From school principal to polygamist prophet
 
By Mark Shaffer
Arizona Republic - Flagstaff Bureau
 
Before he became a polygamist prophet, Warren Jeffs spent 22 years as principal of Alta Academy in suburban Salt Lake City, where all the high school students thought so much of him that they pooled their work earnings one year and bought him a $20,000 van.

"He was a very strict guy but very nice also," said Brigham Fischer, who attended the school in the early 1990s, while Jeffs was principal.

Fischer said he never saw a side of Jeffs that would ultimately lead the future leader of Colorado City's Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints sect to inclusion on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list and a fugitive on the lam for more than a year.

Jeffs was captured late Monday during a traffic stop north of Las Vegas.

But those were in the days before the bizarre, paranoid Jeffs, who has become the nation's most vilified polygamist since Joseph Smith.

And, probably, the most unlikely leader ever of the hard-bitten, frontier-influenced multiple marriage sects scattered throughout the West.

Fischer and other students remember Jeffs as being a goofy, lanky string bean of a man with thick glasses who often clowned for the camera during school pictures.

The Alta school was abruptly closed in 1998, because Jeffs' father, Rulon Jeffs, then the leader of the FLDS sect, the largest group of polygamist adherents in the country, had apocalyptic visions of the Salt Lake City area being destroyed.

Warren Jeffs moved south, just outside Colorado City, with his ailing father that year and took over more and more church leadership duties as Rulon Jeffs' liaison to sect members.

At the time, though, Warren Jeffs was not seen as his father's successor. Rulon Jeffs died at age 95 in 2002.

The general consensus was that Fred Jessop, the longtime bishop of the sect, would take over. He was popular among the rank and file because he grew up in the isolated area and wasn't a city import. "But the really sad thing for the people there was that Fred was 90 years old by that time also," said Ben Bistline, a former Colorado City resident and sect member who wrote a history of the church after he was excommunicated. "He didn't want to do it and he wouldn't put his considerable influence behind the Barlow family."

Former Colorado City Mayor Dan Barlow had been the public face of Colorado City for more than two decades and his brother, Sam Barlow, had been the town's police chief.

So, Warren Jeffs filled the power vacuum, claiming that his father had anointed him on his death bed as the sect's new leader. He wasted no time on the personal front.

According to a letter that was sent from within the FLDS to the media after his father's death, Warren declared many of the estimated 25 women who had been married to his father, and who Warren considered worthy of him, as his own and spiritually married many of them in secret ceremonies.

The transition also reflected a fundamental shift in the sect, that it was becoming too involved with the outside world, said Ken Driggs, an Atlanta attorney who has researched the sect extensively and once lived in Colorado City.

"The Barlows were tied to economic development and being involved in the outside world," Driggs said. "Warren was more conservative and wanted to withdraw. He also surrounded himself with a new, young generation of people from there who felt the same way."

Driggs, who said that Warren Jeffs once worked with him on a research project about polygamy in early Utah, also said that the sect leader has been "horribly mischaracterized," especially in national news television shows.

"He's anything but this mesmerizing, fiery leader like the way he's portrayed. He's not the strongest personality when he walks in a room," Diggs said. "He speaks in a droll monotone. We had all these bulls like the Barlows and (Canadian FLDS leader Winston) Blackmore fawning over Rulon right before he died, and Warren just kind of bided his time."

Not that he was laid back, Fischer said.

"He would preach to us for 45 minutes every morning to begin the school day," Fischer said. "And, boy, most of that stuff really came from a different world."
 
azcentral.com
Originally published August 29, 2006
 
Back