PrairiePundit

Independent on Sunday: First, they were instructed to disrobe. Then the women were given advice on how to keep their pubic hair neatly trimmed. Finally, Warren Jeffs informed them that their duties, as members of his private harem, thought to number more than 100 female members, of various ages, would henceforth include taking part in group sex sessions. "You have to know how to be sexually excited and to help each other. And you have to be ready for the time I need your comfort. This is your mission. This is how you abide the law," he solemnly informed them. "I need more than one wife to be with me at a time. [For] The Lord has shown me that, in heaven, the gods are with quorums of women when they conceive children." According to the prosecution at a trial in San Angelo, Texas, this week, not every member of the audience of this perverse sermon was a consenting adult. At least one of them was just 14 years old at the time of her "celestial" marri...

NY Times: One of the leaders of a polygamist sect was convicted Thursday night of sexually assaulting an under-age girl whom the church elders had assigned to him as one of his nine wives. A jury of seven men and five women deliberated 2 hours and 20 minutes before returning a verdict of guilty in first trial of a dozen members of the Yearning for Zion Ranch just outside this rural hamlet in West Texas. The defendant, Raymond M. Jessop, 38, seemed unperturbed as Judge Barbara Walthers of State District Court read the verdict. Mr. Jessop was immediately handcuffed and taken into custody by the Schleicher County sheriff. He smiled and nodded to several other men in his religious group who sat grave-faced as he was led away. Mr. Jessop will be sentenced after a second hearing before the jury on Monday. He faces penalties ranging from 2 years’ probation to 20 years in prison. ... The defense challenges to the DNA evidence that he had fathered a child with an underage "wife...

Times: A polygamist whose nine wives allegedly include three daughters and two sisters of the self-styled prophet of a Mormon sect became the first person to go on trial yesterday after a controversial raid on the group’s Texas compound. Raymond Jessop, 38, appeared in court in the small town of Eldorado 18 months after police raided the Yearning for Zion ranch and removed 439 children in the largest child custody case in US history. Mr Jessop is one of a dozen men in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) who face charges of child abuse, sexual assault and bigamy. ... According to documents seized at the ranch, he refused to take his under-age wife to hospital when she went into labour in August 2005 because he feared officials would discover her age and turn him in. The age of consent in Texas is 17. A journal written by Warren Jeffs, the sect leader whom members revere as a prophet, said: “I knew that the girl being 16 years old, if sh...

Houston Chronicle/San Antonio Express-News: A grand jury here indicted polygamist leader Warren Jeffs and five other members of his sect on felony charges Tuesday. Jeffs and four other members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints are charged with sexual assault of a child, a first-degree felony that carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. One of the other four faces an additional felony charge of bigamy. A sixth person is charged with failure to report child abuse, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said. Abbott did not name those besides Jeffs who were indicted. "There will be an aggressive effort to apprehend them," Abbott said about an hour after grand jurors filed out of their meeting room. Abbott would only divulge Jeffs' name because he is already in jail. ... I think the state has some documentary evidence in these cases. They should also have some DNA evidence. I suspect that the did not name the men who are not in custody i...

Houston Chronicle: Warren Jeffs, the jailed leader of the nation's largest polygamist sect under investigation for sex with underage girls, married off his 15-year-old daughter to the 34-year-old son of his chief deputy, according to pictures, diaries and a marriage record obtained Friday by the Houston Chronicle. In May, a series of similar scrapbook photos of young girls surfaced in court, showing very young girls in romantic kissing embraces with Jeffs, including a girl he married, who documents now indicate was 11 years old at the time. But the documents involving Jeffs' underage daughter show that marriages of teen girls were not customs practiced only by some, but included the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' leader, who sect members believe takes his orders directly from God. Last year, Jeffs was convicted in Utah on two counts of accomplice to rape for his role in forcing a 14-year-old to marry her 19-year-old cousin. The documents wer...

Independent: They call it the prairie look: big hair, long dresses, and any colour you like, so long as it's pastel. Now the women of a Texas polygamist sect are cashing in on their recent infamy by launching a children's fashion label. The austere clothes, first showcased when inhabitants of the Yearning for Zion ranch flounced up Eldorado's courtroom steps in an attempt to regain custody of 463 of their children, yesterday became available to the public through the organisation's online shop. Bestsellers in the range, which was inspired by America's 19th-century pioneers, are expected to include a "baby dress with bloomers," denim dungarees, and a modest long-sleeved dress for teenage girls. All are being hand-stitched to traditional standards in a factory set up by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). Although some outfits are destined for the fancy-dress market, the church's busin...

Houston Chronicle: At 21, Elissa Wall overcame her fear of losing contact with her family forever and endangering her immortal soul when she decided to help Utah prosecutors in their sexual abuse case against polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs — a man her church believes gets his orders directly from God. Wall is one of the few women who has gone up against the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the group that broke from the Mormon church more than 100 years ago and now sits squarely at the center of a Texas child abuse investigation. "One of the tenets you learn is that if you leave and you testify against the leaders, you are what they call an apostate and damned to hell," said Wall, who wrote Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs . "That's one of the biggest things, those mind hurdles. ... You have to get over this mind thing that you're going to h...

