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Texas Officials Take 401 Kids From Polygamist Leader Warren Jeff's Compound
Monday, April 07, 2008

April 7: Members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, walk along the grounds of their temporary housing, Fort Concho National Historic Landmark, in San Angelo, Texas.

ELDORADO, Texas  —  More than 400 children were taken into state custody as of Monday from a sprawling West Texas compound built by the polygamist leader Warren Jeffs, authorities said.

Child welfare and law enforcement officials had been interviewing more than 200 mostly women and girls who had been removed from the compound since a raid began on the reclusive sect last week, when a 16-year-old girl called to say she was being abused.

Authorities said they had 401 children in custody as of Monday afternoon.

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

Meisner said they have space for all the children who have been removed from the compound but "it's very tight."

Since Thursday, Meisner said, authorities have been searching the 1,700-acre compound 40 miles south of San Angelo "from house to house ... and we're getting close to being finished."

Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Safety, said the criminal investigation was still under way, but that charges would be filed if they 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.

The church members were being held at Fort Concho, a historic fort-turned-museum 40 miles away in San Angelo to be interviewed about the 16-year-old girl and whether, in fact, the 16-year-old girl was among them.

The search continued on Monday. Troopers arrested one person on a charge of interfering with the duties of a public servant, but it was not of Barlow, said DPS spokesman Tom Vinger, who had no other information about the arrest.

Vinger said it's not clear how many people live there; about 20 buildings have to be searched, including a large annex and a massive white limestone temple that rises out of the scrubby flat brushland, easily the tallest building for dozens of miles in any direction.

"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 usual," said 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 compound, built on a former exotic animal ranch that the group bought for $700,000, was built by Warren Jeffs, the jailed former leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The sect, an offshoot of the Mormon church which disavowed polygamy a generation ago, is concentrated in a community on the Arizona-Utah line but several enclaves have been built elsewhere, including in Texas.

Jessop said the move to more isolated locations after Jeffs took over for his father in 2002.

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.

FLDS church members began building the compound several years ago as authorities in Arizona and Utah began increasingly scrutinizing the group.

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.

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Officials contend polygamist site rife with sexual abuse
BY MICHELLE ROBERTS The Associated Press

    ELDORADO, Texas — A polygamist compound with hundreds of children was rife with sexual abuse, child welfare officials allege in court documents, with girls spiritually married to much older men as soon as they reached puberty and boys groomed to perpetuate the cycle.
    The documents released Tuesday also gave details about the hushed phone calls that broke open the case, by a 16-year-old girl at the West Texas ranch who said her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her. Days after raiding the compound, offi cials still aren’t sure where the girl is.
    Officials have completed removing all 416 children from the ranch and have won custody of all of them, Child Protective Services spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner told reporters in San Angelo, about 40 miles from the compound in Eldorado.
    Court documents said a number of teen girls at the 1,700-acre compound were pregnant, and that all the children were removed on the grounds that they were in danger of “emotional, physical, and/or sexual abuse.” Another 136 women left on their own.
    “Investigators determined that there is a widespread pattern and practice of the [Yearn for Zion] Ranch in which young, minor female residents are conditioned to expect and accept sexual activity with adult men at the ranch upon being spiritually married to them,” read the affidavit signed by Lynn McFadden, a Department of Family and Protective Services investigative supervisor.
    McFadden said the girls were spiritually married to the men as soon as they reached puberty and were required to produce children.
    An unknown number of men were being held at the ranch while authorities completed the search of the gleaming 80-foot-high temple, a cheese-making plant, a cement plant, a school, a doctor’s offi ce and housing units.
    Church lawyer Patrick Peranteau did not immediately return a call seeking comment Tuesday.
    The compound was raided Thursday after the 16-year-old girl called a local family violence shelter March 29 and 30, using someone else’s cellphone and speaking in hushed tones to avoid being overheard, McFadden’s affidavit said.
    The girl said she was not allowed to leave the compound unless she was ill. She told the shelter that her husband would “beat and hurt” her when he got angry, including hitting her in the chest and choking her while another woman in the house held her baby.
    The girl also said her husband sexually assaulted her, and that she was several weeks pregnant. The girl told the shelter her husband went to “the outsiders’ world” but didn’t know where.
    Authorities have issued an arrest warrant for church member Dale Barlow, who is believed to be in Arizona, but the girls’ husband is not identified in the court documents released Tuesday.
    In the March 30 call, the girl told the shelter she was being held against her will. If she left, church members told her, “outsiders will hurt her, force her to cut her hair, to wear makeup and [modern] clothes and to have sex with lots of men.”
    At the end of the call, she began to cry.
    Meisner said the agency still didn’t know whether the 16-year-old was among the children removed from the ranch. Child welfare officials have been interviewing the children in search of the girl and to investigate allegations of abuse.
    Investigators said some of the children were unwilling or unable to provide the names of their biological parents or identified multiple mothers.
    The boys were groomed to be ready to marry underage girls upon adulthood and engage in sexual activity, “resulting in them becoming sexual perpetrators,” the affidavit said.

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An anonymous phone call, triggers a government siege of a religious community.

Quoted from JoAnn

But for right now, this incident sickens me, if it is all true.

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Documents: Teens forced into marriage, sex
BY MICHELLE ROBERTS The Associated Press

    SAN ANGELO, Texas — Young teenage girls at a polygamist compound in West Texas were required to have sex in a soaring white temple after they were married in sect-recognized unions, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday.
    The temple “contains an area where there is a bed where males over the age of 17 engage in sexual activity with female children under the age of 17,” said an affidavit quoting a confidential informant who left the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
    Agents found a bed in the temple with disturbed linens and what appeared to be a female hair, said the affidavit signed by Texas Ranger Leslie Brooks Long. The Rangers are the state’s investigative law enforcement arm.
    The temple also contained multiple locked safes, vaults and desk drawers that authorities sought access to as they searched for records showing alleged marriages of underage girls as young as 12 or 13 to older men and births among the teens. The affidavit unsealed Wednesday mentions a 16-year-old girl who has four children.
    Texas law prohibits polygamy and the marriage of girls under 16.
    Also Wednesday, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers completed a weeklong search of the 1,700-acre grounds, said spokeswoman Tela Mange.
    Lawyers for the sect had wanted to cut off the wide-ranging search as it dragged on but agreed in court Wednesday to the appointment of a special master who will vet what is expected to be hundreds of boxes of records, computers and even family Bibles for records that should not become evidence for legal or religious reasons.
    Gerry Goldstein, a San Antonio lawyer flanked by nine other attorneys the church hired, said the search of the temple is analogous to a law enforcement search of the Vatican or other holy places. The church lawyers described in documents three men being dragged from the temple as law enforcement sought entry for the search.
    Troopers also arrested two men over the week and charged them with interfering with the search.
    Prosecutor Allison Palmer argued the search was to uncover any evidence of criminal activity, not to malign a religion.
    The search of the compound in Eldorado, 40 miles south of San Angelo, began last Thursday after a 16-year-old girl called a local family violence shelter to report her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her. The search warrant covered all documents related to marriages among sect members, including photos and entries possibly written in family Bibles.
    Since then, the state has taken legal custody of 416 children, who are being housed at two sites in San Angelo, about 200 miles west of San Antonio. Another 139 women voluntarily left the compound of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints — known as the YFZ Ranch — and were being housed with the children.
    Goldstein said a federal search warrant was issued as well as the state warrants.
    Outside court, Goldstein declined to comment on the allegations against the church.
    Court documents said a number of teen girls at the compound were pregnant, and all the children were removed on the grounds that they were in danger of “emotional, physical, and-or sexual abuse.”

