Locked In with Ian Bick - I Was the Detective Who Took Down the Zion Society Cult — Here's What Happened | Mike King

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

Mike King started his career on patrol and SWAT with the Ogden City Police Department in Utah before becoming the lead investigator in the 1991 Zion Society case, involving a 120-member polygamist doomsday cult led by self-proclaimed prophet Arvin Shreeve. After a member came forward and revealed what was happening inside the group, Mike and his team launched a secret 24-day investigation that ended with coordinated raids on multiple homes, 32 children being removed from the group, and Shreeve and several members ultimately going to prison. Mike later led multi-agency task forces, served as Chief of Staff to the Utah Attorney General, trained in criminal profiling, and created Profiling Evil. _____________________________________________ Thank you to CASH APP & HIMS for sponsoring this episode: Cash App: Download Cash App Today: https://click.cash.app/ui6m/6pao71et #CashAppPod Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Cash App Green features, Savings, Direct deposit, Round ups, Overdraft coverage and Discounts provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. _____________________________________________ Hims: Ready to reach your goals? Visit https://www.hims.com/lockedin to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you. _____________________________________________ Become an EXCLUSIVE Locked In: After Hours Member & recieve a FREE merch box: https://lockedin.supportingcast.fm/ _____________________________________________ Connect with Mike King: Website: https://profilingevil.com/about/ Book: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B092NZ4GJP?ccs_id=f3feb9b3-1dbe-4ce9-ad29-5791e32c6ee7 _____________________________________________ Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://ianbick.com/ _____________________________________________ Timestamps: 00:00 Mike King's Beginning 01:13 Growing Up in Salt Lake City 04:42 A Father's Legacy 05:31 Path to Law Enforcement 08:09 Applying Life Lessons 12:07 Surviving Electrocution 15:42 Early Days as a Cop 22:31 Impactful Calls 24:59 Life as a SWAT Officer 28:04 Finding Common Ground 30:00 Joining the DA's Office 34:49 The Encounter That Changed Everything 36:21 Understanding Cults 39:04 The Zion Society's Dark Secrets 45:46 Building the Case 48:48 Aaron's Courage to Leave 52:02 Dangerous Cult Leaders 54:18 Corroborating the Testimony 59:03 Adding the Bricks 01:01:45 Assembling the Evidence 01:05:44 Getting the Warrant 01:10:35 Why Not the FBI? 01:11:14 Keeping It Under Wraps 01:12:17 Planning the Raid 01:14:57 The Morning of the Bust 01:19:26 Finding the Hidden Weapons 01:22:32 Evidence and Money 01:24:15 Where Was the Leader? 01:25:03 Aftermath and Prosecutions 01:28:36 Sentencing and Justice 01:30:56 Career Evolution 01:32:50 The Satanic Panic 01:36:13 The Toll of the Work 01:38:38 Reconnecting with Survivors 01:46:31 A Path to Redemption 01:49:21 Retirement and Continued Career 01:51:27 Juries and Social Media 01:54:13 The Jury System at Risk 01:56:21 Advice to My Younger Self 01:58:04 A Family Mystery Solved _____________________________________________ To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/LockedInWithIanBicka

She sat in the corner and she had just jet black hair. And she clearly had spent a lot of time getting ready for the day. You know, she was just a beautiful young woman, probably 20, 21 years old. And as I approached her, she stood up and she confidently shook my hand with, you know, one of those good power grips. And she said, I'm involved in a cult that's sexually abusing children. Do you have a minute to talk to me? And that was the trajectory that changed my entire career.

That's Mike King. He spent decades in law enforcement. as a patrol officer, SWAT officer, detective, and criminal profiler. But one case would define his career. A member of the Zion Society walked into his office and revealed what was happening inside a doomsday cult hiding in plain sight in Utah. What followed was a secret investigation, a massive law enforcement operation, and the takedown of the group.

Today, Mike is taking us inside the investigation from the very beginning and telling the full story of what really happened. Quick favor, if you're listening on Spotify or Apple, hit follow and leave the show a five-star rating. It helps more people discover these stories and helps us keep growing. Now, back to the episode. I grew up in Salt Lake City. Nice. Nice area.

It was interesting. I had a single mom. She had kind of a rough life. Came from a coal mining camp as a child. And so I'm actually the son of a coal miner's daughter. and she went through actually four marriages during my lifetime. So our family was a little bit disjointed, bounced around a little bit. But we grew up in the west part of Salt Lake City,

and it was a great childhood because I didn't know any different. And where was your father? My father, actually, he was a World War II veteran who I think is just plain mentally ill. He's now deceased, but he was living in parts unknown. In fact, I saw him probably three times in my life. And sadly, the third time I saw him was I was still working as a police officer for the attorney general. And my sister called me and said, Dad's camped out of my house. And so I pulled up and I said, well, let me send him on his way.

And I walked up to him and he had this old busted down camper. and he was kind of squatting on her little piece of ground that she has. And I walked over and he just, he had no idea who I was. I said, I'm Mike. And he said, hey, I'm Ray and shook my hand. And I said, I'm your son, Mike. And I said, sadly, this is the day you leave town. So it was kind of a sad thing.

But as life continued on, after he, He died. I had always wondered why he was such a bum as a dad. And I actually, I don't know, spending a life in investigations, I started to research his life after he was dead. I never wanted my children to have anything to do with him because I felt like it was more risky than not knowing him. And I tracked down his papers from enlistment.

I ended up calling the Department of Defense, found a guy who said, hey, because your family, I'm going to help you. And we kind of connected. And anyway, came back. And he said, you know, before you think too poorly of your father, he says, I want to send you some paperwork. And he said, I'd like you to call someone else. And at the end of the day, what I found out Ian was that he was in that first wave in the Battle of Peleleleu, which, is an incredible battle that the Marine Corps was involved in in World War II, where probably

80 or maybe even as much as 90% of the Marines that landed were killed in that battle. My father ended up actually receiving two silver stars in that battle and a purple heart was shot seven times in the month and a half that he was locked down on that island before they could get any reinforcements. And so I walked away kind of after a lifetime of not liking the guy to having an ounce of understanding that maybe there were some reasons behind the mental illness that caused him to walk away from his family. Do you think not having him as a child or in your life growing up made a big impact on you? You know, I don't think any kid could say having now dealt with victims of crime, people who commit crime. Folks in general, I don't know how any kid can be raised completely healthy without maybe a mom who will bend down and say, are you okay when you fall off your trike?

But a dad who will say, get up, brush your knees and go forward, you know. And I think kids need that difference in parenting, unless it's unhealthy parenting. And then the last thing they need is some parent who's going to mess them up even more. Did you gravitate towards law enforcement as a kid? Did you see that as your career? You know, my goal in life as a young child was to be a garbage man because I loved that garbage guy who would come by. And I don't know what the deal was. And I guess maybe working in law enforcement, you kind of end up picking up some trash along the way.

But when I was probably 13 or 14 years old, a deputy sheriff from the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office moved into our neighborhood. And he kind of befriended me as a big brother and walked me through my younger years. He would take me out on patrol once in a while. And I think that's where the flame got ignited. What a big difference. I don't think I've ever heard someone say garbage men. Not any hate to garbage people. What a lofty goal, right?

So do you end up going to college or what happens after high school? I did. You know, my grandfather owned a moving company. And so all through high school and after high school, I worked in that moving company, busted my back every single night, hauling furniture out of people's homes. And my grandfather, again, this coal miner said, hey, if you really want to get ahead, get an education. So I was the first person in our family that went over.

I went to school. I got a four-year degree at the conclusion of that degree. I had gotten a job as a police officer in the meantime because I found criminal justice was really where I wanted to be. And then went on and got a master's degree after that. What was your degree in? Criminal justice. Oh, okay. You did go for criminal justice. And then on my master's, I did an emphasis on criminal behavior. At that time, I was being tutelaged by the FBI in, profiling. And so I spent a great deal of time looking at criminal cases from a behavioral perspective, trying to understand what motivates people to commit crimes. And, you know, there are so many interesting things that I found because in reality, and it's difficult for people

to accept, I think, at times. But when criminals commit crime, most often, in my opinion, they're in pursuit of legitimate kinds of needs. They want to be secure financially, or they want to have love and companionship, or whatever the spectrum is. So they want these legitimate things to be fulfilled in their life, but they go about them by illegitimate means. When was the first time you were able to take those lessons you learned early on

and apply it to your police work? Well, I think almost immediately you start, to apply the life lessons that you've learned, the experiences that you've gotten through academia, the things that you've learned through your field training program. But the one thing that I think comes intrinsically is that gut impression, and I believe that all of us have it. I think we all have that little inner voice that says, don't go down that alley. That's not a wise move. But for a police officer, what you do is you start to create a, um, create, an ability to understand when the environment's not right or the individual doesn't look right.

And I was raised in policing in an era when we could still stop somebody because we had a bad gut feeling. And today that's a much more difficult challenge for law enforcement. But, you know, what I found is that if I followed that gut instinct, nine times out of 10, it was correct. It may have been something that, cognitively I didn't recognize when I was talking to someone. Maybe the way they twisted their lip or they shifted their gaze or something tells us in our inner circle of our mind, something's not quite right here. And what good cops do is they chase those threads and they see where it's going to take

them. And sometimes it's just as simple as saying, hey, before you leave, tell me what you you've been up to, you know, who are you? And I always subscribe to the Colombo theory of policing, you know, kind of glump along and allow the individual to explore what's going on with you and be interested, not necessarily interesting, because if you're interested, you can sure gain a whole lot more information from people. Now, do you think that instinct that you're describing, you're born with that, or is that something that could be trained upon you? as a law enforcement officer?

