jessop told the congregants that Prophet Rulon had received a heavenly revelation that pets had no place in the Kingdom of God, not among the pure and clean people of the priesthood. Henceforth, no dogs would be allowed. Everyone understood that this was really Warren talking. Warren didn’t like dogs.

His body was found in the wreckage of his truck at the bottom of Hurricane Mesa, about twenty miles from Short Creek, along with a suicide note. As Warren’s appetite for power grew, so did the body count of devastated victims, both literally and figuratively.

Still, the actual death seemed to surprise almost everyone, as they waited patiently for Rulon to be renewed into his former youthful self. It had become a matter of faith that Rulon, as the living prophet, would be the one who would finally hand the keys of the kingdom over to the returned savior, Jesus Christ. In reality, all he did was die. And the keys were snatched away by his conniving son.

God had raised the dead in the Scriptures; surely the prophet deserved the same blessing. “There was no doubt in my mind that he would just come back,” one of the many widows told me. “God would touch him and he would be made young in every sense of the word. He would be able to walk around with us and know our names, and have time for us and things like that.”

Trained throughout their entire lives to be docile in the face of a man’s authority, most eventually agreed.

Polygamy is the heart of FLDS doctrine, and Warren Jeffs was going to see to it that he had more wives than anyone else, even if it meant marrying his mothers. I have personally counted more than eighty wives, and others peg the number at better than ninety.

Because there were no rules for succession within the FLDS, the combination of questionable personal testimonies from Isaac and Mary, plus the nod of the cowed Uncle Fred, had to be good enough, and Warren named himself the new prophet, seer and revelator.

Warren Jeffs possessed all the outward signs and symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, but narcissism was the lesser of deeper and more frightening emotional problems. I have dealt with many sociopathic criminals over the course of my career, and I can say that Warren was a sociopath too. He is unable to emotionally bond with people, and with his own feelings paramount, he feels none of the pain he inflicts on others.

But with the FLDS predilection for blind religious obedience and submission to authority, he had the willing, captive audience that he needed, like a scientist needs lab rats.

Perhaps the most well-known example is the history of Utah Tool & Die, a business founded by Rulon Jeffs in 1968, which grew into HydraPak, Inc., established in 1976 in West Jordon, Utah, while Rulon Jeffs was on the board of directors.

HydraPak changed its name to Western Precision and moved to a huge building that was hastily constructed as a United Effort Plan work project in Short Creek in only thirty days. In August 2006, when the FLDS came under pressure from the courts seeking UEP assets that had been used to finance the company, Western Precision vanished overnight, moving to Las Vegas, it is now called NewEra Manufacturing, Inc.

Short Creek’s water department exists on paper only. The fire department and search and rescue squads have been formally charged with misappropriating taxpayer money to support local businesses and church members, and are still under investigation. It is almost impossible for a building contractor to win a project on which the FLDS is also bidding, because the church membership has such a vast pool of free labor, using their own young kids to bypass minimum wage and tax laws.

Legitimate business and government entities are unwittingly helping maintain the FLDS leaders’ lavish lifestyles, supporting illegal underage marriage, and participating in the abandonment and neglect of young boys by doing business with a criminal organization that openly thumbs its nose at the laws which the rest of us live by.

Many of the large polygamist families exist primarily on government-provided food stamps and other means of public welfare support. As far back as 2002 an Arizona judge characterized Short Creek as a “taxpayer emergency.”

Short Creek has long been a drain on the welfare and educational systems of Utah and Arizona, diverting funds that would otherwise be available for sorely needed services elsewhere in those states.

If there is a government grant available, the FLDS will find it and take advantage of it.

Books and magazines and flashy clothes were works of the devil, and partaking of such evils set bad examples.

There would be no flying of the American flag, no sports, no organized get-togethers, dancing, or holidays; even Christmas was abolished. No one could wear the color red, because Warren claimed that to do so would be to mock Christ, who he predicted would return in red robes. No television, no books other than approved Scripture, no magazines, and no toys.

On October 7, 2002, one day shy of a month after Rulon died, Warren took the controversial step of marrying seven of his stepmothers,

law. After having two children and while pregnant with a third, Ruth had escaped; and, for a change, the law paid attention and brought charges. “At the age of sixteen, I was pressured to marry Rodney H. Holm, under the rule of the [FLDS] church,” she would testify later in a child custody case. “Since that time, I have lived in a controlling and abusive environment common in the community. The

The Lord will have me do this, get more young girls married, not only as a test to the parents, but also to test these people to see if they will give the Prophet up.

None of this slowed down his acquisition of young girls. In a single eight-day span, he zoomed from twenty-five to forty-two new victims in his stable, with still more undergoing religious “trainings” before being officially corralled. At least one was given a double wedding ring to prove she was married to both Rulon and Warren.

