The lost boys of Colorado City

Jeffs fled and has been on the run ever since. The FBI has offered a $10,000 reward for his capture, and this May, added him to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. But in spite of the high-profile manhunt, there remains little evidence that Jeffs has relinquished his power over the sect. From a distance, he has warned his followers who remain not to talk to outsiders and has told them to mount surveillance cameras on their homes. Last November, Jeffs' brother, Seth, was pulled over by police in Pueblo, Colo. Authorities charged him with harboring a wanted person after discovering $140,000 in cash in his car, along with hundreds of letters addressed to Warren and a donation jar, bearing Warren's photo, labeled "Pennies for the Prophet." Other residents of Colorado City have reportedly fled to west Texas, where the church is building a nine-story temple. Earlier this month, Arizona attorney general Terry Goddard told the Arizona Republic that he believes Jeffs has overseen marriage ceremonies in trailers outside Colorado City within the past three months. And only last Friday, June 30, law enforcement officials responded to a tip placing Jeffs in Cedar City, Utah. When they arrived, he was gone.

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To most Americans Hurricane, Utah -- home to Icke's butt hut -- is a small and unremarkable town of trailer parks and discount stores, little more than a fuel stop on the way to Zion National Park. But to kids like Icke who grew up within the rigid confines of Colorado City, just 30 miles down the road on the Arizona border, a town like Hurricane is Satan's territory, a hostile and confounding place populated by evildoers.

Icke, now 21, was expelled from the FLDS community at age 18. While building sets for a community production of "Little Red Riding Hood," he'd befriended a girl in the cast. After weeks of excruciating flirtation, the two teens consummated their attraction with a makeout session. But the girl, convinced she was going to burn in hell for her wickedness, began having panic attacks and, in a desperate bid for salvation, confessed everything. Jeffs called Icke's father and told him that his son was to leave Colorado City and never return.

The next day, Icke threw some clothes into the back of his Honda Civic and made his way into the world. "I was basically dumped on my head," he says. "I had no understanding of how to live on my own." One of the FLDS elders owned a single-wide trailer in a weed-choked gravel lot, and he offered it to Icke as a sort of halfway house until he got on his feet. Outside the boundaries of Colorado City and of no interest to Jeffs, the trailer park was a refuge for meth addicts and prostitutes. Icke kept to himself, working long days laying tile, then escaping at night into fantasy novels about witches and warlocks.

In many ways, Icke was 18 going on 12. He had none of the tools he needed to make it in the world at large -- no idea how to cook, how to save money, how to rent an apartment. Having grown up in a fundamentalist enclave where boys are forbidden to interact with girls, bathing is considered immodest, and education is eclipsed by religious indoctrination, the kids who are banished from Colorado City are like wolf boys thrust into the suburbs. Their social skills are awkward, their grooming is poor, and most are culturally illiterate.

In the early days of his exile, standing in line at the grocery store in Hurricane, dressed in the starched plaid shirt and unfashionable slacks the church had required him to wear, Icke felt like an alien from a far-away land. He knew the rumors about Colorado City: that Cricker kids are born with horns, and handicapped children are taken into the weeds and shot in the head. Sometimes, when church members drove to nearby St. George to stock up on diapers at the Wal-Mart, people leaned from their car windows and yelled "Plygs!" -- a slur for polygamists. In Hurricane, guys wore jeans and T-shirts, and the girls wore almost nothing at all, so most of what you saw was their skin, glowing and coppery. Icke could hear the prophet's words echoing in his head: All it takes to impregnate a girl is to look at her.

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Even as a kid, Richard Black hated all the prophet's rules and restrictions: his hateful attitude toward homosexuals and blacks, his dismissal of women as "breeders," his prohibitions against cutting hair, and his insistence that men and women wear a full set of long underwear at all times, even when desert temperatures climbed to 110 degrees. In school, Black sat in class, listening to recordings of Jeffs unmodulated voice pontificating about how to live well and prepare for the end times. He devoted every Saturday to working alongside the other men in the church, constructing schools and churches and other public facilities, a form of enforced service that Jeffs liked to call building the Kingdom.

Black dropped out of school in the sixth grade. Fed up with Jeffs' indoctrination, and with the Destruction imminent -- Russia and China were poised to invade America, according to the prophet -- everything seemed pointless. Everything except for partying. "I figured, if I'm going to die in a few years anyway, why not have some fun while I'm around?" Black recalls.

That's exactly what he did: Black and his friends drank a lot of beer, smoked a lot of pot, and roared around town on their four-wheelers. There was a trailer parked behind his mother's pink-and-brown ranch house, and Black turned it into his own personal party palace. Every few nights around midnight, two hours after the Colorado City curfew and his mother's bedtime, Black and a dozen friends would huddle around his computer, watching DVDs, chewing tobacco, and flipping through Hustler and Playboy magazines.

Next page: "I think you need to pack your things and leave Colorado City and never come back"