Warren Jeffs is charged with child sex assault

ELDORADO, Texas (AP) -- Polygamist leader Warren Jeffs was indicted in Texas on a count of child sexual assault, a first-degree felony. Five members of the sect also face charges.

Attorney General Greg Abbott says four of Jeffs' followers are charged with one count of sexually assaulting girls under the age of 17.

One of the four faces an additional charge of bigamy.

Abbott says a fifth follower is charged with three counts of failure to report child abuse.

The charges follow an ill-fated child custody case in which more than 400 children were placed in foster care. The Texas Supreme Court ruled child welfare authorities overstepped in taking all the children from their parents even though many were infants and toddlers.

Abbott earlier Tuesday went into a small community building where a grand jury was meeting in the West Texas town of Eldorado.

Women and girls in prairie dresses, including a 16-year-old daughter of Jeffs, were escorted into the same building, while lawyers and members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints crowded a bench in front of the courthouse.

The grand jury met for one day in June without issuing indictments in the case.

Weeks later, the Texas Supreme Court directed the judge overseeing the case to return the children to their parents, saying the state had overstepped its authority because it didn't show that any more than a handful of teenage girls may have been abused.

FLDS leaders have consistently denied that there was any abuse at the ranch and vowed not to sanction underage marriages.

Grand jury proceedings are supposed to be secret, but documents released as part of the separate child custody case involving the FLDS children have revealed some of the evidence collected by law enforcement during the weeklong raid of the ranch.

Among the hundreds of boxes of photos, documents and family Bibles, investigators found photos of Jeffs kissing and intimately embracing several apparently teenage girls.

A journal entry purportedly from Jeffs attached to a report by a child advocate indicates that he married his daughter to a 34-year-old man the day after she turned 15. The girl turns 17 on Saturday and has denied being married, though the child advocate report indicates that intimate notes between the girl and man were also found in the raid.

The girl, who playfully climbed a giant oak tree while waiting to be called to testify last month, left the community building frowning as she talked to her lawyer. The Associated Press is not identifying her because authorities believe she may be a sexual abuse victim.

Under Texas law, a girl younger than 17 cannot generally consent to sex with an adult. Bigamy is also illegal in Texas, although FLDS members in plural marriages did not get Texas marriage licenses.

In addition to discussions of the girl's marriage, the Jeffs journal entry indicates that he blessed marriages of two other underage sect members.

The FLDS, which believes that polygamy brings glory in heaven, is a breakaway sect of the mainstream Mormon church, which officially renounced polygamy more than a century ago.
Jeffs, who is revered as a prophet, is jailed in Arizona awaiting charges related to the marriages of young girls. He was convicted in Utah of rape as an accomplice for his role in the marriage of a 14-year-old last year.

The Teachings of Warren Jeffs, in his own words

Intelligence Report Spring 2005

Right: Warren and Rulon Jeffs

FLDS 'prophet' Warren Jeffs offers up some harsh opinions on blacks, women, gays, violence and the end of the world.

On Blacks:

"The black race is the people through which the devil has always been able to bring evil unto the earth."
"[Cain was] cursed with a black skin and he is the father of the Negro people.

He has great power, can appear and disappear. He is used by the devil, as a mortal man, to do great evils."

"Today you can see a black man with a white woman, et cetera. A great evil has happened on this land because the devil knows that if all the people have Negro blood, there will be nobody worthy to have the priesthood."

"If you marry a person who has connections with a Negro, you would become cursed."

"I was watching a documentary one day and on came these people talking about a certain black man. ... And then it showed the modern rock group, the Beatles. ... And so the manager of the group called in this Negro, homosexual, on drugs, and the Negro taught them how to do it. And what happened then, it went world wide... . So when you enjoy the [rock] beat ... you are enjoying the spirit of the black race and that's what I emphasize to the students. And it is to rock the soul and lead the person to immorality, corruption, to forget their prayers, to forget God. And thus the whole world has partaken of the spirit of the Negro race, accepting their ways."

(Download an MP3 audio file to hear Jeffs' full comments on the Beatles.)

Download an MP3 audio file containing Jeffs' further comments on "Negroes" and the biblical story of the flood.