Houston Chronicle: Mother-and-child reunions continued around the state Tuesday but most families belonging to a polygamist sect are staying away from the windswept ranch they used to call home — at least temporarily. Only about a third of the families are expected back at the Yearning For Zion Ranch this week, said Willie Jessop, an elder with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a breakaway Mormon sect that believes in polygamy. The rest will remain scattered in houses and apartments in various locations for an undetermined time as they seek space and privacy to reconnect with their children. "They are taking the long way home," Jessop said in a phone interview. "We fully support them as they go and do whatever they need to do as a family trying to rehabilitate." Fear and bad memories are keeping the families from returning, Jessop said, though he added he believes that is what most want to do. Many are still working through the trauma...

Houston Chronicle: The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints made the startling announcement Monday that it will no longer allow underage girls to marry adults within their sect. The decision came on a day when 19 children at two Houston-area group homes were reunited with their parents, ending a two-month impasse between members of the polygamist church and Texas Child Protective Services over the future of more than 400 children. An investigation, meanwhile, continues into child abuse allegations at the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado. By day's end, 16 children had been picked up by their parents from the Jim H. Green Kidz Harbor home near Liverpool in Brazoria County and three from Boys and Girls Country near Hockley in Harris County. Eight remaining at Kidz Harbor and two at Boys and Girls Country will probably be picked up today, officials said. Edson Jessop, 51, stopped for a picnic in a Harris County park with his family and friends after he picke...

Houston Chronicle: The state illegally removed more than 400 children from their parents last month after raiding a polygamist sect's West Texas ranch, the Texas Supreme Court said today. The decision was a stunning victory for a group of the mothers who were represented by legal aid attorneys in their challenge of the largest custody case in Texas history. And it will make it much more difficult for child welfare authorities to continue their investigation into whether children were abused on the remote compound owned by members of a breakaway Mormon group known for its polygamist practices. Although the appeals decided today involved only 129 children, it is expected to apply to all of the children because of a San Angelo judge's global order last month that gave the state broad custody of minors taken from the Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado. The legal roller coaster started May 22 when the 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin ruled that state District Judge Barbara Walth...

Houston Chronicle: Her poise gone, Carolyn Jessop stood shaking slightly before the group of 50 or so foster care and social workers that she had come to advise. "I just can't believe they are just sending them back," she said, her tears now noticeable. "That everyone can pretend that the abuse didn't happen." Just moments before, Jessop had been fielding questions on everything from sartorial preferences to systems of power and dominance among the children born into the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, a polygamist sect she fled in 2003. Last month, worried about pervasive abuse, Texas child welfare workers raided the groups' Eldorado compound, sending about 460 young members into state custody and giving advocates such as Jessop hope that the fringe group might be nearing its end. Thursday, just as the mother of eight was winding up a half-day seminar on how to care for the most indoctrinated of the children, attendees began getting word...

CNN: The state of Texas should not have removed children it took from a polygamist sect's ranch because it didn't prove they were in "imminent enough" danger, an appeals court ruled Thursday. In its ruling, the Texas 3rd District Court of Appeals decided in favor of 38 women who had challenged the removals and appealed a decision last month by a district judge that the children will remain in state custody. "The existence of the FLDS belief system as described by the department's witnesses, by itself, does not put children of FLDS parents in physical danger," the three-judge panel said. According to the ruling, the lead investigator in the case alleged that the belief system facilitates a lifestyle in which "male children are groomed to be perpetrators of sexual abuse and the girls are raised to be victims of sexual abuse." An attorney representing the mothers said the trial court that originally backed the state's seizure of the childr...

Lionel Tiger: The desperate tragedy involving polygamous cultists in Texas has attracted a growing phalanx of lawyers, judges, law enforcers and assorted psychologists. Those responsible for coping with this astonishing disaster would be well-advised to add a primatologist to the team. The fact is that, despite all the blather about faith and freedom of religion, the men operating the various compounds in question are behaving in virtually the same manner as countless dominant males in countless primate troops observed over the years. The essence of the case is that the men who control the politics of the group (as well as the hapless women and children who live there) have used junk theology about heaven, hell, paradise and salvation to maintain their unquestioned access to all females of reproductive age (or younger). That's the reproductive fantasy of any adult male primate. In this blow to simple decency, the Texas polygamists are not pathfinders. Multiple wives are of cour...

Houston Chronicle: Ten "girls" taken into custody by Texas Child Protective Services have convinced the agency they are really adults and more are expected to be similarly reclassified this week, weakening the agency's claim that dozens of underage girls were forced by a polygamist sect to have sex with older men. On Tuesday, six more "girls" were deemed adults, including 27-year-old Leona Allred, whose lawyer insisted CPS knew from the beginning that her client was an adult. "My client showed them the same documents they showed them from the beginning: a valid Arizona driver's license and a birth certificate," said Andrea Sloan. Two others, Merilyn Jeffs Keate and Sarah Cathleen Jessop Nielsen, were reclassified as adults Monday as five judges began sifting through the cases of all the children taken from the Yearning For Zion Ranch in West Texas. Last week, the agency acknowledged that two "girls" who were among the more than 460 chi...