Quoted from CICERO

Guilty until proven innocent.  You have already drawn an emotional conclusion based on the information the media has fed you.  This is the information they chose to feed you.  My point exactly.

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Officials say they had to wait to make move on polygamist sect
BY BETSY BLANEY AND MICHELLE ROBERTS
The Associated Press

    SAN ANGELO, Texas — It was no secret that a polygamist sect that built a compound in the West Texas desert believed in marrying off underage girls to older men. And the sheriff had an informant for four years who was feeding him information about life inside the sect.
    But authorities say their hands were tied until last week, when they finally obtained the legal grounds to move against the group.
    The trigger for the raid was a hushed phone call from a terrifi ed 16-year-old girl to a family-violence shelter to report that her 50-yearold husband had beaten and raped her. State troopers put into action the plan they had on the shelf to enter the 1,700-acre compound, and 416 children, most of them girls, were swept into state custody because of suspicions that they were being sexually and physically abused.
    On Thursday, state and local law enforcement authorities defended their decision to leave the sect alone for four years after it moved in.
    “We are aware that this group is capable of” sexually abusing girls, Sheriff David Doran said. “But there again, this is the United States. We are going to respect them. We’re not going to violate their civil rights until we get an outcry.”
    Doran said it was not until after the raid began that he learned that the sect was, in fact, marrying off underage girls at the compound and had a bed in its soaring limestone temple where the girls were required to immediately consummate their marriages. Also, investigators say a number of teenage girls there are pregnant.
    Authorities in Texas suspected there would be trouble ever since members of the renegade Mormon splinter group — the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints — bought an exotic game ranch in Eldorado in 2004 and began building the ranch.
    Warren Jeffs, the sect’s prophet and spiritual leader at its longtime headquarters in the dusty, side-byside towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., was charged in 2005 and 2006 with forcing underage girls into marriages there. He was convicted in September in Utah of being an accomplice to rape and is serving up to life in prison.
    Doran had been making occasional visits to the Eldorado compound — he even called to tell members of Jeffs’ capture in 2006 — but he said he saw nothing to warrant a criminal investigation. Most of those milling around the compound would scatter when he and a Texas Ranger visited, he said.
    “You can only press someone so far without having a criminal investigation going on,” the sheriff said. “This group doesn’t openly talk and they do not openly answer questions.”
    Doran said he had an informant who was “instrumental in teaching me the group’s ways.” But he declined to say whether the informant, a former sect member, was in Texas, or Utah or Arizona.
    Barry Caver, a Texas Ranger who sometimes went with Doran to the compound, said a general welfare check wouldn’t have produced much. “They would allow us on the property to the extent that we could talk to the main three or four people” only, Caver said.
    Texas Attorney General Gregg Abbott said that despite other states’ investigations into Jeffs and FLDS, Texas authorities had to wait until they had evidence of wrongdoing in this state to act. He said authorities handled the case properly.
    “You cannot go in and bust in someone’s house if there’s not probable cause to do so,” Abbott said.
    Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who has written about polygamy, said even Jeffs’ conviction was not enough to barge in on the sect in Eldorado.
    “You cannot use stale evidence,” Turley said. “They would need a contemporary statement or evidence at trial that an individual at the compound is practicing polygamy.”
    The man alleged to be the 16-year-old girl’s husband, Dale Barlow, is a registered sex offender who pleaded no contest to having sex with a minor in Arizona.
    “I do not know this girl that they keep asking about,” he told Utah’s Deseret Morning News on Wednesday. “And I have not been to Texas since I was a young man back in 1977.”
    Officials still have not identifi ed the 16-year-old girl among the children and the 139 women being held at two sites in Texas.
    “When you’re dealing with a culture like this, they’re taught from very early on that they don’t answer questions to the point,” Doran said. “All of that is certainly being sorted out right now.”
TONY GUTIERREZ/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Law enforcement vehicles are seen on the grounds of the “Yearning For Zion” Ranch, home of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Eldorado, Texas, this week. State troopers, Texas Rangers and other authorities completed their search Wednesday.

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Officials still have not identifi ed the 16-year-old girl among the children and the 139 women being held at two sites in Texas.
    “When you’re dealing with a culture like this, they’re taught from very early on that they don’t answer questions to the point,” Doran said. “All of that is certainly being sorted out right now.”

Quoted from CICERO

  If the government wants to find pregnant teens they should go to Schenectady High School.  Start yanking those kids out of their homes and see what happens.  

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Police face stumbling block in prosecuting sect members
Polygamists’ devotion to Jeffs may be big hurdle
BY CHRIS KAHN The Associated Press

    PHOENIX — Polygamous 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 Jeffs’ 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 tollfree 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.

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Mothers from sect seek help from Texas governor
BY JENNIFER DOBNER The Associated Press

    SAN ANGELO, Texas — The mothers of children removed from a polygamous sect’s ranch in West Texas after an abuse allegation are appealing to Gov. Rick Perry for help, saying some of their children have become sick and even required hospitalization.
    In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, the mothers from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints also say children are “horrified” by physical examinations they have undergone while in state custody.
    The mothers said the letter was mailed Saturday. Perry spokesman Robert Black said Sunday that he had not seen the letter and couldn’t comment.
    Some 416 children were rounded up and placed in temporary custody 11 days ago after a domestic violence hot line recorded a complaint from a 16-year-old girl. She said she was physically and sexually abused by her 50-year-old husband.
    The one-page letter, signed by three women who claim they represent others, says about 15 mothers were away from the property when their children were removed.
    “We were contacted and told our homes had been raided, our children taken away with no explanation, and because of law enforcement blockade preventing entering or leaving the ranch, we were unable to get to our homes and had nowhere to go,” it said. “As of Wednesday, April 9, 2008, we have been permitted to return to our empty, ransacked homes, heartsick and lonely.”
    The mothers said they want Perry to examine the conditions in which the removed children have been placed.
    “You would be appalled,” the letter said. “Many of our children have become sick as a result of the conditions they have been placed in. Some have even had to be taken to the hospital. Our innocent children are continually being questioned on things they know nothing about. The physical examinations were horrifying to the children. The exposure to these conditions is traumatizing them.”
    A judge will decide this week whether the children will remain in state custody or return to their families. Hearings are scheduled for today and Thursday.
    On Sunday, state officials enforced a judge’s order to confi scate the cellphones of the women and children removed from the ranch.
    The order was sought by attorneys ad litem for 18 FLDS girls in the state’s custody, said Marissa Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for Texas Child Protective Services.
    Reading from the court document, Gonzalez said attorneys reasoned that cutting off communications would “prevent the possible tampering of witnesses.”

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Mothers of sect’s children sent away
Huge child custody case a legal morass
BY JENNIFER DOBNER AND MICHAEL GRACZYK
The Associated Press

    SAN ANGELO, Texas — 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 childcustody 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,” Gonzales 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 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.
    Authorities ordered the children to be moved after 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 chicken pox, 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.”
    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 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 may hire lawyers, too, to 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 fi ve 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.

