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BEAVER - When Beaver County Sheriff Kenneth Yardley needed his house remodeled, he allegedly turned to a cheap source of labor: inmates from the jail he runs.
Two former inmates say Yardley took them and others out of the Beaver County jail in 2000 so they could work at his home, stripping wallpaper, tearing out cabinets, pulling up carpet and moving furniture.
On occasion, the men said, they drove themselves to and from Yardley's house in a county-owned truck, and they performed the work without a guard.
"Kenny Yardley is a good friend of mine," said Chett Pearson, one of the former inmates. "I hate to incriminate him. But this bulls--- is wrong."
And the FBI may be interested.
Two agents were here last month and questioned Yardley, said County Commissioner Chad Johnson and the commission's assistant, Bryan Harris.
Johnson and Harris said they met with the agents at the commission's office in Beaver. The officials declined to discuss details of their interview, but Johnson said the agents asked about "a barrage" of issues pertaining to the sheriff's office.
"My take on it was they had a lot of questions about some rumors," Harris said.
Yardley declined to discuss the FBI investigation or the allegations he used inmate labor on his house.
"It's an investigation," Yardley said. "When I get the results, I'll talk."
Spokespersons for the FBI and U.S. Attorney's Office in Salt Lake City declined to confirm or deny an investigation of the sheriff.
Yardley, 63, has been sheriff since 1986. His term expires Jan 1. Yardley has said he will not seek re-election.
In January 2000, a short time after Yardley filed for divorce, he began refurbishing a one-story home about two blocks south of Beaver High School in this city of 2,400 people. To do the gutting, he used at least four jail inmates, said Pearson and Clayton Myers, who said he, too, worked on the sheriff's home.
"He just come in and got us and hauled us up there and said, 'This is what we're gonna' do,' '' Pearson said of his first day of work on the house. "We didn't care. It got us out of the jail cell."
In separate interviews with The Tribune, Myers and Pearson said they would eat breakfast at the jail, then go to the jail's changing room to remove their inmate clothing and put on street clothes.
Then Yardley would transport the men to his house to begin work, Myers and Pearson said. He'd pick them up from the house in the evening so they could return to the jail in time to change back into their jail clothes and eat supper.
On some days, Myers and Pearson said, Yardley gave the inmates the keys to a county-owned, camoflauge Chevy pickup that had once been a military vehicle and allowed the men to drive to and from the house. No guards or sheriff's deputies accompanied them in the truck, and they worked at the house without supervision, they said.
"They knew I wasn't going nowhere," Pearson said.
Between starting time and quitting time, Yardley would drop by only occasionally, the inmates said.
"We might see him in the morning, and he'd ask, 'Do you guys need tobacco or something?' '' Myers said.
Myers and Pearson had different recollections on how they took lunch. Pearson said Yardley would bring them a hamburger or a lunch from the jail. Myers said Yardley brought them a hamburger the first day he worked there, but on subsequent days Yardley returned them to the jail to eat the cafeteria-prepared lunch in the changing room.
"We were all like, 'Can you believe this tight ass?' '' Myers said.
Yardley did little to hide what was happening, Myers and Pearson said. Myers remembers Yardley once telling them not to smoke in front of the house.
Guards at the jail knew what was occurring and were upset, Myers and Pearson said. Some were worried about the lack of inmate monitoring. Others made such comments to the inmates as, "Where's my free labor?"
Pearson said some Beaver County residents who heard what was happening were angry, too.
"He wasn't using us for everybody," Pearson said. "They could see he was using us for his benefit. Period."
Myers - who in 2000 was serving a one-year sentence for felony drunken driving - said he worked at Yardley's house for about 10 days, for which the sheriff paid him about $20 cash.
Pearson - who was serving a one-year term for failure to pay child support - said he worked on the sheriff's house for at least three weeks. Besides gutting the house, he recalls working in the sheriff's yard and helping move a new, large television into the house.
During his jail stay, Pearson also worked at the jail and other county property. The day Pearson's jail sentence expired, he said, Yardley gave him $400. He doesn't recall if it was cash or a check.
"He told me it was for the work I'd done on his house, the work I'd done on the jail, the work I'd done on the fairgrounds," Pearson said.
Myers and Pearson said they don't know why Yardley picked them to work on his house.
In Pearson's court file is a letter signed by Yardley stating Pearson performed 475 hours of community service while serving his jail sentence, but that letter does not give a full account of how he spent that time. A log of Pearson's service time in the summer of 2000 has entries such as "washed trucks - 3 hrs" or "Beaver County Fair 15 hrs." Other entries only say Pearson "worked outside" for a given number of hours each day.
Utah law allows county jail prisoners to leave custody to work at jobs or for personal reasons, but such absences usually require permission from a judge. Retired 5th District Judge Phillip Eves, who in 2000 presided over Myers' and Pearson's cases, told The Tribune he had no knowledge of inmates working at Yardley's house.
Gary DeLand, executive director of the Utah Sheriffs' Association and former director of the Utah Department of Corrections, said having inmates work at a sheriff's home would be so obviously inappropriate that standards adopted by most of the state's county jails do not address the practice.
"We also don't have a regulation that says you can't paint inmates orange and hang Christmas decorations on them," DeLand said. The city of Beaver has no record of issuing a building permit to Yardley or his house in 1999, 2000 or 2001, but it's unclear whether a permit would have been required for the renovations described by Myers and Pearson.
Beaver County sheriff's deputies in 2004 arrested Myers for having a .30-06 rifle in his home. Myers was convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm and served time in the Utah State Prison. He was released in January 2005 and currently lives in Beaver. Pearson, 39, lives in Milford.
Myers, 42, and Pearson identifed two other men who worked with them at the house. One could not be reached for comment. The other is serving a prison term at the Central Utah Correctional Facility in Gunnison. In a telephone conversation being monitored by prison officials, the prisoner denied working at the homes of any county or sheriff's employee.