I think both, Ian, and I would suspect in your own life you've experienced that, where you've had these inner feelings that say, hey, this just doesn't feel right. But then experientially, you also think, I remember when this was going on, and this is usually the result. You know, in law enforcement, we deal a lot with circumstantial evidence, the idea that A plus B is going to equal C in almost every case. case. And I think we all do that intrinsically. We learn how to do it when we're kids. We learn how to read our parents. We learn how to read our siblings. We learn how to read our friends. And we know when we're

stepping over the edge or when the ice is too thin. And we learn how to manipulate. But not only manipulate, we learn how to assess and evaluate and then respond appropriately. Or sometimes we just flat out want to jab the bear and get a different kind of response from people. What department did you start with and how old were you? I started at 21 with a place called the Pleasant View Police Department. And believe this or not, there were six officers on this department. And I was so excited to be a police officer and so thrilled at the opportunity. And I looked out of this as kind of a stepping stone.

in my first three months of policing, I ended up getting sent to a house fire one night in the middle of a terrible thunderstorm. And I was sent to this house fire because the fire department couldn't get their doors cranked up because the electricity was out in the entire community. So my job was just to just go assess it and tell them how bad things were. And as I was walking into the backyard of that house to look at it through a field, a bolt of lightning hit a power pole over the top of me as I was walking. And this may be hard to believe, but an 86,000 volt power line came down and landed flat on my back. And that was kind of my introduction into the perils of law enforcement.

I ended up spending 20 minutes in that electricity, and it was coursing through my body. It melted, believe it or not, all the fillings in my mouth. It blew holes out of the bottoms of my feet, out of my fingertips. It burned my insides up really severely, but somehow I survived that thing. And after about a year of recuperation, I, the... the local police department, a jurisdiction of about 280,000, was hiring police officers. And I thought, I'm going to just go apply. And from an academic perspective, it was easy to get through the testing process.

But then I had to go out and run the agility course. And I had no feeling from my knees down at that time in my legs and feet because I was still recovering from those terrible burns, but I remember you had to run this agility course in two minutes, which was going over six foot walls and climbing ladders and all kinds of things that you might that might simulate chasing a suspect through the streets or something. And I was about three and a half minutes into this run that's supposed to be done in less than two minutes. And the sergeant blew his whistle and he said, dude, you're here. You're out of here. He says, I'll give you one more chance if you want another chance to run it.

And I said, yeah, I just need a couple of minutes. And I was sitting on the tailgate. I had an old 1971 Chevrolet blazer. And I was sitting on the tailgate of that blazer. And I was wringing the blood out of my socks because my feet were so in such bad shape. They would just bleed. And he walked around the back of the blazer.

I'll never forget him, Sergeant Gary Greenwood. And he dropped his clipboard when he saw me ringing blood out of my socks. And I said, oh, I'll be ready in just a second. I got to pull my socks on. And he looked at me and he said, are you the cop that got electrocuted? I said, yeah, I am. And he said, you just scored a minute and 59 seconds on your test. Get out of here.

And he put me under the level and got me my job at the police department. And that's where I really started to thrive as a police officer. So that could have ended your whole career. It absolutely could. In fact, as I sat in the hospital, recovering a lawyer came in and said, this is the best day of your life because you are a rich man now. And I said, I just want to be a cop. And I turned the chance to sue the city down. And thankfully, I think Heavenly Father takes good care of people.

and the opportunities opened up, and I was able to jump into a career that was one of the greatest experiences of my life. What do you think kept you going through that to push forward, aside from wanting to be a cop? Was there something more? Yeah, a grandfather, that old coal miner that said, whatever you do, be the best at it that there is. And he said, it's be the best out of it in your opinion. And he said, don't let yourself fall short. So I just felt this incredible motivation to just drive a little harder.

I remember him telling me as a young man, I was applying for a job at a gas station. And he said, if you really want this job, show up an hour before your interview and just be out in the parking lot, picking up garbage. And he said, and be the last one that leaves if you do get the job. and the first one that shows up to work. And I adopted that. And, you know, for some reason, I was incredibly blessed my entire career. I always had a job. Tell us about your early days on that department when you first got back into policing.

Oh, well, I'll tell you, there's nothing like being a testosterone-filled, 21-year-old cop, working graveyard shifts. I mean, I loved graveyard shifts. It was an entirely different clientele. And it was in those days was a time when you could actually actually. tune a suspect up in the night and just turn them loose after that. I mean, it was not uncommon at all to catch kids drinking beer and to say, hey, you're going to pour all your beer out, and I want you to do 50 push-ups. Now, go home and tell your parents that you were drinking beer and the police stopped

you, and I'm going to call your parents in an hour and see if you talk to them. And you could get away with that, where today these officers will. would probably be in court. But you could get a kid to go home and talk to his parents and say, oh, man, I blew it. And the cops grabbed me in. And, but outside of just those kind of quality of life issues, when you're a young cop, I worked in a city named Ogden. And Ogden was the site of, if you think of the golden spike being driven during the

Transcontinental Railroad, Ogden was. the hub of the west. So every train that was heading from the east coast to the west coast went through Ogden and the streets were just filled with brothels and opium pits and prostitution. And so in the late 70s and early 80s, there were still a lot of downtown disruption in that area. And working a good graveyard shift. I mean, you could plan on being in a bar fight every night. I mean, it just was the state of things at that time. So for a young officer who was really trying to figure out how to be a cop and go out and do policing, it was a great way to go out to be able to drive around with your lights in the middle of the night completely

off in your patrol car, just looking for things that sounded weird. Even to this day, my wife will say, why do you drive with the car windows down? And it's because of what you learned as a young officer is something that you just never get past that my radio in my car as much as I love the beach boys or or the songs from the 70s is barely audible because I keep thinking how will I hear a window breaking if I'm listening to the radio real loud those experiences just change your life and and it gives me flashbacks of being in the field training program and and driving around in the middle of the night and having your training officer turn off the lights to your car and start screaming. Get us a backup. Get us a backup. As he implanted in your brain, you need to know

where you are every single second of the day and night in case things fall apart. Those kinds of experiences, I guess you never lose. And I'll just say this. The other thing that drives my wife still crazy to this day is I don't know how to stop at the stop line. where a crosswalk is because when you're working graveyards, you pull up past the stop, a crosswalk so you can look down both sidewalks and see who's coming and going on the street. And my wife will say, you can't do that. But there's something ingrained inside of your goofy brain that just says, I got to pull forward. I feel like my life now is basically podcast, airport, hotel, event, repeat.

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Cash App Green features savings, direct deposit, roundups, overdraft coverage, and discounts provided by Cash app, a Block Incorporated brand. Visit Cash.com. slash legal slash podcast for full disclosures. What do you think was that first, really first impactful call that you went on in those early days? The most impactful call as a rookie officer for me was the murder of a jailer. Brian, who was just a year or two older than me.

and he was, after leaving the jail one night, went into a place called Sullivan Hollow, where he was stopped by two cars that pulled in front of him, and then he was executed in his car. And we were the officers who responded and found Brian's body. As a young officer, that was a really stark reminder of the dangers of the job and the dangers of the street at night. I don't think I'll ever forget that. the flip side during that first six months of being a rookie, having an 83-year-old man who walked away

from a care center in the middle of a winter in Utah, which gets pretty darn cold, and searching for this old man for hours and hours, who wasn't a criminal, he wasn't some thug that we were trying to chase down. It was an 80-year-old man who was a 80-year-old man who was. wandered away. And I never forgot those experiences. Did you know early on where you wanted to go with your police work? No. Well, I knew that I wanted to move into tactical operations and I was really fortunate to become a SWAT officer and to be able to train with the SWAT team. And we worked as a team of seven officers. We handled nothing but felony crimes in progress and everything we did, we did together. That was really my goal, but my life really changed and my trajectory changed as I got

into investigations and then went to the district attorney's office. And that's really where my career completely changed in a course I never expected. What was it like to be a SWAT officer in the 70s and 80s? Oh, it was an absolute gas because you were training with people that you trusted with your life. I mean, you can't jump out of windows repelling and having someone belay you and know that you can't trust them. I mean, it was, it was this implicit trust. You going on a SWAT call and knowing that whatever you do on one particular night, I was given the responsibility. I was the guy who threw either the tear gas or or put the shape charges on doors to blow the doors.

And to know that your sniper or your marksman had your back as you crawled up, you have this sense of trust that you, as much as you want to say to a spouse, we have no secrets. When you have someone that daily is your backup or you are their backup, and you're seeing the ugly side of life. There's stuff that you share with them that you would never share with a spouse. They're kind of like two different camps that you live within. But those were incredible experiences.

I remember one night we were on a call of a barricaded suspect who was shooting up the city. And the SWAT sergeant said, hey, I need you to crawl in and pop up. tear gas canister. We're going to smoke him up a little bit, and then we'll breach the doors and go in and take the guy down. And, you know, in those days, I was, I was not the fat, glumpy guy you see now. I was still pretty athletic in those days. And I remember I was crawling through a vegetable garden in the backyard in what I thought was the concealment of darkness. And all of a sudden, the guy lit up the sky with semi-automatic rifle rounds shooting at me as I'm crawling through this thing. And bullets are hitting the dirt in front of my face.

And I remember having small cuts on my face from the rocks chipping against my face. I was just crawling as fast as I could to not only get out of the gunfire, but to get to where he couldn't do that. And I ended up getting through the garden. And instead of throwing one tear gas canister, I threw two, which was way too much. because it sucks all the oxygen out of the air. And the guy went into a cardiac arrest.

