“Not very clever being up here, if they’re shooting at us,” he says.

The possibility of someone taking potshots on a Friday afternoon is not such a stretch. Cars constantly follow Engels as he investigates crime in Colorado City, a stronghold of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And that’s not counting those who veer their trucks toward him trying to force him off the road or simply glare as they drive by.

“I’m not the most popular,” he says dryly. Indeed, spend time with Engels, and teenagers in a red truck without a license plate are liable to tailgate you for several miles out of town. It’s the toughest beat this ex-cop has had. “How do you work with people who don’t realize they’re victims?” he asks.

Another volley of shots float up on a breeze bearing the scent of apple blossom, followed by the smell of manure.

Engels doesn’t move, his eyes squinting as he concentrates on identifying where the shots are coming from. Below, back yards stretch out with farm stock and a communal garden recently tilled over. Children on horseback ride up a street. It would look like a typical rural community were it not for the high fences around a number of enormous houses, young girls in ankle-length gray dresses lopping off tree branches or operating backhoes, and the 4-year-old, dirty-faced girl babysitting the toddler in her arms on a street corner in the afternoon.

Waiting for the whistle of a passing round can bring time to an abrupt halt. The ex-cop’s just irritated. “Firearms are off-limits in the city,” he says. As a Boston police officer, he was shot by a man trying to commit suicide. He’s in constant pain from the wound, with a burning sensation down his right leg.

The shots stop, and the silence that blankets this dust-shrouded town returns.

TAKING ON GOD
Engels isn’t the only one who knows what it’s like to be ostracized by members of the FLDS Church. Ask former Colorado City resident and ex-FLDS Church member Margaret Cook.

According to her eldest son Davis Holm, if she departed town, after living there for 18 years, “infamous,” she’s now “legendary,” thanks to the United Effort Plan trust. She’s one of six members of a temporary advisory board set up by the state to oversee the UEP. Until recently, the church-owned trust controlled most of the land in Colorado City and Hildale, on which FLDS members built, and currently build, their houses.

“(FLDS prophet) Warren Jeffs was breaking up the UEP and selling it down the river, piece by piece,” Cook says. Special fiduciary to the UEP trust Bruce Wisan says the trust is worth $110 million.

While Jeffs is on the lam from Utah and Arizona authorities, Cook, in an irony probably unappreciated by FLDS members, regularly attends meetings in Hildale and Salt Lake City to decide the fate of her former neighbors’ homes. Some impute vengeful motives to her actions. But she speaks with genuine affection about the “decent folk who live here” and says she simply wants to know how her daughters, still members of the FLDS Church, are faring. One daughter was kicked out by Jeffs. She lives in Nevada but hopes to return, Cook says. The other lives in a trailer in Colorado City. Both daughters, she says, have disowned her. “They think taking on the UEP is taking on Jeffs, which is taking on God.”

Wisan, who has had some recent success collecting property taxes from residents after church leaders instructed them not to pay, says no one in Colorado City talks to him. Cook, he adds, as a volunteer working for the state, former resident and apostate, faces even grimmer resistance.

For Cook, revisiting her old home one Saturday in March turned into something of a cat-and-mouse game. Wherever she went, hooded young men in cars followed, their stalking coordinated with walkie-talkies. This campaign of intimidation ended up on the highway marking the border between Utah and Arizona. A truck sped past her parked car, a young man at the window glared down at her, his face contorted with hate.

Her son Davis Holm was taught to drywall from the age of 10 while living in Hildale and now works in construction in Salt Lake City. In between sips of a martini, he says Colorado City is like a town surrounded by an invisible wall a thousand miles high and a thousand miles thick.

When that truck hurtled by, for a moment, those walls closed in.

ARRANGED MARRIAGE
Creek (pronounced “crick”) is the name current and former residents give to Hildale and Colorado City, after the town’s original name, Short Creek, before it was split. “Once a creeker, always a creeker,” goes the saying.

For the last 12 years, Cook has fought that fatalistic saying tooth and nail.

