San Angelo Standard-Times Reporter

Matthew Waller

34 W. Harris Ave

San Angelo, TX 76903

Office: 325-659-8263

Cell: 325-212-9557

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Entry 1

FALL OF A 'PROPHET': Records doom rather than bless

Extensive audio, files help seal Jeffs' fate

By Matthew Waller

Saturday, August 20, 2011

SAN ANGELO, Texas — Warren Jeffs left no part of his life as "prophet" unrecorded when he assumed absolute leadership of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Revelations from God, motorcycle rides, audio instructions for sexual "heavenly sessions" with multiple women, including underage girls, accounts of watching the movie "Man on Fire" as an example of the wicked ways of the world, and recommendations for getting a suntan: all were meticulously written and recorded during Jeffs' reign.

And his own words doomed him.

At Jeffs' aggravated sexual assault trial in state district court, former FLDS member Rebecca Musser testified to the sacredness of the records.

"If it's not recorded on earth, it is not recorded in heaven," Musser told jurors.

FLDS teachings hold that without that "recording in heaven," spiritual blessings won't take effect and send followers to the highest degrees of salvation.

Musser pored over documents brought by Texas prosecutors who then offered them into evidence during Jeffs' trial in late July and early August.

A large portion of the voluminous records — enough boxes of evidence to fill a 600-square-foot room — came from the April 2008 raid on the FLDS Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado, many of them from the temple vault. One key audio recording of the sexual assault of the 12-year-old was collected during a 2006 traffic stop in Nevada when a trooper captured Jeffs, an FBI Top Ten Most Wanted fugitive.

Investigators uncovered personal dictations, or priesthood records, of Jeffs himself.

"The kind of records like Warren was keeping, I can't think of a parallel," said Ken Driggs, a Georgia lawyer and FLDS expert.

Prophets within the FLDS faith are believed to have revelations from God, Driggs said. In Jeffs' case, Driggs explained that almost everything Jeffs did and said may have been seen as a potential revelation from God.

Jeffs went as far as recording the mundane of which movies he wanted followers to watch.

One excerpt from Jeffs' dictations states: "The Lord had directed that I make sure they see the program 'Man on Fire,' a very violent, immoral show about kidnapping, where the parents of a child kidnap their own child to get money. I explained to the ladies that this is what the Lord showed me would happen against some of our Priesthood people. So we were quite late into the evening doing that."

A church journal had the heading: "Naomie's Testimony of What Happened Through the Night," and included things that Jeffs said while convulsing in his sleep, such as the need to hurry on a construction project.

Naomie Jeffs is believed to have been Jeffs' primary "spiritual" wife, and she was found with him when he was arrested in 2006, records and state evidence showed.

"He apparently regarded them as sacred," Driggs said about the documents. "They were not for the eyes of anybody but the inner circle."

Jeffs' father, Rulon Jeffs, did not record all of his doings as intensely as Jeffs did, Driggs said.

At trial, prosecutors used the records to connect Jeffs, 55, to his 12- and 15-year-old victims.

Records other than dictations connected Jeffs to the 12-year-old victim, and they supplemented DNA evidence that showed Jeffs fathered a child with the 15-year-old victim. The jury saw bishop's records, one family group's records and marriage records. They showed which people were in which family, when family members had received baptisms, and when they were "placed" in a "celestial" or "spiritual" marriage.

The FLDS sanctions polygamous marriages, believing that polygamy was mandated by God, and for that reason split from the mainstream Mormon church in the early 1900s.

Jeffs' record-keeping extended to audiotapes that jurors heard, capturing Jeffs ritualistically sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl in one and giving instruction in group sex on another.

Prosecutors played clips from eight and a half hours of audio recordings that were admitted as evidence during Jeffs' trial.

"We seal the holy love of God in your mind and heart," Jeffs said in the recording of the assault of the 12-year-old girl. "Just loyal to you as a baby in peace from this time forth and even moment by moment, we bless you with the power of God."

The words came between bouts of heavy breathing.

"Warren seems to have reached the point where every thought was a potential revelation," Driggs said.

In sexual assault cases, it's not unusual to use diaries or private blogs as evidence against an attacker, said Jack King, a spokesman and staff attorney with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Jeffs stands out, however, because of the sheer amount of records he kept, King said, which could rival organized crime cases.

"This case is one of a kind," King said. "There were meticulous records kept. The volume is breathtaking."

Juror Mary Harris was touched by the documents and recordings, especially when she heard tiny female voices speak out with an "amen" on two audio clips.

Jurors asked to hear the Jeffs recording again during nearly four hours of deliberations in the guilt-or-innocence phase of the trial, after which they found him guilty of sexual assault of a child and aggravated sexual assault of a child.

