Warren Jeffs

Gary Tuchman
AC360° Correspondent

Warren Jeff’s fundamentalist polygamist sect has never been so vulnerable.

A grand jury in Texas has indicted three FLDS members on charges related to accusations of sexual abuse of children through marriage of underage girls to older men.

This follows the indictment of five others last month, including Warren Jeffs himself on new charges, Jeffs is already in prison after being convicted as an accomplice to rape for arranging an underage marriage.

There is no reason to doubt that more members of this church are being investigated.

One might think all this is giving some  members second thoughts. But in this church, where the hierarchy is as rigid and strict as old Stalinist regimes, no member in good standing would ever tell an outsider that.

On the contrary, one member I called tells me this “strengthens his faith.” It’s an attack against their religion, he says.

Justice may be getting served. But it’s also increasing a martyr complex among members of this church. And you have to wonder what effect that might have on the men, women and children of this church.

FLDS women at the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas, reacting to the removal of more than 400 children in April.

Chuck Johnston
CNN National Desk

Two weekends ago, I saw the pictorial in the Sunday New York Times Magazine on the FLDS families living in San Antonio that were profiled, and thought to myself, what comes next in the investigation stemming from the April raid on the polygamy ranch in Eldorado?

And today we learned that the Texas Department of Child Protective Services is seeking foster care for eight children who returned to living with their families on the ranch back in June.

CPS is asking a judge to put the children into foster care because they say “their mothers have refused to limit the children’s contact with men involved in underage marriages.”

CPS is asking the mothers of all girls aged 10-17 to sign safety plans to protect their children from sexual abuse.

Mothers of the eight children who CPS is seeking foster care for have refused to sign the safety plan.

According to CPS, among other things, the safety plan requires that mothers keep children away from a man who “married underage girls or agreed to an arranged marriage on an underage daughter.”

CPS is asking hearings to be set for removal of the eight children.

No word yet on whether the court will grant the hearings.

The five men shown above turned themselves in after being charged with sexually assaulting a child at the Yearning for Zion ranch.

Laura Palmer
AC360° Writer
Co-author, with Carolyn Jessop, ‘ESCAPE’

“Fabulous.”

Carolyn Jessop, bestselling author of ESCAPE, her memoir about life in the polygamist world of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, had just heard the names of the five men under arrest in Texas.

She knows the men who surrendered on Monday. Four face up to 99 years in prison on charges of sexually assaulting a child. Two of them were her stepsons, Ray Jessop, and Leroy Jessop. “It’s heart-wrenching, but justice needs to be served if they have truly injured young girls as charged,” she told me.

The fifth man, Dr. Lloyd Hammon Barlow, is charged with failure to report three counts of child abuse. He is a physician, with a Texas medical license in family practice, and a member of the FLDS.

Keep reading

Chuck Johnston
Assignment Editor, CNN National Desk

The gates outside the Yearning For Zion ranch in Eldorado, Texas, are usually locked. But they were open late Tuesday, as families returned to the sprawling ranch with children being returned from foster homes around the state.

“We just traveled day and night. Texas is a beautiful state, I had no idea I would see that much of it,” Zavenda Young said, holding her youngest daughter while her husband Edson Jessop embraced their sons.

“We are sure grateful to be home,” she added. “We’ve traveled 11,000 miles covering visits to the children, visits with attorneys, and all.”

Young told reporters the family had been temporarily living in the Houston area as they shuttled in between their four children and their caseworkers.

“The people that have been taking care of the children were doing such a wonderful job. They literally cried when we took them away,” Young said of the foster parents who cared for the children after they were removed from the ranch by state officials in April, citing evidence of underage marriages and statutory rape.

Young said the children had been hit hard by the removal to foster homes around the state. “They are dazed,” she said. “They are not the same. We hope they pull out of it.”

Some reporters asked returning children how it felt to be back with their parents on the ranch. Clearly still shaken by the experience, children clung to their parents and shied away from the cameras.

Jessop said the raid had created misconceptions of the FLDS members of the polygamist ranch:

“We feel that everybody has been fed a whole bunch of garbage about us. I think when most people come to know us they come to learn that we are different than they suppose, but it’s really hard to change the spots on a leopard-we are what we are. I am the same kind of man that my father and grandfather was. I don’t know why the world wants to change me.”

Ismael Estrada and David Mattingly
AC360° Producer and Correspondent

ELDORADO, Texas — Schleicher County, Texas is the kind of small community where everyone knows your name. This tiny town has two traffic lights and gas stations, a few restaurants, a small, local weekly paper and now — possibly hundreds of new voters.

A few years ago, when the FLDS polygamist sect set up camp on their new 1,700-acre property, they told local officials they wanted nothing to do with local government. They say they just wanted to stay to themselves in their secluded YFZ ranch, where they were building massive homes and a temple as more FLDS members moved in.