On the Role of Women:

You can't go to heaven and be a god unless you have more than one wife." "Don't go that sad road, young ladies. Don't be wooed and tricked by the cute and cool and cunning boys or men that try to get you to like them."

"I have been instructed that any young man who will not leave our girls alone is to be sent away and not allowed to be among us, even before they destroy the girl." Download an MP3 audio file in which Jeffs further explains the role of women in marriage.

On Homosexuality:

"The people grew so evil, the men started to marry the men and the women married the women. This is the worst evil act you can do, next to murder. It is like murder. Whenever people commit that sin, then the Lord destroys them."

On Violence:

"I want to remind you what the prophets have taught us, that whenever a man of God is commanded to kill another man, he is never bloodthirsty."

The End of the World:

"For our God has a controversy with the nations, and He is about to stretch forth His hand and sweep the wicked off this land."

"Today the Lord rules over this people through President Jeffs (Warrens father, Rulon), yet we're under the bondage of the gentiles here in America. Soon the Lord will overthrow our nation and the priesthood people will rule over this land because the priesthood people will be the only ones left."

"Your only survival will be to be lifted up. It will be the greatest earthquake ever to come on the earth. The great war before the earthquake will kill 2 billion and the earthquake will kill quite a bit of those that are left — besides diseases and other things."

"When we finally go to Zion, then another planet is going to crash into this earth."

Warren Jeffs orders death for all dogs in Hildale and Colorado City.

Fences and "No trespassing" signs have proliferated in Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., as residents have moved to block out meddlesome media and gawky sightseers in recent years. Now there is a new kind of warning in this polygamous community at the Utah/Arizona state line "Beware of Pit Bull."



Yep, pit bull, not just any dog, but one with a reputation for having a bad attitude and mean bite. Salt Lake Tribune photographer Trent Nelson and I spotted this particular sign last week in Hildale. And we laughed.





There are no dogs in Hildale or Colorado City. FLDS leader Warren Jeffs banned them a few years ago after the tragic death of a 2-year-old boy who was killed by his family's dog, which some say was a pit bull.





A day later, an order went out that there were to be no dogs in town. If families couldn't bear putting their own dogs to death, a crew headed by Dee Jessop would do it for them.





"They killed every dog in town," says Isaac Wyler, an ex-FLDS member who still lives in the community. As for the sign spotted on Paul Holm's house? "That's for the reporters," Wyler said. "That got put up about six months ago."







Every one in town gets a chuckle out of it...




What does that
mean, "gets a
chuckle?" Every
one in town thinks
it's funny that all
the dogs were
killed, due to some
assholes whim?

Warren Jeffs teachings.

Warren Steed Jeffs, appointed "prophet" of the FLDS, businessman, husband, father, pedophile, rapist, abuser.

*****************************************************************************

Warren Jeffs reportedly renounced his title as "prophet" of the Fundamentalist LDS Church in a jailhouse conversation with one of his brothers.

"He said he is the greatest of all sinners and, in so many words, worked his way to be the leader and prophet when he knew he wasn't called of God to be a prophet," a law enforcement source familiar with the conversation told the Deseret Morning News.

Jeffs, 51, made the comments during a January conversation with his brother, Nephi Jeffs, who had visited him in the Purgatory Jail in Hurricane. The conversation was recorded by jail officials, who monitor most of the FLDS leader's phone calls and visits.

A tape is reportedly in the hands of the Washington County attorney, who prosecuted Jeffs on charges of rape as an accomplice, a first-degree felony. He is convicted of performing a marriage between a 14-year-old girl and her older cousin...

The tape is considered evidence in the growing criminal cases against Jeffs and is not expected to be made public unless it is played in court. The source, who did not want to be identified, said law enforcement agencies in Utah and Arizona involved in the Jeffs cases had been briefed on it.

Jeffs reportedly asked his brother to distribute news of the conversation to people in the FLDS enclaves of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz. However, the source said Jeffs later sent word to his brother saying he had changed his mind.

"The people of Hildale and Colorado City have a right to know," the source said, explaining why the carefully guarded information was being disclosed. "Three cops are being decertified because of their loyalty to him. People are still trying to repent from a distance. Don't they have a right to know?"