And I remember we got him resuscitated. And the ambulance came. And the sergeant said to me, King, I want you to ride to the hospital with him. And this is a guy that just shot like seven rounds at me. And I said, are you kidding me? He says, getting the ambulance. Well, by the time we got from the side of the shooting to the hospital, we were laughing and talking.

And I found this is a really likable guy that just tried to kill me. And I remember saying to him, dude, why did you shoot at me? And he says, well, I saw your big butt sticking above the vegetables. And he said, how could I turn it down? So you have all kinds of crazy experiences. Did that experience help you with your investigative career later on, just having that rapport with someone and knowing how a suspect an individual is after the arrest? You know, Ian, I've been really blessed that I've never taken people personally. I've taken their behavior very personal.

But I've found parts and pieces of people that I like. But most importantly, as an investigator, what I found is by finding some common ground of respect that people will share more information than not. I have had several suspects who at the time they were sentenced to life in prison have asked me to come and stand with them. The arresting officer to stand with them as they talk to the judge. I mean, I have artwork from a ritual serial predator who murdered people and did it all in the name of the God that he believes in, that he sends me from prison to this day where he sketches out with his pencil something and says, I was just thinking and wanted to send this off to you. I don't ever want him to get out of prison, but he's still a human being.

He might be really damaged and he might be really predatory. and really dangerous. And if someone had determined death penalty was more appropriate than life in prison, I would have accepted that just as easily as I accepted the fact that he's there. But, you know, he's still a human being. And by treating him with some dignity, he ended up sharing all of the murders that he committed. How did you end up at the district attorney's office where you spent most of your career? Oh, what a great question because I actually was working as a patrol officer at the time in the city.

And one particular night, I was down in a little park. And at the end of the park was a little kind of lover's lane area. And I was just patrolling the park. And a woman walked up to me and she kind of flagged me down and I pulled over. And, you know, what many people don't realize is you pull them over and you got your hand on the window, but you also have your revolver out of your holster and it's pointed through the door Adam, you know, because you don't know who you're coming up against. And she said, hey, do you have a minute? Because I just killed a lady up the alley here. And I wondered if you could go get her. And

she said, I should probably come in and talk to you. And I thought, oh, man, another goofy person. So I got on the radio and I called another unit and I said, hey, could you just run up and check this white Cadillac up the lane and see if there are any people in there and give me an idea on him. And so I heard him arrive at the scene and 30 seconds later was yelling for an ambulance. And yeah, she had in fact executed this woman who was her lover's wife. And I took her to the station and got a full confession out of her. And at the end, she said, you know, maybe I should call my attorney. And I said, that's a great idea at this stage of the game.

We've got the confession. So I called her attorney at his home, and it was like 1 o'clock in the morning. And I had met this guy. He was a public defender and met him on a number of occasions. Really nice guy, really good attorney. And I told him what happened. He says, do not talk to her. And I said, well, that's too late for that.

But I said, that ship sailed. But, you know, you need to have. handle this. Well, she ended up getting convicted, and that fall he ran for district attorney and won the seat. And after winning, he called me on the phone and he said, I'd like you to come and be an investigator in the office. And that's how I ended up transferring from the police department to the district attorney's office, which is just a revolutionary time in my career. Now, are you still technically assigned to the police department or is it a whole separate entity? No, you're still a police officer. And in the state of Utah, you're allowed to stay under one public safety umbrella. So you continue to

your retirement clock continues to roll. But you just switch ownership of your police power. So instead of then at that point, having citywide police powers and, of course, a state envelope of police powers, you then go into the district and you have authority over a larger area. And, and, okay, course, you start working more complex crimes at that point. No more patrol, which gosh, was like the coolest job on the planet. Now, what's the difference between an investigator with the district attorney's office and say a state trooper investigator? Did they not have those back then? Yeah, they have state troopers and they have investigators in our state, which is different than, for instance, here where we are, a state trooper doesn't go out and investigate felony

cases for local jurisdictions that may not have the capacity to do something like that. They really are confined to handling broader subjects. They also handle things like the Intel centers and major projects. A district attorney is responsible. We had 14 police agencies in our area that we had responsibility to file criminal charges against cases that those officers brought. And if the prosecutors believe that there was enough evidence, then we would go forward. But in addition to that, the investigators in those offices will go out and investigate cases further to strengthen the case. Or if there are cases where there are conflicts of interest within the city police department or the county sheriff's office, then they'll call on an

investigator from the district attorney's office to go in and manage those cases. and in our particular area, we also did a number of task forces. So we had a narcotics task force. We had a sting task force that was buying stolen cars and working our way up the pyramid in those kinds of organizations. And that's where I eventually was transferred to oversee that sting task force and was running that task force on one particular day when I walked into. the district attorney's office to meet with some prosecutors to talk about a case and just prepare for an upcoming trial. And as I walked in, the secretary, I'll never forget this day, said to me, hey, there's a woman sitting in the lobby here who's been waiting to talk to an investigator,

but nobody's available. Can you just visit with her for a moment and get her information and will pass her on to an investigator. Sure, I'd be happy to. And I walked over, and I remember walking across the lobby. And she sat in the corner, and she had just jet black hair. And she clearly had spent a lot of time getting ready for the day. You know, she was just a beautiful young woman, probably 20, 21 years old. And as I approached her, she stood up, and she confidently shook my hand with, you know, one of those good power grips.

and she said, I'm involved in a cult that's sexually abusing children. Do you have a minute to talk to me? And that was the trajectory that changed my entire career. Did you know what a cult was at that point? The only thing I knew about cults, because this was following the 70s and 80s and the creation of that period of time called the Satanic Panic, was that there were these deep, deep, dark groups of Satanists that were running, around. That was my mindset of what a cult was. Now, I was also in the state of Utah, so I knew that

there were also polygamous cults, in my opinion, cults, groups of excommunicated Latter-day Saints. That's a really important kind of differentiator, I think, because today, many people, when they think of polygamy, they think about the Latter-day Saints or the Mormons. And what I discovered as I was going through this transformation is that in 1890, the mainstream Latter-day St. Faith abandoned polygamy. They said, no more. And those that continued to practice it were excommunicated, which is the most severe punishment a church can place on its members is to just kick them out.

But Utah had a batch of polygamous groups where there were allegations of children being raised as child brides and all kinds of things. So I had in my mind those things and that they are cults, but my focus was like, I think, most people, that it was satanic and that it was, you know, people twisting their head around like the Exorcist movie or something. And so I was really caught quite off guard. And yet I tried to act like I heard this kind of thing every day and I invited her back to my office. And it was really a difficult walk down that hall, Ian, because as I walk down the hall, I'm thinking in my mind, this woman is becoming an informant, and yet she's admitting that she's in a cult that's sexually abusing children.

It's possible that she could be responsible for criminal acts against those children, too. So in that interview or interrogation, depending on which way I lean, I've got to be really cautious about how I get information from her. And I felt like the only thing I could do at that point was to warn her that she was really at risk of facing criminal charges if she told me anything that involved her. And I went through the Miranda with her and we talked about it and I got her to agree and sign off on that. And then she started to expose a cult that ultimately led to the conviction of 12 people should have been 20 more that went to prison. but after a couple of years, we chose to stop prosecuting, and it led to the rescue of 32 children. So it was an incredible trajectory change from the guy who just loved testosterone-based policing

to doing something I never planned on doing, which was child sexual abuse and then cult crimes. What does she end up telling you that day that kicks off the investigation once you sit down with her? She told me about the leader of this group, who, again, was an excommunicated Latter-day Saint, who because of being excommunicated, went out and started creating his own church. And in that church, he started teaching polygamy principles where he was, and I'll tell you what, it's big money to be the prophet because you get all the pretty girls and then people that kind of support you might get some of the others, you know. but he started preaching that he was the one that was going to usher these women into paradise

and he started gaining this group of wives, ultimately getting 28 women that were his wives, and get this, ranging from age 59, his only legal wife, down to age two. and that he, because he was their God or their pathway to the God they believed in, that he was able to have sex with them any time he wanted. As the old stallion, I think, became less and less capable to take care of everything that he had committed himself to, he then started creating weird revelation that taught that the women were supposed to have sexual relationships with each other and that God permitted that. So kind of a spiritual lesbianism and that it was all appropriate as long as it was done with his permission. And then as perversions, in my opinion,

always go, then he started saying now the children should be introduced to the sexual way of life, is what the doctrine was that he taught. And then they started sexually abusing children. When we started the investigation, we felt like we had 30 or 40 counts of rape of children, which is an incredible amount of assaults. The 12 people who went to prison were responsible, if I remember, right, 787 different sexual assaults of children. And the cases that I had built represented more than 4,000 rapes of children. So it was an incredibly horrendous story. And the challenge was that you can't just believe this woman because she comes in and says this is what's going on. You have to then go out and corroborate the testimony that she's given with other kinds of things.

