Free Prophet's Prey by Sam Brower Page A

not uncommon in other families that he knew, and that was just how things were. David allowed his son to become a faithful mainstream Mormon, perhaps because being discovered as a polygamist could have meant a jail term for the father. Now, at his father’s birthday dinner, it was time for Rulon to know everything, and David presented his son with a copy of the Truth magazine, an underground publication put out for those maintaining the covert and illegal practice of plural marriage.
    In his memoirs, Rulon wrote, “I asked Father, ‘What is this?’ He told me it was put out by Joseph W. Musser. I said, ‘By what authority?’ So he told me, and he took me to see Brother Musser [who] received me like a father into the work, and I got well acquainted with him.
    â€œWhen I was told about the Priesthood Council, I said, ‘Father, who is the head man?’ [and the reply was] ‘Well, he has to be in kind of hiding.’ I said, ‘I want to see him.’ So I finally got to see Uncle John over on 809 East, 700 South, met him in his home there. My heart leaped for joy finding the Prophet.”
    â€œUncle John” was John Y. Barlow, the acknowledged leader of the secret movement, who had been excommunicated by the LDS Church. After those meetings, Rulon Jeffs fully embraced the fundamentalist philosophy, casually discarding the religious faith he had practiced his entire life.
    After joining the flock, he hung out with his new friends at “cottage meetings” around Salt Lake City, where they spoke fervently about the plural lifestyle and how to mold this idealistic “Priesthood Order” to oversee the breakaway faith, which was called “The Work” by its adherents.
    â€œPriesthood” may best be described as the spiritual glue that binds together the FLDS power structure. Usually, when a boy is about twelve years old, he is ordained within the fundamentalist religion into a preparatory level called the Aaronic Priesthood. It is a means of taking on responsibility and commitment and is not too different from similar practices, under other names, with the youth in other churches. Any comparison ends there. Elsewhere, priesthood is about service; in the FLDS it is about power and control, and even the Aaronic Priesthood would be swept into that black vortex. The higher up the ecclesiastical ladder a man climbed, the more priesthood powers he enjoyed. In the hands of Prophet Warren Jeffs, “priesthood” was wielded like a magic wand. It meant whatever Jeffs wanted it to mean, and he used it as a handy camouflage and justification for his dreadful actions. To lose priesthood was to lose everything.
    When Rulon told Zola in 1940 that he had found a shopgirl that he wanted to marry as an additional wife, she balked. Polygamy was no longer part of Mormon doctrine and anyone found practicing it would be excommunicated. This simply had not been part of the deal when they got married. For Zola, as with the vast majority of Mormons, polygamy was a thing of the past. Her father, the LDS Apostle Hugh B. Brown, came to the house and issued an ultimatum for Rulon to either give up his heretical ideas or be kicked out of both the LDS Church and the Brown family. Having already surreptitiously taken his new bride, Rulon refused, and both threats came to pass. The divorced Zola took their sons and moved to California. Her departure did not really bother Rulon. In the coming years, he replaced her with a harem of dozens of wives.
    Polygamy had been illegal for more than sixty years by the time Rulon decided it would be his life’s calling. Back in January 1879, the United States Supreme Court had heard the case of George Reynolds, a Mormon resident in the Utah Territory, who was charged with having two wives—Amelia Jane Schofield and Mary Ann Tuddenham. In a unanimous decision, the high court found Reynolds guilty of violating the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act. The