After his father's death in 2002, Jeffs became leader of the FLDS Church. Then, dozens of people were ousted from the polygamous sect. Men who were kicked out had their wives and children reassigned to other men.

When Jeffs was charged, federal prosecutors allege he was on the run as a fugitive. He was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list when he was arrested during a traffic stop outside Las Vegas in August 2006.

On Blacks

"The black race is the people through which the devil has always been able to bring evil unto the earth."

"[Cain was] cursed with a black skin and he is the father of the Negro people. He has great power, can appear and disappear. He is used by the devil, as a mortal man, to do great evils."

"Today you can see a black man with a white woman, et cetera. A great evil has happened on this land because the devil knows that if all the people have Negro blood, there will be nobody worthy to have the priesthood."

"If you marry a person who has connections with a Negro, you would become cursed."

"I was watching a documentary one day and on came these people talking about a certain black man. ... And then it showed the modern rock group, the Beatles. ... And so the manager of the group called in this Negro, homosexual, on drugs, and the Negro taught them how to do it.

And what happened then, it went world wide... . So when you enjoy the [rock] beat ... you are enjoying the spirit of the black race and that's what I emphasize to the students. And it is to rock the soul and lead the person to immorality, corruption, to forget their prayers, to forget God. And thus the whole world has partaken of the spirit of the Negro race, accepting their ways."

(Download an MP3 audio file to hear Jeffs' full comments on the Beatles.)

Download an MP3 audio file containing Jeffs' further comments on "Negroes" and the biblical story of the flood.

On the Role of Women

"You can't go to heaven and be a god unless you have more than one wife."

"Don't go that sad road, young ladies. Don't be wooed and tricked by the cute and cool and cunning boys or men that try to get you to like them."

"I have been instructed that any young man who will not leave our girls alone is to be sent away and not allowed to be among us, even before they destroy the girl."

Download an MP3 audio file in which Jeffs further explains the role of women in marriage.

On Homosexuality

"The people grew so evil, the men started to marry the men and the women married the women. This is the worst evil act you can do, next to murder. It is like murder. Whenever people commit that sin, then the Lord destroys them."

On Violence

"I want to remind you what the prophets have taught us, that whenever a man of God is commanded to kill another man, he is never bloodthirsty."

The End of the World

"For our God has a controversy with the nations, and He is about to stretch forth His hand and sweep the wicked off this land."

"Today the Lord rules over this people through President Jeffs, yet we're under the bondage of the gentiles here in America. Soon the Lord will overthrow our nation and the priesthood people will rule over this land because the priesthood people will be the only ones left."

"Your only survival will be to be lifted up. It will be the greatest earthquake ever to come on the earth. The great war before the earthquake will kill 2 billion and the earthquake will kill quite a bit of those that are left — besides diseases and other things."

"When we finally go to Zion, then another planet is going to crash into this earth."

Intelligence ReportSpring 2005

Judge denies Warren Jeffs a new trial

By Mark Havnes The Salt Lake Tribune
04/24/2008

Posted: 3:54 PM-Fifth District Court Judge James Shumate today denied polygamous sect leader Warren S. Jeffs' motion for a new trial.

Jeffs' legal team claimed his conviction for rape as an accomplice should be thrown out as one juror failed to disclose that she was a rape victim. When defense attorneys learned of the omission, they advocated for jury deliberations to continue with an alternate juror.

"The things we should have done, we didn't do," said defense attorney Richard Wright in court this afternoon.

"Jeffs had the right to a unity of verdict," he said. "The jury that convicted him can't be a conglomoration of jurors." Shumate ruled he didn't think replacing the problem juror had violated state law.

Defense attorney Walter Bugden said the ruling will now be appealed to the Utah Court of Appeals.

Jeffs, 52, is head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The sect's Texas ranch was raided April 3 and hundreds of children were removed.

In September, Jeffs was convicted for his role in arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to an older cousin. He's now locked up in Arizona awaiting trial there.

Anti-polygamy activist blames Utah-Arizona inaction for Texas raid

SAN ANGELO, Texas -

Flora Jessop wishes she was wrong.

