Fear and Loathing in Utah

The owners and most of the lunch crowd at the Merry Wives Café in Hildale, Utah, were excommunicated from his polygamous sect years ago. And Warren S. Jeffs, the man revered as the prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), counsels his followers to shun all outsiders, even their more open-minded blood relatives who playfully named their new burger joint after their proud heritage of "plural marriage." Still, news that Jeffs, 51, had been convicted of being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old church member traveled quickly across the red-rock desert to this restaurant along the Utah-Arizona state line, unnerving even the most progressive of the extended polygamist community.

"This hatred for polygamists … I felt it ever since I was a child," says Charise Dutson, manager and part owner of the Merry Wives. Today Dutson is a member of Centennial Park, an Arizona group that split from the FLDS but continues to practice polygamy. Three teenagers who are part of Centennial Park call Jeffs a fraud with no direct line to God. The verdict, meanwhile, worries them all. Another owner of the café, a jovial man who asks not be named, adds, "I don't think we could ever get a fair trial in the state of Utah."

Utah's Washington County attorney, Brock Belnap, argued in court that claims of religious persecution were a smokescreen for Jeffs's crimes, saying, "You cannot hurt young people in the name of religion and think you'll escape the law." Now Jeffs faces a possible maximum sentence of life in prison and further trials in Arizona and in federal courts. Meanwhile, the two-week trial in St. George, Utah, was a discomfiting look under the covers of Jeffs's secretive sect, whose practices are said by many former members to have become increasingly austere and bizarre in recent years, under Jeffs's leadership.

The accuser, Elissa Wall, testified that she was 14 years old when Jeffs told her she must marry 19-year-old Allen Steed, a first cousin whom she disliked. According to church doctrine, Jeffs's matchmaking was divine revelation and her only path, as a woman, to heaven. To defy him meant facing the absolute darkness of apostasy. Wall sobbed through the ceremony Jeffs performed in 2001 in a Nevada motel room. He had to ask three times if she would agree to be Steed's wife, Wall told the court. Finally, prompted by her mother, Wall muttered, "OK, I do." Then she hid in the bathroom. A few weeks later, according to her account, Steed said it was time "to be a wife and do your duty." They consummated the marriage. He fell asleep. Then Wall swallowed two bottles of over-the-counter pain pills, which she vomited, she said. Later she told Jeffs she loathed her husband's touch and asked him to release her from the marriage. He refused and admonished her to give herself "mind, body and soul" to her husband, prosecutors said.

Steed was never charged in the case. He testified that it was actually his 14-year-old bride who initiated their first sexual encounter (not including the time he said he exposed himself to her in a park in an unsuccessful attempt to interest her in sex). Wall, like several other young women in her situation, eventually started an affair and became pregnant with another man's child, ensuring her immediate expulsion from the sect. Now she's 21, married to that man and the mother of two children.

Jeffs's attorneys declined to comment to the media during the trial or after the verdict. Defense counsel Walter Bugden told jurors in court that his client had not committed a crime. "His church, his religious beliefs is what's on trial here, and it's being dressed up as a rape," he said. Bugden said in court that the case against Jeffs was "the continuation of 165 years of intolerance for a people who engage in different cultural and religious practices." In the end the five man, three-woman jury concluded that Wall had been enticed into marrying Steed and could not legally give her consent, in part because of her fears of eternal damnation for defying the prophet's will. After the trial Wall said she has tender feelings for the FLDS members. "I pray they will find the strength to step back and reexamine what they have been led to believe," she said. "This is not about religion or a vendetta. It's simply about child abuse."