Stephen Singular - When Men Become Gods: Mormon Polygamist Warren Jeffs, His Cult of Fear, and the Women Who Fought Back

D RIVING NORTH OUT OF LAS VEGAS AT TWILIGHT, you see the Strip spread out in a valley below you, glowing in the rearview mirror. Its neon signs and casinos represent several of the deadliest sins, from gluttony to lust to greed. Along Interstate 15, you pass the ragged-edged mountains that ring the city, dull red against the evening sky. The wind blows across the highway, sending discarded garbage and tumbleweeds spinning through the air and ramming into grilles. A few cars stream up and down the pavement, but the desert night is left mostly to predatorsthe coyotes and snakes creeping through the darkness, looking for an easy kill. Just before nightfall, the desolate countryside surrounding Las Vegas takes on an edge-of-the-world emptiness, as if one could disappear from I-15 without a trace. Its a great place to go underground.

Since the start of Americas War on Terror in late 2001, police officers across the nation had been trained by the Homeland Security Department to look for signs of trouble. In big cities, they studied behavior on street corners and subways, but in the open expanses of the West, state troopers watched out for suspicious vehicles transporting questionable passengers. Along the UtahArizona border, a different kind of terrorism had been unfolding since the start of the new millennium, in a different sort of war. Law enforcement needed to be aware of it, too. At 9:00 P.M. on a warm late August evening in 2006, Nevada Highway Patrol Officer Eddie Dutchover was observing the cars and trucks heading north on I-15, their headlights cutting through the indigo night.

As a Cadillac Escalade passed by in near darkness, Trooper Dutchover noticed its temporary license plate. Something was wrong. The writing was partially obscured, which was a minor violation, but these days you couldnt be too careful. The officer hesitated: Should he stop the car and correct the problem or let it gothe sort of split-second call a patrolman has to make every day. Instinctively, he pulled out behind the Escalade, moving in closer and then lighting it up on the highway. At four minutes past 9:00 P.M. , the Cadillac came to a stop on the I-15 shoulder. Dutchover stepped outside, approaching the drivers seat in routine fashion, but trained to be ready for anything.

A man sat behind the wheel of the Cadillac, with a male and female passenger in the back seat. Dutchover looked closely at all three, settling his eyes on the man in the rear, who was eating a fast-food salad. He looked out of place beside the Vegas Strips excesshe was gaunt and spindly and very pale. At six feet five inches and 150 pounds, he was a skeleton wrapped in skin. His posture was ramrod-erect, even inside the crowded quarters of the Escalade, and he had an oddly delicate face. One moment his eyes seemed gentle and open, the next icy and blank. His cheeks were pockmarked and sunken, his chin weak.

Seated beside him was an attractive womanone of his countless wives.

By the evening of August 28, 2006, fugitive Warren Jeffs had been riding around like this for more than two years, zigzagging throughout the western United States and up to the Canadian border, down by Mexico and dipping into Texas, once taking a side trip to Florida to visit Disney World. Hed covered thousands of miles by car, constantly circling back to his home base on the UtahArizona border, just below Zion National Park. Late at night, members of his Fundamentalist Mormon church, which included the local police, sneaked Jeffs into the twin communities of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, to perform secret ceremonies and rituals. As the leader of his Fundamentalist Latter-day Saint congregation (as opposed to the official Latter-day Saint Church in Salt Lake City), hed married teenage girls to older men. On other visits, Jeffs took new wives for himself and was married to thirty or forty or fifty younger women; some people said the correct number was three or four times that high. He could demand sex from them whenever he wanted to, and theyd been taught to obey his every command.

Since 2004, cops in two states had been hunting for him, along with the Washington County (Utah) Sheriffs Department, a Mohave County (Arizona) criminal investigator, and the FBI. A private investigator had been tailing the man for more than 100,000 miles, always one step behind. Back in the spring, the feds had placed him on their Ten Most Wanted List and boosted the reward for his capture to $100,000. Night after night throughout the past summer, his picture had appeared on national and international television, alerting viewers to be on the lookout for his lean body and long face. Four months had passed since hed made the FBI list without a single sighting of the fugitive or a decent lead.

The Utah and Arizona authorities had lately been applying financial pressure to the border towns, and their strategy was effective. Theyd won a number of recent victories, but frustration was growing because they hadnt been able to catch this one man. He was too elusive, with too many resources and too many people willing to hide him, just as others had hidden Western outlaws in previous centuries. Estimates of his congregation throughout North America ran as high as twenty to thirty thousand worshippers. To the faithful, Jeffs wasnt merely their pastor but their Prophet, the only person on earth who took orders directly from God. For the past two years, hed assumed legendary status among his flock, the phantom ruler whod never be brought to justice, the spiritual guru who mocked the law and government as he left them in his dust.

That August night as Dutchover surveyed the three passengers, the interior of the Escalade remained silent, a hint of panic filling the small space. The threesome had never been stopped before, despite the all-points bulletins issued in connection with Jeffs. Their good luck had made the three a little cocky and a little sloppythe flawed temporary tag had escaped their attention. For months while on the run, the fugitive had worn disguises but then relaxed the practice. Jeffs had taken off his wig, shaved his beard, and stopped wearing caps all the time, and he now looked just like his wanted poster, plastered across the Southwest. His tall, lean figure was cramped inside the SUV, his bony knees barely fitting within the Escalade, and he badly needed to stretch his legs. His neck was pulsating. For the first time in his life, the fifty-year-old religious leader was encountering authority outside of the border towns, without the protection of his father or his church.

In the past few years, religious extremists of different stripes had been showing up all over the globe, convincing others to strap explosives to their chests and kill themselves in a busy marketplace or fly airplanes into buildingsall for the glory of God. From Jakarta to London, New York to Madrid, theyd been acting out stories and myths hundreds or even thousands of years old while spilling blood for their faith. Like the radical Muslim leaders who promised their suicide bombers scores of virgins in heaven for fulfilling their deadly missions, Warren Jeffs had long ago learned how to exploit the critical connection between erotic impulses and violence. Hed issued orders that had ripped apart families, reassigning one mans wives and children to another; banished hundreds of boys from the community and left them to fend for themselves; and called for the mass extermination of pets. Since coming to power, hed also left a trail of suicides behind hima homegrown version of the kind of terrorism that had been emerging worldwide.