Born into polygamy in Salt Lake City, her father Francis C. Olds was a Methodist who converted to Mormonism, then fundamentalism. Her biological mother was a refugee from East Germany. Cook shared two mothers with three siblings. “We couldn’t dress like kids in the world,” she says. “I worked for my father from when I was 6. No bikes, no roller skates, no free time to play.”

When Cook was 12, she asked her parents if she could move down to the Arizona Strip. “I didn’t fit in in Salt Lake. I didn’t fit in down in Colorado City either, but it was the better of the two.”

In the Creek, she shuttled back and forth between two women, Fawn Broadbent, sister of Mayor Fred Jessop, and Viola Broadbent, Fawn’s daughter-in-law. “You had to be like everybody else, or you were looked down on. Viola was afraid of not raising me right, that my Salt Lake ways were too entrenched.”

Yet in this town where boys and girls aren’t allowed to talk to each other, she says she found in her first years, “a little piece of heaven.”

At age 16, her heaven took on a darker hue. A member of the seven-strong priesthood council (one-man rule came in the early ’80s with prophet LeRoy Johnson) told Cook they wanted her to marry Keith Holm, a 22-year-old Hildale resident. Cook told the council she wanted to finish school. “Get back to us,” the ruling council told her.

Cook says Holm was no happier about the match than she was. “He planned to marry someone who would let everybody know he was deserving of the best. Then he had to marry an Olds from Salt Lake who wasn’t trained right. He wanted so much to be in the inner circle, but instead he felt picked on.”

Holm doesn’t agree. “She was a sweet gal, very pretty. I felt good about it. A guy’ll try to do what he’s asked.”

Cook says she agreed to the marriage under pressure from the community. “I honestly thought if I didn’t do it, I would be forsaken by God. The fear of not obeying felt more real than what I was being asked to do.”

The first years were marked by poverty. While Holm, she says, worked for free for the community, she had to contend with a trailer roof that leaked in 11 places, no oven, no money for groceries or power and water bills, a backed-up sewer line. But she made no requests for help from the church’s storehouse for fear it would embarrass her husband.

Between the 1975 wedding and their 1994 split, Cook bore Holm eight children, even as her marital satisfaction—what there was of it—waned. “He didn’t get that I needed more than a contracted marriage. I needed to feel cared about, loved, valued—not just given to him by God and that’s it. My only value was as long as I obeyed.”

After her older children rebelled against the community, the church and the priesthood, her husband demanded she discipline them or kick them out. “He told me, ‘I answer to the prophet, you answer to me, the children answer to you,’” she says.

Holm, who still lives in Colorado City, proffers no comment about those years. “It’s between her and me.”

But Cook was having increasing problems of her own with the church’s dogma. “It made no sense anymore.”

It wasn’t her absence from church that enflamed town prejudices against her—those were already at an all-time high. Rumors accusing her of everything from prostituting her daughters to having affairs with teenagers and other women circulated during her last two years in town, she says.

“That was because I allowed teenagers to come home and watch movies, rather than go out and get drunk in the mountains. Because I wasn’t accepted anymore, my kids were treated much worse.”

Her son Davis was thrown out of friends' houses by their parents. "Sometimes you wonder about the violence they're capable of," he says. Cook recalls how one daughter, then 12 years old and well-accepted by the town, one day came home and told her she was embarrassed that Cook was her mother. "She told me the town thinks you're no good."

WALLED IN
The Vermillion Cliffs cradle the back of Hildale. A cemetery sits near the base and, looking back, you can see the town below. Gravestones mark homesteaders born in the 1890s. A few cedars dot the rectangular plots, tiny plaques planted in front of oval mounds of red dirt. Cook searches for her mother’s grave. She hasn’t visited Gerta Olds’ resting place since her 1999 funeral. No one told her about her mother’s death. She found out from a relative outside the community. Olds had moved down to Colorado City after divorcing Cook’s father. She disowned her daughter for leaving the FLDS Church.

