Prophet's Prey by Sam Brower Page B

kids were learning in their homes, such as the nonsense that man had walked on the moon. In 1973, Rulon Jeffs had one of the larger buildings within his walls turned into an FLDS school with a proper, fundamentalist curriculum. It was called the Alta Academy, and it would become Warren’s launching pad.
    Without a college education or teaching credentials, he was hired into the original faculty of the academy and was soon elevated to the position of principal, a promotion that carried an astonishing amount of personal power for someone who had yet to see his twenty-first birthday. Inside that building, the headmaster could do as he pleased, so he did.

CHAPTER 8
    Lost Boys
    One stormy afternoon late in May 2004, my cell phone chimed as I was driving down Main Street in Cedar City. The water was slamming down so hard that I pulled into a parking lot before answering. On the other end of the call was prominent Baltimore attorney Joanne Suder.
    She said that she was looking for a private investigator for some potential lawsuits that were in the works involving the FLDS and that my name had come up as someone knowledgeable about their culture.
    One of the first things Suder wanted to know about was my own religious beliefs. When I replied that I was LDS, her next query was whether my being a Mormon would create a problem in investigating the FLDS. How many times have I answered this question? In the minds of many Americans, if you are a Mormon man, then you must have a couple of wives. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
    â€œI’m not FLDS,” I told her rather firmly. “I’m LDS.” Then I gave her the shorthand version of the stark differences, and I ended the lesson by saying, “The FLDS are no more Mormon than Lutherans are Catholics.” That made sense to Joanne Suder. She was a Roman Catholic and yet had played a lead role in exposing the rampant child abuse by pedophile priests within her own religion.
    Suder was now setting her sights on abuses by the FLDS involving the so-called Lost Boys. I turned off the car and made myself comfortable. For the next hour and a half, we discussed one of the most horrific practices within the fundamentalist organization.
    The Lost Boys are former FLDS kids who committed such outrageous sins as watching television, sneaking away to see a movie, or perhaps unbuttoning their shirts at the neck. Others may have been caught experimenting with drinking or flirting with a girl or having an attitude about something. Or perhaps the prophet may have seen them in a bad dream. No matter what the reason, such offenses are deemed not to be harmonious with how God wants them to behave, and the wayward boy can be excommunicated and literally abandoned by a roadside by his own family and ordered not to come back to Short Creek.
    Girls are handled in an entirely different manner. A polygamous society needs a lot more hens than roosters. Girls, because of their potential as brides and child-bearers, are a valuable commodity. In almost any other town, the male-female ratio is about fifty-fifty, but the plural marriage system creates its own mathematical certainty; if the older men harvest the child brides, what is to be done about those strong sons who were raised doing hard farm and construction work? If young girls were allowed to choose who they wanted to marry, they would invariably pick husbands near their own age, cutting out the good ole boys and the aging church hierarchy. That would not work within the FLDS caste system. The gender ratio had to be turned on its head.
    The first step was to keep all of the children, boys and girls alike, ignorant of sex education and normal marital intimacy. Sex was and is never discussed with FLDS children, and unless they grow up on a farm where they can witness animals breeding, they have no idea about sexual relations. Instead of receiving education, the children are admonished to avoid any physical contact completely and treat