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Polygamous mothers decry loss of children; Texas says it was necessary
By Brooke Adams
and Kristen Moulton
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 04/15/2008 11:35:00 AM MDT

ELDORADO, Texas - Concealing their anger but not their tears, more than two dozen women of a polygamous sect told reporters they were surrounded by troopers and forced to leave their children in state custody Monday.
    In an extraordinary break from past reticence, the women met with reporters at the YFZ Ranch hours after leaving their children and accused the Texas Child Protective Services of lies and trickery.
    "They just as well line us up and shoot us as take our children away," said Donna, a 35-year-old mother who left behind a 10-year-old daughter. The women used only their first names.
    After a week's stay at two makeshift shelters - described by one woman as a
"concentration camp" - state authorities moved women and children to the San Angelo Coliseum on Monday, promising them they were being taken to a "bigger, better" place. They were told they would be reunited with other family members, the women said.
    Once at the coliseum, the women were separated according to the ages of their children.
    Mothers of those age 6 or older were herded into a room, each one flanked by a CPS worker. More than 50 troopers, according to the women, lined the room. The women were given a choice: return to the ranch or go to a domestic violence shelter.
    Their children, they were told, were no longer theirs. "They told us the state is in charge of them now," said Donna.
    "They wouldn't even let us go back and say goodbye to our children," said Sarah, who now has five children, ages 8 to 16, in state custody.
    Like many of the women, she wept as she spoke.
    Marissa Gonzales, spokeswoman for CPS, said 82 women remained Monday with the youngest of the 416 children taken from the ranch. She said 51 women returned home and six chose to go to a "safe location."
    Rod Parker, a Salt Lake City attorney representing the FLDS families, said no women went to the shelter.
    One woman said that CPS workers pressed the women to go to the shelter, assuring them they would see their children more often if they did.
    Donna said she didn't believe it. "We have not been able to trust anybody."
    State authorities raided the YFZ Ranch on April 3 after receiving a report from a local family violence shelter that a 16-year-old girl telephoned several times, claiming she had been abused by her "spiritual" husband.
    The women from YFZ Ranch said Monday the girl does not exist and the calls were a hoax.
"It is a bogus person. It is a person they made up. That person does not exist on this land," said Joy.
    Janet said no one has heard of the girl named in a search warrant. "She is a fictitious person."
    Another girl with a name similar to that of the girl in the search warrant was grilled for hours by investigators, Janet said. They kept telling her " 'You are this girl. Why don't you want our help?' " she said.
    State officials said Monday they still have not located the caller but are "hopeful" she is among the children in custody.
    Texas CPS say that because of a "pervasive pattern" of abuse and exploitation at the ranch, all children need to be removed.
    The women said no one is forced to stay at the ranch and that anyone can leave at any time, contrary to the state's contention that it is a closed, controlled community.
    Teenage girls were separated early on after the raid, and several mothers said that boys 12 and older were taken away Sunday. CPS said the boys have been moved to a facility "outside the area."
    One mother said she was asked if her two daughters, 15 and 16, were married or pregnant. She said no. The girls were given pregnancy tests, she said, and the results proved she was truthful.
    Asked if any teenage girls were pregnant, the women refused to answer.
     Monday evening, reporters were allowed to travel the half-mile dirt road onto the ranch and were escorted to a log building, where they were met by the women, whose faces were drawn and weary.
    Construction of the ranch began four years ago by members of the FLDS faith, most of whom lived in Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz.
    The women described how Texas Rangers and CPS workers came knocking on their doors and began removing their children 11 days ago.
    Sarah said she and her two teenage daughters were taken to a school building at the ranch, where authorities spent three or four hours questioning the girls. She has not seen the girls since.
    "We just want our children back, clean and pure," she said.
    While at Fort Concho, the woman said her 10-year-old son was asked by CPS workers if he was married and if he had ever been touched in "sacred" places.
    "He said, 'Of course not. That is a stupid question,' " Sarah said.
    Donna said that living conditions at the shelters became harsh Sunday when CPS confiscated the women's cell phones and forced even the smallest child to pass through a metal detector. Their bedding was searched, too.
    When they were hastily separated from their children on Monday, the women had to leave bags of belongings - including medication - behind.
    They described some of the CPS workers and troopers in tears as the women were loaded on buses that took them back to the ranch.
    "There were a few whose hearts were touched," said Mary, now separated from her 8-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son.
    "The truth is we need our children and our children need us," said Donna.
    Janet said her 11-year-old son was hopeful that the buses were taking them home.
    "The last thing my little boy said is, 'I just want to go home.' "

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Strip club fee found unconstitutional

    AUSTIN, Texas — A $5-percustomer fee on strip club patrons dubbed the “pole tax” has been declared unconstitutional.
    A state district judge ruled that clubs can’t collect the fee. The charge went into effect in January and was expected to raise about $44 million for sexual assault prevention programs and health care for the uninsured.
    Judge Scott Jenkins wrote in the March 28 decision that the fee, “while furthering laudable goals, violates the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and is therefore invalid.”
    The Texas Entertainment Association Inc., which is a group of topless clubs, and Karpod Inc., the owner of an Amarillo club, sued Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and Comptroller Susan Combs over the fee.

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Polygamy laws expose our own hypocrisy
By Jonathan Turley

Tom Green is an American polygamist. This month, he will appeal his conviction in Utah for that offense to the United States Supreme Court, in a case that could redefine the limits of marriage, privacy and religious freedom.
If the court agrees to take the case, it would be forced to confront a 126-year-old decision allowing states to criminalize polygamy that few would find credible today, even as they reject the practice. And it could be forced to address glaring contradictions created in recent decisions of constitutional law.

For polygamists, it is simply a matter of unequal treatment under the law.

Individuals have a recognized constitutional right to engage in any form of consensual sexual relationship with any number of partners. Thus, a person can live with multiple partners and even sire children from different partners so long as they do not marry. However, when that same person accepts a legal commitment for those partners "as a spouse," we jail them.

Likewise, someone such as singer Britney Spears can have multiple husbands so long as they are consecutive, not concurrent. Thus, Spears can marry and divorce men in quick succession and become the maven of tabloid covers. Yet if she marries two of the men for life, she will become the matron of a state prison.

Religion defines the issue

The difference between a polygamist and the follower of an "alternative lifestyle" is often religion. In addition to protecting privacy, the Constitution is supposed to protect the free exercise of religion unless the religious practice injures a third party or causes some public danger.

However, in its 1878 opinion in Reynolds vs. United States, the court refused to recognize polygamy as a legitimate religious practice, dismissing it in racist and anti-Mormon terms as "almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and African people." In later decisions, the court declared polygamy to be "a blot on our civilization" and compared it to human sacrifice and "a return to barbarism." Most tellingly, the court found that the practice is "contrary to the spirit of Christianity and of the civilization which Christianity has produced in the Western World."

Contrary to the court's statements, the practice of polygamy is actually one of the common threads between Christians, Jews and Muslims.

Deuteronomy contains a rule for the division of property in polygamist marriages. Old Testament figures such as Abraham, David, Jacob and Solomon were all favored by God and were all polygamists. Solomon truly put the "poly" to polygamy with 700 wives and 300 concubines. Mohammed had 10 wives, though the Koran limits multiple wives to four. Martin Luther at one time accepted polygamy as a practical necessity. Polygamy is still present among Jews in Israel, Yemen and the Mediterranean.

Indeed, studies have found polygamy present in 78% of the world's cultures, including some Native American tribes. (While most are polygynists — with one man and multiple women — there are polyandrists in Nepal and Tibet in which one woman has multiple male spouses.) As many as 50,000 polygamists live in the United States.

Given this history and the long religious traditions, it cannot be seriously denied that polygamy is a legitimate religious belief. Since polygamy is a criminal offense, polygamists do not seek marriage licenses. However, even living as married can send you to prison. Prosecutors have asked courts to declare a person as married under common law and then convicted them of polygamy.

The Green case

This is what happened in the case of Green, who was sentenced to five years to life in prison. In his case, the state first used the common law to classify Green and four women as constructively married — even though they never sought a license. Green was then convicted of polygamy.

