Authors: Sam Brower
Then Sarah dropped a Short Creek address into one conversation, identifying it as a corner house. I knew the place! The following morning, I drove down to the Crick to confirm it. Town records showed that it belonged to an FLDS member named Lorin Fischer. When Sarah called the next time, Flora worked that name into the conversation. “Lorin Fischer is your father, isn't he, sweetheart?” The girl was hushed for a moment, then began to weep. “Am I in trouble?” she asked. “Am I going to be in trouble?”
She again carefully dodged all questions about her exact location, and stymied our attempts to help her. Gary was getting nowhere on the legal side in Arizona because of the lack of evidence. Our attention, and that of the entire nation, turned to Texas. Our stubborn mystery caller, however, was not yet finished with any of us.
CHAPTER 36
The Texas rescue attempt at the YFZ compound left everybody unsteady. CPS had stumbled onto an enormous case load at a single location. The parents and their children were entitled to mandatory hearings concerning the allegations, and statutory deadlines had to be met. Texas requires that a hearing be held not later than fourteen days after a child is taken into custody. Now it was the court system's turn to be overwhelmed, and Judge Barbara Walther consolidated all 463 children into a single preliminary hearing in San Angelo on April 17, 2008.
I needed to determine if any of our clients might be affected, particularly an FLDS refugee whose wife and children had been reassigned to another man by Warren. Clothing bearing the new father's name was found in the temple at the ranch, along with the wife and one daughter. The other daughter, a thirteen-year-old, was gone, and I feared she had already been given in a fake marriage to the man who had become her new father only a short time earlier. We never found her. She was another of the girls who have simply vanished deep into the FLDS culture.
Back in Texas, I began meeting with many of the people who had been involved in the rescue attempt. Among them was Angie Voss, the Child Protective Services supervisor who had made the actual decision to take the kids away from the compound. Voss asked me to come by the CPS office for a question-and-answer session about the FLDS with a few of her co-workers. I was impressed by Voss and her ability to make tough calls. She was an experienced veteran who had encountered the most horrible kinds of abuse during her career, and prior to the YFZ raid, she thought that she had seen it all.
When I arrived at the office, Angie introduced me to her colleagues, and we settled in for an informal chat. More people drifted in. Soon, about fifty people were crammed into the room. My impression was that until a couple of weeks earlier, they probably had not known the FLDS from horseshoes. Now they were scrambling to catch up and anxious to get help through the learning curve. They peppered me with questions:
How does this peculiar religion work? Are they really Mormons? What about “celestial” marriages, and being “sealed for time”? Why do the women act like robots?
While giving them an overview of the world according to Warren Jeffs, I was able to pick up more information about what those beleaguered workers had faced at the ranch.
They had gone out to find one specific child, the girl named Sarah Jessop. Once inside the compound, that original mission mushroomed as evidence was discovered of more child abuse. Underage girls had been placed in arranged connubial relationships with older men, having babies soon thereafter, and even younger girls were in danger of the same fate. One CPS worker told me they had started to think, “Oh, crap, this could turn into a half-dozen kids.” Then the number rose to eighteen children who needed further investigation and protection. Eventually, the CPS team reached the astonishing conclusion that it was not just one girl at risk on the ranch, it was every kid there!
I let the CPS workers know that I felt that in removing those 463 children from the ranch, they had made the only choice open to them. Come what may, they had been true to their responsibility to protect children ensnared in a predatory caste system.
I explained to them that kids raised in the FLDS culture just don't stand a chance. That when a boy is born, he has only three options in life: make a mistake and be abandoned by his parents, become frustrated enough to eventually leave the religion and live out his life as a traitor, or grow up to be a perpetrator of abuse. That to be born female promises a future just as dismal. She will either be an underage bride or will later be placed with a man without regard to love. Either way, it is probable that her children will grow up and continue the cycle of abuse, with her as their primary mentor.
It was important for me to let the CPS people know that I had never met nor spoken with any FLDS woman who had not been abused in some form. Not one.
