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Lyle Jeffs believed the FBI was out to get him.

He warned the people living in his huge home in Hildale about former followers of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who were aiding law enforcement. He made plans to escape any raid through the use of decoy cars. He had hideouts waiting for him.

"I personally built two of them," said his oldest son, Thomas Jeffs, in an interview with The Tribune.

All this was years before Lyle was charged with any crime. Then, on Sunday, Lyle was gone.

The federal agents who were monitoring him in Salt Lake County while he waited for trial on charges related to food-stamp fraud couldn't find him. A federal judge issued an arrest warrant.

As of Tuesday, Lyle, who at the time of his arrest was the bishop of Short Creek — the collective name for Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz. — and running the day-to-day operations of the FLDS, remained a fugitive.

The FBI on Tuesday published a wanted poster saying Lyle "SHOULD BE CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS." Lyle at one time had a concealed-firearms permit.

Interviews with Lyle's family and former followers of the FLDS, as well as documents filed in the food-stamp case, describe the steps he took for years to stay ahead of law enforcement agencies and prepare for the day they sought to arrest him.

A decade ago, his planning came in handy.

In 2006, Lyle's older brother, FLDS President Warren Jeffs, was a fugitive wanted in Utah for charges of rape as an accomplice. Witnesses have since testified that Warren hid with the aid of prepaid cellphones and a network of homes across the country that the FLDS called "Houses of Hiding."

Witnesses also have testified Lyle laundered cash for his brother and helped coordinate Warren's flight from prosecution. Federal agents showed up at the Leroy S. Johnson Meetinghouse in Colorado City one Saturday to serve subpoenas on Lyle and a handful of other FLDS men.

According to testimony in January in a federal civil trial in Phoenix, the agents arrived during a prayer, and people in the congregation told the agents to wait until it was finished before proceeding into the sanctuary. But Lyle used the agents' pause to flee to a basement furnace room, where he had stashed an all-terrain vehicles for just such an eventuality. Lyle and another man put camouflage hoods over their faces, started the ATVs and roared up a concrete ramp out of the meetinghouse and into the Arizona Strip desert.

Lyle spent the next few months living out of a motor home he drove to different locations in the Las Vegas area, according to court documents. The motor home, according to the court documents, was registered under an alias Lyle used — John Gibbs. FLDS loyalists took cash to him.

Any search for Lyle appears to have ended after Warren was captured outside of Las Vegas in August 2006, but Lyle's ex-wife, Charlene Wall Jeffs, has told investigators that her then-husband continued living out of an RV under aliases into 2008.

He often traveled alone from one FLDS hiding spot to another, Charlene said in an interview entered into a court record, but would sometimes bring some of his then-nine wives with him.

"He would invite ladies to go and be with him," Charlene said. "And he would travel, he would travel and then stay at the house for X amount of days and then go."

In the years since, Lyle seemed to establish his own network of hiding.

Charlene, who was Lyle's legal wife until she divorced him in 2015, has said she and Lyle owned homes in Kansas and Colorado. Lyle also owned a ranch in South America, she told investigators.

Thomas Jeffs, Lyle's oldest son, has said his father had different hiding spots in Short Creek, including at FLDS-controlled businesses and least one apartment built into a commercial building.

When Lyle was in Short Creek, he would change the cars he rode in to avoid detection, family members have said. If police arrived with an arrest warrant, there was a plan to use decoy cars to evade the warrant.

Lyle was seldom seen outside the confines of his home in Hildale, his nearby office or the FLDS meetinghouse. He would emerge when served with subpoenas to testify at the frequent legal proceedings that have embroiled the FLDS.

That is how he was arrested earlier this year.

On Feb. 23, Lyle appeared at a Salt Lake City law firm to give a deposition in a lawsuit filed by former bodyguard and FLDS spokesman Willie Jessop, who says the FLDS burglarized his excavating business. Federal prosecutors had obtained sealed indictments against Lyle and 10 others in the food-stamp fraud case. FBI agents waited until they could apprehend Lyle to serve the indictments.

Jessop since has testified that he told the FBI where to find Lyle, and as agents moved in, Lyle turned to run and was caught from behind.

On Tuesday, Jessop said he doesn't think Lyle fled because he is worried about the food-stamp trial scheduled for October. Lyle, Jessop believes, is worried about ongoing investigations into himself and the FLDS. Jessop said his attorney on Thursday had notified Lyle that he still needs to sit for the deposition in the burglary case; otherwise Jessop would ask a judge to hold Lyle in contempt.

"The welfare issue was the tip of the iceberg," Jessop said.

The FBI is leading the search for Lyle, though it has offered no details on what happened to his ankle monitor or where he might be now.

Sam Brower, the private detective who investigates the FLDS and pursued Warren a decade ago, wrote on his Facebook page how he thinks Lyle will try to stay free.

"I'm sure Lyle will be in disguise," Brower wrote. "Probably growing a beard, sunglasses and summer clothes."

Twitter: @natecarlisle