While she wanders the lots, several white trucks—the town’s vehicle of choice, judging by their numbers on the streets—drive through the cemetery. One stops at the back of Cook’s car, as if checking out her plates. Ten minutes later, two police trucks pull up, one blocking the nearest cemetery exit.

An officer asks if Cook might be Carla Jeffs. He has an outstanding warrant against Carla’s husband, he says. Carla is also one of Cook’s daughters; Cook is driving Carla’s car that morning.

After checking Cook’s record, the officer drives off. On his radio, the voice of a cop back at the station squawks, “But they were walking around taking photos.”

Cook continues her search. “One of the nicest guys I ever knew,” she says in front of one plot. “Ran over my eldest son Davis when he was 21 months old. Minded his own business. Went to Vietnam. Died of a brain tumor.” She stops in front of another familiar name. “Died in a car crash. Got kicked out by Warren, his family given to someone else. He stayed single and faithful to the religion as asked. But they don’t have a religion here anymore. It’s just Gestapo tactics.”

Several graves, belonging to men once powerful in the community are distinguished by tombstones, one listing his six wives on the back, another his 18 children. Dozens of infants form outer rings around the plots of prominent families.

There’s been prolonged publicity to babies succumbing to rare genetic disorders due to community inbreeding. Lesser known are the many children and adolescents who were killed in farming accidents, run over or drowned in the local reservoir.

“No swimming classes in the Creek,” Cook says. She blames this carnage on what she describes as the Creek’s lawlessness. Few use seat belts—children sit up front on their parents’ laps. The lack of car insurance or registration isn’t a problem unless your car is totaled. “If you have an accident, you just shake hands, go home and get it fixed yourself,” Cook says. Later she points out a boy, no more than 12, driving an enormous black truck on his own, barely visible above the wheel.

“Why he doesn’t have a headstone 2 feet tall, I don’t know,” Cook says, standing in front of the grave of long-time FLDS Bishop Frederick M. Jessop. “Uncle Fred loved people, kept the spirit of the community alive.”

“Uncle” is the moniker applied to bishops and prophets both by Colorado City residents, and those who have left but can’t break the habit. In the case of Jessop, many saw him as a family presence.

Uncle Fred, Cook recalls, organized plays and shows performed by different families and local businesses. He set up spring, summer and fall fairs, as well as an Oktoberfest celebration. At the summer parade, those who had served in the military were at the front on horses. Behind them came floats from the store, the dairy—famous for its “squeaky cheese,” so-called because of the noise it makes between your teeth—and the service station, along with clowns on stilts throwing out candy to the crowd.

In the ’80s, Cook says, Uncle Fred had overseen the building of Cottonwood Park, close to the center of town. Drive through the park today and you see tattered awnings, peeling paint and tipped-over chairs. A sign hangs over some tables. “Good neighbors,” it reads.

This motto, however, was not one that Uncle Fred—who ran the storehouse—necessarily practiced, Cook says. He played favorites. “He oversaw who got help and who didn’t,” she says. “He should have taken care of his own people, regardless if they were in favor or not.” Cook says if it hadn’t been for food stamps, she and her family would have starved within the first five years of her marriage. Finally she finds her mother’s grave at the back of the cemetery. “I didn’t even bring flowers,” she says, heading for town in search of a floral tribute.

A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN OF GOD
Cook’s brightest memories of Colorado City social life center on Friday nights. Even so, darkness rims the borders of her recollections.

Every other Friday there was a movie screened in the church meetinghouse. In a town where girls and boys cannot fraternize, holding hands in the dark while Herbie Rides Again, Flubber or Black Beauty spooled out across the auditorium was a victory of sorts.

Movies alternated with weekly dances. Girls wore three-tier lavender and purple dresses with flounces, boys donned suits and dark blue ties. There was girls’ choice and boys’ choice. Along with waltzes, Scottish dancing was popular. Dances like The Shepherd’s Crook let a man parade on the floor with several wives at the same time.