And when you think about how law enforcement builds cases, we build cases based on kind of forms of evidence. And we're all used to the physical forms like a fingerprint or the forensic kinds of pieces of evidence, whether it's saliva or body fluids or things like that that are used to help build these criminal cases. Forensics nowadays include telematics off vehicles and everything else. And then we have eyewitness accounts. And, you know, eyewitness accounts aren't as great as we would like them to be. you think about your own experience, how your memory of an event is really clouded by your personal biases or your life experiences. So you have to look at eyewitness accounts kind of

cautiously. And then you have confessions or admissions from times to time. And then finally, you have circumstantial evidence, the idea that I'm hearing things. thunder outside and it's cloudy and I'm hearing the sound of rain hitting the window pain, I think I can now circumstantially say it's raining outside, you know, and circumstantial evidence is just so powerful. So it's then how do I bring all of those forms of evidence together in corroboration with her testimony and have that prove that this truly is going on and is strong enough that I dare go to a judge and say, hey, I want permission to raid a compound of 14 houses and I need to do it at 6 o'clock in the morning and kick every door in because I'm afraid

that they're going to shoot at us when we come in. That's how complex that one person walking through the door and saying, I'm involved in a cult that's sexually abusing children. Trying to lose weight can be frustrating as hell. You're eating better, trying to stay active, doing everything you think you're supposed to do. And sometimes it still feels like you're fighting your own appetite every single day. That's where weight loss by Hymns comes in. Hymns now offers access to an affordable range of FDA-approved GLP-1 medications,

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Wagobee clinical study information and restrictions, visit HIMS.com. Did she bring any physical evidence at all or she just told you her side of the story? when she first came in. No, she just told us her side of the story. And I remember I set up an appointment for the following day. And I didn't know if Aaron would show back up. I wouldn't have shown back up. But I walked into the district attorney's office and I sat down and I said, hey, you got a heavy one on your hand. And I told him what the interview was all about. And I was not capable of handling an investigation like this. I mean, I was a knuckle dragon cop that, you know, just worked with a team of guys kicking doors in. And I remember the district attorney sliding the

case report back across the table to me. And he said, you've been relieved of command. You're no longer running the sting operation. He says, you're now a sex crimes investigator. He said, I can't afford to have someone else try to create the relationship that you now have with Aaron. And, and, you're And he said, if children truly are being sexually assaulted, we don't have time for you to waste. He says, you've got to get out there and solve this. And he says, you can't tell anybody because we don't know who's involved at this point. Because these cults always say a cop's involved or the police department knows what's going on. And, you know, the environment.

It's like this is a great control mechanism. But we didn't know if that was possible. So I immediately had to start working on this thing. And in order to do it, I did say I need to pull one guy in on this investigation with me. And to me, he was the best investigator in the entire area. His name was Detective Dave Lucas. And he said, well, go down and talk to the police chief. And I went down, of course, the police chief and I had served on the SWAT team together.

And so I walked in and I said the chief. be, I need Lucas. I can't tell you why. And I'm going to have him for a couple months. And that afternoon, Detective Lucas was assigned to me. And he was an incredible investigator, kind of a country boy that could really just talk to people. But he was so talented as an investigator. And together, we ended up working seven days a week, 18, 20 hour days for, a little over a month before we had enough corroborative evidence to support that. We had eyewitnesses. We had victims that we found that had gone out of state.

We had physical evidence. And with that, we were able to put together enough to go to a judge and ask for a search warrant, a no-knock search warrant. And with 70, 70 police officers, we took down the compound one morning. So now this victim, Aaron, that came to you, how are you okay with letting her go home again that night after she tells you all of this? And was she returning back to the compound to the cult? She was not returning to the cult. She had left the cult, which made even more her statement suspect.

And that's why it was so important that we had time. to deeply investigate it and corroborate what she was saying with other pieces of evidence. And was it risky? Absolutely. But what can you do? Because we live in this free society where we could have arrested her on what she had to say. But if you go into court with one form of evidence, people would just come in and say, my client's crazy.

She just made all this up. And you're dead in the water. And so we needed to trust. And I suspect there are investigations where it doesn't work. But for us, we were really fortunate and it worked. What was her story of how she was able to leave? And is that common for people to be able to just walk away or leave like that in a cult? You know, I remember her sitting in my office,

and after two and a half hours of telling me on that first day, everything. And she got up and we had made this appointment to meet the next morning at 8 o'clock. And she said to me, I want you to know. I didn't think I was joining a cult. I was just fleeing a really bad marriage. And it taught me a lot about, number one, the kind of people who get sucked into these kinds of things and how sometimes life circumstances

just put you in the very worst position at the worst time. But then as she was turning to walk out of my office, I had a picture of my kids on the wall in Hawaii with us. And she stopped and she started crying and she's looking at that photograph and she said, your children look safe. She said, something I never gave my own kids. And she spent two and a half years in this cult, participating in the cult, participating in the abuse, participating in everything that went wrong. And then one day she had that moment of clarity where she was able to walk away and say, I got to do something about that. She spent two months on her own before she ever came to the

police department. And she just had a conscience, one of those rare people who really are impacted and think to themselves, I would rather go to prison than to continue to live this internal hell that I'm living because of what I've been involved in. So she really is the heroine of that entire story because she had the courage to step forward. We'd heard about this cult for years, but anytime we had cases, they ended up being civil custody cases where estranged parents were trying to get their kids back from another spouse who was in the cult or something like that. It was a really complex and delicate case that could have gone either way. Do you find that these cult leaders are violent in nature, like as opposed to not letting her walk away, they might have maybe killed her to cover it up?

Because doesn't that just open a can of worms for them? Well, there certainly are examples. And at any given time, I remember sitting on the Dr. Phil show after doing some work with him. And one of his researchers came back with the idea that somewhere around 5 to 6,000 cults are operating. any given time around the world. And we're talking about destructive cults, not, you know, somebody who happens to like the Yankees. I mean, that's a cult in and of itself, right? They wear the clothing, they chant, they do all kinds of goofy things. But we're talking about destructive cults that take away people's ability to think, that they convince them to abandon the morals that

they maybe at one point had. And I think it's really important when you're talking cults to recognize, too, that they kind of drift into two buckets, in my opinion. You have, to answer your question, are there cult leaders that are destructive and dangerous? Jim Jones proved that, you know, getting 900 people to drink poison is a really serious thing. And then you hear other cult leaders who maybe are pretty docile. But I find myself oftentimes worrying less about the cult leader and more about the lieutenants underneath them who are trying to prove their allegiance as being sometimes more threatening

or more dangerous. Doesn't mean the head of the snake still shouldn't be removed. But it's really hard to just blanket statements say, you know, they're just really dangerous people. I think anyone who controls others through coercion are really dangerous people. If it's domestic violence or some spun out goofy cult leader who's blowing smoke out of his ears and tinkling bells. And people are going, holy cow, this is somebody I want to follow. So now you had Aaron, you had your partner on the case.

Where do you go first? Well, we had to start, in my opinion, we had to start either including, and supporting and corroborating or excluding things that she said. And one of the things that she said is that completely out of nowhere told us about women in the group who were prostituting the children to men outside of the cult in order to get money. And that they were going to local strippers and selling lingerie to the strippers in exchange to come in and teach the ladies in the country. cult, how to seductively dance for the profit of the group. And those things we had to say, there's no way, but if we can prove this, it increases her stock and her value starts becoming more. And I remember she identified one child who had left the group. And she said, this child

was taken back by a father forced through the courts. And that child, she said, was. raped hundreds and hundreds of times. And she said, here's her name. And so I went and I called her parents and her father. Her mother was a cult leader. And I said, I need to talk to you. And he said, I can't talk to you. When I got my daughter back, I signed a court order that I would never talk about the

group. And so the first thing I did is I went to the district court judge and I said, I want that overridden and he said, absolutely. And I walked into that father and I handed him a warrant. And I said, here's an affidavit that says, you are free of any kind of responsibility if you tell me. And he opened the floodgates. He said, you've got to talk to my daughter. He says, this is what happened to her. She was one of those children that was prostituted and sent away. As we spoke with her, she shared the location where she went and a first name. And so after some investigation, I'll never forget, a city about 50 miles from where we were investigating, a guy named Brian,

I knocked on his door, and I happened to have the district attorney with me because he kept saying, this just can't be true. You know, it was so overwhelming. And we walked in and I introduced, I introduced myself, and I, of course, badged him, and I said, you know, I got to have a quick talk with you. I said, I've got the district attorney here. and personally, I just want to put you in prison for the rest of your life, but he thinks you need an opportunity to come clean.

And, of course, the guy was like, you're the attorney. And he said, will you promise me? And he said, I'll promise you that I'll only file a second degree felony on you rather than a first degree. And the guy confessed and said, yeah, he said, I paid. They brought these kids. And then he said, my buddy was also doing it. And we ended up going to the buddy, and he gave a confession as well.

And all of a sudden, her stock increased a little bit. And then she said, I had her drawing house plans of all the homes and tell me where the, because this group had been stockpiling semi-automatic weapons. And, of course, there's a big fear of what you might be involved in there. And she told me how the homes were fortified and the bars on the doors and the still doors. and the still doors on the residences. And those kinds of things, I could get into the neighborhood in the middle of the night and walk around and start to validate.

This map is perfect. You know, these windows are barred. This location does have a bunker in the backyard. And so bit by bit, we were able to corroborate the things that she was saying and slowly start adding witnesses. And one of those witnesses happened to be a stripper. And I remember going down to this little strip club and pulling her aside and saying, hey, you know what?

I just need to ask you a couple of questions. And of course, you know, that's kind of an adversarial role because they're so used to being harassed and thrown in jail for what they do. And I pulled her aside and I said, I need you to tell me about your experience with the Zion Society. And she started crying. And she said, I was teaching children out a strip for their master. And so you start bit by bit, adding the bricks. And pretty soon, after a whole lot of work and a ton of surveillance, we had enough evidence that we could go to the judge.