She wishes authorities hadn't found dozens of young girls at a polygamous sect's ranch in West Texas who were already mothers or pregnant. That rumors of abuse were unfounded. That no one had to experience the upheaval that now has beset members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

But she also wishes someone - Utah and Arizona authorities, specifically - had acted long before now to stop the sect's practice of arranging marriages between young girls and older men.

"Do I wish it on them? Absolutely not," said Jessop, who lives in Arizona. "But if a child is being hurt, the authorities need to be there for the children. They deserve the right to be free from abuse, just like their parents."

Utah and Arizona authorities have said they will not prosecute polygamous relationships that involve adults - a position taken because such prosecutions would likely fail on constitutional grounds. But the two states have attacked the sect's practice of underage marriages with some success.

Most notably, Utah prosecuted sect leader Warren S. Jeffs last fall for conducting an arranged marriage between a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin. He received two consecutive five-to-life terms and is now awaiting prosecution in Arizona on similar
charges.

Utah authorities also crippled the sect's home base in Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., by seizing its communal property trust in 2005. That trust remains under court oversight.
Jessop has always maintained the states have not done enough, however. Jessop, who left the sect when she was 16, has spent the past decade helping other teens and women leave the FLDS church.

She won't say whether she knows the teen involved in this case, but Jessop told The Salt Lake Tribune on Friday that authorities had identified the wrong man as her husband. She also said the girl's husband had broken her ribs - something revealed in an affidavit released by Texas authorities on Tuesday.

Jessop has called the massive investigation the girl's call triggered a "colossal mistake" because it smacks of the 1953 Short Creek Raid, in which Arizona authorities took approximately 263 women and children into custody in an effort to stamp out polygamy.

She said the women and children who have been rounded up and sent to Fort Concho or the Wells Fargo Pavilion are unlikely to share the sort of information sought by authorities - names of fathers, dates of births, ages.

"First of all, they are all terrified they are going to hell if they talk to anybody," she said. "They've been taught their entire lives not to reveal who their mother is, who their father is. It's part of the culture of secrecy. And secrecy breeds isolation."

She believes many of the children at the ranch were sent there by parents in other states and claims they were taken from those families and given to "more worthy" ones. The 16-year-old girl whose call to a family shelter triggered the investigation said as much in her phone calls for help to an unnamed family shelter in Texas.

Jessop said one girl told her "The men own the babies, not the mothers."
Texas authorities said Tuesday during a press conference that many of the children do not appear to have parents there.

Jessop also said that one way young teens were enticed to stay at the ranch was their infants were given to other plural wives - women who shared a common husband - to raise. "If they spread the children out to other women," she said, "the mothers are not going to leave."

Prosecutors: Allegiance of Texas polygamists to Jeffs may prove to be hurdle for police

CHRIS KAHN

Associated Press Writer

PHOENIX — Polygamist sect members who were moved to a Texas compound from their longtime homes along the Utah-Arizona line were hand-picked for their fierce loyalty to leader Warren Jeffs, and that allegiance may be a stumbling block for law enforcement, authorities say.

Jeffs, the imprisoned leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, transferred people to Eldorado, Texas, to escape growing government scrutiny on the sect's base in Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said.

"This was Warren Jeff's all-star cast," said Goddard, who has been investigating the sect since 2004. "They had the strongest sense of obedience."

As a result, their extreme devotion could make it hard on Texas authorities as they push for prosecutions, said Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff.

"All these girls are taught from the cradle not to trust anybody from the outside," Shurtleff said. "Especially the government. We're the beast. We're the devil."

Authorities raided the Eldorado ranch April 3 after a girl from the clan made a whispered telephone call for help to a family violence shelter. Texas has since taken legal custody of 416 children on suspicions that they were being sexually and physically abused.

Jeffs, who was convicted last year in Utah of being an accomplice to rape, wanted "to isolate and perhaps purify the sect from any kind of outside influences," Goddard said.

Eldorado "is the most concentrated version of this particular style of life," he said. Prosecutors in Arizona and Utah struggled for years to gain the trust of witnesses in abuse cases, but many young girls still refused to speak out.

"We've had them come out and make statements, and then they disappear, or they recant," Shurtleff said.

The FLDS split from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints more than a century ago when the mainstream Mormon Church renounced polygamy. The Mormon Church excommunicates members who practice plural marriage.

