The Pedophiles in Eldorado TX

January 20, 2003

Polygamists Face Off Against Each Other And Police

by Bob Moore
Hurricane, UT – The long time feud over polygamist rights is coming to a head in Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona. Within the past three weeks Warren Jeffs, the prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (aka FLDS), has excommunicated twenty men and demanded they immediately leave the Colorado City/Hildale area. The men were some of the more prominent in the polygamist community, but had fallen on disfavor in Jeffs’ eyes and were stripped of their positions within the church, their properties, and their families. This turmoil within the community has resulted in a few of the children escaping the compound and being held in safe houses in the Phoenix area – while Colorado City law enforcement personnel demand their return. Flora Jessop, who escaped from Colorado City fifteen years ago, has become an activist for the children and has made statements to the press that she will not return the children to their polygamist parents.
In an interview this morning with the new Mohave County Attorney, Matthew Smith, there appears to be hope for the girls, some as young as twelve, faced with plural marriage to men three and four times their age. Smith says he will begin actively enforcing child rape, statutory rape, incest, and sex with a minor child statutes against the perpetrators residing in Mohave County. Smith also stated the County Attorney for Washington County, Utah has agreed to step in on the Utah side of the state line.
Strong evidence has been discovered that the leaders of various polygamist groups have taken boys, as young as fifteen, to large cities - Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City - and abandoned them on the streets. These boys have been “convicted” of the crime of looking at or speaking with a girl who had been promised to one of the adult men in the community. It is also alleged that once the young men within the sect turn the age of eighteen they are banished and turned onto the streets because they are no longer eligible for social security or welfare, whereas the women – who will continue to produce babies into their forties – are an economic asset to the leadership of the church.
Another disturbing aspect of how far the leaders of this community will go to improve their personal economic picture stems from the desire for handicapped children. By selective in- and cross-breeding the incidents of retarded or handicapped children increases. Additional government funds are available for special-needs children, adding more to the monthly “take” of the group. The polygamists find nothing dishonest in any of their scams to take taxpayer money, and have given the practice the name, “Bleeding The Beast.”
As we walked the streets of both Colorado City and Hildale, we were struck with the almost ghost town atmosphere, as the people remained inside their homes, fearing to come out and talk with us. The children – and there are literally hundreds in these two tiny communities – were nowhere to be seen. But beneath this surface of calm lies a cauldron ready to explode at any moment. The presence of state (AZ and UT) and county law enforcement conspicuously driving the streets is evidence that the fear of armed response is not only possible, but also expected. On numerous occasions I was asked by officers in both Arizona and Utah to explain what I was doing in the area and to show my carry permit for a concealed weapon.
It is difficult to explain what may be the flash point in this confrontation, but I feel it will have much more to do with the money being taken in by the leaders of this cult, rather than in any religious rights they feel they may have. In this reporter’s opinion, if the polygamists were told they would be free to practice their religious beliefs, but there would no longer be the hand-outs of Social Security and welfare payments, it would signal the end of this “lifestyle” for both of these tiny communities backed into the red foothills of the Vermillion Cliffs of Southern Utah.


Polygamy in Arizona and Utah is very much a reality, with authorities estimating the number of polygamists at between 30,000 and 50,000. Most of the polygamy compounds, such as Hildale, UT and Colorado City, AZ straddle the Arizona/Utah state lines, thus muddying each state’s jurisdiction. Some polygamists, though, live openly in larger cities such as Phoenix and Salt Lake City.
Utah and much of Arizona were settled by Mormon pioneers who practiced polygamy under the original direction of church founder, Joseph Smith. Following Smith’s murder in Nauvoo, IL Brigham Young assumed control of the church and moved the Mormons west to The Great Salt Lake Basin region, where they continued the practice of polygamy. Although officially disavowed by the Mormon Church in 1890 and outlawed in Utah in 1896 as a condition of statehood, polygamy remained very much alive in the outlying Mormon communities.
In 1953, on the instructions of then Arizona Governor Howard Pyle, the Arizona National Guard raided the large polygamist compound in Short Creek, Arizona (now Colorado City). Utah authorities declined to take part in the raid. The polygamist males were briefly jailed, but because the women - who had been trained to obey the men’s every command - refused to testify against them, prosecution failed. The women also protested that without their men they would have no means of support. Photographs of impoverished women, surrounded by large numbers of children, ran in newspapers across the United States, as well as in a feature story in Life Magazine. Readers, mostly unaware of the abuses of women by their polygamist “husbands”, saw Pyle as a hard-hearted destroyer of families, effectively destroying his political career. The men were released from custody and returned to their polygamist lifestyles. Since 1953, there has never been another raid into a polygamist compound. Politician’s fear what happened to Pyle may be their fate if they attempt to prosecute.