But their promise to stay out of local government has changed since Texas authorities raided their property on April 3. Keep reading

David Mattingly
360 Correspondent

It looks like payback time in Eldorado. Members of the secluded, polygamist sect felt vindicated yesterday when the Texas Supreme Court agreed state authorities did not have the right to take all 400-plus children into custody. But the FLDS families don’t plan to go home quietly. Come November…they plan to vote.

I spoke at length with sect spokesman Willie Jessop about plans to register five to six hundred FLDS voters. Schleicher County has fewer than 19 hundred registered voters and no candidate is safe.

Sheriff David Doran, one of the leaders of the April raid at the YFZ ranch was the leading county vote-getter four years ago with just 903 votes. He’s in for the re-election campaign of his life.

The County Commissioner from the precinct where you find the FLDS compound should also be worried. He ran unopposed four years ago and got into office with just 154 votes. Just a couple hundred write-in votes could conceivably land a sect member a seat on the county commission.

A family waits at a San Antonio, Texas, courthouse last week for a reunion with a seized child

Members of a polygamist sect whose children were removed by Texas authorities could flee the state if a lower court ruling stands, according to lawyers for the state.

If sect members were to flee, they also would leave the courts’ jurisdiction, attorneys for the state Child Protection Services said in court filings Tuesday to the Texas Supreme Court.

The case involves 38 mothers from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Mormon offshoot that practices polygamy, and their 124 children.

In a ruling last week, the Texas 3rd District Court of Appeals said the state had no right to remove those children in April from the Yearning For Zion ranch near Eldorado, Texas. Although that ruling applied only to those 124 children, attorneys said the reasoning could apply to all the youths removed during the raid — about 460. (Up to 20 of those later were found in court to be adults.)

Read full story…

You can view court evidence here.

According to testimony, one of the girls seen kissing Jeffs was the baby’s aunt, lived in the same home with the parents and was only 13. The state provided no context for the photos–we don’t know why they were taken or where authorities found them. But, it’s clear, these pictures had an impact on this hearing and proved to be an effective weapon for the state when they try to prove the existence of a pervasive pattern of abuse at the Yearning for Zion Ranch.

The pictures are of Warren Jeffs and 2 minors…

These pictures were entered into evidence on Friday for the Jessops custody hearing but also released to the media…

Here is what we know about one of the girls in the photos

• Lived on the YFZ Ranch in the same building with the Jessops
• Is a minor
• Was supposed to testify in the Jessop’s custody case, or called as a witness, but the two parties reached an agreement before that happened

Carolyn Jessop is a former FLDS Member and Co-Author of Escape

Carolyn Jessop
Former FLDS Member

I was shocked when I heard the news of the Texas Appellate Court ruling this afternoon.
Waves of horror washed over me at first as I thought that the children might have to be immediately returned. But that’s not going to happen. This ruling will be appealed. It’s not a knockout punch, but the FLDS obviously gained some ground today.

If those children go back to the complete, unsupervised control of the FLDS at the Yearning for Zion Ranch it would be like throwing gasoline on a fire that’s already burning out of control. It would send a message that the FLDS can get away with any level of crime which would reinforce what society, through its inaction over the years, has reinforced for a very long time. The pattern in the FLDS is, from my experience, that once its leaders can get away with one level of crime they move on to the next.

I know from my conversations with those close to this case that Texas authorities feel they have found a system of abuse within the Eldorado compound. Remember the dozens of babies that were left unattended in a nursery? Or the news this week that 100 kids didn’t match up with any parents in the compound? There will be more information about the physical and sexual abuse of these children when criminal charges are filed. A lot of evidence was taken out in the raid that investigators are still piecing together.

Keep reading

Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints mothers smile as they leave the Tom Green County courthouse after hearing news of a court ruling in their favor.

Jeffrey Toobin
CNN Sr. Legal Analyst

The Third District Court of Appeals, in Austin, today ruled that the children seized last month at the FLDS ranch must be returned to their mothers. The decision made a lot of sense to me. The nine-page opinion is very much worth reading here.

To me, the key passage in the opinion is this one:

“Removing children from their homes and parents on an emergency basis before fully litigating the issue of whether the parents should continue to have custody of the children is an extreme measure. It is, unfortunately, sometimes necessary for the protection of the children involved. However, it is a step that the legislature has provided may be taken only when the circumstances indicate a danger to the physical health and welfare of the children and the need for protection of the children is so urgent that immediate removal of the children from the home is necessary.”

The question is whether the Texas authorities put forth enough evidence to justify the ‘extreme’ step of taking the children away from their mothers. The court focused a great deal on the claim by Texas that the ‘pervasive belief system’ of the FLDS put the children in danger­ that males were raised to be perpetrators of sexual abuse and females were trained to be victims.

Keep reading