Private eye hoping to collar Jeffs

Craig McLachlan leans back in his soft leather chair and looks at the ceiling.

Warren Jeffs is close, he can feel it.

He rubs the stubble on his shaved head and sighs. For 37 years, McLachlan has worked as a Salt Lake private investigator, and he's learned to trust his hunches.

Jeffs may be somewhere in Utah, McLachlan thinks, somewhere not far from here, a single-story brick office building on Salt Lake's gritty south side.

McLachlan takes out a yellow legal pad. Objective, he writes in pencil. Find and locate W.J.

For months, McLachlan, 58, has been plotting the overthrow of the fugitive polygamist leader, chasing leads in Florida, Texas and Arizona.

Now there have been two sightings over the weekend. The first was in Lehi Sunday afternoon at the hunting and fishing emporium Cabela's. Security cameras captured a man resembling Jeffs — who is 6-foot-4 and 150-pounds — in a wheelchair, surrounded by a group of women in long-sleeved dresses and two presumed bodyguards.

The second sighting was Monday at Strawberry Reservoir, about 55 miles southeast of Salt Lake City. The description was the same, if it was Jeffs.

Now the FBI is in Colorado City, the Arizona border town Jeffs still rules, even on the run, following leads stemming from the two sightings. McLachlan says that if the FBI finds him there, it will screw up McLachlan's plans and could even trigger a shootout.

"I don't think the FBI knows how dangerous he is," McLachlan said. "This isn't some country bumpkin. He has security, he has communications, and he has a lot of money. He's not going down without a fight."

Ever since Jeffs went on the lam last summer, fleeing sex charges in Arizona, McLachlan has been meeting with a loose-knit group of polygamists, some of them runaway wives, others still living within the FLDS sect. This group, McLachlan says, has a plan for Jeff's removal.

McLachlan's life, as he tells it, is worthy of an action movie as he hunts for a man with a $10,000 bounty on his head.

The son of an ex-CIA agent, he became a private detective at the age of 21, running an armored guard service for Salt Lake-area banks. Since then, he's raised goats and herbs, raced cars and built a Park City mansion patrolled by a pair of Dobermans.

He lost it all to alcoholism, he admits, and lost his wife of 21 years to cancer, too. All that loss may explain the puffy bags under McLachlan's eyes, the skinny frame, the gaunt look to his face.

What's more difficult to explain, even for McLachlan, is exactly what he does and how he ended up in the middle of the Jeffs manhunt.