| Private eye hoping to collar Jeffs He believes the FBI is underestimating the threat posed by leader | |
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By Jesse Hyde Deseret Morning News | |
Craig McLachlan leans back in his soft leather chair and looks at the ceiling. Warren Jeffs is close, he can feel it. He rubs the stubble on his shaved head and sighs. For 37 years, McLachlan has worked as a Salt Lake private investigator, and he's learned to trust his hunches. Jeffs may be somewhere in Utah, McLachlan thinks, somewhere not far from here, a single-story brick office building on Salt Lake's gritty south side. McLachlan takes out a yellow legal pad. Objective, he writes in pencil. Find and locate W.J. For months, McLachlan, 58, has been plotting the overthrow of the fugitive polygamist leader, chasing leads in Florida, Texas and Arizona. Now there have been two sightings over the weekend. The first was in Lehi Sunday afternoon at the hunting and fishing emporium Cabela's. Security cameras captured a man resembling Jeffs — who is 6-foot-4 and 150-pounds — in a wheelchair, surrounded by a group of women in long-sleeved dresses and two presumed bodyguards. The second sighting was Monday at Strawberry Reservoir, about 55 miles southeast of Salt Lake City. The description was the same, if it was Jeffs. Now the FBI is in Colorado City, the Arizona border town Jeffs still rules, even on the run, following leads stemming from the two sightings. McLachlan says that if the FBI finds him there, it will screw up McLachlan's plans and could even trigger a shootout. "I don't think the FBI knows how dangerous he is," McLachlan said. "This isn't some country bumpkin. He has security, he has communications, and he has a lot of money. He's not going down without a fight." Ever since Jeffs went on the lam last summer, fleeing sex charges in Arizona, McLachlan has been meeting with a loose-knit group of polygamists, some of them runaway wives, others still living within the FLDS sect. This group, McLachlan says, has a plan for Jeff's removal. McLachlan's life, as he tells it, is worthy of an action movie as he hunts for a man with a $10,000 bounty on his head. The son of an ex-CIA agent, he became a private detective at the age of 21, running an armored guard service for Salt Lake-area banks. Since then, he's raised goats and herbs, raced cars and built a Park City mansion patrolled by a pair of Dobermans. He lost it all to alcoholism, he admits, and lost his wife of 21 years to cancer, too. All that loss may explain the puffy bags under McLachlan's eyes, the skinny frame, the gaunt look to his face. What's more difficult to explain, even for McLachlan, is exactly what he does and how he ended up in the middle of the Jeffs manhunt. These days, detective work is only part of his job at Watson and McLachlan, a two-man enterprise that operates out of a modest office on West Temple, just off 3300 South. McLachlan likes to describe his job as "case structuring," which is a fancy way of saying he is hired by lawyers to do the work they don't want to do. Most recently, he has teamed up with Provo lawyer Rhome Zabriskie on a number of high-profile cases, including the case of two former Brigham Young University football players charged with gang-raping a teenage girl in August of 2004. Those two players, Ibrahim Rashada and B.J. Mathis, were acquitted, to the surprise of two co-defendants who cut deals with Utah County prosecutors to avoid jail time. Mathis credits his acquittal to McLachlan's work. "There's no question about it, he's the best. He found out things no other investigator did," Mathis says. "He told us from the beginning, 'If you boys tell me the truth, you have nothing to worry about, I'll take care of you.' And he did. He's like family to us." Even Donna Kelly, the Utah County prosecutor on the case, is complimentary of McLachlan, although the two are hardly friends. "In my experience, he's very aggressive and seems to genuinely care about his defendants and their cases," she said. "Although he does hang out with convicted felons like the Zabriskies." Three of the men in the Zabriskie family, which owns the law firm McLachlan does much of his work for, have served jail time (although two of their convictions were eventually overturned), as has McLachlan himself. But he says his five-year stint in prison almost two decades ago came to an abrupt end when two of the prosecution's chief witnesses in the case against him admitted they had perjured themselves. A parole board called an emergency hearing and McLachlan was immediately released from a federal penitentiary in Texas. These days, McLachlan says he is trying to make up for lost time, which is why he wants to track down Jeffs. "I'm not interested in money anymore. Been there, done that. I'm only interested in taking on cases that shake up the system," he said. "I mean, what are you here for, on this earth? To make a change, to evolve. That's what I'm interested in." McLachlan sees the capture of Jeffs, and the media attention it would generate, as a golden opportunity to expose what he sees as the evils of the FLDS sect's current leadership. To prove his point, he rifles through a stack of papers on his desk until he finds nine sheets of paper detailing the deaths of dozens of polygamists living in Colorado City and Hildale, Utah, dating back to the early 1970s. McLachlan says children ages 2 to 9 have been run over, drowned and shot in the head and that men and women have been killed in car crashes, explosions and farm accidents. "If you want to silence someone, you don't scare them, you kill them," McLachlan said. "We're talking about murder." But FBI agent Brent Robbins, who works out of the bureau's Salt Lake office, says there is no reason to believe Jeffs is armed, dangerous or has a propensity for violence. McLachlan says the FBI is underestimating Jeffs and that a Waco-style shootout is a real possibility. To avoid such a scenario, McLachlan said his clients, who he will not name on the record to protect their safety, have devised a plan in which Jeffs would be replaced by a more peaceful leader who would not allow marriages between men and teenage girls or remove wives from men deemed disobedient, as Jeffs has done. His clients also want to raise money for a rehabilitation program that would help runaway polygamists make the transition to secular life. "It's not like assassinate Caesar. It's like who can replace Caesar, then we'll talk about getting rid of him," McLachlan said. He clicks on his computer and pulls up aerial photos of the temple Jeff's followers are building in Eldorado, Texas. He points at large barn-like structures built on dirt roads leading to the temple. "This is the compound," he says. "If Jeffs wants to be in that temple right now, he's in that temple. He goes where he wants. He believes he's protected by God." Behind his office, McLachlan has a high-tech surveillance vehicle prepped to track Jeffs down. If all goes according to plan, McLachlan will collar Jeffs on his own and bring the media along for the ride. "If they arrest him, what does that accomplish? He doesn't need to be made a martyr, he needs to be shown for what he is. That's where the media comes in, to expose him. This guy is sick." E-mail: jhyde@desnews.com | |
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deseretnews.com Originally published Wednesday, October 26, 2005 | |
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