Until recently, Arizona and Utah authorities had left the FLDS communities in Hildale and Colorado City alone.

The last time Arizona officials focused their attention on the FLDS homeland was a notorious raid in 1953. That action turned into a public relations debacle as pictures circulated of children being pulled from their mothers.

Afterward, authorities left the FLDS to police themselves. However, Goddard started talking with Shurtleff about the FLDS in 2002 shortly after he was elected, his spokesman said.

Arizona officials put up a billboard in Colorado City with a toll-free number for young women who felt abused. They got rid of local police officers, who had pledged loyalty to Jeffs, and opened an office in the community manned by Mohave County officers.

The Arizona Board of Education took over the Colorado City school system and Utah officials cut off a major source of assets from the sect's United Effort Plan trust, which was estimated to contain as much as $114 million.

"We were increasing the pressure," Goddard said. "That's when they started this escape to Texas."

In 2005, news started circulating about a new FLDS community that was being built on 1,700 acres in Eldorado.

FLDS leaders said publicly at the time they weren't expecting any apocalyptic event or mass exodus to Texas. But former FLDS member Flora Jessop, 38, said she heard a different story from family members who made it to the Texas compound. Eldorado, Jessop said, was to make up for the failures Jeffs perceived in Colorado City and Hildale.

"Warren thought it was there were too many unfaithful people in Colorado City," Jessop said. "So he started the culling, if you will."

"He started moving all the most faithful to Texas so that God would be able to lift them up while he swept the evil wicked outsiders off the face of the Earth."

Following his Utah conviction, Jeffs is in jail in Arizona while awaiting trial on four counts of incest, four counts of sexual contact with a minor, one of sexual conduct with a minor and one of conspiracy to conduct sexual conduct with a minor. The charges predate the Eldorado raid.

Polygamy Sect Moms Told To Leave Children

Right: No boob jobs for these ladies.

Authorities Allow Only Mothers With Children 4 Or Younger To Stay During Custody Hearings
SAN ANGELO, Texas, April 15, 2008

(CBS/AP) Texas officials who took 416 children from a polygamist retreat into state custody sent many of their mothers away Monday, as a judge and lawyers struggled with a legal and logistical morass in one of the biggest child-custody cases in U.S. history.

Of the 139 women who voluntarily left the compound with their children since an April 3 raid, only those with children 4 or younger were allowed to continue staying with them, said Marissa Gonzales, spokeswoman for the state Children's Protective Services agency. She did not know how many women stayed.

"It is not the normal practice to allow parents to accompany the child when an abuse allegation is made," she said. The women were given a choice: Return to the Eldorado ranch of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a renegade Mormon sect, or go to another safe location. Some women chose the latter, Gonzales said.

The agency said they took this action after consulting mental health experts and attorneys who thought it would be best to separate the mothers from their children, reports CBS News correspondent Hari Sreenivasan. On Monday night, about three dozen women, many of them mothers, sobbed and held onto each other outside a log cabin on the sect's ranch, recounting the way police officers encircled them in a room and told them that they could not stay.

One woman, Marie, said the women weren't allowed to say goodbye to their crying children. "They said, 'your children are ours,"' said the sobbing 32-year-old whose three sons are aged 9, 7 and 5 and who would not give her last name. "We could not even ask a question." She said the children at the ranch have not been abused, but she feels like "they are being abused from this experience."

She said the children have been "have been so protected and loved." The women believe the abuse complaint that led to the raid came from a bitter person outside their community. Brenda, a 37-year-old mother of two, said CPS officials did not tell the women they would be separated from their children or why the children were removed from the compound.

CPS also gave the women inaccurate information about opportunities to meet with attorneys, she said. "We got to where we said, we cannot believe a word you say. We cannot trust you," she said. A call to CPS for comment on the women's claims was not immediately returned Monday night.

The state is accusing the sect of physically and sexually abusing the youngsters and wants to strip their parents of custody and place the children in foster care or put them up for adoption. The sheer size of the case was an obstacle. "Quite frankly, I'm not sure what we're going to do," Texas District Judge Barbara Walther said after a conference that included three to four dozen attorneys either representing or hoping to represent youngsters.

