Assisting with the escape

By: 
Jason Ferguson

For a few months last year, Marty and Jen Mechaley had a house full of guests who had never seen a movie, didn’t know who Elvis Presley was, didn’t know what a deck of cards was and didn’t know how a car radio worked.
“They thought someone was singing through the speakers,” Jen said.
If you were to think these visitors were very young or from another planet, that would be understood, and to an extent, they may as well have been from another planet.
But the visitors weren’t toddlers. Far from it. They were the daughters of Warren Jeffs—self-proclaimed prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS)—and the sheltered life they had led was laid bare when they began to experience things most of us don’t give a second thought on a day-to-day basis.
The very first movie they watched was in the living room of the Mechaley home. It was the Walt Disney film “Togo,” which centers on Leonhard Seppala and his sled dog in the 1925 run to Nome to transport diphtheria antitoxin serum through harsh conditions during an epidemic of diphtheria.
Jen said their jaw dropped as they watched the film.
And they had questions. Boy, did they have questions.
“We were bombarded with questions,” Marty said.
In fact, the Mechaleys said it was that way with every movie they played for the girls. It was more of a question and answer session than watching a movie.
“They would question everything,” Marty said.
But to know how the daughters of one of the most infamous criminals in recent history were sprawled out on the Mechaley living room floor watching a Disney movie you first have to know the winding road they took that put them inside the Mechaley home, and the winding road Custer County Sheriff Marty Mechaley traveled that led to them knocking on his front door.
Marty became familiar with the FLDS long before he was sheriff of Custer County, traveling to the southwest Custer County location shortly after it was started in 2005. He and his fellow deputies spent years going to the compound, driving around and trying to establish communication to no avail.
However, former sheriff Rick Wheeler was eventually successful in establishing communication with the compound leaders, which again ceased with former compound leader Seth Jeffs—Warren Jeffs’ brother—was arrested for a food stamp scheme in 2016. Since Wheeler was a part of the arrest, all trust the sheriff’s office had earned with FLDS members evaporated.
When Mechaley was first elected sheriff he traveled to the compound to attempt to reestablish a line of communication, and eventually began to talk with Helaman Jeffs, who was overseeing the compound. Helman is a son of Warren Jeffs.
“I told him, ‘you and I are never going to trust each other, but we need to work together,’” Marty said.
Marty said he told Helaman Jeffs he did not have to talk to him if he didn’t want to, and that he would never violate an FLDS member’s rights or come onto the compound property without a warrant.
The two eventually started to communicate more and more, and Marty would contact Helaman when he needed to collect property for an FLDS member who had left the compound.
Marty said he had a fine line to walk, because the media wanted to know what was going on at the FLDS compound, but if he divulged too much information he knew it would get back to FLDS leaders that Helaman was cooperating with local law enforcement and that could mean Helaman being pulled out of the compound and the insertion of someone else who could potentially cease all communication.
“I always walked that fine line of giving just enough information to satisfy the news a little bit, but not give it all because I knew it would ruin that communication,” Marty said.
As for Jen, she knew the compound existed because of her husband’s dealings at it throughout the years, as well as working with former FLDS members at her place of work in Hot Springs.
“Other than that, I didn’t know a whole lot about it,” she said.
When the Custer County compound was sold at auction to former FLDS members in February of last year, the new owners wanted FLDS members who were still on the land to vacate. Among those were nine women who are daughters of Warren Jeffs.
The girls had called Marty asking about their options to reclaim their property from the new compound owners, and then asked if they could meet with him, to which he agreed. Marty figured one or two would show up. All nine flooded his office. It was so many that he and deputy Derrick Reifenrath took them into the jury room at the courthouse so there was room to talk.
“I asked them if they were OK,” Marty said, saying he told the girls he would help them with whatever they needed. He would later learn they scoffed at his offer to help, as they had heard the same thing from Texas law enforcement when the Yearning For Zion ranch was raided in April 2008. The girls were all at the ranch at that time.
While at the sheriff’s office, the girls took a particular interest in the numerous patches from other law enforcement agencies from across the world that are on the walls of the sheriff’s office. They took Marty’s business card, but both parties believed it would be the last time they talked to each other.
Not even an hour later, however, Marty’s cell phone rang and it was the girls asking if they could have a Custer County Sheriff’s Office patch. It was 7 p.m., and they offered to turn around to retrieve the patch. By this time, the girls were living in Fargo, N.D., at another FLDS-owned property.
Marty agreed to give them patches, and asked Jen to come to his office to meet the girls when they arrived. When they arrived, Marty told the girls to receive a patch they first had to shake his hand and tell him their name. All obliged—sort of. A few gave fake names, he would later learn.
That’s when the text messaging started.
At first, they were few and far between. One of the girls would text and ask about different laws and how they could get their property back. Then the texts became more frequent, and from other numbers. Jen’s number had been given to them by Marty, and she began to get text messages as well. For four months the Mechaleys were bombarded with text messages from a group of curious girls wanting to know more about life outside the FLDS.
“In four months we fielded thousands of text messages,” Marty said.
“Thousands or millions?” Jen quickly responded.
The girls were night owls, and would text the two at all hours of the night. If they didn’t respond immediately, the girls would apologize, thinking the Mechaleys were sick of talking to them or that they had said something wrong.
Eight girls were texting them by this time, and sometimes they would pretend to be another girl and ask a question. Unfortunately for them, however, by this time the Mechaleys had been texting them so often they could tell who was texting them by the way they typed.
“I always wanted to try to answer them. The life they lived, they couldn’t at any time just call you,” Marty said. “They had to be away from other people. They would Facetime you from a closet, or they would be outside hiding under a tree grove.”
There was more than one night both Mechaleys would fall asleep with their phones in their hands. They would wake up to more questions.
One day the girls came to the sheriff’s office to deliver cakes, and to a man (and women) sheriff’s office employees office still rave about the baking skills of the girls. Driving great distances didn’t bother them in the least. They would come down from Fargo, visit the sheriff’s office for two hours and drive home. For those curious, Custer to Fargo is 534 miles, or around eight and a half hours in a vehicle.
The first time the girls went to the Mechaley home was a result of surgery. Jen had gone under the knife, and the girls wanted to come to the sheriff’s office to visit. Marty told him he wasn’t at the office because he was at home with Jen. But, he told them, they were welcome to come to the Mechaley home.
The girls had never gone to anybody’s home and were completely “freaked out” by the idea.
Marty cracked a joke at that point, saying “don’t worry, I’ll leave the gate open,” a nod to the FLDS always locking him out of the Custer County compound. The girls were apprehensive and asked for his address.
Marty knew because of his position of sheriff of Custer County the girls already knew where he lived, and likely had for a long time.
“I texted back and said ‘you already know where I live,’” he said.
They indeed did. They texted back his address. It wasn’t long after there were eight girls in their distinctive prairie dresses inside the Mechaley home, lined up along the wall of the living room, saying nothing. They had brought flowers, bread and cakes for Jen.
“They were trying to show they cared, but they were scared to death,” Jen said.
The silence was awkward. Eventually, Marty offered how to show them how to shoot a pellet gun. They agreed. They started to talk a little more. They were shown the foosball table downstairs—another thing they had never heard of. The Mechaleys could hear their laughter and screams of excitement as they played.
From that point on, for the next four months, the girls would show up at the Mechaley home, slowly transforming from girls who knew nothing of the outside world and believed those outside the FLDS hated them, into confident, fun-loving women who all shared a goal they shared with the Mechaleys, but not with each other.
They wanted out of the FLDS.
Next week, the women continue their journey out of the FLDS.

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