VICTIMS BLAME FOUNDER FOR UTOPIA GONE SOUR

Bill Doughty's day of reckoning was here.

Six nervous men had shown up on this spring morning in 1993 to take him to the woodshed, agreeing in advance to confront the "visionary," as Doughty called himself, to tell him enough was enough, to let him know the dream was dead and to insist on knowing - point-blank - where all the money went.More than $1 million had disappeared, according to promissory notes and private papers obtained by the Deseret News as well as numerous interviews conducted by the paper.

The money came in loans and donations from followers who generously sacrificed and faithfully subscribed to the picture Doughty saw of a southern Utah utopia where families would live off the land and the Founding Fathers would be featured in a 20th-century theme park of America as it was meant to be.

Followers had sold their homes and moved from out of state to join the cause. They had forked over nest eggs, quit their jobs, borrowed against equity. Most had waited patiently, politely, persistently.

But somehow the plan had soured, and now they were angry.

Today they would resist Doughty's skilled salesmanship and his persuasive pitch. They would force him to concede failure - maybe even pay them back.

It proved a task easier said than done.

Bill Doughty was in classic form that day, according to followers who since have abandoned him. A California investment adviser, economist and one-time Baptist minister before his conversion to the LDS faith, Dough-ty possessed remarkable skill in gently steering listeners his way by promising returns he could not deliver.

"This was a meeting with six men whose families had been out on the street," remembers Phillip Gleason, who moved from California with a wife and seven children to join the movement and had lent Doughty $20,000.

What was supposed to be Doughty's comeuppance ended with four of the six ready to give him more money.

Court documents and interviews show the incident was one of many in which contributors hoping to be part of a grass-roots political movement got no return on their investment.

Clayton Cheney, an Ogden native who today lives in Cedar City, said scores of believers were taken in. Cheney was among those who lost relatively small sums of money, paying $2,500 on a parcel of land for which he never received a deed.