Prophet's Prey by Sam Brower Read Free Book Online Page B

but did not know where she was. The girl was safe, the chief said, and had voluntarily run away from home. Lenore did not believe him. She believed that her child had been kidnapped and was probably now married to Wynn Jessop.
    Lenore notified the Washington County sheriff’s office in Utah, the Mohave County sheriff’s office in Arizona, and the attorneys general of both states. All promised to open investigations, and Nicole eventually was located in the FLDS community in Bountiful, British Columbia, Canada. Lenore knew that her daughter did not have a driver’s license or a passport, so there was no legal way for her to have crossed that international border without parental permission or the appropriate documentation, particularly since she was a minor being transported for the purpose of being married against the wishes of her family. Lenore filed complaints with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada and the FBI in the United States, and once again she was promised investigations into the disappearance of the girl. Nothing came from any of it.
    Nicole was indeed in Canada and had been secretly married to Wynn Jessop, to whom she had been presented like a gift. The powerful FLDS had outmaneuvered the family. Nicole, brainwashed since infancy to obey the prophet, did just that, and was convinced that her parents were wrong. She saw nothing unusual about being assigned at her young age to an older man who was already married to someone else. But since Nicole was a child in the eyes of the law, it had not been her decision to make, and if sexual relations were indeed involved, it was clearly rape, no matter what she said or wanted or believed. The church arranged it and then ran interference for her.
    Nicole refused to speak to her mother, stating that if any attempt was made to call or contact her, it would not be reciprocated. Expelled from the church for their actions, and ordered to leave their house, the parents sued.
    From that came the UEP v. Holm case that had finally been settled the previous May. It was not really about property issues at all. The real crime was that Milton and Lenore had broken an unwritten FLDS law by challenging the word of the powerful prophet. Therefore, they had to be punished.
    The Chatwins and the Holms provided a hint at what might lie ahead. Nicole was only fifteen when church leaders tried to place her in a so-called marriage. Ross and Lori had been thinking about marrying a sixteen-year-old until I stopped them. There had always been chatter in the surrounding gentile communities about young girls being married off within the FLDS, but much of it was chalked up to rebellious farm girls tiring of their restricted lives and running away from home in search of love. That happened every day somewhere in this country. But how young was too young? How low would they go within the FLDS when deciding who was ready to be married? And if little girls were involved, what about the little boys? I was just beginning to grasp the true extent of the complexities of the case.

CHAPTER 5
    Big Willie
    With a court appearance looming to defend the Chatwins, we assembled a list of key FLDS players who could either be deposed or appear as witnesses. The biggest name on our list was the prophet Warren Jeffs himself, and this time when I returned to Short Creek, I was carrying more than a camera, or a hammer and nails: I had a satchel full of subpoenas. The cloistered community was shocked when I started dropping the papers on them and denting their confidence that they were exempt from such legal trifles.
    I began with Sam Barlow, who had been the first town marshal. Some twenty years earlier, both Utah and Arizona had decertified him as a peace officer for lying to the Washington County sheriff about a cache of some 180 semiautomatic rifles that he had secreted in a cave. He had emerged unscathed from that decertification, and as far as the church was concerned, Barlow was a key