While the justifications have changed over the years, the most common argument today in favor of a criminal ban is that underage girls have been coerced into polygamist marriages. There are indeed such cases. However, banning polygamy is no more a solution to child abuse than banning marriage would be a solution to spousal abuse. The country has laws to punish pedophiles and there is no religious exception to those laws.

In Green's case, he was shown to have "married" a 13-year-old girl. If Green had relations with her, he is a pedophile and was properly prosecuted for a child sex crime — just as a person in a monogamous marriage would be prosecuted.

The First Amendment was designed to protect the least popular and least powerful among us. When the high court struck down anti-sodomy laws in Lawrence vs. Texas, we ended decades of the use of criminal laws to persecute gays. However, this recent change was brought about in part by the greater acceptance of gay men and lesbians into society, including openly gay politicians and popular TV characters.

Such a day of social acceptance will never come for polygamists. It is unlikely that any network is going to air The Polygamist Eye for the Monogamist Guy or add a polygamist twist to Everyone Loves Raymond. No matter. The rights of polygamists should not be based on popularity, but principle.

I personally detest polygamy. Yet if we yield to our impulse and single out one hated minority, the First Amendment becomes little more than hype and we become little more than hypocrites. For my part, I would rather have a neighbor with different spouses than a country with different standards for its citizens.

I know I can educate my three sons about the importance of monogamy, but hypocrisy can leave a more lasting impression.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School.

Quoted from CICERO

Why isn't the media asking where the 16 year old girl is that made the phone call.  It's been 12 days and nobody's been arrested.  These libs in the media complain about Guantanamo Cuba and the detention of suspected terrorist, but are silent on 400 detained American children.

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Texas: What matters most is the evidence
Polygamous mystery: Does allegedly abused teen bride 'Sarah' exist?
By Brooke Adams
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 04/16/2008 10:19:42 AM MDT


FLDS women who were in state shelters with their children until Monday say investigators appeared desperate to find "Sarah" and were grilling girls by that name.
    There also are discrepancies between what the girl said about her "spiritual husband" and what is known about the man later named in the search and arrest warrant first used to enter the YFZ Ranch, owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
    
    Authorities say a girl named Sarah made a series of telephone calls to the crisis line at NewBridge Family Shelter on March 29 and March 30.
    In those calls, the girl talked of becoming the seventh wife of a 50-year-old man named "Dale" and conceiving her first child when she was 15, according to affidavits used to get the first search warrant. In a later call, she seemed to indicate he had three other wives living at the ranch.
    She described being beaten by her husband, once so badly she needed treatment at a hospital for broken ribs.
    The girl said she was pregnant and wanted to leave the ranch but had been warned of the dangers of the outside world and threatened with being locked up. She also said her parents, who lived out of state, were planning to send her younger sister to the ranch.
    Two women who have worked with teens leaving the FLDS sect - Joni Holm of Utah and Flora Jessop of Arizona - say Sarah is real.
    Holm said last week she has been in contact with people who know Sarah and believes she is among the girls now in state custody.
    "They just have to keep weeding through them," she said last week. Neither Holm nor Jessop returned calls from The Salt Lake Tribune on Tuesday.
    
    But there are some who believe the story of a 16-year-old victim sounds concocted, that
statements attributed to her don't ring true.
    "There is no verbage or terminology used that leads me to believe the statements were made by someone inside," said Ezra Draper of Hildale, Utah, who left the FLDS sect six years ago. "I think it's bunk."
    Examples: The term FLDS use to describe other people is "gentiles," not outsiders, and they don't observe such holidays as Easter Sunday, when the alleged victim claimed she was last beaten.
    Susan Risdon, the crisis shelter spokeswoman, said the calls to the shelter were not recorded but that the two employees who spoke with the girl wrote down what she said.
    "I think it's the exact language," Risdon said.
    He points out that only the most worthy among the FLDS were called to live at the ranch. Those "FLDS wouldn't have tolerated any abuse like that [the girl's broken ribs] within their society," he says.
    Draper also wonders how the girl knew to call the shelter, given the isolation and control that authorities say those at the ranch experienced.
    Rod Parker, a Salt Lake City attorney who is representing the FLDS families, said there are "sufficient questions surrounding the authenticity of that call that cry out for an answer."
    
    On Monday, hours after being separated from the children taken into state custody, FLDS women claimed authorities appeared driven to find Sarah.
    "They are trying to pin it on anybody named Sarah," said Annette, who is back at the YFZ Ranch after more than a week in custody with her six children and five nieces and nephews she is raising.
    Sarah is a common name and several are in custody, she said. One by one, the Sarahs have been interviewed, she said. "They find out and then let them go, then grab another one and try to find out and the let them go."
    "There is just not a Sarah that fits what they said," said Annette.
    Investigators have zeroed in on one Sarah in particular, Annette said. The girl, who has a 5-month-old daughter, is petite and looks young, so the investigators don't believe she is 18, she said. She declined to name the girl's husband, but said it is not Dale Evans Barlow, the Arizona man named in the initial arrest and search warrants.
    One night, shortly before midnight, child welfare workers came into the dorm where the mothers with small children were and told this specific Sarah that she and her baby had to leave. In a phone call later, Sarah told other mothers she and her baby were sent to a house, alone, at Fort Concho, Annette and other women said.
    On Tuesday, 51st District Judge Barbara Walther rejected an attempt by this Sarah's family to have her recognized as an adult so she could be represented by a private attorney rather than an attorney ad litem.
    
    Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said investigators are still looking for the 16-year-old who placed the calls, but she said she didn't know whether they have any good candidates.
    Texas Rangers interviewed Barlow on Saturday and Mange said they are still reviewing information he provided. She said Texas authorities are not ready yet to definitively clear him of any involvement with a 16-year-old girl in Texas.
    Barlow, who was convicted in Arizona of sexual misconduct with a minor in 2007, has said he does not know the girl and has not been to Texas since 1977 - claims backed by his attorney and his Arizona probation officer.
    A presentencing report prepared on Barlow by Arizona authorities states that he has three wives - all of whom, according to friends and family, live in Colorado City, Ariz. That contradicts the girl's description of his family.
    
    Some experts say it matters less if Sarah is never found or turns out not to exist.
    It is the strength or weakness of the state's evidence of alleged abuse found at the ranch that will matter when Judge Walther decides whether the 416 FLDS children will go to foster homes, they say.
    John J. Sampson, a University of Texas law professor and expert on family law, said those cases will focus on what investigators found once they were at the ranch.
    But if the state hopes to later bring criminal charges, they must find Sarah.
    "The problem for the state is this girl is the linchpin that holds together any criminal case against the group or even any individual," said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor.
    brooke@sltrib.com
    ---
    * KRISTEN MOULTON contributed to this story.
    

