Authors: Sam Brower
“R-1 was discovered by our enemies,” Warren wrote soon after in the Priesthood Record. “A certain private investigator [is] searching for me.”
I had come very close to my quarry. According to his journal, both the prophet and Uncle Fred were at the Mancos compound when Jon and I were in the surrounding forest. The prophet later claimed that he had been having weird dreams that “the devil himself was on the land.”
My unexpected appearance at his place of refuge knocked Jeffs further off balance. He quickly started to move most of the Mancos residents down to Texas, whether or not they had yet been deemed worthy to go there.
CHAPTER 22
“I can't take it anymore! I have to get out!” The trembling voice of seventeen-year-old Janetta Jessop was a terrified whisper when she telephoned her older sister, Suzanne Jessop Johnson, on November 5, 2004. “Can you please help me?” Suzanne had not seen or heard from Janetta for more than a year, ever since Suzanne had taken a plate of cookies over to the family home in Colorado City to congratulate Janetta on her sixteenth birthday. But the birthday girl had not been there. Neither had her belongings. “All of a sudden it was like Janetta had never existed,” Suzanne told me later.
There was open strife between Suzanne and her parents, because she had abandoned the FLDS and did not recognize Warren Jeffs as a prophet. She was the only wife of Lester Johnson, who had also parted ways with Warren's madness and had become a follower of Winston Blackmore in Canada, although they both continued to live in Short Creek. Suzanne had asked her mother about Janetta's whereabouts and received only a stare and a bland, “Well, I don't know.” After some prodding, her mother finally said that Janetta was on a special mission and was happy and well.
For Suzanne, it was no real mystery. She just hoped what she suspected was not true. Two of her other sisters, Kate and Velvet, had been married to old Uncle Rulon and were among those wives later taken by Warren. Suzanne believed that pretty, blonde Janetta also had become a new bride for the prophet and was stashed away in some secret place against her will, struggling to make a run for it. I would later discover a photograph showing Warren Jeffs and Janetta, their arms entwined, drinking from silver goblets on their wedding day, after she had just turned sixteen.
The surprise telephone call from Janetta on Friday, November 5, made Suzanne afraid for her sister. “The first thing that crossed my mind was that Warren or somebody was doing something bad to her, or making her do things she didn't want to do, and it was scaring her.” Suzanne tried to calm her little sister and promised to help. Janetta quickly said she would pack some things and call right back to arrange a rendezvous.
That was the last that Suzanne heard from her. The following day, their mother came to Suzanne's place in Hildale to deliver a message: “I don't know what's going on, but Janetta told me to tell you, âNever mind.' ” Suzanne asked why her sister had not called her directly, and the mother shrugged. “Well, you know Uncle Warren has to be in hiding right now. It just has to be this way for a while.”
Knowing that calling the Short Creek police would be a useless exercise, and desperate to help Janetta, Suzanne and Lester instead phoned Winston Blackmore. He called me, and I felt a surge of adrenaline rushing through my veins. I was furious about this little girl being handed over to the prophet on her sixteenth birthday by her proud parents. That would make three of their daughters in the prophet's household, quite a coup for Frank Jessop, as valuable as a truckload of gold in that cult. Janetta was in trouble, and we had to find her.
The situation was the sort of opportunity for which I had been waiting. It is a felony in Utah for a man to marry an underage girl who is ten or more years younger than himself. Warren was about fifty at the time, and Janetta sixteen. If we could persuade her to tell authorities what had happened to her, confirm the sham marriage on the record, there would not only be civil matters pending and under investigation, but possible criminal charges, too. Every cop in the land, except those around Short Creek, would be looking for Warren Jeffs. Taking it one step farther, if she would testify, it would also help focus some much-needed national attention on the plight of young girls in Short Creek.
It could not have happened at a better time. I had some dependable law enforcement help. Riding in from the West, as the storybooks say, came Gary Engels, a no-nonsense former homicide investigator hired by Mohave County, Arizona, specifically to monitor what was happening in Short Creek. Gary had been wounded in the line of duty, he was fearless, and he would never back down from any church goons. It would not be long before the entire town hated him as he dug into the FLDS criminal organization.