The mothers were taken away Monday after they and the children were taken by bus under heavy security out of historic Fort Concho, where they had been staying, to the San Angelo Coliseum, which holds nearly 5,000 people and is used for hockey games, rodeos and concerts. The polygamist retreat is about 45 miles south of San Angelo.

Some of the youngsters' mothers complained to Gov. Rick Perry that the children were getting sick in the crowded fort. About 20 children had a mild case of chickenpox, said Dr. Sandra Guerra-Cantu with the state Health Department. Perry spokesman Robert Black said the governor did not believe the children were being housed in poor conditions at the West Texas fort. "Let's be honest here, this is not the Ritz," Black said, but he called the accommodations "clean and neat."

CPS said the move to the coliseum had been in the works since last week, but couldn't be done sooner because the facility had been booked for another event and had to be cleaned and set up for the children. CPS also said about two dozen teenage boys were moved to a facility outside San Angelo with the judge's permission. "We don't normally say where we place teens," Gonzales said when asked where they were sent.

Monday's courtroom conference was held to work out the ground rules for a court hearing beginning Thursday on the fate of the children. The judge made no immediate decisions on how the hearing will be carried out. Among the questions left unanswered: Would a courtroom big enough to hold everyone be available at the Tom Green County Courthouse, or would some kind of video link be employed?

Texas bar officials said more than 350 lawyers from across the state have volunteered to represent the children free of charge. Moreover, the 139 mothers who voluntarily left the sect to be with their children will need lawyers, too, to help them fight for custody.

The sheer numbers left the judge perplexed as she considered suggestions from the lawyers for how to handle Thursday's hearing. "It would seem inefficient to have a witness testify 416 times," the judge offered. "If I gave everybody five minutes, that would be 70 hours." In an unintended illustration of the problem, Walther gave the lawyers 30 minutes to break into groups and report back to her with ideas. It took almost two hours for everyone to reassemble.

The raid followed a call to a domestic violence hot line from a 16-year-old girl who said she was beaten and raped by her 50-year-old husband. In addition to becoming a monumental legal morass, the case is proving to be a public-relations headache for the state. Over the weekend, some of the mothers went on the offensive, complaining the children are falling ill and are frightened and traumatized from living in cramped conditions at the fort, with cots, cribs and playpens lined up side by side.

The secretive nature of the sect - and the indoctrination children receive from birth to mistrust outsiders - have added to the confusion. Randoll Stout, one of the lawyers who plan to represent some of the children, said the youngsters "seem to change their names. Adults change their names. Children are passed around."

Betty Balli Torres, executive director of the Texas Access to Justice Foundation, said 10 women went into the San Angelo legal aid office last week seeking help and reported there were 100 more women who needed lawyers. Attorneys began meeting with the women over the weekend.
She said it was vital that the mothers be represented by lawyers. Otherwise, they could lose their children - "what we call kind of the death penalty of family law cases," she said. A church lawyer, Rod Parker, said the 60 or so men remaining on the 1,700-acre ranch have offered to leave the compound if the state would allow the women and children to return to the place with child welfare monitors.

But the state Children's Protective Services agency said it had not yet seen the offer and had no comment on it. The sect practices polygamy in arranged marriages between underage girls and older men. The group has thousands of followers in two side-by-side towns in Arizona and Utah. The sect's prophet and spiritual leader, Warren Jeffs, is in prison for forcing an underage age into a marriage in Utah.

From Janet: The state is trying to find children who were removed from their families in 2003 and sent to Zion in Texas. The families want their children back. These are the people who have really started this investigation. This colony has been watched since it was sold to Warren Jeffs. The women in Texas have been raising these children, but probably no one knows who the kids over five years of age really belong to. This colony has been watched since it was sold to Warren Jeffs.

Texas wants to know how many children are Warren Jeffs and of those, how many draw state aid because there is no listed father. IF there is a birth certificate. That's why the journals and diaries the authorities found are so important. Evidently they record lots of the genealogy of extended families. cool.
Birth Defects in the FLDS are also double any other given population. ew.

Polygamist Sect Encouraged Fear

(CBS/AP) All their lives, the girls in the polygamist sect in the West Texas desert were told that the outside world was hostile and immoral, and that venturing beyond the brilliant white limestone walls of their compound would consign them to eternal damnation.