So now as you're getting these witness statements, are you arresting these individuals or are you waiting until after? Don't want to do anything to upset the apple cart. It is so delicate, again, because we were told that they were working with police. In fact, one particular instance was that the men in the cult were dressing up like police officers and then interrogating the children and the women so that they knew how to respond if they were ever interviewed or interrogated by police. that really came full circle after the bus day and maybe we'll touch on that.

But so during that process, you're constantly just kind of building little pieces here and there and you're saving everything. And there are times when it makes really good sense to start arresting early because it loosens people up. They start saying, I want to cut a deal or I want to do this or that. But in a case of this magnitude, especially when you're trying to get to the, the head of the snake, it really requires some careful planning and preparation. Plus, if, in fact, we were going to serve search warrants, which I believed we would from the beginning, and if, in fact, they truly are stockpiling weapons and training and teaching their people how to defend themselves, you want to have every possibility that you're going

to surprise them rather than them be fortified and ready. So it is like this incredible, stressful chess match as you try to figure out how am I going to move in place the next step. How do you ensure that these individuals aren't reporting that they had a conversation with you with investigators back to the cult? Or are they so far removed from the sale because it's been maybe years since they bought a child or whatever happened that they did as a part of it? So we were not using confidential informants like you might in a narcotics transaction where you're wiring them up and sending them in and building cases. We were in a little better position because most of the people that we dealt with were estranged from the group already.

And especially in religious cults, when someone leaves the group, everyone else is told you will not talk to them. You'll have nothing to do with them. They are Babylon. We're sacred in Zion or whatever term. they want to use. And so they really become pretty dangerous company for anyone inside the cult to ever talk with. So from that perspective, you're really dealing with the outsiders that also create challenge for you because a defense attorney could just say they're angry because

they got kicked out of a group that was loving and they weren't, you know. Now, at that point, how do you compile the case? Is it just all witness testimony on like witness statement type forms in a box, I guess, because there's not really any physical evidence. There's not DNA. There's not pictures yet. It's just the testimony. Yeah, we didn't have the benefit of a child coming forward and saying I was sexually assaulted and you were able to collect evidence, for instance. We were building it all on the come that, number one, we had witness testimony that says, I was there, I was doing it. These children were involved and hurt. But you're...

You're doing this on the come with the idea that when you get those children in the forensic examination, they may or may not admit to what was going on to them. And you think about it, if they've been indoctrinated, that sharing something like this would be a condemnation that would send them to hell, it creates some real challenges for you. Along the way, you're picking up things that take away from all of the supposition. When you have two guys that say, yeah, I was buying children from members inside this cult, and here are the ladies that were selling them to me, that's a really powerful piece of additional evidence to take into the case. When you got a victim who comes forward in the very beginning and says, here's a child who was taken back by her father through the civil process. You might talk to her.

And then that child says, I was raped by this person, this person, this person, this person, and goes on and on. All of a sudden, you've got corroboration and collaboration that you never would get even with a piece of physical evidence like DNA or something. Now, at that point, couldn't that have just been enough to go to a judge to get a warrant or did you want the surveillance aspect of it? Yes, you can always go sooner. And that's a real balancing act because if, in fact, it's true that children are being sexually assaulted every single day, that weighs really heavy on you as an investigator to think, okay, I want to wait just two more days to get this piece of evidence. But I know in the back of my mind that four children are going to be raped during that time or, you know, just coming up with wild swag numbers. of how many children might be abused.

So you're constantly balancing between, at what point do I say I've got enough that I can go in and really hammer people and in what point do I sacrifice what might happen to a child in order to get a little bit more? And the problem is, if you go in with a weak case,

you never get to go back. You don't get another dip at the well. And so you've got to really plan through this. And I'm so grateful that, number one, I had prosecutors that I could sit down with every single day and say, where do you think we go now or what's the next step? I had another investigator that I trusted deeply that I could say, what are your thoughts here? And, you know, even when it came to bus day, we didn't tell any of the officers what they were coming to work at 4 a.m. for. We just told him you need to show up at the police station at 4 a.m. And because we were afraid of sharing too much information and having a backfire on us.

Tell us about that process of going to the judge what you bring with you and what that conversation is like once you have all the evidence. You know, what you bring with you is your affidavit. And this is my personality. I'm not going to take anything that he can rifle through or anything else. that judge is either going to believe me based on the integrity I've created over my career, or he's going to say, you don't have enough. And so I walked in, but I had really documented my case, and I said, here are the things I'm looking for in the search warrant, here are the children I'm looking for,

here are the suspects I'm looking for, and they are all tied to these particular events. On or about this day, Bob sexually assaulted, victim one. at this residence and she was wearing this nighty that's a child's nighty and it's colored this way and we believe it's stored in this resident enough that you can say to the judge it's prescriptive and I know what the heck I'm talking about but not enough that he could go well I don't think that's a red colored two two or whatever you know and and then I mean I hope people understand police officers that go to judges to get warrants signed, they're putting their personal integrity on the line. I mean, they're walking in and saying, judge, I'm not just going

after some guy because I didn't like the fact that he, you know, didn't brush his teeth on Thursday. I'm going after him because of all these things. And we need to get him off the street. And yet it's a it's a crapshoot, too. I mean, one of the things I wanted was to search a huge, rock bunker that they had in one of the backyards, fortified with like eight-foot, thick walls and steel doors. And I was convinced there was something in there that I needed to have, but I didn't know what I wanted in there. But I included it in the search warrant, and the judge said, tell me about the bunker. And I'm like, oh, man, just judge, I got this gut feeling. And he said, you can't search the bunker. And to this day,

I have nightmares about that bunker because the self-proclaimed profit of this group, I believe, was hiding in that bunker on the morning we served the search warrant. Wait, how could you not search it, though, if it's a part of, you have so much evidence that that whole compound is a part of it? Yep. Welcome to the criminal justice system. And thankfully, I guess that it requires that you have a reason to do that. It's not just a blanket. These are bad people go anywhere you want. It's like, but what do you want in that bunker?

What do you want? When I said, I want to go in this safety and security officers home, I could go and say he maintained records of who he had been training on the semi-automatic rifles. He had gun reloading equipment there. He had these are the things I want to take the bomb making material. I want to seize that in that particular home. in this home that served as the health center for the commune. I want to go in and seize all of the medication that they were stealing from local hospitals when they would fake injuries so that they could get access to the surgical supplies in the ER or other places.

In the lingerie business that was selling to the strippers, I want to get inside and seize these items. The library, I want to seize the sexual way of life. training manuals that he was using and all of his revelations that he was sharing. But then I said, and then I want to get in that stinking bunker. Why? Because there's got to be cool stuff in that bunker, Judge. Yeah, there might be, but you're not going in it.

Now, a case like this, why isn't it passed to the FBI? Well, you'd have to prove for something like the Bureau. You'd have to prove that it was crossing state lines or that there was some form of transitory kind of thing that takes it outside of the jurisdictional boundary. Now, the FBI could be brought in on cases like that. And today, it's different than it was when we investigated the Zion Society cult, where you might lean on them for their child abuse unit or some other things to have specialty capabilities, but it still would probably remain a localized case prosecuted locally,

unless you could say here's a civil rights violation or something that fit within U.S. statutes. So it's kind of a tricky area, and it's not always the politics that people think of, you know, oh, local doesn't want the FBI guys coming in. It's not that at all. It's that each has their own responsibility, just like a city police department isn't real thrilled about having the county come in and work a case in their jurisdiction unless they're invited in, and sometimes the county, because of a conflict of interest, has to step in and take a city. And then the state has to take what a county may have been doing or the FBI, what a state may

have been doing if there are conflicts or laws that are being broken that fit within federal statutes. Now, a case like this, do you think it could be kept as under wraps as you kept it in today's world? Especially with technology and just everything kind of gets out? No, unless you somehow were able to convince the people that you were asking information from, but you would be taking a risk to not say a word. I mean, this is an incredible era of people sharing, not only sharing, but this guy's walking around in my neighborhood, or why is this car keep coming into my neighborhood? or those are real challenges that we didn't face during that investigation.

I would hope that the informants and the victims would remain quiet during that process. But, you know, how many times do we hear investigations that drag on a really long time and families get frustrated or it could have been a challenge? So now the judge signs off on the warrant. What happens next? Well, so we went back. I met with the SWAT commander, who was my commander when I was a SWAT officer, and I said, if I give you a day, can you can canvas that place, figure out an assault plan? And I sat down with the SWAT commander and Detective Lucas. and we determined how many officers we would need to take down the houses and the compound.

We came up with a number of 70. We went to the police chief and said, we need half of your police department tomorrow morning at 4 a.m. And he just started laughing. He said, I got people on court duty, on vacation, on, and we said, what do you think? And he said, I'll send a memo. out and he sent out a memo, assigned this, and we handpicked every member of every team

based on experiences we had had with them. And there were a few teams that had young officers that we didn't know, you know, that were just assigned as backfill. And we had officers that were assigned to do traffic detail and lock the area down. And then we also called the state division of family services and said, we need three of your best forensic examiners, and we need your vans, and we're not going to tell you why. And we had to get them to give us a batch of social workers, too, because we were going to take children into protective custody. And there were a batch of really unhappy cops.

And I remember that night, I did not sleep. an ounce. And finally around two, three o'clock in the morning, I just got out of bed and quietly drove into the city. And I went into the briefing room. And I started laying out all of the bus day packets for each of the teams. And we had seven teams that we had primary homes that had real high risk issues. And I got all that laid out.