In the penalty phase, Jeffs' words proved equally damaging. Jurors went on to sentence him to life plus 20 years in prison — the maximum possible under Texas law.

"Hearing the little voices," Harris said, " That's when the emotion really kicked in."

Entry 2

SPIRITUAL EXPEDITION: Group tours world religion centers

By Matthew Waller

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

SAN ANGELO, Texas — From the white marble of a Hindu temple gleaming in the sunset to the multicolored stained glass glowing in a Catholic cathedral, a San Angelo group saw a full spectrum of faiths in a tour of world religions at Houston this past week.

The whirlwind journey covered seven religions in three days, from March 5 to Monday.

"I think this trip just whetted our appetites," Becky Benes, the trip organizer and a member of the interfaith San Angelo Peace Ambassadors, said.

At almost each stop the group of more than 20 people — including some from Wall, Houston and Abilene — would pile out of a rented tour bus or their own cars and visit temples, centers and churches for an hour or more, getting a lecture and receiving answers to general questions about the place or religion from a guide at the location.

Then the crew would rush to the next stop, under the overarching guidance of a world-renowned professor of comparative religion, Helen Rose Ebaugh.

The first stop was at the Baha'i Center, not a temple but a place of gathering for the followers of Baha'i, and the group was among the first to be inside it that day as the center had not yet opened.

"There is one religion," Vafa Bayat, a Baha'i follower, said. "I believe I'm a Christian, I'm a Jew, I'm a Muslim."

Bayat said the Baha'i believe that two men in Iran in the 19th century were manifestations of God on par with Jesus Christ, Muhammed and Moses, and the Baha'i take to actively promoting world peace and the implementation of a global federal government, Bayat said.

At the next stop, a docent or lector at the Roman Catholic Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart talked about the significance of the sanctuary, where the group later attended Mass in the evening.

Along with mentions of marble imported from Ethiopia and the spiritual significance of some of the designs of the church, Bob Longmire, the docent, motioned to the massive wooden crucifix fixed to the wall behind the alter.

"Sometimes Protestants say, 'Why do you focus on the crucifixion? We have crosses, too. We focus on the resurrection.' We do both," Longmire said, and he motioned to a stained-glass window 40 feet high and 20 feet wide depicting the risen Christ.

The crew also visited a Catholic social work site, Casa Juan Diego, at a building seemingly dilapidated from the outside, that helps those in need and was founded to especially help undocumented immigrants.

"Her focus was on hospitality," Mark Zwick, one of the founders of the organization, said about Dorothy Day, a founder of the Catholic Worker movement that includes the Casa Juan Diego programs.

The group visited two Buddhist temples, one with a 72-foot tall statue of a Buddhist version of a saint, said Linda Tu, the guide at the Vietnam Buddhist Center.

"If you want to get a taste of what meditation is, this is the place to be," said Josten Ma, a member of the board of the Texas Buddhist Association who met us at a Chinese Buddhist temple where worshippers recited sutras, or sayings of the Buddha, in Mandarin, one of the languages of China.

Ma said Buddhists focus on relieving suffering by detaching oneself from the world through meditation and spiritual disciplines and become Buddha, which means "awakened one."

At a marble Swaminarayan Hindu temple, with thousands of detailed carvings of deities and nature representations, with shrines that had sacred images of deities that are dressed and bathed every day, the group watched a Hindu ceremony with singing and candle waving.

"Salvation means to get rid of the cycle of birth and death," Ashvin Dave, a volunteer at the temple said, referencing reincarnation.

Two Muslim centers, one a downtown center that a retired NBA basketball player, Hakeem Olajuwon, helped fund, and another belonging to Turkish Muslims, exposed the group to moderate Islam.

"The essence of our faith is obedience," Ameer Abuhalimeh, the executive of the Islamic Da'wah Center said as he demonstrated how a Muslim is to wash before prayers in the mosque that is part of the center.

Ebaugh said she encourages her students not to read the Koran because of the lack of historical context and the tremendous variety of interpretations of the sacred text.

She said the book is believed to be divinely dictated from God to a merchant, Muhammed, who wanted to reform the Christianity and Judaism that he knew.

The Turkish Muslim Turquoise Center promotes the Gülen movement, a humanistic approach to Islam that encourages interfaith dialogue and has a focus on education and charitable works. Ebaugh wrote an English book on the movement.

"The only way to solve these problems is through cooperation," said Ali Candir, the president of the Gülan Institute at the University of Houston, regarding social and interfaith conflicts.

The group visited the Synagogue Beth Yeshuren, where retired rabbi Jack Segal spoke of the persecution of Jews down through the ages, including the family he lost during the Nazi genocide that killed six million Jews.

"The Jewish people have been in fire ever since Egypt," Segal said, referring to the Biblical enslavement thousands of years ago.

