| In remote polygamist town, one investigator is trying to buy more time for young girls | |||||||||
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By Harriet Ryan Court TV | |||||||||
KINGMAN, Ariz. — On a Friday afternoon this month, a jury in this hot, dusty city on the road to the Grand Canyon announced it had reached a verdict in the case of a 39-year-old building contractor accused of the statutory rape of a 16-year-old girl. It was clear from the reporters, lawyers and curious citizens in the first-floor courtroom that the accused, Kelly Fischer, was no ordinary defendant and the charges against him no ordinary statutory rape case. Fischer is a polygamist, and the young woman prosecutors call the victim is his third wife and mother of his child. His trial in Mohave County was the first prosecution in Arizona in decades stemming from plural marriage among the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints (FLDS), a group that broke with the mainstream Mormon church in 1890 over the practice of polygamy. Conspicuously absent from the crowd who gathered in the courtroom that evening was the man to whom the verdict likely mattered most. Gary Engels, the investigator who built the case against Fischer and seven other polygamists to be tried later, was too nervous to sit in the courtroom. Assembling evidence against the members of the insular church required Engels to move hundreds of miles from his family to work in the isolated, high-desert town the FLDS ran as a virtual theocracy. For the better part of two years, he had lived and worked in a state of psychological warfare with the members of the church, enduring harassment, office break-ins, soul-killing glares, and comparisons to Satan. Unsure if he could control his emotions when the verdict was read, Engels sat in an office across the street from the courthouse, waiting alone to learn if the difficult 21 months had been for nothing. The Prophet "Dumbasses." Engels was being tailed, as he always is in Short Creek. He steered his county-issue SUV down a dirt side street and the Lexus behind him nearly collided with a pick-up tracking Engels from the opposite direction. The 54-year-old shook his head. "That makes six of them. There are six of them following us," he said. Outside, women wearing long, loose braids and prairie dresses, and blond children in homemade clothes, stared from the yards of large houses as Engels drove by, closely pursued by the Lexus. The pick-up was visible on a side street. A sedan rolled toward Engels, and other vehicles seemed to greet him at every side street. All had darkly tinted windows, but behind them, young men in baseball caps and sunglasses were visible. Some of the women took their children by the hand and turned toward their houses. "Everyone in town knows who I am. By now, they have to," he said. The state line separating Utah from Arizona runs through the middle of the FLDS city. The Utah side is officially known as Hildale, the Arizona portion as Colorado City. The town spreads out from the Vermillion Cliffs, red and brown stone formations that share the dramatic beauty of the Grand Canyon, which is directly to the south of town, and Zion National Park, which lies to its west. The state boundary means little to the approximately 7,000 residents, many of whose families have lived there since before either state existed. They refer to the area by its original name, Short Creek, and in their minds, the law comes not from Salt Lake or Phoenix, but from the mouth of the man they call the Prophet, Warren Jeffs. Jeffs is now on the FBI's most wanted list for fleeing charges in Mohave County and Utah involving sex with underage girls, but his followers continue to believe God speaks through him. These revelations inform every aspect of their lives, from where they live to what games children play to when the world will end. Perhaps most importantly, Jeffs, who inherited the position from his father, arranges and performs all marriages. The church teaches that a man must have multiple wives to attain the highest level of heaven, so Jeffs in effect determines where individuals will spend the afterlife. About half the families in the town are polygamous. Jeffs himself is said to have 75 wives. A one-page case file At a bend in the road near town, Engels does a U-turn and drives directly toward the sedan. The driver backs up and Engels pins his car against the side of the road and jumps out. "Why are you following me? What is your problem? Do you want something?" he barks at the young man behind the wheel. The driver, who has been pursuing Engels for 20 minutes, appears terrified. I'm not following you. I have no problem with you, he says. Disgusted, Engels stomps back to his SUV and drives slowly on. "I feel sorry for these kids. Just trying to impress Warren," he says later. "He controls the women and, therefore, he controls the men." Shortly after Warren Jeffs took over the church in 2002, he excommunicated a group of young men and older, married men from the church and assigned their wives and children to other husbands. He said they were banished until they repented for unspecified sins, but some of them felt he was eliminating competition for wives. It was these purges that brought the law to Short Creek. The town has its own police department, but the officers function as sort of an FLDS Taliban, enforcing religious commandments and reporting violators directly to the Prophet. Some of the banished church members sued in an attempt to regain their families and properties, and their accounts of teenage brides at Short Creek caught the attention of the newly elected county attorney, Matt Smith, a career prosecutor who specialized in sex crimes cases. "We didn't really know what was going on up there. We had these allegations, but I wanted to find out the truth," Smith recalled. From a logistics standpoint alone, it was no easy task. Smith's office in Kingman is farther from Short Creek than Washington, D.C., is from New York Getting there means a 275-mile drive around the Grand Canyon. The route passes through three states, two time zones, the Hoover Dam area and Las Vegas. It takes four hours in good weather. In October 2004, Smith hired Engels, who had retired as a police officer a decade earlier after being shot in the line of duty, and assigned him full-time to the FLDS. "I said, 'Find out what's the truth and what's the rumor,'" Smith recalled. Engels wasn't sure what to expect when he drove into Short Creek for the first time. Raised a Lutheran in Colorado, he knew only the broad outlines of what the FLDS believed. "I never had much use for organized religion," he admitted. His case file was essentially a single piece of paper — a list of names of apostates, excommunicated church members, who might be willing to help talk. 