Houston Chronicle: A woman from a West Texas polygamist sect will be allowed to remain with all three of her children, not just her nursing infant, Child Protective Services said Thursday — the first sign the agency may be softening its approach in the massive custody case. Agency attorney Michael Shulman said temporary housing will be sought so Louisa Bradshaw Jessop can remain with her three young children. Until now, only mothers and their nursing infants have been kept together, leaving the vast majority of the sect's 465 children scattered across the state. "I just knew that the Heavenly Father would see us through," a relieved Jessop, who gave birth in Austin earlier this week to a boy, said by telephone Thursday. The Jessop children will not be released from state protective custody while investigators seek to determine whether underage girls at the Yearning for Zion Ranch, which is outside Eldorado and is run by followers of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Ch...

AP /WOAI: Behind guarded, ornate gates at the end of a rural road, a self-proclaimed prophet warns his followers about the end of time and rails against a dangerous and unclean world outside their West Texas compound. The women are covered in long skirts and long-sleeve shirts. Many of the children have different mothers and share the same father. But this isn't the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' ranch, which authorities raided last month in Eldorado after receiving reports that underage girls were being forced to marry much older men. This is the House of Yahweh: a different, even darker sect that the state has been investigating for years. Authorities in February charged the group's 73-year-old leader with performing polygamous weddings and forcing about 40 children - some as young as 11 - to work jobs at his 44-acre compound. "If a bunch of adults want to get together and follow some con man and throw their lives away, that's their r...

AP /MSNBC: Hand-scrawled bishop's records taken from a polygamist sect are helping untangle the spider-web network of family relationships at the Yearning For Zion ranch, where some husbands had more than a dozen wives. The bishop's records offer a peek into an intricate culture in which men related to the sect's prophet, Warren Jeffs, enjoyed favored-husband status in the distribution of wives and all young women were married by 24. An Associated Press analysis of the records, which authorities seized in a raid last month, show that by the time a girl reached 16, she was more likely to be married than to live as a child in her father's household. The same was not true for boys. ... The bishop's records, released by court officials last week, include 37 families totaling 507 individuals. At the time the lists were written from March through August of 2007, most of the people were living at the YFZ Ranch, though others were in homes along the Utah-Arizona line. Two-t...

NY Times: Utah’s attorney general, Mark L. Shurtleff, sat before a room of perhaps 400 people, most of them fundamentalist polygamists , at a town hall meeting here on Thursday night. He asked for a show of hands. How many people, he wanted to know, were related to the children who were seized last month in a raid in Texas in an investigation of possible marriage and abuse of child brides? Scores of hands shot up. Then Mr. Shurtleff asked his follow-up: How many of you would be willing to take those children into your homes? Without a moment’s hesitation, the same hands rose. “We think it would be wonderful if that were to happen, and we’re going to continue to try to encourage that,” Mr. Shurtleff said, as the room exploded with applause. The raid in Eldorado, Tex., was not formally on the agenda here, and neither was the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , or F.L.D.S., the sect at the heart of the Texas case. And never mind the question, for the moment,...

NY Times: As the supper dishes were being cleared away and the rice pudding brought out for dessert, Marvin Wyler’s two wives, along with some of their children and a group of friends, began poring over the list. The 44-page document, from a court in Texas , gives a glimpse of who is married to whom in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , or F.L.D.S. — and in the hothouse world of religious polygamy , a list like that is a sort of Rosetta Stone to the usually hidden relationships of power, politics and piety. “We are adding up the number of men who may be going to prison,” said Isaac Wyler, 42, the eldest of Mr. Wyler’s 34 children, who was examining the list on Sunday to see which men may have had wives under the legal age when they married. Scenes like this have played out in recent days in polygamist communities on the Arizona - Utah border as the marriage list and other records, seized last month from the polygamist sect in Eldorado, Tex., along with 46...

Ed Stoddard , Reuters: When a renegade Mormon sect was looking for a quiet place to live out its polygamous beliefs, it made a Texas-sized mistake when it picked this state to move to. Texas responded by raising the age at which children can legally get married with parental consent, and law enforcement agencies immediately put the sect in its crosshairs. The result was raids this month that left 463 minors in state hands or foster care. With judges saying they will hear abuse cases individually, the sect's practices are sure of thorough legal scrutiny. "They made a big mistake when they came here," said Harvey Hilderbran, who represents this part of Texas in the state legislature. "We didn't invite those folks to Texas but by God we expect them to obey our law." ... "With action being taken in Arizona and Utah, it seems like they decided to branch out," said Benjamin Bistline, a historian who has written about the sect in Ariz...