It definitely would have been easier to investigate just a single case at a time, but that had not been possible here because hundreds of children were involved. In my opinion, Angie Voss made the right call. “You should feel fortunate that you have been given this opportunity to make a real difference in the lives of so many children,” I told the workers at the San Angelo CPS office.
After the meeting, a few of us adjourned to a smaller venue to continue the discussion. That was when I got my first clue that things might not be shaking out well within the Child Protective Services department. Two senior members of the department had been sent down from Houston, allegedly to help, but by the time our discussion broke up, I had the clear impression that they were really there to plan an exit strategy.
The next day, I attended the hearing. The grounds of the Tom Green County Courthouse were carpeted with FLDS women in pastel prairie dresses and lawyers in suits. Few, if any, FLDS men attended, in order to avoid having to answer questions about their families and marital relationships. District Judge Barbara Walther would hear twenty-one hours of testimony that lasted over several days.
Judge Walther ran a tight ship, but the situation bordered on chaos. One attorney would say something, then another would pop up to object and within moments others would pile on with more objections and opinions. She needed the wisdom of Solomon, combined with a lion tamer's whip and chair. After weighing the evidence, the judge decided there was a significant risk of harm if the kids were returned to the YFZ Ranch, so she ruled to keep all of them in protective custody while foolproof DNA tests were performed to establish parental relationships. All of the children would have to be individually evaluated before any decision could be made about returning them to their parents or placing them in foster care.
I felt optimistic as I flew home. The justice machine had taken over, and it was out of my hands. They were going to have to find a solution, and the DNA testing was a good idea, at least in theoryâalthough I knew the FLDS would fight it.
The FLDS propaganda machine was furiously set in motion, with lawyers, mothers, and spokespeople talking about the impact that the horrible government's action was having on the poor children. The same parents who were performing for the cameras at these staged news conferences had willingly fed those same children into the abusive system of their church, saying nothing when Warren Jeffs chased away their sons and placed their underage daughters with aging men. There was no doubt the children were currently going through a tough time, and naturally they did not want to be separated from their mothers, but the decision could not be left up to them, nor swayed by emotion.
On April 24, there was startling news. A call came from an excited Flora Jessop: “You hear what happened?” Near my elbow, a producer for a major television network was also answering his phone, and his manner changed with each passing second. The police had found a woman by the name of Rozita Swinton in Colorado Springs, and the original calls to the crisis hotline were proving to have been a hoax.
“They took her down and questioned her, and no sooner had she gotten out, and she was calling me again and claiming she was Laura!” Flora was baffled by the caller's nerve: She was either very bold or very sick.
This was a game-changer, not in the legal arena, but in the eyes of the general public. The FLDS was going to have a field day with this.
The story line was carefully manipulated by the former FLDS lawyer Rod Parker, who had been fired during the Lost Boys case but was now brought in to handle the public relations situation at the ranch. He spoon-fed information to a couple of hand-selected FLDS apologist reporters, knowing that all it takes is a few people skilled with pens and television cameras to plant enough doubt to change the tide. FLDS mothers gushed horror stories about how the government was mistreating the crying children, some of whom were suffering from chicken pox and tummy aches. There were pictures galore.
Until then, the media reports had been fairly sympathetic toward law enforcement. But with the new developments, an unlikely mix of radical constitutionalists, bigoted hate groups, and First Amendment defenders loudly protested what they perceived to be government mistreatment of the industrious Christian religious group and its children.
The Texas governor and attorney general began to receive threatening letters and e-mails. I was asked to review some of them to see if I recognized the authors or origins. “What happened to religious freedom?” was the common theme. An e-mail received by the governor's office warned Americans, “It's the Mormons this time, but it could be you next.” They seldom mentioned the deviant prophet who had created the mess and was currently in prison for being an accomplice to sexually assaulting a child.
