What Christine Recorded That Locked Up Samuel Bateman

Late 2021. Christine Marie's camera was rolling. Samuel Bateman started talking. And what he said in his own voice on that recording finally became the thing the FBI couldn't ignore.

In this second part of our three-part interview, Christine tells the story of building a case against a man the local police would not touch. Short Creek — the FLDS community on the Utah-Arizona border where Bateman built his sect — had spent decades training itself not to notice what was happening to its own children. Polygamy was "their lifestyle." Underage marriages were "how it is out there." The sergeant Christine kept going to in the Netflix docuseries all but admits, on camera, that he believed her tapes and still couldn't move. The reasons he gives sound a lot less like incompetence the longer you listen.

Christine walks me through the wait. Why she didn't go to the FBI sooner. What it cost her to keep going back to local cops who kept sending her home. The exact moment she captured Bateman describing the so-called "Atonement" — three of his wives, one a minor, handed to three of his men — and knew the dam had finally cracked. The conversation she had with Julia Johnson, a mother whose four daughters had been given to Bateman, that flipped her into a federal witness. The morning of the raid, and the precision it took to separate the girls from Bateman without tipping him. And the question she still carries with her — what she'd do differently to stop him faster, knowing every month it dragged on cost those girls more.

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DISCLAIMER

This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.


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