Church leaders watched over the hall, Cook says, no doubt making matches for the future. A boy who showed a preference for one girl by dancing with her too many times received a severe reprimand. So would a girl who went to the dance without her hair done up in a braid, wave or bun. In that case, men at the door sent her home. “Long hair is a status symbol of obedience,” Cook says. “Cutting your hair is disgraceful to what a beautiful woman of God should look like.”

In time, prophet Rulon Jeffs, Warren's father, brought the dances to a halt. “He said there was too much boy-girl interaction" Cook says. “It felt like a reprimand, that we weren’t good enough, that we couldn’t control ourselves, so it was taken away.”

Fun became as obsolete as the 30 refrigerators that stand, doors attached, in a field, or the rusting air-conditioning units piled up against a fence.

Jessop was kicked out by Jeffs for arranging a ceremony dedicating a monument commemorating Arizona Gov. Howard Pyle’s 1953 raid against the community. Jessop’s crime was not having first consulted the prophet. According to Cook, Jeffs claimed that because a journalist photographed the ceremony, Jessop brought unnecessary media attention to the town. But the resulting purges of those who threatened his power base, Cook adds, generated far more headlines and media attention than anything Jessop did.

The recent upswing in media attention has also fueled tensions between polygamists and neighboring towns.

On the outskirts of Colorado City stands Centennial Park, Ariz., home to former FLDS Church members who broke away to form their own church. Centennial-based plural wife Linda Earl remembers one woman in a market pulling back a baby’s bonnet, saying, “I just want to see what little urchin I’m paying for.” Centennial women say that in the last two years, St. George residents have frequently rolled down their car windows and screamed “plyg” at them. “Plyg” is a slang word polygamists use to describe each other, but which outsiders use as an epithet.

The flip side of this, says Elaine Tyler, who runs St. George-based anti-abuse activist group HOPE, is people lining up to buy chicken in a supermarket and seeing a polygamist woman buying $400 worth of steaks with food stamps.

For Centennial polygamists, reporters knocking on their doors are very much double-edged swords. While publicity for their lifestyle might well be productive, it also makes it much harder to employ teachers for Centennial Park’s Masada Charter School, headmistress Leanne Timpson says. “They hear where we are and they hang up the phone.”

Some Centennial residents chafe at the constant intrusion, at media insistence that they debate and defend their lifestyle. “We’re tired of being called brainwashed victims,” says Ann Wright. “We don’t want to be rescued.”

“IF I SCARE YOU, SCREAM”
At the town’s thrift store, Cook runs into her past. Three women sit in the store, working on a quilt. “It’s so boring around here,” one says. “All there is to do is quilt.”

Two of them barely acknowledge Cook. She reveals afterward one is her sister-in-law, the other—once—her very best friend. “For the sake of how she looked in the community, she ostracized me before I was kicked out,” Cook says. “They’re all into their own sick-minded survival.”

Purple and chocolate are dominant colors when it comes to the clothing racks. Former prophet Rulon Jeffs ordered red clothes destroyed. “He said it was a sacred color,” Cook says, “that Jesus would return in robes of scarlet. Anyone wearing red is mocking Jesus returning.”

After the thrift store, Cook sets out to find her brother’s house. She drives up and down dusty streets, past houses that are unfinished, at least on the outside. “They put all their money into the inside,” she says. The opposite is apparent with Centennial Park houses. Many in the throes of construction, they look like elegant mansions rather than unfinished, oversize shacks.

Cook rings her brother’s doorbell. There’s no answer, so she writes him a note. In a neighboring yard, a tall girl in a light blue dress stands on a swing seat, swaying back and forth. It’s as if she’s marking Creek time, a languid, mournful rhythm.

“I wonder if they’re watching us,” Cook says, turning the corner. As if answering her question, a silver Lexus with tinted windows waits on the roadside, the driver a young man wearing sunglasses and holding a walkie-talkie to his lips.

The God Squad’s on the case.

Cook can’t stop laughing. She’s had years of being chased around town by what was formerly known as the Night Watch—volunteers from the community assigned by church leaders to make sure the town’s inhabitants were in bed after dark.

