By Ben McNitt
Tucson Sentinel
September 29, 2011
http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/arts/report/092811_jeffs_review/account-warren-jeffs-fanaticism-riveting-read/
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Polygamist prophet Warren Jeffs' summation last month to the Texas jury that ultimately convicted him on two counts of child rape was to stand silent before them for over an hour, staring at the floor, answering them nothing.
"Answer Them Nothing" is author Debra Weyermann's riveting account of how—after over half a century of existing as a state unto itself—the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) and its beyond-lurid leader Jeffs were brought to a long overdue accounting before the law.
FLDS is of a genre that raises deeply troubling questions about how fanaticism can draw otherwise normal people into a world of insular perversion. Jim Jones' cult was of this type. So were the Nazis. To view it through Weyermann's solidly documented, lightning-fast narrative is fascinating and repellent at the same time.
FLDS neither was nor is it still some tiny fringe sect of the Branch Dividian variety consumed in the Waco tragedy. Established as a polygamist bastion of Mormonism in the 1940s, FLDS commanded the services of Salt Lake's top-flight legal talent, controlled $110 million of followers' property, ran businesses with multi-million dollar government contracts, set up tax-supported police, fire and school systems for its 10,000-plus followers in the Short Creek enclave spanning the Arizona-Utah border and had more adherents scattered across at least six states, Canada and Mexico.
And at its core the group was feeding the prophet and those male followers he chose to "bless" with a continuous stream of "celestial wives" who had no say in the matter, picked for their "sweetness," often teenagers given to men old enough to be their grandfathers.
By the time Jeffs consolidated his hold as FLDS prophet in 1992 he had at least 80 such wives. The two the Texas jury convicted him of raping, and for which he was sentenced to life in prison, were each 12 years old at the time. The altar at the fortress-like church in the FLDS compound near Eldorado Texas where marriages were consummated was a bed.
The story of FLDS' unraveling has a direct Tucson lineage, as does Weyermann herself: she was an Arizona Daily Star reporter in the 1980s.
Early in 2002, semi-retired Tucson attorney Bill Walker received a telephone call about a 16-year-old girl who was seeking custody of her two children. Walker's success as a quicksilver-mined, relentlessly dogged lawyer had given him the financial resources to accept pro bono cases where he felt clear issues of justice were at hand.
The woman, Walker was told, had been forced to marry a man in a polygamist cult on the Arizona side of Short Creek, had given birth to two children, was pregnant with a third but had escaped and wanted her children back. This doesn't need civil action, Walker thought, advising his caller to just contact the police.
That's the point, Walker was told. The husband is a cop.
Thus began Walker's pursuit of FLDS member Rodney Holm, a police officer badged in both Arizona and Utah, that not only won the custody case but created sufficient heat for authorities in both states to awake to the enormity of the FLDS cesspool.
Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff took action that ultimately put FLDS' $110 property trust into receivership and saw Holm, who had two other wives with 18 children, convicted of bigamy and child rape. A rolling expose by Phoenix New Times reporter John Dougherty prodded steps by then-Arizona Attorney General Janet Napolitano to seize the FLDS controlled Short Creek school district. Mohave County authorities secured an indictment against Jeffs.
The heat drove the prophet underground where he directed the founding of a new enclave in Texas described as a "hunting lodge" to skeptical locals while eluding the law until stopped by a Utah patrolman in 2006 in a red Cadillac that contained $60,000 in cash and a trove of credit cards, disguises, computers, police scanners and a list of safe houses. A subsequent raid on the Texas compound led to the charges Jeffs was convicted on last month.
Part of the strength of Weyermann's narrative of these events is that it does not exploit the lurid - although that aspect is laid bare - but tells a whole story of how peoples' minds can be imprisoned, the courage of those who escaped, and the determination of those who used the legal system to expose and dismantle a true evil in their midst.
It is also a warning that that evil has not disappeared simply because a man who once led it has been brought to account.
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