Answer Them Nothing: Bringing Down the Polygamous Empire of Warren Jeffs - Hardcover

Weyermann, Debra

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569765316 ISBN 13: 9781569765319

Verlag: CHICAGO REVIEW PR, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

When police raided the Short Creek compound of the Fundamental Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1953, it soon became a political and publicity nightmare and eventually cost the governor of Arizona his job. From that point on, skittish public officials allowed the polygamist sect to practice its tenants unmolested for the next 50 years and turned a blind eye to child abandonment, kidnapping, statutory rape, incest, and massive tax and welfare fraud.

            But then Warren Jeffs, a new FLDS prophet, escalated the sect&;s crimes to near madness. Activists watched in horror as he used his limitless authority and the resources of a tax-supported community&;in essence, a feudal empire on the Utah/Arizona border&;to devastate thousands of lives on cruel whims, marrying girls as young as 11 to 60-year-old men and driving off teenage &;lost boys&; who Jeffs felt threatened his authority.

            Answer Them Nothing is the chilling story of the victims, activists, prosecutors, judges, cops, and attorneys who in 2001 began the struggle to dismantle the FLDS empire and bring Jeffs and his henchmen to justice. It is a mesmerizing journey into one of America&;s darkest corners, a story that stretches over three states and deep into history of the powerful Mormon Church.

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Debra Weyermann is an award-winning journalist who has written for numerous publications, including the Arizona Daily Star, the Denver Post, Harper&;s, and the Santa Barbara News-Press.

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Answer them Nothing

Bringing Down the Polygamous Empire of Warren Jeffs

By Debra Weyermann

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 2011 Debra Weyermann
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-56976-531-9

Contents

Map, 
Note on Sources, 
Prologue: The Raid, 
1 Ruth Crosses the Rubicon, 
2 Section 132, 
3 Bill Walker and the First Case, 
4 Judge Shumate, 
5 The New Sheriff, 
6 Dan Fischer and the Lost Boys, 
7 Roger Hoole and the Lost Boys Lawsuit, 
8 Short Creek, 
9 Warren Jeffs, 
10 Texas at Bat, 
11 Arizona at Bat, Again, 
12 Answer Them Nothing, 
13 The Whip Comes Down, 
14 The End Begins, 
15 Fun on the Run, 
16 Cops and Taxes, 
17 Satan's Accountant, 
18 Nailed, 
19 Conviction, 
20 Texas Pulls the Plug, 
21 The Courts, 
22 Emergency Wars, 
23 Utah Fades, 
24 Arizona Rising, 
25 Three Strikes in Texas, 
26 The Lives of Others, 
27 The Light, 
28 End Game, 
Epilogue: Ruth Across the Rubicon, 
Acknowledgments, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

RUTH CROSSES THE RUBICON

Sisters, do you wish to make yourselves happy? Then what is your duty? It is for you to bear children in the name of the Lord, that are full of faith and the power of God — to receive, conceive, bear, and bring forth in the name of Israel's God. — Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, Vol. 9

The devil uses a certain weakness. He whispers selfishness, and that weakness in a girl — since I am talking to girls — is vanity, wanting to be noticed, wanting to be looked at. Vanity is something useless where you want it, but it gets you nowhere, and when girls want to be where the boys are, look at them, that is called vanity. The good boys won't even pay you any attention. Faithful and good Priesthood men won't pay you attention and try to get you to like them. The boys that pay you attention and tries [sic] to get you to like them are the boys that would destroy you, and you can see that difference. — Warren Jeffs, lecture to eighth grade girls, November 1, 2002

I just want to eat sugar or drink a cup of coffee without asking permission. I want to take my kids across town to the park without being followed. I want to get off all the welfare and be a real person. I want to be free and my kids to live free and I want my kids to have an education and have hope. I just want to be a real person. — Journal of Ruth Stubbs, nineteen-year-old plural wife, June 2001, Phoenix

On a night nearing Christmas 2001, a resolved Ruth Stubbs stroked the perfect faces of her two sleeping toddlers, reviewing her deliriously dangerous plan to save their lives. If it worked, and that was a big qualifier, the plan would save her life as well, but Ruth didn't care about her own messed-up life. Looking back on the eternity of her nineteen years on earth, she understood she had never cared. FLDS had tricked her into self-loathing from birth, and tomorrow they'd begin hunting her like an animal.