Getting into her car, she chases after the Lexus, which guns down a side street and disappears, only for a black truck to appear in her rear-view mirror, slowly following. She spins the car around, racing after the truck, laughing.

“I’m having too much fun with this, don’t you think?” she says. “If I scare you, scream.”

Another truck idles on top of a hill. Cook waves her fingers at the beanie-wearing driver. He drives so close to her car, they’re inches apart.

“How stupid is this?” Cook shouts happily.

But then in a battered tan sedan across a street, she spots her brother, one of his wives, and several children staring at her. “Do you think they’ve got my brother following me?”

She accelerates after him, only to lose his car down a side street.

WHO AM I?
Get up at 6 every morning, attend church, quit a $10-an-hour job in St. George cleaning houses, put your hair up, quit wearing pants, have breakfast on the table by 7:30, don’t do the washing on Sundays.

When Cook refused these tasks, she says, Holm wanted a divorce. She took the children with her. “They felt I was taking them to hell. If you leave the Creek, that’s what you’re told.”

At that point, her life consisted more of what she didn’t have than what she did. No formal education, no credit, no job history, no support from family or friends. “I’d never seen a résumé. I had no idea whom I could trust to look after my kids. I lied on application forms about the number I had so I could get a roof over their heads.”

Running her own life brought Cook face to face with her limitations. “That’s one of the things about the Creek. You have no idea how to make decisions when you leave.”

HOPE’s Tyler agrees. “They have this incredible sense of entitlement, that they are God’s chosen people. Yet ask a polygamist woman to chose between a ham and a peanut-butter sandwich, and they can’t do it. They ask you to. Their self-esteem is zip.”

Cook was befriended by a wealthy Mormon couple who got her an apartment in St. George. She’d drive around the neighborhoods, trying to figure out the first steps that would get her on the path where all those seemingly content, normal families were. How did they get there she wondered, where did they begin?GOING HOME

A boy runs out into the road, pushing a tractor-tire, inside of which is curled up a little boy.

“Don’t that make you sick to your stomach?” Cook shouts out.

Then she sees a man she’s known for many years. She asks if it’s all right to talk. “Why wouldn’t it be?” he says. They shake hands. She tells him about being followed, says it’s bizarre. He doesn’t agree. Threats have been made against the community, he says. She mentions her run-in with the police. His face doesn’t react, but his eyes swivel to the road. A police car cruises by.

“There are many ways to a righteous life,” Cook says afterwards. “But if these people were given freedom of choice, that look of fear in his eyes wouldn’t be there.”

Finally she gets a response from the God Squad to her antics. As she sits in her car on the highway splitting the two towns, one of the trucks that’s followed her all afternoon roars by, a young man’s twisted face at the window as he gives her a double middle-finger salute.

Cook is bemused. “This town is being abandoned by Warren. Some are left here as pawns to do his work. But most of them are not the chosen, I’d say. They just don’t know it.”

Back in Salt Lake City, a question about Cook’s own emotions provokes a raw, tearful response. “You are taught from the time you are born to get your emotions under control, to be sweet. Crying is the devil, emotions are for the weak. You have to obey. If you cry, you have a bad spirit, if you are over-happy, you’re rowdy and have a bad spirit. You have to be monotone. My self-esteem depended on what Keith and the Creek thought of me. I just thought of myself as a plyg wife.”

Having fought so many battles to free herself from the Creek’s hold, Cook says now she lives only for the day at hand. Working in Murray as a kitchen designer, she’s also remodeling her father’s house, which he bequeathed her. An English colonial bungalow, it’s the first property she’s owned after years of fighting to pay the rent and keep a roof over her children’s heads.

Despite her experiences with fundamentalism, she still believes in a divine force. Since leaving the Creek, she says she’s found a spiritual connection: “That’s helped me many times.”

Nobody who leaves the Creek, says Davis Holm, is ever completely free. “They feel cheated out of their future. You see it in their eyes. Their whole life was a lie.”

Cook is more optimistic. “When you leave the Creek,” she says someone told her, “you’re only as old as the number of years you’ve been gone.”