When I began looking into the Warren Jeffs’ case in the winter of 2006, I wasn’t much interested in rehashing Mormon history or even the history of polygamy among consenting adults. Like the states of Utah and Arizona, I felt that adults should basically be able to pursue their own lifestyles. I wanted to explore the place where fundamentalist religion meets criminal behavior, which I’ve done in previous books. As it turned out, this was a fortunate approach. Not only did Warren Jeffs end up on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list and get arrested and then convicted for accomplice to rape in September 2007; but as everyone knows by now, his compound in Texas, known as the Yearning for Zion Ranch, was raided by law enforcement on the night of April 3 and 462 children were removed because of allegations of sexual abuse and underage marriage. The story has exploded into headlines and the basic issue centers on where religious freedom ends and crimes against children begin. The book features the adventures of a private investigator who tailed the fugitive Jeffs for 100,000 miles without ever catching up with him, and those of a criminal investigator who took on a town of 6-8,000 fundamentalists Mormons who despised him (the police in town are also polygamists). Their efforts to uncover crimes - - rape, incest, physical violence, forced labor for kids, tearing up of families, reassigning wives and children to other men, slaughtering animals, banishing 1,000 teenage boys from the community, and bleeding the American government of welfare payments and other financial scams -- are heroic, as are the women who’ve come forward over the years and tried to get law enforcement to stop Jeffs’ reign of terror. The two states finally launched an investigation and now he’s serving two five-to life terms in Utah, while awaiting another trial for incest in Arizona.
On a larger scale, I wrote the book because for nearly seven years our federal government has been fighting a global War on Terror against religious extremists across the planet. With more than 4,000 American soldiers dead, possibly half a million other victims, and the cost of the war estimated as high as $3 trillion, there’s little indication that this conflict has any end point and no one seems to be able to define victory, let alone achieve it. In decades past, Arizona and Utah tried using force to stop polygamy and change the fundamentalists’ beliefs and lifestyles -- it ended in disaster. This time they took a much more intelligent and comprehensive approach. The book is about how this strategy has been implemented -- and how it’s succeeded in extremely difficult circumstances. Those two states have a lot to teach us about combating the problems of religious terrorism, but this isn’t a book of theory. It’s filled with courageous characters, a nasty villain, and plenty of action.
It was my wife, Joyce, who first told me to go down to southern Utah and look into the Warren Jeffs’ case. She understood that women in particular would be fascinated by the details of this closed society operating inside our own country. She’s been right about these things before, and her instincts were on target again. Sometimes, it really pays to listen.