The last three years had been the most monstrous. So monstrous it was sometimes hard to remember what had come before the prophet, out of the blue, "gave" her to a guy twice her age whom she didn't know. Until that surreal day almost exactly three years ago, Ruth felt she'd enjoyed a pretty OK childhood despite living it around the utterly twisted Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with "around" being the operative word. Looking back on it, Ruth realized she'd never truly been in FLDS. Until recently, her life had not been the physically battering, emotionally hopeless existence that she'd handed her own children, but in her defense, Ruth never imagined there would be any children in this picture. She'd only just turned sixteen when they'd literally thrown her in a pickup truck and driven her to hell.

That her father had helped them had been completely out of character and very difficult to accept, but Ruth didn't really blame him anymore. David Stubbs was FLDS raised. He'd acquired the three wives needed to enter the celestial kingdom and rule a planet after death before Ruth was born in 1982. That was lucky, because not so many men got a shot at the celestial kingdom after Rulon Jeffs and his son Warren took over Short Creek in 1986. After that, you had to be on the good side of Uncle Rulon, as he was called, to get the not-quite-ripe young girls assigned to you, and the Jeffs had some high-handed notions about strengthening Israelite bloodlines when making the assignments.

Until the Jeffs happened, David Stubbs had been kind of like FLDS royalty, being descended from one of the oldest polygamist families since The Work — as FLDS used to be called — got started in Short Creek during the 1930s. Consequently, the Stubbs family had some of the best lands with the most water rights — very important in the desert. Stubbs women had married into all the important Short Creek families who were also there from the beginning, and everybody was cool with the Lord and one another. Not to be too profane or anything, but Ruth had observed that the bonds of a more terrestrial nature could make the day-to-day business of living go a lot smoother.

Which was probably why David Stubbs wasn't too impressed with the Johnny-come-lately Jeffs family when they moved from Salt Lake City to Short Creek after the former prophet, Leroy Johnson, died. Naturally, Ruth hadn't known Uncle Leroy personally because she was just four years old when he died in 1986, but she did know he was beloved by a lot of Short Creek people, her dad included. When Rulon Jeffs just up and announced he was the new prophet when he'd lived in his Salt Lake all that time, a lot of Short Creekers didn't buy it. The first prophet, Joseph Smith, said that only God selects the prophet, and Uncle Leroy, who was the only one talking to God at the time, hadn't said squat about Rulon Jeffs before he passed on.

Plus, it was very cheeky, the way Uncle Rulon moved down from his big house in Salt Lake to take over Short Creek. Rulon and his favored son, Warren, had always been a little snotty to the Short Creek folks, who were still in shock that the prophet Leroy Johnson had died at all. Like all the prophets before him, Uncle Leroy said he'd never die until the apocalypse, which FLDS people have been expecting just about any day now from the beginning. Uncle Leroy predicted the end of days about three times, even anointing with sacred oil the ATVs God's chosen people — FLDS people — would need to hightail it to higher ground once the wholesale butchery of all the disbelievers started.

The descriptions of it could just make you sick with all the Gentiles' guts and blood flying everywhere and getting on your clothes. FLDS held survivalist skills classes where you learned how to slit cows' throats and everything, but nothing ever happened. People were disappointed when the world didn't end, but they felt even worse when Uncle Leroy explained that it hadn't happened because the FLDS people hadn't been pure enough for Joseph Smith and Jesus to ride their heaven cloud back to earth. The people felt really bad they'd let Jesus down that way. Uncle Leroy said that everybody had to double down and do better to help end the world, but he never said anything about the stuck-up Rulon Jeffs being elevated.

There was a big fight over it with a good number of people, Ruth's dad included, saying that Rulon...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: CHICAGO REVIEW PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1569765316
• ISBN 13: 9781569765319
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 386
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar