Desert Lost (9781615952229) (24 page)

Chapter Twenty-nine

Although my efforts to save Darnelle had broken two of her ribs, no one at the hospital blamed me since she was conscious, crying, and telling everyone who'd listen that she really, really didn't mean to kill Celeste. Most appreciative of my efforts—and Darnelle's continued verbosity—were Sylvie Perrins and Bob Grossman, who'd arrived at the Emergency Ward during her babbled confession.

“I thought you were bringing her in for questioning, not joining her for a moonlight swim,” commented Sylvie, as she watched a nurse administer Darnelle an antibiotics shot.

“Two drunks got in my way.”

Bob cleared his throat. “Which reminds me. That wreck? Your Jeep got towed right along with the other cars.”

“What?!”

“You shouldn't have parked on the sidewalk,” said Lieutenant Dagny Ulrich, who'd made the trip with them. She was back to her old self, gleeful at catching me in the wrong. Somehow I found comfort in that.

Darnelle's eyes searched mine. She was still covered in mud and weeds, but sadness had replaced the wildness in her expression. “Promise me,” she whispered.

Touched by her anguish, I said, “What?”

“Keep an eye on my baby. Make sure he's all right.”

I didn't even have to think about it. “Whatever it takes, Darnelle.”

“Thank you.” With that, she covered her face with her hands and didn't say another word, not even when the hospital released her into the waiting arms of Scottsdale PD.

***

Four hours later, Jimmy and I—armed with a wad of cash, driver's license, car registration, proof of insurance, and other official papers—stood waiting for the impound lot in an industrial section of Mesa to open. The day promised to be a warm one, with the sun already blazing down from a cloudless sky. Although I still hurt over what I'd had to do to Darnelle, the realization that law officers now swarmed the polygamy compound—the scene of the crime—helped ease the pain. Polygamists didn't like people knowing their business, so chances were good that Prophet Shupe would call them all back to Second Zion. That was the good news. The bad news was that Second Zion, and its multitude of sins against women and children, would continue to prosper.

Some day, though…

“Can you see the Jeep?” I asked Jimmy, as we peered through the impound lot's chain link fence.

“Just a couple of big dogs. We'd better step back.”

I ignored his suggestion until two Dobermans rushed the fence, fangs bared. What made them even scarier was the total silence in which they moved. They weren't out to frighten, they wanted dinner. I muttered, “There better not be any scratches on that Jeep.”

Jimmy shot me a look. “Cars can be fixed.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that people sometimes can't. What you pulled last night was pretty stupid, driving around at two a.m. with a murderer.” He raised his palms in a gesture of exasperation.

“The chances that Darnelle would try to hurt me were slim, but if she did, I knew she was no match for me. Not without a two-by-four handy, she wasn't.”

“Still…”

“Still, nothing. I was perfectly safe, whether you believe it or not.”

“She could have had one of Ezra's handguns hidden somewhere in that dress.”

“No pockets. And if she'd strapped a gun to her thigh, don't you think I would have noticed when she hiked up her skirts to run?”

A grunt.

The Dobermans, frustrated at not being able to chew our legs off, began snapping at each other. We watched in silence until the larger Doberman intimidated the smaller one into slinking away. The winner of this face-off then returned to the fence and flashed triumphant teeth.

“Such a nice doggie,” I said.

Nice Doggie wagged his stump of a tail.

Jimmy managed a resigned laugh. “You always did have a way with animals.”

“Too bad it doesn't extend to men.”

With that, we fell silent and watched Nice Doggie scratch himself. After a few minutes, the vanquished Doberman shuffled up and sat a few feet away from the other. Nice Doggie snarled, sending him scuttling back under a rusted '92 Seville.

A few minutes later, after the interplay between the Dobermans grew boring, Jimmy said, “How'd you know?”

“Know what?”

“That Darnelle killed Celeste. It's not like you had any proof.”

“She's the only person it could have been.” As opposed to other cases I'd worked where I'd finagled access to suspects' homes and businesses, the polygamy compound was a closed site. None of its residents, other than Darnelle, would talk to me, so I'd had to rely solely on my knowledge of victimology. In the end, that had been enough.