'I was the devil to them' Polygamy is specifically banned by the Arizona constitution, but it's not a crime. The state only recognizes one marriage at a time, but if a man takes multiple wives in religious ceremonies, he cannot be arrested or prosecuted. In 1953, the governor of Arizona used illegal cohabitation statutes to arrest hundreds of polygamists in Short Creek and ordered their children placed into state custody. The raids were a public relations disaster. Newspapers carried photos showing crying babies being ripped from their mothers' arms. Eventually, the charges were reduced or dropped, and state authorities shied away from intervening in the polygamist community. What troubled Smith and others in Arizona law enforcement were the apostates' allegations of polygamists taking teenage girls as wives. Under state law, it is a crime to have sexual relations with anyone under the age of 18 unless the parties are legally married to each other. Because a polygamous marriage can never be legal, the men marrying teenagers as second, third or fourth wives were guilty of statutory rape, or sexual conduct with a minor. Determining if that was happening — and then proving it — was Engels' job. It was more difficult than he imagined. In a normal town, he would have sought out the victim, relatives, neighbors, teachers and friends for interviews. In Short Creek, he soon learned, that is unthinkable. "There's basically a fear taught of the outside world, a terror-type thing that to do that is death or destruction, going to hell," one of the apostates, Richard Holm, explained to a grand jury last year. Anyone who talked to a "Gentile" — the FLDS term for anyone outside the church — risked eternal damnation and through the wrath of Warren Jeffs, the loss of his house and family. Shortly after he arrived, Engels received a tip that a 16-year-old had been married to Warren Jeffs. He found her visiting her parents and asked her about the allegation. I prefer not to answer, she replied to every question he asked. Her parents stood by, staring at him with a hatred that still burns a year later. "I was the devil to them. To all of them," he said. In the end, all he could do was tell them he would stop back periodically to check on her. "She better still be living here," he told them. His reception did not improve. Engels has the ramrod posture and authoritative air of one who has spent his career in law enforcement, but he has a gentle thoughtfulness that in the past had earned the respect of even those he had arrested. But in Short Creek, people acknowledged him only with dirty looks and comparisons to Satan. Once he accompanied a female apostate to pick her children up for a custody visit from relatives who remained in the church. They hurled insults at Engels. Afterwards, the woman apologized for how the church members had treated him. He shrugged. "I said, yeah, it's pretty much a daily occurrence." Engels and his wife of 30 years have a house in a town near Kingman, but to be closer to Short Creek, he lives in the RV in which they had planned to retire in Hurricane, a 22-mile drive from Short Creek. On weekends, he makes the long drive home. The distance from his wife, the lack of friends and the constant anxiety are difficult. Engels is always looking over his shoulder. After the county's office, a triple-wide trailer on the outskirts of town, was burglarized, he began carrying his files with him everywhere. FLDS boys in trucks with tinted windows try to follow him home at night. He learned to check under his tires for glass whenever he moved his vehicle. His closest backup is 75 miles away. "It's a theocracy here. A Third World country. All that's missing are the veils," he said. Doing the math Gradually, he earned the trust of the apostates, many of whom still believe in the ideals of the church. They explained the culture and the complicated family trees in town. Many are polygamists. "When I first got here, it was still a shock," he said. "I don't even think about it anymore. There are some families up there where polygamy works for them, and some who it doesn't. But I think it has to be done among consenting adults." Those thrown out of the church told Engels that, while teenage marriage had always been a part of the FLDS, Jeffs had, in the words of Holm, "supercharged" it. More and younger girls were being forced by the prophet to marry older men. Love matches were not permitted. Engels pulled the last few years of birth certificates from the church's birthing center and began comparing the birth dates of the women to the birth dates of their children. By cross-referencing with marriage certificates, he identified women who were legally victims of statutory rape. In Fischer's case, a 17-year-old named Jenny gave birth to a daughter in 2001 and listed him as the father on the birth certificate. At the time, Engels discovered, Fischer had two other wives, Allison, his only legal spouse, and Jenny's mother, Lou Jean. He found a half-dozen other cases of what appeared to be statutory rape in the birth certificates. In Kingman, Smith convened a grand jury. "I wasn't sure it would go anywhere," he said. Engels had tried to subpoena the women, many of whom were now in their early 20s with several children. He went first to Fischer's large house. The women saw him walking across the yard and ran inside, locking the doors behind him. From then on, the word was out, and none of the victims or their children were to be found. Engels was able to persuade one woman to testify before the grand jury. Candi Shapley had been cast out of the church for adultery, although her parents remained loyal members. She recounted how when she was 16, Warren Jeffs had married her to a 28-year-old man who already had a wife. Shapley, who subsequently gave an interview to "Good Morning, America," said Jeffs married his own 16-year-old daughter and another teen to older men the same day. She said her husband, Randolph Barlow, had actually raped her when she told him she felt she was too young to get pregnant. Asked why she hadn't gone to authorities when Jeffs told her she was to marry Barlow, she said, "We were told we would go to hell if we did." The grand jury in Kingman indicted Barlow for sexual assault, Jeffs as a conspirator and Fischer and the other six men for statutory rape. Smith and Engels decided to try Fischer first as a test case. His was among their weakest cases. Search warrants on the homes of the other men had turned up photos and family trees that indicated the teenagers were married to the defendants, but Fischer had moved homes shortly before the searches, and Engels did not find those materials in his new house. The trial that began July 6 lasted just two days. Smith's case consisted of the birth records and three witnesses. In addition to Engels, who recounted how he found the documents, the jury also heard from two apostates. Holm, who served on the Colorado City town council before being excommunicated, acted as a tour guide through the FLDS world. He described life in Short Creek and the power of Warren Jeffs in arranging marriages. Another former member Isaac Wyler, who has a horse farm in Short Creek, testified that he saw Fischer and the alleged victim, Jenny, riding horses together, an activity that struck him as courting. He told jurors that later he saw Jenny sitting next to Fischer in a vehicle. Typically, he said, wives rotate sitting next to the husband. Fischer's defense attorney, Bruce Griffen, opted not to call any witnesses and instead focused on what he acknowledged was a legal technicality. The prosecution was required to prove that the sexual contact between Fischer and Jenny occurred in Arizona, not in Utah or elsewhere. With the state line running through the middle of town, how could jurors know for sure, Griffen argued. After summations, the jury of five women and three men filed out to begin deliberations. Engels was worried as he waited for the verdict. "I was really nervous. We had a lot of time invested, a lot of sacrifice," he recalled. In all likelihood, the investigator was more anxious than the defendant. The punishment for statutory rape ranges from probation to two years in prison and first-time offenders, which would include Fischer, generally do not serve time. The punishment is much more severe for sexual contact with minors under the age of 15. Although there are rumors of 14-year-olds being married in Colorado City, no charges have been filed. The case the jurors were deliberating came down to a difference of two years. What was legal for Fischer and Jenny to do at 18 was illegal when she was 16. All the days and months Engels spent in Short Creek were simply to buy the teenage girls two and in some cases three more years before marriage. It's an unwanted gift of time, Engels knows, but, he says, it is one they need. "In two years, they will mature where they can make a better informed decision about whether they want to live this lifestyle or not," he said, adding, "I have not met any 16-year-old girl, especially up there, who I felt knew anything about life." Buying girls a little time "Guilty." A colleague delivered the news to Engels in the county attorney's office shortly after the verdict was read in court. "I felt vindicated. I felt glad. I've never been one to celebrate, because even though I won, someone's going to pay the price," Engels said. A judge will decide what price Fischer pays at a sentencing hearing Aug. 4. The other seven trials are "in a holding pattern," according to the defense attorney. His sentence "will be educational for other people who are similarly situated," Griffen said. Gary Engels returned to Short Creek four days after the verdict. There are no televisions or newspapers in town, and it was unclear how many people had heard about Fischer's conviction. Ken Driggs, a legal historian who has studied the FLDS' encounters with the law, said the men will be treated as martyrs. "They are not going to be regarded as bad men. They are going to be regarded as people who were willing to go to prison for their beliefs," said Driggs, a Mormon whose great-great-grandfather was a polygamist who served time in prison. Driggs, who has spent time in Colorado City, said he fears the prosecutions will only encourage the leadership to withdraw further from the outside world. "It plays into the hands of the people in the community who say the world is evil and we shouldn't be involved in it," he said. As Engels drives through town, trailed by a half-dozen FLDS vehicles, he notices head-high fences going up around many of the houses. Some are made of metal, others decorative stucco or wood, but they all serve the same purpose, to obscure the views of Engels, the apostates and any other outsiders. At the birthing center, women in plural marriages have stopped listing a father on the birth certificates. Engels says he worries more about the young men following him. With Jeffs on the run, there are no marriages being performed in town. The single young men, desperate for wives, will do anything to impress Jeffs, Engels says. He wonders if that includes hurting him. He is aware of at least 10 more cases of teenage marriages that could result in statutory rape charges. "If I could tolerate it long enough, I could be here another 10 years," he says. Engels knows that ultimately, he is only a deterrent. At most, he can keep Jeffs from sneaking into town to arrange marriages and allow a few teenage girls enough time to decide for themselves whether this is the life they want. "One thing I realized up there," he says, "is that you can't reason religion into people and you can't reason it out of them." | |||||||||
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CourtTV.com Originally published July 21, 2006 | |||||||||
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