We would become close friends during the coming months, and we were happy to have each other as backup. Often, as we drove around Short Creek together, it seemed that we were the only two sane people on an otherwise screwball planet. In many such moments, we would adjourn to Gary's office, a double-wide modular trailer that had been set up on the edge of town on a rented rare piece of land that was not owned or controlled by the FLDS church. We dubbed it “Fort Apache,” and it became our only sanctuary in an area where we felt surrounded by hostiles.
We made a good pair and, at the time, we were the only two investigators in the trenches actively working cases involving the FLDS. If a possible crime was involved, I always made Gary aware of it.
Gary was still brand new to the job when Janetta Jessop telephoned her sister for help. The case was his baptism by fire, and he went after it hard, as was his style. Janetta's family lived on the Arizona side of Short Creek, within his jurisdiction, which gave him the authority to open an investigation. But Suzanne Johnson, who had received the distress call, lived on the Utah side. That invisible border had bedeviled real law enforcement for decades.
The FLDS can run back and forth across it as they will, but a police officer with the wrong badge may end up hamstrung. Because of the jurisdictional mess, the first thing I advised Suzie Johnson to do was file a missing persons report with the Washington County sheriff's office on the Utah side. They are the closest legitimate law enforcement agency, although Sheriff Kirk Smith was never pleased to have a Short Creek case dumped in his lap.
A Washington County deputy was instructed to telephone Janetta's parents, who naturally said that she was safe and sound at home. That was “case closed” as far as the sheriff's office was concerned. I couldn't believe they would have made such a careless phone call, which tipped off the parents that the authorities were now looking for their daughter. That meant that any opportunity of finding her without alerting Warren had evaporated.
Suzie and Lester raised such a fuss about this that the sheriff agreed to send someone to verify whether Janetta was really at the house.
A county detective knocked on the door of Frank Jessop. He had not been provided with a current photo of the girl for whom he was allegedly searching. The detective saw two girls wearing long dresses and the swept-up plyg-do hairstyle, but neither showed identification and the detective was not allowed to talk to them. When the parents assured him that one of girls was the missing Janetta, the detective said, “Okay,” and left. The sheriff's office in Utah had done what it had to do, and no more.
I was frustrated and concerned at the seeming apathy I was encountering in some of the law enforcement agencies. They had ignored Short Creek for so long, allowing the community itself to handle any problems within the little theocracy, that I felt they needed a push to start treating the Crick like the rest of the country.
Jon Krakauer, untroubled by borders, stepped forward and wrote a detailed news release about the missing girl on November 12, 2004. It carried the boldface headline, UTAH SHERIFF WON'T INVESTIGATE CALL FOR HELP FROM UNDERAGE BRIDE OF POLYGAMIST LEADER WARREN JEFFS. If the media picked up the story, the Utah sheriff's office might finally feel compelled to actively get involved.
The news release worked. It led to appearances by Sheriff Kirk Smith and me on the nationally televised news show
Deborah Norville Live
, where we discussed the case in separate interviews. Smith defended his department's actions in public. The undersheriff was so steamed about me pressuring them to do their job that he called me and threatened to arrest me for filing a false police report. That was ridiculous: The missing person report was not false, and I hadn't filed it; Suzie Johnson had.
Gary Engels also had been fuming about the inaction on the Utah side. He was not used to walking away from a challenge, and he made plans of his own to try to get a one-on-one with the girl, away from her parents. They lived on the Arizona side, which was his turf. He ignored the locals in Short Creek and launched his own investigation, bypassing the sheriff's office in Washington County. He arranged for some Arizona Child Protective Services workers to go to the house for a surprise visit, backed up by Arizona deputies. I followed with Suzanne in my car.
A deputy knocked on the door, but there was no answer. We weren't surprised. My sources had warned me long ago that all FLDS residents in Short Creek had instructions from church leaders not to answer the knock of anyone who does not first call ahead. We were about to leave when Suzanne spotted her mother's car coming down the street, with Janetta in the passenger seat. When she saw that we were at the house, Mrs. Jessop kept driving right past the driveway. I pointed and yelled, “There they go!”