A few members of the group also visited a Unity Church of Christianity complex, including a golden-colored pyramid sanctuary.

Unity believes people are essentially divine and express and awaken spiritually though positive thought, prayer and meditation, Mindy Lawrence, a minister at the church, said.

Ebaugh said she believes interfaith understanding is imperative.

"In today's global world, it's absolutely critical, because no matter what country you're in, what kind of business you're doing, you're rubbing shoulders with people of different cultures and different religions," Ebaugh said. "If we're really going to have peace and tolerance in the world, we're really going to have to learn about one another's religions."

Entry 3

Church missions to Mexico thwarted

Drug violence halts work

By Matthew Waller

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

SAN ANGELO, Texas — The orphanage has gone days without running water. Its shelves are bare of food and its walls and ceilings crumbling with yellowed drywall.

And with the violence in Mexico, few of the churches — at least one of them from San Angelo — that the orphanage 30 miles outside of Acuña depends on have been able to help.

"Each time we see ourselves sadder, more alone," said Gilberto Chavez, who runs the orphanage.

Chavez tries to do what he can to bring in money, selling ornate wooden chairs at an outdoor workshop where he teaches children the basics of carpentry.

With about a dozen children under the care of him and his wife, they still depend largely on the one remaining church that comes to him with groceries, whereas before violence escalated in Mexico several years ago, almost a dozen churches would visit throughout the year.

"Many parts of the country has the missionaries scared," Chavez said.

As the violence increases, more children find themselves orphaned and abandoned, Chavez said.

"The need is greater, and the help is less," Chavez said.

Mexico's violence stems from different cartels struggling for power.

In some cases even victories against cartels, such as the elimination of a cartel leader, leads to more chaos and violence because of a lack of organization and discipline in the cartel, Scott Stewart, the vice president of tactical intelligence for the global affairs think tank STRATFOR, said.

"We've seen a pretty steady uptick since 2006, and over the last two years it has been the most deadly," Stewart said. "There has always been a criminal threat. What we're seeing now is a more well armed, more violent threat."

According to a travel warning from the U.S. Department of State issued in April, 34,612 people have been killed in violence related to narcotics since December 2006, and 15,000 of those occurred in 2010, a two-thirds increase from 2009.

Thirty-five U.S. citizens were murdered in Mexico in 2007, and 111 were murdered there in 2010; about 150,000 people cross the border every day, the travel warning states.

"It kills me to not be in Mexico," said Kevin Huddleston, the youth and family minister for San Angelo's Johnson Street Church of Christ.

For about 20 years, Huddleston had been taking groups of 30 to 80 people, and that stopped three years ago.

Shootouts had broken out in the lobbies of hotels were his groups had stayed, and some people they had worked with had been kidnapped, Huddleston said.

"A group of students I wouldn't take at all," Huddleston said.

The Catholic Diocese of San Angelo has had to stop sending seminarians to Mexico, diocese Bishop Michael Pfeifer said.

Pfeifer said he spent 16 years working in Mexico, and having to turn from it pains him.

"We're advising people that do volunteer in Mexico not to go for time being, especially northern Mexico," Pfeifer said.

PaulAnn Baptist Church has had to stop its regular trips to a medical clinic and orphanage in Mexico, Phil Todd, the executive pastor for that church, said.

The group has crossed over the border in the past two years, but they largely work on the U.S. side of the border and even help get aid to churches from the United States, Todd said.

"Our summer trips where we stay for a week, those have ceased," Todd said. "We play it by ear year to year."

Other Baptist churches across the state have also ceased going to Mexico for mission trips.

About 300 churches partnered with the Baptist General Convention of Texas organization River Ministry to go to Mexico, Daniel Rangel, the director of that organization, said.

Now there are about 20 churches left that do missions in Mexico through them.

"So far we've been very fortunate," Rangel said. "None of the groups we have worked with have had difficulties. The majority of the churches have decided we will take a step back."

One church in San Angelo that still travels to Mexico once every two months, Southland Baptist Church, goes to Chavez's orphanage.

Within the last couple of months the church's participants in the trips have had to sign an insurance waiver to continue to go.

"We continue to go every other month because we have found a point of ministry that we can access safely and make a big difference in the lives of the children and house parents at" the orphanage, Phil Neighbors, who leads and coordinates the trips, said.

The least safe places continue to be around Juarez, Tijuana and port cities, Stewart with STRATFOR said.

The U.S. Department of State lists several northern states that can be dangerous, including Northern Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas.

The cartels are stealing more cars because they are losing their ability to traffic drugs and buy cars, Stewart said. The cartels are also hiring more thugs instead of members of the military, making for more reckless violence and collateral harm, Stewart said.