There was also the looming issue of how much money the State of Texas was spending on the hundreds of cases. The financial pressure was growing severe. All of the workers, the emergency housing, the food, the overtime, and the unforeseen extras caused by having to deal with so many children and cases were blowing a hole in the budget. The overall price tag could run into the tens of millions.
Things were simply happening too fast. The state was losing control, it was costing too much, and the PR field had been virtually lost to the FLDS spin doctors after Rozita's hoax was discovered. The case against Dale Barlow, the man who was alleged to have been the abusive husband of the non-existent Sarah and therefore the second target of the raid, was dropped without comment.
Only six weeks after the authorities breached the YFZ stronghold, I received a dismal e-mail from a frustrated source in Austin who had been closely involved with the rescue attempt: “I don't think we can protect these kids much longer.” The will to succeed was evaporating in the higher ranks of the bureaucracy. Within a few months, dozens of CPS workers, including those who had been involved in the raid, were fired, forced to retire, or reassigned because they would not agree to keep silent as directed by their superiors.
At the end of May, Judge Walther's custody ruling was overturned by the Texas Third Court of Appeals. That court said there was no evidence of a clear and immediate danger to the children at the ranch and ruled that Walther essentially had mishandled the situation by rolling all of the cases into one. A week later, the Texas Supreme Court allowed the Appeals Court decision to stand. CPS would need to file each case individually in Walther's court and give the specific reasons why each child should be removed and placed in protective custody. Instead of going to that trouble and expense, CPS chose to begin quietly releasing the children, and Judge Walther had to vacate her ruling on custody.
The result was a decisive win for the FLDS, and I watched in powerless fascination as they made the most of it.
Big Willie Jessop, of all people, was now emerging as the chief public spokesman for the FLDS. Knowing his background as Warren Jeffs's tough-guy enforcer, I found it almost impossible to believe. He had not even been deemed saintly enough by Warren to be a temple worker, and had never even been allowed on the temple grounds, but now he was the front man, all over television, playing the religious persecution card.
Willie bragged among his people that he had learned this new skill of leadership at no less an institution than Harvard University. And that part was true. His former assistant explained to me that Willie had paid four thousand dollars for a weeklong seminar at Harvard Law School on how to become a better negotiator. The Ivy League university runs such seminars regularly, but I had to wonder about the standards for being admitted to such a program. By shelling out big money for a five-day course, Willie became a credentialed bullshitter with “Harvard” tacked behind his name.
Willie held a news conference for the gathered national media in June and read a statement that promised the FLDS religion would no longer perform underage marriages in any place where they would be illegal. While that pledge appeared to acknowledge movement toward change, it was just more FLDS smoke and mirrors. Marrying children was already illegal throughout the country, as was polygamy. Furthermore, no FLDS member has ever had the legal authority to perform a marriage of any kind. I considered anything coming out of Willie's mouth to be suspect.
Few reporters knew much about the religion's background. They did not realize that a vital underpinning of the church was utmost secrecy, and that lying to gentiles was considered normal. After the lie, they would go back to doing whatever they wanted. It had been working in Arizona and Utah for many years, and it was working again in Texas.
The press, however, did have some questions about this new spokesman. Was Willie the official church representative? Did his words reflect the actual policies of the church or its leadership? He dodged each point. To hear him tell it, he was just some guy handing out a news release. Whatever he said could be denied by the church hierarchy. Willie did not make any decisions without the approval of the prophet, and when asked if Warren had authorized the new policy of no more underage marriages, Willie had no comment.
It was not long after this that I received a telephone call from Winston Blackmore in Canada. A fourteen-year-old girl had shown up unexpectedly at the home of her father, who was a Blackmore follower. The mother was a Warren Jeffs follower who had been reassigned to another man along with the children after the father had been expelled. The girl said she had run away from her mother's new household after being told that she was to be taken down to Short Creek and married to someone she had never seen. The cycle of child abuse continued. The fundamentalists had originally begun to rebel against the “Mother Church” in 1890 because of their refusal to recognize and obey the laws of the land. To cave in to the rule of law now would be to deny the principles upon which their religion was founded.