And I just sat and waited. and frankly said a lot of quiet prayers to myself. And then about 3.30 in the morning, I started hearing locker doors slamming in the back room. And I could hear some grumbling, and cops started coming in about 10 minutes to four and sitting down. And I remember two salty old cops, one corporal that I had worked with for years. And he leaned over and he said, I'll bet it's parade duty. And they were complaining like crazy. And just then the district attorney walked in.

Everybody kind of sat a little taller in their chairs. And then the division captain and the police chief walked in. And the kid sitting next to this corporal leaned over and he says, I don't think this is parade duty. And once we got everybody inside, we started laying out what was going on, you could see the enthusiasm changing as they knew they were going in and that they were going to be kicking doors and taking a bunch of people down and into custody. How long had you worked on this case for at this point? By the time we served the search force was about five weeks. And are you just every day?

on the case, no days off. 18 to 20 hour days, seven days a week. It was one of the most grueling things I ever did as an investigator because, and we could have maybe slowed down, but emotionally we couldn't slow down knowing that children were being sexually abused. So now tell us about the actual bust. The morning of the bust, we, of course, went through the briefing and then we had everyone staged about two blocks from the scene. At 6 o'clock in the morning, the captain said go, go, go, and we blew into that neighborhood with a show of force that was really quite impressive. And it took about three to five minutes to secure every household, but it was such a relief for me to hear each of those team commanders reporting back were secure. and then the chatter over the next four hours on the radio was incredible as the officers started

finding the hidden passageways in the homes, the alarm systems, the pharmacy, the taking people into custody. And you could just hear the energy that was going on. Of course, I was busy moving from residents to. residents and making sure that the crime scene people were getting the particular things that I needed to have recovered. And during that period, they started taking the children out to the protective services vans. And I remember one in particular about a 15-year-old girl giving me the most angry death stare I think I've ever seen in my life. And that girl would never

speak during the interviews. And 31 years later, she called me on the phone. And she told me about that day. And she said, you know, it took me 16 years to quit hating your guts for what you did to us there. She said, on that 16th year, I realized that you rescued us. And it was a really emotional phone call. But yeah, we were taking all that, and nobody was reporting finding any firearms. And I was just like, what is going on? And I remember going through my notes with Aaron. And in one particular note, she told me about how the weapons were hit. And in one particular event, she told me how the weapons were hidden in passageways.

in the walls, in things that looked like just little foot lockers and other locations. And we just weren't finding them. And I remember sitting in the corner of one of the bedrooms of one of the homes. And I was sitting on the floor, staring, trying to figure out where on earth these weapons could be hidden if they really even existed. and I was tugging on the nap carpet, and I felt the carpet give away. And I pulled a little harder, and I realized the carpet was velcroed to the floor. And as I pulled, it started pulling up panels in the floorboards that between the floor joices were rifles stacked,

fully loaded, and ready to go. And we were able to then start to recover the weapons and, other things. How many weapons were there? I can't even remember, but there were a batch. They had weapons hidden in walls. They had walls that you would push on, and then the wall would spring forward. It would, you know, be a wood-trimmed wall. And so they were racked in the walls. They had things that looked like just little six-inch landings for shoes in the bottom of the cupboard or closets where you would pull the Velcro from the face of it up, and then it would expose a lock and then the box would pop up. They had at doorways, they had a little, it became

kind of a easy find once we cracked the code, places where there was a belt hook and belts or ties hanging from by a door and you'd pull on the hook itself and it would expose a location with weapons in it. It was really quite an amazing experience. Do you think had they been tipped off they would have used those weapons against you? You know, I don't know. I mean, you have to go in prepared that they would use those weapons against you. The testimony from those who lived in the group was that they were trained, that they had an end-of-world ideology, and that they were going to defend their ground.

Now, this was before Waco. I don't know. I don't know. But you have to go in assuming that that's what's going to happen. Now, was that the only physical incriminating evidence that you guys discovered that day? Or were there pictures or anything else they were keeping? There were photographs. There were manuals.

There were documented entries in books. There were the clothing that children said they were wearing when they were sexually assaulted was recovered. There was just a boatload of evidence that was recovered. Now, what about money? Do they keep it in a bank or is everything cash? How does that aspect of this work? In the drawers, you would find drawers with stacks of money marked tithing for Arvin. And Arvin was the self-proclaimed cult leader.

And so all of the women were required to work jobs. And then they would give everything that they get to him. And he would decide who got what. one of the things that we heard over and over again is that the women were forced to weigh in every day and be within a certain weight. So even things like scales and lists showing the weight of every child and every adult became really important pieces of evidence in the investigation. And it wasn't until years later when we were filming or when we were recording for Gardens of, Evil, the podcast. I learned of a police officer who had been a member of the Colt when he was a young man. And this was a police officer that I had trained as his field training officer. His name was

Ron Van Beacom. And he and his wife, just after getting married, moved into that neighborhood as a brand new young couple. And they were recruited to join the Colt. And they almost joined but left after the cult finished their yard, built their basement out, and started teaching the doctrine, and they got their wits about them and left. But I remember interviewing Ron for that podcast, and at one point he paused and he said, did you ever get the gold out of the walls? And, I mean, I've been surprised by so many failures that I had during the investigation, but I said, what?

And he says, oh, yeah, he says, those walls were filled with gold coins and these little gold bricks. He said, not the kind you see on television, but little flat gold bricks. And he said, they had so much gold hidden in those walls, had no idea. So I don't know, whether it's true or one of those ghost stories. Now, was your expectation that day to take down the leader as well to arrest him? Yes. And what ends up happening? We did not find him there.

I personally still believe he was hidden in that stinking bunker, but it took three days until he turned himself in into a little tiny jail about 300 miles from Salt Lake City. Why would he do that? He heard that he was being pursued, and I think he had always been able to manipulate his way out of things. I think he thought he could talk his way out of it. Because he probably had the means to flee the country.

He may have had the means to flee. the country, although I think he was kind of a home body, too. I don't know. So now in the aftermath of the arrest, the raid, how many people do you remove and place into custody that day? So that particular day, we didn't arrest anyone. We couldn't find anybody, any of the adults. And we have wondered if somehow they found out. And we later learned that one of the social workers actually reported that she was coming up to work a case in Ogden and there was question about maybe whether that social worker may have let someone know. We were never able to do anything with that. But it was over the course of about four months till we had all 13 of the initial

people we wanted to arrest in custody. And then we started the criminal process on those with another, I think it was 22 or 24 adults that we're going to be next in line. And what we found is back in those days, children were forced to testify in preliminary hearings about what happened. And if you think about a preliminary hearing versus a trial, a preliminary hearing, a defense attorney can get really aggressive with witnesses, things that they would never dare try with a jury, for instance, that would be really angry. because they're hammer and some child about their testimony.

And so we found that during the course of those 13 trials, that the children were having to testify over and again, we started to wonder how much damage we were causing the children by continuing to testify. And so at the conclusion of those 13 convictions, well, 12 convictions, One got off. The child curled up on the stand and couldn't testify. And that charge of sodomy was a young boy, six years old, was dropped. And so we were able to get convictions on 12 others, nine men, or nine women and three men. The two men that were prostituting the children, the self-proclaimed prophet, and then nine. of his lieutenants, the women running the organization. And that took us about two years to get through that process alone.

And at that point, we, after talking with the psychologists and thinking through, we determined that we wouldn't file the other charges on the other 20, which I still question today. The children, now 45 and 50-year-old adult women, question and wonder why it didn't happen. But we, I think airing on the side of compassion felt like we had hurt these children long enough. And so we chose, or the prosecution chose, to not file anymore after that. But it was a long, grueling process. Now, do you think those individuals, I know you didn't work the cases, but would end up reoffending again down the road that weren't prosecuted?

Absolutely. With, personally, without question, I believe they would have. I think, and I continued to follow many of them who went to other polygamous groups and started continuing on in this thought process. I don't know that. And I can only give you my personal opinion based on a lifetime of experience that I think they absolutely would have. How much time did the individuals get that were charged and proven guilty? It ranged from less than a year. Thankfully, they got to prison and did a welding program and got rehabilitated. And others, the prophet, died in prison.

Why do you think America is so not tough on these types of crimes? I mean, I posted an article yesterday on Facebook. Someone for child pornography got two and a half years in the state, which he'll get out six months probably. Why is that? It goes back to even to these early days of investigating these types of cases. You know, I've watched, when I was a young man, I remember a guy named Leroy in the neighborhood who was a sex offender. He was a pedophile. And I remember adults saying, you stay away from Leroy because he's dangerous. But people would say, we don't want to destroy his life. What we're saying is we don't care that children's lives were destroyed, but we don't want to

destroy this person's life. He's got a family to take care of, or he's got this or that. I think we have slowly evolved toward caring more about the victim than the offender today, but I still think it's really difficult to get sex offense charges against children. In some cases, you get judges that put them away for life. But you change it from a male predator to a female predator, and it is even more difficult for a judge to say, how could this woman sexually assault that child hundreds of times? It's just beyond their capacity to really believe and to fathom.

And so we're allowing predators, to get out of prison too soon. And we're seeing that with the whole teacher epidemic now, the female teachers. I see an article a couple times a week about this right now. Exactly. And they're grooming young teenage boys, whether they haven't matured as adults or whatever, who cares? If they're sexually assaulting children, they should go to prison.

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from the crew. So go to locked in.supportingcast.fm or eanbick.com today and sign up or scan the QR code on the screen. Now when you work a case like this so early on in your career, how does that shape you? You know, mentally, how do you even move on past that? For me personally, Ian, after this case, I went to the Attorney General's office and led a task. force investigating polygamy across the state. So I kind of evolved my career from the good old days where testosterone drove my daily menu to becoming a sex crimes investigator. During that time, I also connected with FBI profilers and was taught this art and science of profiling. So I was able to start adding behavior to those four types of evidence we talked about earlier. And as I did that, I started to get more and more comfort and capacity in looking at these kinds of crimes.