Quoted Text

Historic battle brewing in Lone Star state
Parents ready to defend a lifestyle they say is aimed at raising moral and pure children
By Brooke Adams
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 04/17/2008 02:40:44 AM MDT



SAN ANGELO, Texas - Both sides knew it was coming.
    When a polygamous sect began building a secluded community in west Texas, state authorities went to work on ways to shut them down.
    But no one predicted the clash would result in this: 416 children in state custody, authorities prepared to remake their lives and a long-silent people speaking out in a desperate bid for their children's return.
    Today, the Tom Green County Courthouse will be the setting for a historic hearing on the children's welfare. The state will argue parents belonging to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints put them at risk through physical abuse and socializing them into accepting early, illegal marriages.
    The parents will resist the state's attempt to make a single argument that envelops all the families, and defend a lifestyle they say is aimed at raising moral, pure and beloved children.
    "We want our families back and we want to be together again," said Nancy, 19, who said she spent 11 days in the shelter with a diabetic younger sister. "We want our children home."
    The state raided the sect's YFZ Ranch on April 3 after a 16-year-old girl called a family shelter for help. But authorities still say they have not found the girl, and the man she apparently accused of abuse remains free in Arizona, though authorities have not yet clearedhim as a suspect.
    On Wednesday, men and women on the ranch spoke in their own defense.
    "I pray and pray for Heavenly Father to intervene," said Lamar Johnson, whose five daughters are in custody. "My work needs to be within myself . . . to let him fight our battles."
    Utah and Arizona authorities are part of this chain of events. Beginning in the late 1990s, both states began prosecuting men who married, legally or otherwise, young girls and in ensuing years passed laws to curtail underage marriages.
    Sect leaders looking for safe haven thought they had found it in Texas, which back in 2003 still let 14-year-olds get married with parental permission.
    Texas also, unwittingly perhaps, engineered the landmark Lawrence v. Texas U.S. Supreme Court decision that said what adults do behind closed doors is no one's business.
    In 2003, Texas land was still affordable, so the FLDS bought a 1,700-acre spread outside Eldorado and began to build a small city where they hoped peace could reign and spiritual devotion increase. Its centerpiece: a limestone temple.
    Members "yearn to be here," said Janet, whose three children are in custody. "I want [people] to know we're so happy here and want to be free here to love God with all our heart and strength."
    Soon after their arrival, ex-sect members and child advocates provided a group portrait that was anything but pastoral, claiming systematic abuse was the norm in the FLDS. And one ex-member began feeding information to Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran.
    Pressure increased in the sect's home base of Utah and Arizona, which seized its $110 million communal property trust and began prosecuting men who married underage girls.
    Among those targeted: FLDS President Warren S. Jeffs, who is now in prison for rape as an accomplice for conducting such a marriage.
    In 2005, the Texas Legislature passed child protection legislation that included provisions targeting FLDS marriage practices.
    "The overwhelming majority of people in Texas want to prevent little girls from being forced to be married and forced into sexual relationships," said sponsoring state Rep. Harvey Hilderbran. "Our laws needed to be updated even if this group hadn't come to Texas."
    The changes raised the marriage age to 16, outlawed first cousin and stepparent marriages, made it a crime to officiate at illegal marriages and to enter a polygamous union.
    "This isn't a part of Texas values, having polygamy, bigamy and forcing marriage of teenage girls," Hilderbran said. "We didn't invite them to come here, but if they're going to come here, they've got to obey Texas law."
    One law is key here: Are girls age 16 or younger assigned in marriage as a matter of course? It's a question the FLDS deflect but that state authorities are determined to prove as fact.
    Salt Lake City attorney Rod Parker, who represents the FLDS families, said Texas has deceived the FLDS at every turn since entering the ranch two weeks ago - most hurtfully when it separated mothers from children on Monday. Now, he said, Texas "has an obligation to treat their people fairly. This is not about winning, it is about reaching a proper resolution for all concerned."
    A state lawmaker says that's the state's aim.
    "None of us like human misery," Drew Darby, of San Angelo, said Tuesday. "Nor do we like abuse of our children."
    At the YFZ Ranch Wednesday, the schoolhouse was empty. A woman stood on a porch, head hanging. For the first time in days, men resumed building a new home.
    "We're still depending on the same Heavenly Father to deliver us," said Gwendolyn, 80, who was 25 in 1953 when Arizona authorities conducted a similar raid aimed at wiping out the group. "I was numb the first time and I was numb this time, too."
    Lamar Johnson, her son, clutched copies of a letter written by his 8-year-old daughter, who is custody along with four older sisters.
    Dear Father, I love you. I miss you. I am doing very well. We need you. And we are praying for you. I love you, Avalon.
    "I miss my daughters," said Johnson, his face a portrait of anguish and frustration.
    brooke@sltrib.com

Quoted Text

Investigator says girls pregnant in polygamist sect
By MICHELLE ROBERTS, Associated Press Writer

SAN ANGELO, Texas - After hours of lawyers popping up with similar objections and questions, a custody hearing for 416 children seized from a polygamist sect finally turned to whether they were abused: A child welfare worker said some women at the sect's ranch may have had children when they were minors, some as young as 13.

The testimony came late Thursday, the first day of a court hearing to determine whether the children, swept up in a raid on the ranch two weeks ago, will remain in state custody. Child welfare officials claim the children were abused or in imminent danger of abuse because the sect encourages girls younger than 18 to marry and have children.

Child welfare investigator Angie Voss testified that at least five girls who are younger than 18 are pregnant or have children. Voss said some of the women identified as adults with children may be juveniles, or may have had children when they were younger than 18.

Identifying children and parents has been difficult because members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints have given different names and ages at various times, Voss said. The state has asked that DNA be taken from all of the children and their alleged parents to help determine biological connections. The judge has not ruled on that request.

The court hearing, which continues Friday morning, disintegrated into farce early Thursday, as hundreds of lawyers who descended on San Angelo for the proceedings shouted objections or queued up to cross-examine witnesses. The judge struggled to maintain order.

"I've tried to impose some structure to this free-for-all," said Texas District Judge Barbara Walther.

The case — one of the biggest, most convoluted child-custody hearings in U.S. history — presented an extraordinary spectacle: big-city lawyers in suits and mothers in 19th-century, pioneer-style dresses, all packed into a historic courtroom and an auditorium two blocks away that was patched into the proceedings by a grainy video feed.

The state wants to keep the children in its custody, and likely move them to foster homes while officials continue investigating abuse allegations. The state must provide evidence the children were physically or sexually abused, or are in imminent danger of abuse.

In 11 hours on Thursday, only three witnesses testified, including Voss.

As lawyers shouted, dozens of mothers sat quietly in their long cotton dresses and braided upswept hair. They were sworn in as possible witnesses at the hearing's outset, but it was not clear when they might testify.

In the satellite courtroom at City Hall, hundreds of people strained to see and hear a large projector set up on the auditorium's stage. But the feed was blurry and barely audible.

"I'm not in a position to advocate for anything," complained Susan Hays, the appointed attorney for a 2-year-old sect member.

No decisions were made on the fate of any of the youngsters, and more cross-examination of Voss was likely Friday.

The children, most of whom are being kept in a domed coliseum in San Angelo, range in age from 6 months to 17 years. About 130 are under 4 years old, Voss said.

She said she was concerned about how the children and women followed the orders of the church's prophet, identified as jailed leader Warren Jeffs.

"The children reported that if the prophet heard from the Heavenly Father that they were to marry at any age, they were to do that. If the prophet said they were to lie, they were to do that," Voss said.

Jeffs is currently awaiting trial in a Kingman, Ariz., jail on charges related to the promotion of underage marriages. He previously was convicted of being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old wed to her cousin in a Utah case.

The sect came to West Texas in 2003, relocating some members from the church's traditional home along the Utah-Arizona state line. Voss said the ranch was considered a special place, the sect's Zion.

Authorities raided the 1,700-acre ranch south of here in Eldorado on April 3 and began removing children while seeking evidence of underage girls being married to adults. Walther signed an emergency order giving the state custody of the children taken from the ranch.

The raid was prompted by a call from someone identifying herself as a 16-year-old girl with the sect. She claimed her husband, a 50-year-old member of the sect, beat and raped her.

