"Prophet's Prey"

Meet Sam Brower: The man who helped nab polygamous prophet Warren Jeffs

More than 30 years ago, Sam Brower was the best man in his friend’s wedding. Three months later, he was carrying that friend’s body in a casket. Killed in a home invasion in California, his friend was the impetus for Brower’s long career in criminal justice and private investigation.

Today, Brower is best known as the man who cracked open the secretive world of the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). His work led to the arrest and conviction of prophet Warren Jeffs, who is currently serving a life sentence plus 20 years in a Texas prison for child sexual assault.

Brower details the investigation in his new book, Prophet's Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints. CultureMap spoke to Brower in advance of his appearance at Austin's Texas Book Festival. Here’s a preview of what the Utah-based private eye reveals in his book:

CM: How did you gain the trust of the FLDS community?

SB: The community itself is very distrustful, very isolated, very insular. It literally took years, baby steps, little bits at a time, getting to know somebody and then them having a brother or some other contact that would slowly begin talking to me. It was a very cumbersome process.

CM: The conviction of Warren Jeffs was a huge feat, but how much will it really change within the FLDS community?

SB: Even though Warren’s in prison in Texas right now, [the FLDS] are still doing the same things. They have this network and support of this crime syndicate and the same things are still going on... Warren’s brother, Lyle Jeffs, has already taken over.

CM: So it’s sort of like Al Qaeda or the Mafia in that respect?

SB: It’s even more insidious than the Mafia. The Mafia threatens you with your life, but the FLDS threatens you with your family and your eternal salvation, and people that lose their family are without hope, and that’s worse than death.

CM: The investigation must have been emotionally taxing on you. Did you ever want to give up?

SB: It’s been an emotional roller coaster. I’ve been skewered by FLDS apologists, harassed by high-powered FLDS attorneys. I’ve had people try and run me off the road. I wanted to give up many times. By the same token, I’m glad I did get involved, and I’m glad I’m on the right side of the table and helped expose it.

CM: Now that Jeffs is in prison will you continue to investigate the FLDS?

SB: My personality is such that, the harder they push, the more I want to stay involved. So I am. I am staying involved, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to turn my back on it.

CM: Was it difficult diving back into seven years of material for the book?

SB: The hardest part was not trying to figure out what to put into the book but what to leave out of it. There’s so much that’s happened, there’s so much that can’t be said at this time because there are ongoing criminal investigations.

CM: What do you want readers to take away from the book?

SB: My motivation was to put this in the public face and make people aware of it. It’s catching on more in the West, but it seems like in the East it’s not their business as much. But in actuality, it’s everybody business. It’s child abuse, for crying out loud.

CM: What shocked you most about the FLDS community during your investigation?

SB: I’d heard of polygamy and what was happening to these young girls, but I had no idea how young they really were. His one victim in Texas was barely 12 years old. One of the things that was also a great revelation that came from everybody’s investigation was Warren’s priesthood journal that was found in Texas. It was voluminous. It probably had over 10,000 pages. And there were computers and hard disks and flash drives and external drives and all this evidence chronicling Warren Jeffs’ FLDS criminal activities. That was so implicating for me. I’ve talked to all these people, but here it is in Warren Jeffs’ own words. It was a private investigator’s dream come true.

CM: You’re Mormon, which often gets confused with fundamentalist Mormonism. How did that affect your role in the investigation?

SB: I get it from both sides, whatever the group’s agenda is. Warren Jeffs’ attorney says that because I’m LDS, I’m out to get Warren Jeffs and all Mormons hate the FLDS. And other activists say that because I’m Mormon, I’m out to cover up what FLDS does. The fact is, I’m just like anybody else. Anybody with a moral compass that reads this book and finds out what’s going on within the FLDS is going to reach the same conclusions as I have.

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Movie Review

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 doesn't match the first movie's enthusiasm

Blumhouse

Five Nights at Freddy's 2.

Blumhouse Productions first made their name with the Paranormal Activity series, establishing themselves as a leader in the horror genre thanks to their relatively cheap yet effective movies. In recent years, they’ve added on “soft” horror films like M3GAN and Five Nights at Freddy’s to draw in a younger audience, with both films becoming so successful that each was quickly given a sequel.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 finds Mike (Josh Hutcherson) and his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) still recovering from the events of the first film, with Abby particularly missing her “friends.” Those friends just so happen to be the souls of murdered children who inhabit animatronic characters at the long-defunct Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, children who were abducted and killed by William Afton (Matthew Lillard).

A new threat emerges at another Freddy Fazbear’s location in the form of Charlotte, another murdered child who inhabits a creepy large marionette. Mike, distracted by a possible romance with Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), fails to keep track of Abby, who makes her way to the old pizzeria and inadvertently unleashes Charlotte and her minions on the surrounding town.

Directed by Emma Tammi and written by Scott Cawthon (who also created the video game on which the series is based), the film tries to mix together goofy elements with intense scenes. One particular sequence, in which the security guard for Freddy Fazbear’s lets a group of ghost hunters onto the property, toes the line between soft and hard horror. That and a few others show the potential that the filmmakers had if they had stuck to their guns.

Unfortunately, more often than not they either soft-pedal things that would normally be horrific, or can’t figure out how to properly stage scenes. The sight of animatronic robots wreaking havoc is one that is simultaneously frightening and laughable, and the filmmakers never seem to find the right balance in tone. Every step in the direction of making a truly scary horror film is undercut by another in which the robots fail to live up to their promise.

It doesn’t help that Cawthon gives the cast some extremely wooden dialogue, lines that none of the actors can elevate. What may work in a video game format comes off as stilted when said by actors in a live-action film. The story also loses momentum quickly after the first half hour or so, with Cawthon seemingly content to just have characters move from place to place with no sense of connection between any of the scenes.

Hutcherson (The Hunger Games series), after being the true lead of the first film, is given very little to do in this film, and his effort is equal to his character’s arc. The same goes for Lail, whose character seems to be shoehorned into the story. Rubio is called upon to carry the load for a lot of the movie, and the teenager is not quite up to the task. A brief appearance by Skeet Ulrich seems to be a blatant appeal to Scream fans, but he and Lillard only underscore how limited this film is compared to that franchise.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is better than the first film, but not by much. The filmmakers do a decent job of making the new marionette character into a great villain, but they fail to capitalize on its inherent creepiness. Instead, they fall back on less effective elements, ensuring that the film will be forgettable for anyone other than hardcore Freddy fans.

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Five Nights at Freddy's 2 opens in theaters on December 5.

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