Jimmy still didn't get it. “Why not Ezra? Or that monster Opal? Or any one else at the compound, maybe even the guys who kidnapped Madeline.”

“Darnelle was the only person with the means, opportunity, and
passion
to beat Celeste to death. None of the others cared enough.”

Now several other drivers had formed a line behind us: a jittery brunette with a squalling baby; a Hispanic man dressed in mechanic's overalls; an elderly man leaning on a walker; and several twenty-somethings. The twenty-somethings all looked defiant; the rest looked scared.

“Passion?” Jimmy's disbelief brought me back to his original question.

Keeping my voice low enough that the others couldn't hear, I said, “Yeah, passion, but not the kind you're thinking about, just a mother's passion to keep her son safe. Women have killed for their children before, and they will again.” My own mother's face flashed into my mind.
Had she killed for me
? “Darnelle's tragedy was that she asked the wrong person for help.”

At one time, I believed, Celeste would have been the right person. She'd helped Rosella and KariAnn escape from Second Zion. But time changed people, often in terrible ways.

“People who have no power—women especially—learn to use manipulation to get what they want,” I explained, “which is what Celeste did to survive. Her father told her to marry Prophet Shupe, so she did. When Shupe sent her daughters to other compounds, she acquiesced, but she got her revenge by helping other girls escape. When Shupe reassigned her to Ezra, she acquiesced again. By then the damage was done. Even Darnelle said that she seemed somehow ‘different' after she'd been given to Ezra.”

“If that's true, why'd Darnelle ask her for help?”

“There was no one else to ask. And remember what I said about manipulation. Celeste had learned to survive by hiding her own feelings, kowtowing to Opal, always smiling—and ‘staying sweet'—for Ezra. She probably encouraged other women to confide in her because it reminded her that she wasn't the only miserable person around. But after those first adventurous years up in Second Zion, when she ran her own small version of the polygamy Underground Railroad, she stopped helping anyone. She was so far gone that when the day came, she even stood passively by when Ezra's goons drove her own son away and dumped him on the street like garbage.”

Once a woman allowed her heart to be numbed, her soul soon followed. By the time Darnelle approached Celeste for help, she'd long been deaf to other people's pain. So in the end, her own heartlessness killed her.

“It's a rough life, polygamy,” Jimmy said, after I'd voiced my thoughts.

“Yeah. That poor woman.”

He gave me a questioning look. “Which one?”

I thought for a moment, then answered, “Both of them.”

Author's Note

If one man can have ten wives, nine men will have none.

While recent events at the YFZ (Yearning for Zion) compound in El Dorado, Texas, may have familiarized the public with some of the more onerous customs of the Southwest's polygamy compounds (child marriage, incest, brain-washing, etc.), a major problem area remains largely unexplored: what happens to polygamy's surplus boys?

By order of the reigning prophet, those surplus boys are being systematically culled from the compounds where they grew up. Between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, these surplus boys—now termed Lost Boys—are loaded into vans and dumped out on the streets of St. George, Utah, Flagstaff, Arizona, or larger cities to make their way as best they can. They are not allowed to contact their families again or return to the place of their birth.

In a
New York Times
article dated Sept. 9, 2007, Paul Murphy, an assistant Utah attorney general who has worked with these boys, said, “In part, it's an issue of control. If you're going to have plural marriage, you need fewer men.”

Making this culling practice even more tragic is the fact that many boys (and girls) raised in polygamy compounds are so undereducated that their reading and math skills test out at the second grade level. This makes the boys uniquely unsuited to the challenges of modern life. Ultimately, many fall prey to crime and drugs. To feed themselves, some even turn to prostitution.

Fortunately, some Arizona and Utah charitable groups, such as the HOPE Organization, the Diversity Foundation, and the Child Protection Project have stepped in to stem the tide of misery.

In an article published by the
Deseret Morning News
on May 28, 2006, Elaine Tyler, founder of the HOPE Organization, which provides food and shelter for these culled children, said, “We try to just cover their basic needs. They're coming out with nothing. The Lost Boys are living out of cars.”

In an interview that ran on National Public Radio on April 11, 2008, Tyler went into further detail. “They don't know how to handle money, how to get a library card. We're seeing seventeen-year-olds who can't even read the menu at McDonald's.” She also adds that many of them have been subject to sexual abuse. “Building trust with these boys takes a long time. They're burdened with a sense of guilt and shame. So this is not a quick fix.”