The girl has yet to be identified, though Voss said a girl matching her description was seen by other girls in the ranch garden four days before the raid began.

___

Associated Press writer Jennifer Dobner in San Angelo contributed to this report.

Quoted Text

Polygamy Trail Leads to Colorado
Texas Rangers Take Part in Arrest of Woman Who Allegedly Made Hoax Call in Colorado
By JIM AVILA, TERI WHITCRAFT, REYNOLDS HOLDING, ANDREA BEAUMONT and SCOTT MICHELS
SAN ANGELO, Texas, April 17, 2008


Rangers participated in the arrest of a Colorado woman who allegedly pretended to be a girl locked in a basement. The Rangers were in the state as part of their investigation into the Texas polygamy custody battle, local police told ABC News.


It was unclear if the arrest was related to the phone call from a woman who claimed to be a 16-year-old girl, a phone call that sparked what has become one of the largest child custody cases in U.S. history.

Officials in Texas raided a polygamist compound and took 416 children into custody after an abuse hotline received a series of phone calls from the purported teen who said she was being held at the compound. The girl, who called herself Sarah, said she was being physically and sexually abused by her adult husband, court documents say.

Texas child protection lawyers have said they believe the girl does exist, even though they have not found her.

But ABC News has learned that Texas Rangers flew to Colorado Springs, Colo., and participated in the arrest of a 33-year-old woman who was charged with filing a false report.

The FBI also told ABC News it is assisting local police in the investigation. Colorado Springs police said in a statement that "The Texas Rangers were in Colorado Springs Wednesday as part of their investigation involving the compound in Texas."

Local police said Swinton had been under investigation for some time on that accusation, but police made an immediate arrest after the Texas Rangers became involved.

"This arrest stemmed from an incident that occurred in Colorado Springs in February of this year," Colorado Springs Police said in a statement. "The Texas Rangers were in Colorado Springs yesterday as part of their investigation involving the compound in Texas. They left and have not filed any charges on Rozita Swinton as of this time. "

ABC News was unable to reach Swinton or her lawyer for comment.

Swinton became a person of interest to Texas authorities when former Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints member Flora Jessop, who now operates a rescue mission for teenage girls trying to escape the sect, told authorities she had been getting calls from a girl claiming to be Sarah -- the same girl who made the call for help to a San Angelo, Texas, shelter that led to the raid on the El Dorado compound.

Jessop told ABC News that she -- at the direction of Texas Rangers -- began recording those calls in the past two weeks and that the Rangers were able to trace them to Colorado Springs, where the arrest was made.
Jessop's allegations could not be immediately confirmed by ABC News.

The Colorado Springs police gave no details about the Texas connection other than to confirm that the Texas Rangers were in on the arrest and helped with the investigation.

Quoted Text

Judge kept chaotic Texas polygamist abuse case on track
By MICHELLE ROBERTS, Associated Press Writer

SAN ANGELO, Texas - Most of the cases that come across Judge Barbara Walther's bench are quiet affairs: divorces, drunken-driving violations, the kind of small-time disputes that sprout in places where land and livestock are more plentiful than people.

But in the past two weeks, the no-nonsense state district judge has found herself at the center of one of the most convoluted, unruly custody cases in U.S. history, herding hundreds of lawyers while dozens of reporters camp out on the lawn of the historic columned courthouse that sits in the center of San Angelo.

Those who know her say Walther did what she always does. She needled yammering lawyers, refocused wandering questions and then ruled. No drawn-out testimony, no taking the case under advisement, no lengthy written ruling later.

After 21 hours of testimony over two days, Walther took a short break, then ruled Friday night. The 416 children taken from a polygamist sect and placed in state custody will stay there, she said. Walther also ordered all the children and parents involved to take DNA tests.

"She will rule, and that is something in a judge's personality that lawyers really appreciate," said Guy Choate, a longtime San Angelo attorney. Her attitude is, "I may be right or may be wrong, but I'm not uncertain."

Walther was the first Republican elected to cover the five-county area that includes San Angelo and sparsely populated adjacent counties, including the polygamist sect's Schleicher County, when she was elected in 1992.

She hasn't had an opponent since.

The 55-year-old comes from a longtime San Angelo family and is married to a prominent radiologist in the city of 90,000.

Walther survived the polio epidemic that slammed San Angelo in the 1950s, infecting the town's people at a rate of 1 in 124. She still wears a leg brace.

Her manner — that of a self-proclaimed "simple country judge" — helped control a chaotic case that includes hundreds of lawyers, one for each child and for the parents.

"We're going to handle this the best we can," she said at the outset of a hearing required to continue the state's temporary custody.

There were so many lawyers that an auditorium with a video link had to be added because the deep courtroom that sat roughly 200 people wasn't enough. Throughout the hearing, lawyers popped up from their seats to make objections, often simultaneously, and they queued up in the aisle or in the front of the auditorium for a chance to raise their objections or question witnesses.

It was often difficult to determine which attorney should be allowed to talk next, and at one point, she called on an attorney who wasn't objecting.

"This is like a cattle auction. If you scratch your nose, you bought it," Walther said to a chorus of laughs.

Walther peppered the hearing with humor, easing frustrated attorneys and nervous witnesses.

When one of the lawyers sniped that he didn't understand why another attorney was following a particular line of questioning, Walther quipped, "If I knew the purpose of any lawyer's question, I wouldn't be sitting here."

To get a soft-spoken mother in a pioneer-style dress to speak loudly enough for everyone to hear, Walther leaned toward the witness box and said, "Pretend you're yelling at a child far, far away." The otherwise stoic woman smiled.

Walther, who could not be reached for comment Saturday, has a lot of experience with family law cases. Before being elected in 1992, the Southern Methodist University law graduate served as a special master in family law, a position that allowed her to hear parts of family law cases in the place of a judge.

Choate, who isn't involved in the polygamist custody case but has tried other cases before Walther, said, "She was really made for this case and I thought did a terrific job under incredibly adverse conditions."

Still, Walther made it clear she doesn't want to preside over a similar circus in the future. The hundreds of children in state custody will get individual hearings before June 5 to determine whether they'll have to remain in foster care or have a chance to go home.

"Trust me," she said Friday. "I'm going to do everything I can to avoid a mass hearing in the future."

Quoted Text

How a hunting ground became polygamous nightmare
By TODD LEWAN, AP National Writer
Sat Apr 19,

The guy didn't look much like a hunter. He was beanpole tall — scarecrow-ish, some might say, with a high, collegiate forehead and a reluctant handshake. Even in a pearl-snap shirt and jeans, this cowboy somehow seemed better suited for a college lecture hall than a saddle.

Still, he wanted land — lots of it — for a corporate hunting retreat. Said he might build a lodge, to entice some big-roller clients of his in Vegas. North of town, the old Isaacs ranch — rocky and dotted as it was with rusty oil rigs, cactus and gnarled mesquite trees — caught his eye. It was plenty cheap, he said, and plenty remote.

But it didn't take long for the sheriff and everyone else in Schleicher County to figure out that their new neighbor, David S. Allred, president of YFZ Land, LLC, had much more on his mind than the hunting of whitetail.

After the closing in November 2003, dozens of Allred's associates arrived to make improvements on the property. Sunday to Sunday, day and night they toiled, completing three, three-story houses — each 10,000 square feet — within weeks. Soon, a cement plant shot up. Then fields of limestone were miraculously plowed into fertile farmland. And then, a superstructure unseen in these parts — a temple, masterfully clad with limestone quarried onsite — ascended into the west Texas sky.

And that, as it happened, was only the beginning.