What few prosecutions have taken place in the past fifty years have not been for polygamy, but (with one famous exception) for the crimes which continue to surround polygamy: sexual assault, child endangerment, battering, welfare fraud and racketeering. Violence towards girls and women in a polygamist compound is common, but any escape from the abuse, or a compound, is extremely uncommon. Polygamist women are forbidden to use any type of birth control and their husbands maintain a chart of their fertile days in order to impregnate them more easily.
The ideal among many polygamy sects is for every woman to have one baby per year until her child-bearing years are over, thus insuring her husband's place in the celestial kingdom or the "Highest Heaven.” When a girl does escape from a polygamist compound, county law officers usually return her to the compound. In April, of 2001, a fifteen-year-old girl ran away from her polygamous family, telling authorities that her parents were about to force her into a polygamous marriage with the much-married Warren Jeffs (son of sects group founder, Rulon Jeffs who recently died, leaving behind a reported 75 wives), the No. 2 leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (aka FLDS). Despite her pleas, the sheriff’s department returned her to the compound, releasing a statement to the media that since the girl was a minor her parents had the right to decide how she would live. This is the crux of the problem – a person is classified as a minor until the age of eighteen, so a runaway at an earlier age will ALWAYS be returned to her family, even though that family will force her into a marriage.
In a similar case, Ruby Jessop, a fifteen-year-old girl fleeing an illegal marriage was returned to her polygamous parents by St. George, Utah, Director of Family Services Gene Ashdown, who said, "As far as I am concerned, there are no abuses in Hildale or Colorado City. If Ruby has to deal with an unwanted marriage, that is her problem." He said he would henceforth see to it that all runaway girls were returned to the compounds. Ruby's sister, upon contacting the FBI, was told they had no jurisdiction in the case, even though the girl was eventually transported across state lines (Utah to Arizona) for "marriage" to another polygamist.
In 1998, John Daniel Kingston, of Salt Lake City, Utah, was arrested for beating his sixteen-year-old daughter for resisting his order for her to become the 15th wife of Daniel Ortell Kingston, her uncle. The girl, who had been beaten more than twenty times, suffered a broken nose and deep bruises on her face and buttocks. After being confined to a desert "re-education camp" for recalcitrant women and children, she eventually submitted to the sham marriage and subsequent rape. She finally escaped by staggering several miles through the desert to a gas station, where she was helped by concerned customers. Her father and uncle are now serving prison terms for incest and felony child abuse, but not polygamy.
Because of their tight-knit and secluded compounds, the pool of possible mates among the various polygamy clans remains small. This frequently leads to incestuous plural marriages. Sometimes, however, that incest is purposeful. The Kingston clan (cited above) was founded by Charles Elden Kingston, who - after experimenting with breeding dairy cattle - set up a similar breeding program for his own children. To this day, members of the Kingston clan are allowed to breed only with blood relatives.
In an article written by Greg Burton, printed in the Salt Lake Tribune April 25, 1999, Connie Rugg, one of John Ortell Kingston's estimated 65 children, said, "All (of) my life my family told me I had to marry a Kingston. I could choose, but it had to be a brother, uncle or cousin." Many Kingston children are born with serious birth defects directly traceable to the sect’s breeding program. According to the Burton article, one Kingston girl was born with two vaginas and two uteruses but no vaginal or bowel opening. Congenital blindness and dwarfism are common among members of the Kingston group, as are microcephaly, spina bifida, Down syndrome, kidney disease and abnormal leg and arm joints. In the strange world of the polygamist birth defects are considered to be a blessing because it means more income for the men in the form of additional social security and welfare payments.
These children and their mothers (who are designated as unwed mothers by both Arizona and Utah social service agencies) receive considerable medical care and welfare, all paid for by the U.S., state and county taxpayer. Under Utah law, it is a felony for close relatives to have sex, but this law is - as is the law against polygamy - rarely prosecuted, and then only when considerable physical force has been used upon an unwilling girl. Daniel Ortell Kingston's prosecution for incest is one of the few on record.
Although the women in most polygamy sects are not allowed to inherit or own property, and thus live in dire poverty, the leaders of these sects are often quite wealthy. Reporter Lou Kilzer, in an article in the Denver Rocky Mountain News, August 14, 2000, connected the Kingston sect's holdings to organized crime.