Now, if the state gets its way, hundreds of the girls could be put in foster homes, in what could be a wrenching cultural adjustment that may require intensive counseling. "What they are up against is having to deprogram an entire community," said Margaret Cooke, who left the sect with seven of her eight children near the end of 1994. The children "are so naive and they have been sheltered to the point that they don't even trust their own judgment."

Marleigh Meisner, a spokeswoman for the state Children's Protective Services, said the agency is working with mental health and other experts to make the children's transition as easy as possible.

Meanwhile, in court papers unsealed Friday, authorities said they found a "cyanide poisoning document" in their search of the compound in the town of Eldorado. But the 80-page list of items seized gave no further explanation. Texas Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Tela Mange said the document consisted of pages torn out of a first-aid book on how to treat cyanide poisoning. But she said she didn't know why the sect would have such information on hand.

Child welfare officials seized more than 400 children, most of them girls, in the raid on the compound of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, saying the youngsters were in danger of physical, emotional and sexual abuse.

The renegade Mormon splinter group requires girls at puberty to enter into polygamous marriages with much older men and produce children, authorities say. The sect also teaches children to fear the outside world, including the very authorities who removed them until a court hearing Thursday that will help determine their future. "You're taught to fear everyone and everything," said Cooke, herself a 16-year-old bride.

The children and the 139 women who followed them voluntarily out of the compound are being so secretive that child welfare officials are having trouble sorting out who the youngsters' parents are. The state is now scrambling to find shelter for the women and children, reports CBS News correspondent Hari Sreenivasan.

Most of the children are the offspring of the faith's inner circle - including its now-imprisoned prophet, Warren Jeffs - who were born since construction began on the compound in 2003, or were hand-selected by Jeffs to come to the enclave, which the sect regards as part of Zion on Earth.

In 2003 and 2004, Jeffs, the spiritual leader of an estimated 6,000 followers in two adjoining towns along the Utah-Arizona line, plucked children under the age of 6 to bring to Texas without their parents, former sect member Isaac Wyler said. "Over age 6 they were too contaminated for the world to be of use to God," said Wyler, who still lives in Colorado City, Ariz., and has 39 siblings.

"He picked the ones that would be the most obedient, the ones that would be qualified to go to Zion." Authorities raided the Eldorado ranch April 3 after a girl from the clan made a whispered telephone call for help to a family violence shelter.

The 16-year-old, who indicated she was a few weeks' pregnant, said her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her. The girl has not yet been identified among the 416 children and may not even be among them. In the call, the girl said that sect members warned her that if she ever left, outsiders would hurt her and force her to cut her hair, wear makeup and have sex with many men.

Most of the sect's children have never attended public schools or worn modern clothing. The girls wear long, pioneer-style dresses and keep their long hair pinned up in braids.

In their search of the compound, police uncovered dozens of journals and other documents that contain birth, marriage and other genealogical records. That may help social workers match children with their parents.

According to tax documents, the ranch paid more than $400,000 in taxes in 2006, reports Sreenivasan. In addition to a cement plant and cheese factory, the hundreds of women and children could be another source of income. The hearing next Thursday will determine whether the state gets full custody of the children or whether they can return to the compound in Eldorado.

Eldorado Texas: Who was at the YFZ Ranch?

In a court filing released Tuesday, Texas investigators listed dozens of names of men, women and children believed to have been living at the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado.

One of the most prominent names on the list: Wendell Nielsen, a prominent businessman in the FLDS community and a counselor in the sect's religious hierarchy.

There are 25 women on the list, 12 men and more than 100 children. The document was filed in district court as part of an affidavit seeking conservatorship of the children taken from the ranch over the past six days.

Also on the list: Donald Robert Barlow. A man by that name was charged with sexual misconduct by Arizona authorities in 2005 but was acquitted the next year after prosecutors failed to prove he had a sexual relationship with a girl in that state.

Court documents also say the state wants the judge to require genetic tests of parents to prove parentage of the 419 children now in state custody.

