PARK CITY — Sam Brower isn’t slowing down a step. For him, there’s no letting up.
For 11 years and counting, he’s been hounding polygamist fundamentalist leader Warren Jeffs, ever since the January day in 2004 when Brower saw a photo in the newspaper of a man excommunicated and ostracized from the Fundamentalist LDS Church holding up a copy of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” comparing Jeffs to Hitler.
Brower was in his office in Cedar City at the time, running his private investigator business.
But he couldn’t get the image out of his mind. Was there really, truly, honestly, a community barely an hour’s drive from Cedar City where a modern day Hitler banished this man from his home and cut him off from his family? How could that be possible?
So Sam got in his car and drove to the twin polygamous border towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, to talk to Ross Chatwin, the ousted man, and find out for himself.
“I thought, ‘this can’t be happening,’ ” he remembered of that day. “Then I found out that it is.”
After he heard Chatwin’s story, he explained he was a private eye and offered his services, which Chatwin gladly accepted.
“But you’ll have to pay me something to make it legit,” said Brower.
Chatwin said he would if he could but didn’t have any money. The church had it all, every bit of it.
Brower said, “Give me a dollar then.”
Chatwin said, “I don’t have a dollar.”
Brower reached in his pocket, gave Chatwin a dollar, and said, “Now give it back.”
That’s how it started. That’s how Sam Brower began poking into the secretive, closed-off world of Warren Jeffs and his running of the FLDS Church.
The more he poked the more his outrage grew.
He found evidence of rampant sexual abuse; of repeated violations of child labor laws; of wholesale neglect; of girls in their early teens marrying older men, including Warren Jeffs; of a culture that deprived people of their rights and property, including custody of their children.
“Good grief, there’s 10, 15 thousand people that’ll do anything that this guy tells them," he concluded. “It’s nuts, crazy. They’re a crime syndicate that specializes in child abuse.”
And hiding behind religious freedom didn’t cut it. “You can believe whatever you want,“ he said. “If you want to believe it’s OK to sacrifice virgins and throw them in a volcano, that’s fine. But when you act on those beliefs, when you start breaking the law, then it’s not fine.”
While he was working for Chatwin, a group representing several young men who had been banished by Jeffs, known as the Lost Boys, hired Brower to do some investigating for them as well.
He actually got paid for that job, but when it was over he didn’t stop digging. The abject audacity of what Jeffs was doing — not in Afghanistan, not in North Korea, but smack in the middle of the United States of America — ate at him like battery acid. In another time and place, Sam Brower would have chased down Nazi war criminals, or hunted Osama bin Laden. In this time and place, he locked his sights on Warren Steed Jeffs.
His investigating took him to South Dakota and Colorado and Texas — anywhere Jeffs’ influence and trail led. It was Sam Brower’s doggedness that helped fuel the fire that sent Jeffs into hiding in 2005, that put him on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list (next to bin Laden), that led to his capture in 2006 and that saw him convicted of aggravated sexual assault of children, for which he is serving a life sentence in a Texas prison, plus 20 years.
Unfortunately, that didn’t end anything, as Jeffs has continued to run his church from his jail cell.
To draw attention to the reality that a convicted felon and serial sex offender is still in charge, and to chronicle the horrific things he’s learned, Sam wrote a book, “Prophet’s Prey,” that became a New York Times best-seller in 2011. After that, he made a documentary film by the same title that made its debut at Sundance earlier this year.
“People don’t read as much as they used to, so we wanted to tell the story in a film, too, where many more, hopefully millions, can see what’s happening,” said Sam after he showed his documentary recently at Rick and Holly Alden’s Park City home as part of a fundraiser for Holding Out HELP (holdingouthelp.org), the nonprofit that provides services to polygamous refugees.
Brower drove up from Cedar City for the event, on his own time and his own dime. He said he hasn’t been paid anything on the Jeffs case in years. He’s able to fund what has become a crusade from the cases he investigates that do pay.
The plan is for “Prophet’s Prey” to be shown in limited release in New York, Los Angeles and Utah this summer, before a television release on Showtime this fall — with hopes for Emmy and Oscar consideration. More details are available at prophetsprey.com.
“It’s all about raising awareness, to expose the public to the dictatorship in our backyard,” said The Man Who Will Not Let Go. “I saw something that wasn’t right and couldn’t walk away.”
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Mondays.
Email: benson@deseretnews.com