The Kingston’s business empire includes casino gaming equipment such as slot and video poker machines (purchased from Mafia-controlled companies in New Jersey), coal mines, accounting firms, finance companies, pawnshops, bail bond firms, poker parlors and huge cattle ranches (a 160,000 acre ranch in Nevada formerly belonged to actor James Stewart). Estimates of the Kingston sect's wealth range from $150 million to - by one of their business competitors - $11 billion. According to Kilzer's article, the 1,000 member sect is currently headed by Paul Kingston, a Salt Lake City attorney with 32 wives and more than 200 children.
A Los Angeles Times article written by Julie Cart, dated Sept. 9, 2001, assessed polygamy's cost to the U.S. taxpayer. She cited U.S. Census Bureau estimates that found every school-age child in Colorado City, Utah, was living below the poverty level. This level of poverty is unlikely to change, since many polygamists - who are unwilling to have their children influenced by "outsiders" - have pulled their children from the public school.
Cart's article also cited wide-ranging tax fraud, since polygamists rarely declare the full extent of their income. This income-hiding behavior was highlighted in the 2001-2002 bigamy and child-rape trial of Tom Green in Salt Lake City. Court documents revealed that Green’s five wives had been supporting him by selling magazine subscriptions while the family was collecting large welfare payments. The child rape charges emerged from findings that Green impregnated one “wife” when she was only thirteen - with the permission of her mother, who was also married to Green. To date, the mother (now Green's ex-wife) has not been prosecuted for aiding in child rape. Green is now serving 20 years to life in prison; his wives and 29 children remain on welfare.
In Cart's article on incest and polygamy, Cart stated that the combination of birth defects, poverty and the lack of education, have overtaxed the already strained public service agencies of both Arizona and Utah. In fact, Cart found that Medicaid pays for more than one-third of the babies born in Utah, with plural wives accounting for a disproportionate share of those births.
According to an article by Tom Zoellner, in the Salt Lake Tribune, June 28, 1998, fully 33% of the residents in the polygamous Hildale and Colorado City area are using U.S. Dept. of Agriculture food stamps to feed their families (the average in Arizona is 6.7%, and in Utah 4.7%). The town of Hildale was also awarded $405,006 in federal housing grants to refurbish 19 homes on polygamist-owned land. Colorado City and Hildale rank among the top 10 in the Intermountain West in reliance on Medicaid and government-issued food.
Proving a polygamy case continues to be difficult, since most polygamist wives refuse to testify against men they consider as their husbands. Proving child rape is difficult because, as seen in the Green case, the parents agree to the illegal "marriages" of their children.
The children themselves have been taught from birth to blindly obey the dictates of their parents and sect leaders. Also, the girls are moved back and forth between compounds, thus making establishing the actual place of statutory (or actual) rape is difficult, because establishing the exact place where the act took place is necessary for prosecution. In addition, many of these child marriages are consummated in Mexico, where the majority of Arizona's and Utah’s polygamy sects have set up satellite compounds beyond the reach of U.S. jurisdiction.
Complicating the polygamy issue is suspicion that the polygamy compounds have stockpiled large caches of guns and explosives in various caves near the compounds. Few politicians want to face the prospect of another Waco. However, in some cases, Utah and Arizona county prosecutors simply decline to prosecute. In a front page article in the Salt Lake Tribune, published May 20, 2001, Mohave County (Arizona) Attorney William J. Ekstrom Jr., said, "We don’t view polygamy as a prosecutable crime. There is no driving desire to prosecute people for these types of things. We see it as consensual relations between adults."
Most women and girls in today's polygamy compounds are, like their predecessors, the victims of learned helplessness. Most are undereducated, have no job skills, no bank accounts, no property, and no income other than their welfare checks, which they hand over to their husbands. In the unlikely event they ever leave the compounds, they are poorly equipped to find jobs and support their children. The few women who have managed to leave the compounds usually leave their children behind.
The polygamists depend on public and governmental apathy in order to maintain their lifestyle. The only people empowered to change this state of affairs are the governors and attorneys general of Arizona and Utah, as well as the legislators of both states. In a Los Angeles Times article by Julie Cart, published Aug. 25, 2002, Arizona state rep. Linda Binder, an anti-polygamy activist, complained that her efforts to pass legislation curbing polygamy in Arizona has continually met with resistance from other elected officials. Binder said, "We have a situation here that is unconscionable. We have the Taliban in our back yard."
Additional information regarding polygamist abuses and current legislative activities can be found at www.polygamy.org a website founded by Tapestry Against Polygamy, an organization founded by women who have fled the polygamy lifestyle.