It also asks that the parents and children be given psychological and psychiatric evaluations. Parents should be required to pay retroactive support for children in state custody, it adds. -

Brooke Adams

The Salt Lake Tribune

400+ Kids Taken From Polygamist Compound

By MICHELLE ROBERTS Associated Press Writer
4:53 PM CDT, April 7, 2008

ELDORADO, Texas - More than 400 children, mostly girls in pioneer dresses, were swept into state custody from a polygamist sect in what authorities described Monday as the largest child-welfare operation in Texas history.

The dayslong raid on the sprawling compound built by now-jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs was sparked by a 16-year-old girl's call to authorities that she was being abused and that girls as young as 14 and 15 were being forced into marriages with much older men.

Dressed in home-sewn, ankle-length dresses with their hair pinned up in braids, some 133 women left the Yearning for Zion Ranch of their own volition along with the children.

State troopers were holding an unknown number of men in the compound until investigators finished executing a house-to-house search of the 1,700-acre property, which includes a medical facility, numerous large housing units and an 80-foot white limestone temple that rises discordantly out of the brown scrub.

"In my opinion, this is the largest endeavor we've ever been involved in in the state of Texas," said Children's Protective Services spokesman Marleigh Meisner, who said she was also involved in the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.

The members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints spent their days raising numerous children, tilling small gardens and doing chores. But at least one former resident says life was not some idyllic replica of 19th-century life.

"Once you go into the compound, you don't ever leave it," said Carolyn Jessop, one of the wives of the alleged leader of the Eldorado complex. Jessop left with her eight children before the sect moved to Texas.

Jessop said the community emphasized self-sufficiency because they believed the apocalypse was near.

The women were not allowed to wear red -- the color Jeffs said belonged to Jesus -- and were not allowed to cut their hair. They were also kept isolated from the outside world. They "were born into this," said Jessop, 40. "They have no concept of mainstream society, and their mothers were born into and have no concept of mainstream culture. Their grandmothers were born into it."Meisner said each child will get an advocate and an attorney but predicted that if they end up permanently separated from their families, the sheltered children would have a tough acclimation to modern life.

Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Safety, said the criminal investigation was still under way, and that charges would be filed if investigators determined children were abused.

Still uncertain is the location of the girl whose call initiated the raid. She allegedly had a child at 15, and authorities were looking for documents, family photos or even a family Bible with lists of marriages and children to demonstrate the girl was married to Dale Barlow, 50.

Under Texas law, girls younger than 16 cannot marry, even with parental approval.The church members were being held at Fort Concho, a 150-year-old fort built to protect frontier settlements, to be interviewed about the 16-year-old girl and whether, in fact, the teenager was among them.

DPS troopers arrested one man on a charge of interfering with the duties of a public servant during the search warrant, but it was not Barlow, Mange said. "For the most part, residents at the ranch have been cooperative. However, because of some of the diplomatic efforts in regards to the residents, the process of serving the search warrants is taking longer than usual," said DPS spokesman Tom Vinger, who declined to elaborate. "The annex is extremely large and the temple is massive.

"Barlow's probation officer, Bill Loader, told The Salt Lake Tribune that he was in Arizona. Phone messages seeking comment from Loader and Barlow were not immediately returned Monday.Barlow was sentenced to jail last year after pleading no contest to conspiracy to commit sexual conduct with a minor. He was ordered to register as a sex offender for three years while he is on probation.

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, headed by Jeffs after his father's death in 2002, broke away from the Mormon church after the latter disavowed polygamy more than a century ago.

The group is concentrated along the Arizona-Utah line but several enclaves have been built elsewhere, including in Texas. Several years ago it paid $700,000 for the Eldorado property, a former exotic animal ranch, and began building the compound as authorities in Arizona and Utah began increasingly scrutinizing the group.

The compound sits down a narrow paved road and behind a hill that shields it almost entirely from view in Eldorado, a town of fewer than 2,000 surrounded by sheep ranches nearly 200 miles northwest of San Antonio. Only the 80-foot-high white temple can be seen on the horizon.Jeffs is jailed in Kingman, Ariz., where he awaits trial for four counts each of incest and sexual conduct with a minor stemming from two arranged marriages between teenage girls and their older male relatives.

In November, he was sentenced to two consecutive sentences of five years to life in prison in Utah for being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl who wed her cousin in an arranged marriage in 2001.The investigation prompted by the girl's call last week was the first in Texas involving the sect.