âYep, itâs true. The first-born son is always named Brigham. Itâs a family tradition.â He was a direct descendant.
After leading cautious lives in what had turned into a high-crime area of Southern California, we were pleased to be among friendly neighbors. Six years after our move, I graduated from Southern Utah University with a 3.87 grade point average and a degree in criminal justice with an emphasis in criminalistics and a minor in chemistry. It had taken a long time for me to get through college while working full time and raising a family, but I never give up.
Then I got down to business. Right after college, I teamed up with a friend who was a private investigator in Cedar City. The townâs growth had inevitably been accompanied by an increase in crime and drugs, and I saw an opportunity in the bail bond industry, which would, I hoped, provide some additional income. Along with that, I also became a bounty hunter, legally tracking down people who had had some sort of brush with the law and returning them to the custody of the sheriff to await a court appearance.
My state license as a bounty hunter proved to be a potent tool. In most states, bounty hunters do not even need permission or probable cause to enter a dwelling, unannounced, to make an arrest. And through reciprocity agreements, if a case originates in Utah, I could follow it across state lines and go into other cities with the same authority I had at home. I became good at finding people who didnât want to be found. I learned a lot about tenacity and seeing a difficult assignment through.
Among my first jobs was a self-assigned cold-case project back in California. Even before we moved to Utah, Larry Wheelock, one of my best buddies, had been murdered in a home invasion robbery, and the killer had never been caught. I dug out the files, pestered detectives, and discovered some new evidence by using new technologies. Within six months, Larry Donel Page was arrested for the murder. At twenty-six years, it had been the oldest cold case to be solved in Orange County history.
Because an adversarial situation plays out in just about every case, I have made a decision to be armed most of the time. I have come to the realization that it would be foolhardy to find myselfâor worse, my familyâin circumstances that might require having to protect ourselves against the threat of serious injury or death, and not have the means to do so. I refuse to let that happen.
As I settled more into our new home and life, I began to feel an obligation to my children, and myself, to contemplate the value of some sort of spiritual life. After years of exploring many religions, I was converted, along with my family, to the mainstream LDS Church. I had returned to my Mormon roots.
By the time I drove down to Short Creek to meet Ross Chatwin for the first time in 2004, I already had a lifetime of experience dealing with hard cases. Little did I know that I was on a collision course with Prophet Warren Jeffs and the breakaway, mysterious sect called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
CHAPTER 7
The Father
I vividly remember my grandfatherâs stories of leaving his home in Farmington, Utah, and riding the rails to San Bernardino, California, in his search for work during the Great Depression: Wall Street had crashed, thousands of banks had closed and wiped out the savings of millions of people, industrial production collapsed, and farmers throughout America lost their land. Utahâs citizens were trying to survive, but times were hard in this rugged state. There was a great exodus of men looking for work.
However, returning to Utah from England about that time was a tall, neatly dressed twenty-three-year-old man with a nice smile and dark hair who had escaped the ruination that had been suffered by so many. His name was Rulon Timpson Jeffs. He arrived not in a boxcar but on a passenger train, and he was a
After leading cautious lives in what had turned into a high-crime area of Southern California, we were pleased to be among friendly neighbors. Six years after our move, I graduated from Southern Utah University with a 3.87 grade point average and a degree in criminal justice with an emphasis in criminalistics and a minor in chemistry. It had taken a long time for me to get through college while working full time and raising a family, but I never give up.
Then I got down to business. Right after college, I teamed up with a friend who was a private investigator in Cedar City. The townâs growth had inevitably been accompanied by an increase in crime and drugs, and I saw an opportunity in the bail bond industry, which would, I hoped, provide some additional income. Along with that, I also became a bounty hunter, legally tracking down people who had had some sort of brush with the law and returning them to the custody of the sheriff to await a court appearance.
My state license as a bounty hunter proved to be a potent tool. In most states, bounty hunters do not even need permission or probable cause to enter a dwelling, unannounced, to make an arrest. And through reciprocity agreements, if a case originates in Utah, I could follow it across state lines and go into other cities with the same authority I had at home. I became good at finding people who didnât want to be found. I learned a lot about tenacity and seeing a difficult assignment through.
Among my first jobs was a self-assigned cold-case project back in California. Even before we moved to Utah, Larry Wheelock, one of my best buddies, had been murdered in a home invasion robbery, and the killer had never been caught. I dug out the files, pestered detectives, and discovered some new evidence by using new technologies. Within six months, Larry Donel Page was arrested for the murder. At twenty-six years, it had been the oldest cold case to be solved in Orange County history.
Because an adversarial situation plays out in just about every case, I have made a decision to be armed most of the time. I have come to the realization that it would be foolhardy to find myselfâor worse, my familyâin circumstances that might require having to protect ourselves against the threat of serious injury or death, and not have the means to do so. I refuse to let that happen.
As I settled more into our new home and life, I began to feel an obligation to my children, and myself, to contemplate the value of some sort of spiritual life. After years of exploring many religions, I was converted, along with my family, to the mainstream LDS Church. I had returned to my Mormon roots.
By the time I drove down to Short Creek to meet Ross Chatwin for the first time in 2004, I already had a lifetime of experience dealing with hard cases. Little did I know that I was on a collision course with Prophet Warren Jeffs and the breakaway, mysterious sect called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
CHAPTER 7
The Father
I vividly remember my grandfatherâs stories of leaving his home in Farmington, Utah, and riding the rails to San Bernardino, California, in his search for work during the Great Depression: Wall Street had crashed, thousands of banks had closed and wiped out the savings of millions of people, industrial production collapsed, and farmers throughout America lost their land. Utahâs citizens were trying to survive, but times were hard in this rugged state. There was a great exodus of men looking for work.
However, returning to Utah from England about that time was a tall, neatly dressed twenty-three-year-old man with a nice smile and dark hair who had escaped the ruination that had been suffered by so many. His name was Rulon Timpson Jeffs. He arrived not in a boxcar but on a passenger train, and he was a
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