The YFZ Ranch — which, as the townspeople would come to learn, stood for Yearning for Zion — would mushroom into a bustling, parallel city: a 1,691-acre, self-sustaining enclave carved, literally, into a rock pile for the innermost circle of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, FLDS, a 10,000-member sect that has continued to practice polygamy after it was banned by the Mormon Church in 1890.

Here, there would be enormous dormitories for enormous families, a cheese factory, a medical clinic, a grain silo, a commissary, a sewage treatment plant — and watchtowers with sentries, infrared night-vision cameras to monitor gated entrances, and 10-foot-high compound walls topped with spikes.

There would evolve a saga of "plural marriages," racism, underage "celestial" brides and allegations of child abuse, turning Eldorado upside down with frightening tales, rumors, and a flood of reporters and investigators. A raid on the polygamists' compound — the largest of its kind in more than a half century in the West, involving hundreds of law enforcement agents — would lead to the removal of 416 children and set up a child custody confrontation of unprecedented dimensions.

The episode would also fire up debate in the courts, and in this community of 1,951 residents, over the state's duty to protect children from alleged abuse and over the limits of basic constitutional rights like religious liberty and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.

In the end, the residents of Eldorado would lose a measure of their rural innocence and find themselves conflicted, caught between their love of traditional, family values and their powerful, west Texas beliefs in civil liberties.

___

On a chilly evening in January 2004, J.D. Doyle, a pilot, and his father, James, the local justice of the peace, climbed into their Piper twin-engine plane and took to the skies over Schleicher County to see if recent rains had greened the grazing fields owned by friends who were cattle ranchers.

But as they flew over the YFZ property four miles north of Eldorado, they noticed something different: Down below, jutting up between scatterings of cedar bushes and outcroppings of limestone, were three enormous, cabin-style barracks with enough room to accommodate two football teams.

What were those doing on a hunting retreat?

Later, they asked a friend, Joe Christian, a computer tech who lived adjacent to the YFZ ranch, what he made of it. Christian hadn't a clue, actually. His new neighbors had been reclusive, leaving him to puzzle over all that nonstop building. We should take some aerial photographs, he suggested; the Doyles agreed.

The photos intrigued Randy and Kathy Mankin, who published the town's weekly paper, The Eldorado Success, so they did a background check on the buyer, Allred. Initially, they saw no red flags: He was, as he'd claimed, a builder from Washington County, Utah. Still, why build such large residences on so remote a ranch?

Then, in late March, the paper got a call from Flora Jessop, an anti-polygamy activist from Utah who'd been raised in the FLDS and who, as a teenager, had run away from the sect. A polygamist group, she'd been told, was rumored to be establishing another enclave in west Texas.

In Randy Mankin's mind, polygamy had already taken its place on history's ash heap. But the caller wouldn't stop asking questions. When Mankin finally relinquished the name of the buyer, he heard a silence on the line, then:

"Oh, my God ... it's them ... "

___

"Them," Jessop went on to explain, was the FLDS, a renegade, splinter group of Mormons that by the 1930s were practicing polygamy (the ticket to heaven, followers believed) in secret ceremonies for "spiritual brides" that circumvented bigamy laws in the United States.

In recent years, sect members and their prophet, Warren Jeffs, were being investigated by authorities in the sister cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., for allegedly marrying off girls as young as 13 to much older men with multiple wives. Women and girls who fled the sect — and boys who'd been forced out or abandoned — told stories of forced marriages, incest and abuse; some who left called the FLDS a destructive cult.

The March, 25, 2004, story atop the Success' front page — "Corporate retreat or prophet's refuge?" — sent shockwaves up and down Eldorado's dusty streets. Everyone wanted to know: Were these outsiders like the Branch Davidians, whose compound near Waco was stormed in 1993, resulting in the deaths of 80 people?

Would they kidnap their sons and daughters? Brainwash them? Would they try to conquer Eldorado by ballot, voting as a bloc for judges, commissioners and school and hospital board members sympathetic to their ways?

At the local library, paperback, cassette and hardcover copies of "Under the Banner of Heaven," an unsparing look at similar sects, suddenly were in demand. The local paper featured articles almost every week on the FLDS, and posted online audio clips of Jeffs ranting in a steely monotone about the Beatles being covert agents of a "Negro race."

Locals, buzzing regularly over the property in their planes, snapped photos of FLDS women in long, pioneer dresses tending gardens, men digging small graveyards, erecting thick walls around their temple, and building enough dwellings to establish a mini-city.

"They never shut down," says Gloria Swift, who runs the Hitch'n Post Coffeeshop with her husband, Jerry, in town. "Even when you drive by that ranch at night, you see this glow of lights from the highway. They're out there with heavy machinery, building, 24 hours a day."

The sect's members, meanwhile, shunned nearly all contact with outsiders, including the media, insisting they wanted to be left alone to practice their religious beliefs in peace. The women didn't shop in local stores; the children were home schooled on the ranch.

As a group, sect members bought most of their merchandise in the much larger city of San Angelo, 45 miles up the road past sun-baked fields of cotton and mesquite trees. There, they shopped in bulk for warehouse staples, and were often seen at the Lowe's home-improvement store hauling away dozens of appliances at a clip.

When drivers waved to the men, who occasionally came to town in their trucks to buy propane, housewares or tools, they didn't wave back. They did maintain a cordial, if not friendly, relationship with Curtis Griffen, who ran Eldorado's only fuel depot with his father.

"They were always nice, polite," Griffen says. They bought thousands of dollars in fuel each month, always paying their monthly bills on time, in cash. "From what I could gather, they had no intention of creating problems here in town. In all my dealings with them, them seemed like any other regular customer."

Most other Eldorado residents, however, remained wary. Owners of neighboring ranches were warned to keep an eye out for young girls fleeing the compound. Some days the sheriff, David Doran, stood at the gates, in view of the sect's sentries, peering at the group through binoculars. (As time passed, Doran established a rapport with the sect's leaders; he was one of a handful of outsiders ever allowed inside before the raid.)

State Rep. Harvey Hilderbran became alarmed by reports from Eldorado, former sect members and the Utah attorney general. In 2005 he pushed into law a bill that raised the legal age of consent to marry in Texas from 14 to 16.

"Every now and then you'd hear something about alleged child abuse, but there was never any hard evidence of it," says Randy Mankin, publisher of Eldorado's local paper.

___

As the months passed without incident, the townspeople's' fear of the group morphed first into a generalized disgust of the sect's polygamous practices, then a morbid curiosity with the now-finished, gleaming white temple (which had 4-foot-thick outer walls of poured concrete), and its priesthood rites, marriage ceremonies and secretive ordinations.

When Jeffs, the self-styled prophet, predicted Armageddon in 2005, an Eldorado resident paraded in front of the ranch's outer gate in a grim reaper costume. Caps were sold in town with ELDORADO: POLYGAMY CAPITAL OF TEXAS stitched across them. A resident songwriter had a local hit with "The Plural Girl Blues," a tune about polygamy.

"People would stop each other on the street and ask, 'So, what's the latest on our polygamists?'" recalls J.D. Doyle, the pilot. "They'd ask, 'How many houses do they have now?' Or, 'Have you ever met one yet?' See, those people were like an itch on the back of your neck, and you needed a way to make light of it."

Gradually, interest waned, except for those times that reporters came to town, or when Jeffs made headlines in Utah with his legal troubles. (Last year, he was convicted in Utah for being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl for forcing her to marry her cousin.)