The deputies pulled her over a short distance away as I drove up along with the CPS people. Janetta and Suzanne fell into a tearful embrace as their mother went into a tirade, shouting the automatic FLDS response about how government could not take away her child.
The Short Creek police arrived and demanded to know why they had not been consulted. Gary responded in his usual professional manner, although I could tell he was tempted to laugh in the faces of the local cops for asking such an absurd question. Janetta was ferried to neutral territory at a children's justice center in nearby St. George, Utah, for an interview.
Our hopes for a big break now lay on the frail shoulders of young Janetta, who was overwhelmed by what was happening. The CPS workers spent four hours with her and determined that her shaky physical and mental states were in part due to large amounts of drugs such as Xanax and Prozac. She appeared to be near to the point of incoherence.
Janetta had spent time with some of Warren's other concubines at the R-1 compound in Mancos, Colorado, where she had been moved after Warren took her into his fold on her sixteenth birthday. Once again, since it was not a legal marriage but an FLDS imitation, no laws had been broken. She was to complete her training there to become a “heavenly comfort wife” and learn the importance of keeping sacred things secret. She would get out of bed at four in the morning, say her prayers, then feed the birds in the chicken coop. Such superficial descriptions of her daily life were a start, but not really helpful.
She would not elaborate on where she had been for the past year and would not discuss her relationship to Warren Jeffs. Once again it appeared that the guilt and brainwashing that had been instilled in her, and her fear that she might be putting her salvation in jeopardy, stopped her from speaking out against the prophet. The family and church had gotten to her before we intervened. Janetta's most frequent answer, repeated over and over, was, “I don't want to talk about it.”
My hope of finding someone willing to come forth and tell the whole story of what had happened to her was dashed, but by this point in my investigation, I had learned not to expect much; nothing was easy in dealing with an entire culture that was so completely dysfunctional. I had to be patient and thorough.
Only later did I piece together what Warren claimed had happened to Janetta. In one of his “heavenly sessions” recorded in his journal, Warren justified what he did by making the ridiculous assertion that “evil powers” had made Janetta tiptoe in the night to the room of Warren's own son, Mosiah, with the desire to have sex with him. According to Warren, Mosiah later confessed an attraction to her, so despite the fact that nothing had taken place between them, and that Janetta had never even entered the room, they both complied with the prophet's insistence that they confess the sins of their hearts. Warren then banished them from R-1 and sent Janetta further into hiding in Nevada.
Putting together the interviews I had with her sister over time, plus the prophet's record, the story emerged that when the supposedly errant young wife got caught phoning her sister and planning to escape, and word came that police were involved, Janetta was sent back to her family in Short Creek to avoid further scrutiny by the law. Her father was given the responsibility of bringing her back under control, so that she might one day again prove herself to be a worthy wife of the prophet.
As disappointed as I was that Janetta would not talk, I was more surprised at the effect that her story had on me. It had very little shock value. Crimes had been committed against this young girl and only a handful of people cared enough to even try to rescue her. It was maddening, but as the case had gone on, I found myself growing more matter-of-fact about the sick, hidden sins of Short Creek.
The truth is that an investigator cannot survive and be effective if he walks around in a constant state of shock. You have to put the outrage aside and do your job.
Poor Janetta was another young girl abused by the FLDSâone among so many. As usual, I would stay in touch with her sister in case something else developed, but I had to move on and think of the thousands of other children who still might be helped.
Christmas does not exist in Short Creek. Warren had declared all holidays to be a distraction for the people and proclaimed Christmas in particular to be evil and idolatrous. He weighed this as another chance to test how far the people would go in obeying his seemingly irrational commandments. There was little resistance about the ban on the Christmas holidays. With no bright lights or outdoor decorations, no toys, no trees with ornaments, and no joy, Short Creek seemed even more dreary than usual as 2004 wound to a close.
That did not mean the fundamentalists were idle.
Aerial photos of the ranch outside of Eldorado, Texas, had been gathering on my desk, and they showed the progression of a large, new project down there. A wide, flat area had been cleared and the latest photos showed that a huge foundation was being laid, with footings approximately eight feet wide by six feet thick. Whatever was going in there would be enormous.