And back when I went to work for the Attorney General, it was right in the midst of the satanic panic era. And for those who may not know what that is, it was a period of time when, And everyone believed Satan was running amok and, you know, abusing children and creating all kinds of cults. And we actually had a team that were cross-designated as U.S. Marshals so that we could cover an 11-state region. And our responsibility was to take the most high-value criminal cases involving ritual crime in that region. We ended up investigating 300 cases over a... a three-year period of time. And our responsibility, those cases would come to us by a police department that says,

I really believe that Satan is doing this, you know. And in those 300 cases, we only had one that we were able to substantiate with any other evidence that it was really happening. And that was the period of time when there were questions about repressed memories and whether the mental health profession was helping create memories that were satanic-based or anything like that. But the things that I learned during that process, I used to teach law enforcement officers all around the world. And primarily, the first and most important thing was that when you're investigating these cases, forget all the voodoo, forget all the weird stuff about religion or anything else.

on the elements of the crime. Was there a sexual abuse? What was that abuse? How did it happen? Build that case first. And then add in all of the ritual components as supporting documentation. But prove your case first, because too many police officers today even get spun up in all of the voodoo rather than focusing on those criminal elements. and so that became really important to us to start sharing that message. We published reports that talked about the fact that, again, these cases, these ritual abuse cases are probably happening, but you've got to prove it. You've got to prove, for instance, when you're talking about, if we were talking about Warren Jeffs, who was committed and sent to prison for sexually abusing children in the FLDS cult, the fundamental LDS cult.

Warren Jeff's was convicted of sexually abusing children. There was documentation that said, eyewitness that he's doing it. There were videotapes of him doing it. So physical evidence. There was testimony of the victims. And that made really solid criminal cases. But in addition to that, there were things that they could go after like public consistence fraud and other kinds of things. And so what you need to do in these kinds of cases is

not discount the ritualism, but just kind of stack it on a shelf for a short time while you build your criminal cases and then bring in all of the ritualism to support and show how aggravating the case is. Were you surprised that these types of cases even existed once you came into that world and started discovering these? I was absolutely devastated at times during the Zion Society investigation and during the years that I investigated sexual assault in other types of cults that, number one, any predator would take their personal perversion, whether it's pedophilia or just sexual desires and build religions around that to justify and take something so sacred as a person's faith and turn it into something like this.

It was troubling. And you cannot as an investigator investigate these crimes and not have a portion of them hit you personally. I mean, I had children that were the same age as those children that were experiencing hundreds of rapes. you can't look at your own kids even and not think, hey, this is really ugly and really bad. In fact, for most investigators, I would say they probably go through some ups and downs emotionally. I remember I'm thankful that I have a faith tradition that I could talk to a faith leader. I couldn't share with them what my case was about, but I could share with the challenges I was having and being able to be counseled from them to be able to put things in the right bucket was really helpful.

I had academic training. I had law enforcement training, but what I didn't have was the mental health training. What's the toll, the physical and mental toll that this line of work and these investigations take on someone like you? Three days ago, I received a text message from one of the kids that we rescued. and I had nothing to do with those kids for 30 years. In 2020, one afternoon I received a text message from a girl named Amber, who was a tough nut to crack in this investigation, sexually assaulted literally hundreds and hundreds of times.

She emailed me in 2020, and she said, I'm having memories that I can't make sense of. Would you talk to me? I had purposely stayed away from these kids. I kind of watched from a distance what I could watch. But she said, would you talk to me and tell me what happened to me in the cult? I sat on her email for a couple of days and I finally responded and I said, Amber, I'm not a mental health expert. I have no authority anymore.

I really can't help you. And I just wish you the very best. And I signed up Mike. It was a really hard email to send. She sent back just a short thank you. That was it. Three days later, Ian, do you remember me talking about that 16-year-old girl

that gave me that ugly look? I received a letter from an email from Andrea. She said, hey, Mr. King, I don't know if you remember me, but I was in the cult, and I wondered if you could help me with some memories that I'm having. I sat on that email for a couple of days, and my wife said, Are you kind of figuring anything out here?

Are you going to tell this one no, too? I said, I just don't want to go there again. I don't want to think about this because I was already having a flood of memories. And I'll tell you what, I don't care how mental, how healthy you are from a mental health perspective. When you have 10 and 12-year-old children telling you they are sexually assaulted daily for the course of, of five or 10 years and that they are brutally surviving. You don't forget those stories. You don't forget them telling you how they laid on the bed and just stared at the window

and watched the curtains fluttering in the breeze because that's all they could focus on to keep from crying. You know, you don't forget stuff like that as the self-proclaimed prophet is having sex with them. I told her no. I said, sorry, I can't help you. A week after that, that old district attorney called me up, and he said, the state of Utah Victims Rights Council wants to know if we would talk about

what the life is like for the kids 30 years after the Zion Society cult. And I finally thought, okay, I'm going to pull that old box of stuff I have on the shelf down stairs out. And I dug in and I called the girls up. I said, if you want to get on a Zoom call, we're in the middle of COVID, I'll try to answer what I could, can, and you can invite any of the other kids you'd like. We ended up with a Zoom call full of beautiful 45, 50-year-old women who got on that call. It was the first time they'd seen each other since they were 10 or 15 years old. And some of them were yapping like sailors. Others were crying. Others were laughing. It was the most interesting call. And then they started going through what their memories were. And I remember at one

point, one of the girls said to Amber, that first girl that wrote me the email, she said, Amber, I don't remember you ever being in the group. And it was like a mic drop moment, you know. the room went dead silent and Amber looked at her you could see him looking through the screens of the TV and she said Don you wouldn't remember much because you were only about five or six years old but she said I'm the one that taught you the sexual way of life because she started crying and said because I was forced to teach you how to satisfy these adult leaders sexually And she said, and she said, I'll never forget every morning curling your hair with a curling iron. In fact, she said, I remember one night or one morning, I burned you on the neck right here. And dawn burst out in tears.

I said, I remember you. And to see those kids connecting and learning and exploring and finding someone who believed them because they lived the same story was incredibly remarkable. And since that time, we've become very close. Most of them have nothing to do with their parents who put them in the cult. Many of them lean on my wife and me as a parent figure to help them when they're reaching challenges or they got something cool happening in their life. And at the end of a couple of meetings like that, the kids shared three areas that we failed them as investigators. The first area was that we took kids who were homeschooled and we put them into a public school system where they didn't matriculate. They didn't

fit in. They wore goofy clothes. They didn't understand any of the social norms. And almost every one of them dropped out of school and have worked hourly jobs the rest of their life. They complained about that. They said, in fact, you failed us because you put us there. Now, law enforcement didn't fail them. The system may have. I don't know. But then they said, you also promised us mental health counseling, but you send us back to the parents that put us in the group. And we never got the mental health counseling that we were promised.

And then they said, and the third thing is, because you quit taking us through trials, we never got to tell our story. We never got to hold people responsible. I asked him if I could have a couple of days to think about that and get back with them. And during that time, I immediately called the district attorney and I said, here are three challenges. And I said, what do you think? And as we counseled together, we came back and we got that meeting back with the girls.

I introduced him to them because they couldn't remember him. me wasn't as personally involved as I was in the case. And in the meantime, we had gone to the governor of the state of Utah, and we got the state of Utah to agree to pay for mental health counseling for these kids 30 years later. And so we got them on the call, and we said, hey, we just want you to know we heard what you had to say, and we're going to pay for mental health counseling. It was a beautiful moment to hear them. to see them weeping, to see them looking at someone believing and really advocating for them.

I said, I also want to introduce you to the president of Weber State University. And he got on. And he said, whether you want a GED, and for those who don't understand in other countries, a high school equivalency, a GED or a Ph.D. will help you get it and promise them education. And then I said, tell me how I can help you have a voice. And they said, write a book. And so I committed to writing a book.

And I got them on the Dr. Phil show. And we got them talking to victim advocacy groups. And then we put Gardens of Evil inside the Zion Society cult out on podcast. The thing went crazy, went to number one worldwide. And we got them a global audience that heard their story and gave them the voice that they wanted. And finally, the old salty cop started to fill some ounce. of redemption. Now, before you got to share that moment with them, did you ever wonder throughout your career

or worry that these individuals, the victims, would ever become the perpetrators? Absolutely. And statistically, you would expect that because you hear predators who say, I was sexually assaulted as a child. And thankfully, none of these kids that, because I've had frank discussions with them, have experienced those kinds of things. Now, I don't know if it was because this was primarily. lesbian-based, but there were two young men, two six-year-old boys that were sodomized over and again,

and they have not. I don't know what their futures are like, but I think they have a pretty good handle on it, but every one of them have experienced dysfunctional relationships throughout their lives. They've, they've, many of the women have had same sex relationships, heterosexual relationships, and still try to figure it out. And as Andrea said to me a few days ago, she said, I still feel like the people I date are my abuser because something clicks and says, I need this person to control me. Where did you end up finishing your career? So I was fortunate. I was able to progress through the ranks at the Attorney General's Office, eventually promoted the chief of staff and retired from the Attorney General's office. From there, I had a great post-career. I retired after 28 years of service and went to work for a global mapping company, helping law enforcement all around the world. I actually worked with the 60 largest police departments in the, in the, the world, helping them put together mapping real-time crime centers, intelligence and fusion centers, and even had the opportunity to work on and in the real-time crime center in New York

City and Japan and Sydney, Australia, and many other places around the world. It was a fabulous career. I tried to retire two years ago and took a job with a New York City-based company based in Mid-Ten called Data Miner, and this is a company that mines data from the Deep Dark and Surface Web, and spent 14 months on a contract helping them open up some of the European market and the law enforcement market for Intel. And during that time, I started this goofy profiling evil channel, and for some reason, those old cop stories seem to resonate, and we've just had a blast associated with full.

folks like you, Ian. Yeah. When you were, you know, living those cases and going back to earlier in your career, did you ever think that they would become these types of stories and books and podcasts and just this whole world of having these types of conversations? Never. Never. And I never thought I would talk about some of these investigations like I have.