They thought their exiles would be temporary, and that after repenting for a couple of weeks, they would be allowed to return to their homes and regain their families. That was not the prophet’s plan at all, and as time passed, my investigation would show that some of the women and children were handed around the “priesthood” like sugar candy at a party; everybody got a turn.

The Daily Spectrum in nearby St. George

he prophesied that after God’s judgments devoured the land and the wicked, the righteous FLDS members who remained would resettle there to construct his ultimate project, the final temple.

so I called Jon Krakauer at his home in Colorado. We had made telephone contact several months earlier, and I had grown comfortable talking with him. His book, Under the Banner of Heaven, had already been published and he had no intention of writing anything more about the FLDS, but his disdain for some of the group’s despicable practices had remained, and he was fierce about wanting to help.

Nobody can build faster than a troop of motivated FLDS builders who are convinced they are working for their very lives and the prophet.

Asking for a handful of nails had cost Rulon Barlow everything.

When Hurricane Katrina struck the Louisiana coast six months later, on August 29, devastating the city and leaving more than 1,800 people dead, the prophet was convinced that he had literally summoned down to this place of sin one of his oft-sought whirlwind judgments from God.

The prophet married twelve-year-old Brenda at nine o’clock that night, only a few days after picking her out in a dream.

On April 13, I was in the Texas state capitol in Austin along with Jon Krakauer and others to testify before a legislative committee in support of a bill to raise the legal age of marriage, which at the time was only fourteen.

I interviewed one of the medical staff who was present and another of Rulon’s wives, and they both confirmed that in his last moment, Rulon actually had looked into the eyes of his maniacal son and said, “Oh my God—what have I done?”

The indictment on criminal charges following Candi Shapley’s testimony apparently was the prophet’s ticket to party as no other FLDS member had ever done; he used it as an excuse to gallivant around the country and live a life that was not possible inside of the FLDS compounds.

After a shower, she put on a fresh set of the long underwear required by her religion and slid into baggy sweat-suit pants before adding stockings up to her knees.

The jail’s land sharks showed no mercy; child molesters are at the bottom of the prison food chain.

In Utah, there is no insanity defense. If found mentally incompetent to stand trial, those charged are detained in the criminal section of the state mental hospital until deemed capable of understanding the charges and participating in their own defense.

Unable to control his compulsions, and despite knowing that he was being viewed through the video cameras, the prophet masturbated so frequently that the guards continually reprimanded him.

He would later attempt to hang himself with his pajamas,

He had written, in part, “I have not been a prophet and am not the prophet.” He had intended to announce to the court that he was not the prophet of the FLDS after all.

Even after confessing to his mother and several church leaders that he had “immoral relations with a sister and a daughter,” nobody would listen. He had conditioned them so completely that not even he could reverse the brainwashing.

He had made a point of showing his followers that he was sticking to the religious mandate of covering his flesh.

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.

Despite the deception and misinformation, within the first six hours authorities found eighteen girls between the estimated ages of twelve and sixteen who were in various stages of pregnancy or had given birth.

That the Constitution does not give anyone permission to engage in criminal activities under the guise of “religion” was mostly ignored. Worshipping God is much different than raping children and breaking families apart.

the very notable disparity in number between males and females at the ranch: There were twice as many girls as boys.

They would periodically hold their arm to the square and pray loudly for God to bring down “whirlwind judgments” upon the heads of the police, the defilers, and strike them dead.

journalist Katy Vine of Texas Monthly magazine, “Going up to the governor, none of them had any idea what was going on. They had no clue.”

God is requiring his noble prophet to suffer and atone so the rest of them can attain salvation.

Rulon and Warren Jeffs’s obsessive desire to create a pure Priesthood People has resulted in a closed, corrupted gene pool, and Short Creek today is a reflection of its own decades of inbreeding. Down in the Crick, the offspring of cousins, half-siblings, and other family members are now paying the price, with the border FLDS community carrying the world’s largest population of verifiable cases of the genetic disease known as Fumarase Deficiency.

Fumarase Deficiency

Fumarase Deficiency results in an interruption of the Krebs cycle, a metabolic function that enables the body to process food at the cellular level. An infant with the mutated gene may be born with an abnormal brain inside a small head, or be unable to grow at a normal rate as his or her nervous system is attacked. Development is stunted, physical deformities are frequent, some organs do not function properly, and seizures can sometimes be so powerful that the child may be bent backward like a pretzel. Most victims do not survive beyond a few months.

It is currently estimated that more than half of the children in the entire world who suffer from Fumarase Deficiency live in Short Creek.

With the FLDS, the Feds are facing one of the largest organized-crime syndicates in the history of this country. Some ten to fifteen thousand members support a religion that participates in child abuse, interstate and international sex trafficking, and other crimes in support of their religious dogma.

Reliable sources inform me that there is evidence of “temple rituals” that are really nothing more than group sex orgies with preteen victims.

The petition to the president is presented as a commandment from “… your Lord and Savior” to “… Let my servant go.” Warren supposedly received the revelation in his prison cell while in Draper, Utah.

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