Free Prophet's Prey by Sam Brower

loyal, practicing member of the mainstream Mormon Church. Born in 1909 in Salt Lake City, Jeffs, a highly intelligent young man, became valedictorian of his LDS high school class in 1928 and delivered the graduation address in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, which he recalled as a “knee-knocking” experience.
    Mormon young men are encouraged to undertake a proselytizing mission for the church as they mature from adolescence to manhood. It requires that they set aside their own wants and needs and devote two years of their lives to spreading their beliefs through personal example. Brigham Young once said those called to the position must have “clean hands and pure hearts, and be pure from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet; then live so every hour.” LDS missionaries continue to be an extraordinarily successful means of spreading the Mormon message around the world, and multitudes of people have responded to the words and deeds of the devoted young “saints.”
    Rulon Jeffs began his own mission on June 1, 1930. He was sent to London, where he became a secretary at the mission headquarters. Two years later, he was home again and was given a secure job with the Utah State Tax Commission, a salaried government position that included an office in the capitol building in Salt Lake City. In June 1934, his fortunes grew even more when he married Grace Zola Brown, the daughter of influential LDS apostle Hugh B. Brown. That gave the ambitious Rulon a direct link to leadership and influence. He and Zola had two children.
    As I plunged into the daunting task of figuring out the structure and history of the FLDS and its leadership, it was apparent that understanding the enigmatic Prophet Rulon Jeffs would be necessary before there could be any hope of grasping the madness of his son, Prophet Warren Jeffs. Was Warren an extension of his father’s eccentricities and deviant behavior? Between them, the two men hijacked the fundamentalist movement, established a position of unchecked power, and sowed chaos and perversion in their wake for fifty years.
    The Mormons’ incredible record-keeping system would prove to be invaluable as I assembled the puzzle. The genealogy and family histories of millions of individuals, soon to be billions as more databases come on line, are available through LDS resources. I have even found and read my polygamist great-grandfather’s personal diary, digitized and available online in its original form. Starting the investigation, I began to amass material gleaned from legal documents, the churning of online search engines, books and papers available in libraries and private collections, private law enforcement databases, public business transactions, and information from personal interviews and conversations. This is the kind of project that I find particularly intriguing as an investigator; I love this stuff.
    The problem was that the fundamentalists were no less enthusiastic about their own records. They were intensely paranoid about their illegal lifestyle and did a thorough job of hiding their accounts. For a researcher, that created an occasional black hole. I felt the information must be out there somewhere, beyond my reach, secreted away in barns or cubbyholes, behind false walls or in locked rooms. I would fantasize that at some future place and time I would find my way to that hidden trove of information, or it would find its way to me.
    The “Hallelujah” moment for Rulon Jeffs, his introduction to Mormon fundamentalism, came on September 25, 1938, when he took his father, David Ward Jeffs, out for a birthday dinner. David had been a closet polygamist for years, so deep underground that Rulon had been born “in hiding” to David’s second wife. The boy lived for the first ten years of his life under the fake name of Rulon Jennings, although in such a society, it is doubtful he ever questioned his name change. The practice was