But I also have continued to evolve throughout my career. and I've realized that a couple of things. Number one, the victims deserve to have their story told in a way that isn't sensationalizing, but that really does advocate for them. And number two, that the public deserves to hear something more than the wild-eyed ghost stories that many creators put out on their channels where they dig into wild conspiracy theories and other things. I think people are smart enough to make their mind up if you just give them the facts of a case. And if we could somehow, my personal goal is if I could somehow get people to look at evidence rather than emotion in criminal cases, that would help them understand why sometimes things that emotionally feel really charging don't ever end up in convictions, that we really need to separate the two, but we should never lose sight and glory. or glamorize the predator, we should always remember who the victim is.

Do you ever get worried with so much conspiracy theories out in the world, especially on social media? Do you ever worry that juries in today's world will gravitate towards that or see that and pick that up in that affected decision? Not only worry about it, but I, from a very personal opinion standpoint, see it happening with cases that we're looking at today. even here close to us where we're sitting right now, the Karen Reed case, absolutely emotionally charged and absolutely a case that I believe was influenced by social media creators. I think we're seeing it even with lawyers who are getting on the bandwagon supporting the defense, others supporting the prosecution, instead of supporting the evidence and what's been provided in the courtroom. because sometimes information is provided in a courtroom and it isn't as horrific or as emotional as other pieces of evidence that never get admitted into court. But in the public, we hear about that and we're in sense because some things don't happen the way we would like to. I think just recently in the Lindsay Clancy case, we're seeing how emotion is more important than evidence in the case.

I am terrified personally at what I think is doxing of the lone juror in the Lindsay Clancy case. I don't know this guy. We haven't heard the evidence yet to know whether he had something that wasn't put on that jury questionnaire or if it was. It doesn't matter to me if he was involved in domestic violence or not. The question is, did he put it on the jury for him? And that's a question that needs to be answered. but it should never be publicly exposed. When a defense attorney gets on and creates in this environment where social media creators will show up on people's doorsteps with bullhorns, screaming at them like they did in the Brian Laundry case when his parents with Gabby Petito, his parents' home had people out front with bullhorns screaming at him.

The parent didn't commit the homicide. But we have this crazed thing happening. But now with Lindsay Clancy, if jurors are fearful of being doxed, what value is the jury system? And frankly, if I were a juror today, the first thing I would do when being questioned during Wadir is I would say, I am terrified of being doxed by you prosecutor or you defense attorney or any member that gets called to this jury unless you can promise that you're going to protect the jury. And that's going to have a big impact on the retrial if it gets to a retrial, if they aren't able to work out some type of deal, because I wouldn't want to be a juror after seeing what's going on right now.

Heavens, no. And why should anyone have to be fearful of their civic duty? I think it's disgusting what's happening, but that's a personal opinion. There might be reasons behind it. I am not a bit offended by asking the question of did he lie on it. But that's not a question you or I can answer. That's something the court has to resolve. And you know what's interesting that you just brought up, I didn't even think about,

is that you can see evidence now on the Internet that doesn't make it into court. So much evidence. That's right. And imagine, you know, if you're being told, if we looked at things like Rex Hurman and what happened in Rex Hurman's case. And you talk to people that say, I had. some influence by Rex Herman or I worked in his office in Manhattan or whatever. And they're on yapping on shows like yours and mine irresponsibly. People are saying, why isn't that in court?

You know? And sometimes the judge can't admit it because it wasn't obtained legally. And so we have to really kind of put ourselves in check as citizens. And that's why I always say on profiling evil, Folks, let's focus on the facts, the things that have been publicly released. I think we all are hearing the theories. We're all hearing the ghost stories, but let's focus on what publicly is being released by people in authority.

And it may not be everything, but it's the stuff that's going to matter in the trial. And holy cow, could you imagine being a juror in this kind of environment? with the fear that all these people in the courtroom are figuring out whether you like blue ice cream or green ice cream? I couldn't do it. Not with the high profile case. Yeah. Now, if you could give your 21-year-old self one piece of advice that you know now, what would

that be? Be more interested and less interesting. Watch, just suck in everything you can possibly suck in. find mentors that you believe really have figured some things out. And it's usually people that are a little wiser. Sometimes wise wisdom comes at age 10. Sometimes it comes at age 80. But really look at people that you would like to model your life after and think, what is it about them that made them successful?

Thankfully, I was really fortunate because I had leaders who, flew top cover. And I remember as a young officer, one of my police captains pulling me in and chewing me out after something that I did that was wrong. And he was screaming at me and he said, if I can keep you young cops out of prison for five years, you'll turn into something decent. I never forgot that because we got to cut with, use, some slack, but still hold people accountable so they can grow and mature.

And then as an individual, I wish I would have been a whole lot more easy on myself and given myself the chance to say, don't be so proud and say, oh, man, I messed up there. Because every time I've fallen down and gotten up, I've actually been better after I got up if I did it the right way rather than the emotional way. Well, Mike, I appreciate you taking the time to come out here today. What an honor to be with you, Ian. And thanks for your story. I mean, I look at these stories of redemption.

Heck, who hasn't made dumb mistakes? And I look at my own life and I think I would hate to be judged today for the kid I was when I was in high school. And I think the same is for all of us. I mean, it's what we end up with at the end of the road that's important, not the bumps along the road. I agree. And we'll have your books in the description in this episode.

You've got to tell the audience about that other book that you said isn't the bestseller, but it's really interesting. I'm definitely going to check it out because that's intriguing. Well, I'll tell you, my favorite of all my books is a book that is called She Knew No Fear. And this is the story of my great-great-grandmother who immigrated to the United States from Edinburgh, Scotland. She walked across the plains with Mormon pioneers. And most of that I found in an old journal, she walked barefoot. holy cow, how tough these people were. But in 1891, she was sent with her husband and a group of people through a place called Hole in the Rock. So if you think of the Grand Canyon, the front end

of the Grand Canyon is an area that are cliffs that are 2,000 feet high, straight up and down. She and a group of 80 different pioneers actually carved a road into the side of one of the those cliffs in 1890 by tethering their children on ropes off of the cliff with blasting powder to tap holes in the side of the wall where they would put poles and build a road hanging over the side of this cliff to take a bunch of cattle through. Well, she was murdered in 1891 in the south east corner of Utah, the four corners area of the United States. And all my life, I heard my grandfather talking about this as we fished up at strawberry reservoir. And as I was preparing to retire, I thought, holy cow, I spent my entire career investigating

homicides and violent offenders. Why don't I look into this? And so I started researching her life. And I spent nearly 10 years researching her life. And just at the conclusion of my 10-year search, I found the arrest warrant. in an old county jail in Utah in the basement from 1891 where the sheriff charged the guy for murdering her and it was the wrong guy. And so my story talks about that.

I feel like that could be a whole other. You know how they have like the ancestry DNA type things? I feel like this could be a whole other true crime type of business. I'm going to leave you with the coolest story you'll ever hear. Okay. So the mayor of Salt Lake City was a guy named Paul. DePaulis. And many years ago, in one of the spring floods in Salt Lake, as the mountains dropped, you know, 800 inches of snow started to melt, the streets of Salt Lake City were flooded.

And Mayor DePaulis actually built rivers downtown State Street, where he built sandbags about four feet high to channel the river down the main street of the city and out to the Great Salt Lake. Palmer later became a chief at the Attorney General's office, and he and I were working together. And one day, we were driving to the Four Corners area of Utah to meet with a bunch of officials down there on the Indian Reservation. And as we were driving, I was telling him about my grandmother, Jane, and this investigation. And I said, I just have to stop in this little tiny town to just see if anybody has ever heard of her, because I think she lived here and was the first settler here. And he listened to me for four hours from Salt Lake to this outskirt area

yapping about this. And I'm sure he was just thinking, oh, get this over with. Well, we pulled into this little town at about nine o'clock in the morning. We went to the local chamber of commerce. And we walked through the door and up to the counter. And there was this old woman. I mean, she was old behind the chamber of commerce desk. And I said, ma'am, I'm looking. for anyone that might know something about a woman named Jane McKechnie Walton. And I'll never forget this. And she looked up at me and she had this little crooked arthritic finger, you know. She kind of pointed out like this at me.

And she said, are you family of Mrs. Walton? And I said, I am. I'm our great grandson. And she said, I have your grandfather's diary. I've had it since I was a girl. She said, we're not related. but my father handed it to me and said one day her family would come asking for it. Would you like to have that diary?

And I mean, I was emotional. I said, absolutely I would. And I flipped open to the day that my grandmother died in that diary. And it was there that my grandfather wrote who actually killed my great, great grandmother. That's why I wrote the book. That's crazy. Well, thank you again, Mike, and safe travels back. Thanks, Ian.

Awesome.