Two of the most notorious polygamy compounds, Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah, were—until recently—run by FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs, convicted on two counts of rape as an accomplice, and who is now serving two terms of five years to life in Utah; he is awaiting trial on further felony charges in Arizona relating to the sexual abuse of a minor. Estimates are that during Jeffs' reign, between five hundred to one thousand boys were ejected from his compounds in order that Jeffs' chosen followers could have multiple wives. Long before the boys' expulsions, however, Jeffs forced these children to drop out of school between fourth and eleventh grades and work without pay in Jeffs' various businesses, where workdays averaged ten to twelve hours.

Although this is in flagrant defiance of child labor laws, testimony before the U.S. Senate on July 24, 2008, revealed that Jeffs' companies included New Era Manufacturing, which has a Department of Defense contract for aircraft wheel and brake manufacturing worth $1.2 million. Another is JNJ Engineering, which has an $11.3 million deal with the Las Vegas Valley Water District. A third of Jeffs' companies, Paragon Contractors Corporation, has been fined more than $10,000 by the U.S. Department of Labor for employing twelve-to-fifteen-year-old boys and not paying them.

These financial malpractices caused U. S. Sen. Harry Reid, in a Senate hearing on the matter, to label Jeffs' FLDS church a form of organized crime where the FLDS has “wrongfully cloaked themselves in the trappings of religion to conceal crimes such as bigamy, child abuse, welfare fraud, tax evasion, massive corruption, and strong-arm tactics to maintain what they think is the status quo.”

Although at the date of this writing Jeffs remains in jail, his hand-picked deputies still control the compounds at Colorado City, Arizona, Hildale, Utah, and El Dorado, Texas—where girls as young as thirteen are given to elderly men to serve as “multiple wives” and surplus boys continue to be expelled onto the streets of neighboring cities.

When
Desert Wives: Polygamy Can Be Murder
(Betty Webb, Poisoned Pen Press) was published in 2002, few readers knew that polygamy was still being practiced on American soil. Even fewer were aware of its many human rights abuses. The Author's Note to that book quoted Linda Binder, former Arizona state senator and a vigorous anti-polygamist activist, as stating, “We have a situation here that is unconscionable. We have the Taliban in our back yard.”

The Taliban is still here.

Resources

For more information about polygamy:

Organizations

The Child Protection Project—
www.childpro.org

The HOPE Organization—
www.childbrides.org

The Diversity Foundation—
www.smilesfordiversity.org

Articles

“Polygamy in Arizona: The Wages of Sin,” by John Dougherty, Phoenix New Times, April 10, 2003.

“Seeking Shelter in a Storm: Amid Flurry of Controversy, Girls Flee Polygamist Enclave,” by Betty Webb, East Valley Tribune, January 15, 2005.

“Polygamy's Lost Boys Need Not Walk Alone,” by Brooke Adams, Salt Lake Tribune, August 1, 2004.

“Lost Boys: Polygamy, Prostitution and Rape in the Name of God,” by Ben Williams, Salt Lake Metro Magazine, November, 2005.

“Polygamist Leader Quietly Awaits Trial in Jail,” by Felica Fonseca, Washington Post, February 14, 2009.

“Evidence Reveals a Paranoid Jeffs,” by Paul A. Anthony, San Angelo Standard Times, February 15, 2009.

Books

Lost Boy
, by Brent W. Jeffs and Maia Szalavitz. Broadway Publishing

Under the Banner of Heaven
, by Jon Krakauer. Doubleday

The Secret Lives of Saints
, by Daphne Bramham. Random House

Church of Lies
, by Flora Jessop and Paul T. Brown. Jossey-Boss

Stolen Innocence
, Elissa Wall, Lisa Pulitzer. William Morrow

Escape
, by Carolyn Jessop and Laura Palmer. Broadway Publishing

Documentaries

Banking On Heaven: Polygamy in the Heartland of the American West
. An inside look at the compounds and their people. Over the Moon Productions

Polygamy Diaries: 2001 to the Present
. A series of televised reports by Arizona journalist Mike Watkiss, of KTVK-TV.