Indeed, the taxes the county collected from the YFZ ranch — the sect's property at one point was valued at $8 million — was a boon to a community of sheep and cattle ranchers and cotton farmers. And yet, the nagging doubts, the scuttlebutt and rumors about what was going on behind the fences and walls of the sect's compound wouldn't die.

A Mormon who had lived in town with his family for years moved away with his wife and children, after first writing a letter to the editor of the local paper which said the FLDS was not representative of mainstream Mormons.

"Those people came under false pretenses to our area," says Lynn Meador, 62, a local sheep and cattle rancher. "Even though they brought a lot of things to our community, I think people deep down were afraid this thing would end up like Waco. We were all just waiting for the other shoe to drop."

___

It came in late March, when a 16-year-old girl reportedly called a local domestic abuse hot line to report that a 49-year-old man had married her, impregnated her at 15, and beaten and choked her repeatedly, according to court documents.

In one of several phone calls to the hot line, the girl said her husband had broken her ribs. But church members had warned her to not to flee — otherwise she would be found and locked in a room, according to an affidavit signed by an investigator for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

On April 3, hundreds of agents — a SWAT team, FBI agents, Texas Rangers, San Angelo police, highway patrol, and sheriff's department officers from four counties — raided the YFZ ranch, backed by an armored personnel carrier, K9 dog units and ambulances. For six days they searched the compound for evidence of child abuse and illegal marriages, hauling away a cache of computers, photographs, and birth and marriage records.

According to other affidavits, investigators saw numerous underage girls who were pregnant, and took statements from others who told of entering into polygamous marriages in their early teens. They described finding beds on a top floor of the temple, including one that had what looked like a long strand of female hair.

The long-feared bloody conflagration didn't materialize. Tela Mange, a spokesperson for the Texas trooper and Department of Public Safety, said agents had been much more "diplomatic" with the sect that they have been in other raids. "Not a shot was fired," she said, "and there wasn't even a twisted ankle in this one." (She declined to say whether weapons had been found on the ranch.)

But the sight of the confused, anxious faces of women and children gazing out the bus windows as they were transported to local churches, then mass shelters in San Angelo, was enough to shake Eldorado's townfolk, and stir a debate over whether the authorities may have gone too far.

Some were uncomfortable that the 16-year-old who reportedly called the child abuse hotline wasn't identified. A man authorities thought could be her alleged abuser had not set foot in Texas in the last five years. No arrests have been made on any abuse charges in the compound.

Others wondered if it was legal for the agents to keep the sect's men in their homes the first 24 hours after the raid, without charges. Later, at the group shelter in San Angelo, authorities took the cell phones away from mothers who remained in contact with their husbands back at the ranch.

Since the women hadn't been charged with a crime, folks asked, did the police have that right?

"A lot of people here are starting to ask those questions," says Griffin, the oil dealer. "If those women weren't under arrest, how could the police do that to them?"

Others were less bothered by it. "It's about time they went in there and busted that thing up," says Lisa Lopez, a 43-year-old homemaker. "I couldn't understand how people in Eldorado could sit back and let them have sex with underage girls for so long."

You've got it all wrong, say the people of the YFZ ranch, finding their voices after years of near silence. Children were not abused here. Eldorado — indeed, all the outside world — does not understand.

"We are all Heavenly Father's children," says an FLDS mother of two boys, ages 11 and 14, who identified herself only as Brenda. "You have your religion. I have mine. You choose to live how you want. I choose how I live mine. Is this not freedom? Can't we choose?"

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Still, he wanted land — lots of it — for a corporate hunting retreat. Said he might build a lodge, to entice some big-roller clients of his in Vegas.

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They described finding beds on a top floor of the temple, including one that had what looked like a long strand of female hair.

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A child welfare worker said some women at the sect's ranch may have had children when they were minors, some as young as 13.

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ACLU joins debate about FLDS kids' custody
Also, a Utah man gets 1,000 signatures from people opposing the children's removal
By Brooke Adams
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 04/21/2008

SAN ANGELO, Texas - The ACLU of Texas has joined the debate over the removal of 416 children from a polygamous sect's ranch more than two weeks ago.
    And a Utah man has gathered 1,000 signatures on an online petition site from people who oppose the blanket removal of the children from the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado. That petition is on its way to Texas, said Connor Boyack, a political blogger. The petition is online at http://www.thepetitionsite.com
    /2/free-the-innocent-flds.
    In a statement released Friday, the ACLU said the situation has raised "serious and difficult issues regarding the sometimes competing rights of children and their parents."
    Judge Barbara Walthers ruled Friday that the state had proved all the children were in imminent danger of being abused or neglected by their parents, who are members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
    The ACLU issued the statement after listening to some testimony but before the judge issued an order continuing state custody of the children.
    "While we acknowledge that Judge Walthers' task may be unprecedented in Texas judicial history, we question whether the current proceedings adequately protect the fundamental rights of the mothers and children of the FLDS," Terri Burke, the ACLU's executive director, said in the statement.
    Connor Boyack, of Lehi, said his petition drive - which also cites constitutional rights - asks that the children be released and officials apologize for the "acts of aggression" against the FLDS.
    He posted the petition April 15 and five days later reached his goal of 1,000 names. About 75 percent of those signing identified themselves by name.
    Boyack is sending the petition to Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Commissioner Cockerell of the Department of Family Services, among others.
    "I don't expect too much to come of it," he said.

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Polygamist fashion in spotlight
BY HILLARY RHODES The Associated Press

    For a society accustomed to the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, the images of the women from the polygamist compound in Texas are almost shocking in their understatement: Ankle-length dresses, makeup-less faces, hauntingly uniform hair.
    And while no one would accuse the women of making a fashion statement, the pioneer-style outfi ts are a rare example of how in an age of overexposure, modesty, too, can give pause.
    The puff-sleeved, pastel dresses worn by the women in the sect are a combination of original 19th-century wear and 1950s clothing that was adopted when the church took a conservative turn, according to Janet Bennion, an anthropologist who studies polygamist women.
    The dresses are meant to show modesty and conformity: They go down to the ankles and wrists, and are often worn over garments or pants, making sure every possibly provocative inch of skin is covered.
    John Llewellyn, a polygamy expert and retired Salt Lake County sheriff’s lieutenant, says the women cover themselves “so that they’re unattractive to the outside world or other men.”
    The appearance of unity through uniform dress, however, can belie the jealousy that often arises when the women — who might all look alike to an outsider — find themselves in competition with one another over the affections of the same man, Llewellyn says.
    The clothing is also stitched with special markings “to protect the body and to remind you of your commitment,” Bennion says. She declined to go into detail about the stitchings because she said it would be an infraction against the fundamentalist Mormon community to talk about their sacred symbols.
    Pastel colors evoke femininity and don’t come across as bold or strong, says Bennion, a professor at Lyndon State College in Vermont.
    Then there’s the question of the elaborate hairdos.
    The women never cut their hair because they believe they will use it to wash Christ’s feet during the Second Coming, Bennion says. A Biblical quote says a woman’s hair should be her crowning glory.
    The bangs are grown out and rolled (but usually not using a curling iron, because that would be too modern). There are sausage curls on the sides and often braids down the back.
    The exact history of the hairstyle is unclear, but it is reminiscent of the Gibson Girl image of the 1800s. It’s a pre-World War II look, exaggerated with the pompadour, Llewellyn says. Chloe Sevigny’s character in the HBO show “Big Love,” about modern polygamist Mormons, has mastered the ’do.
    Celebrity stylist and salon owner Ted Gibson thinks it gives off a “homely” impression.
    “It says ‘I don’t really care very much. I really don’t have time to worry about the way that I look, because I have 20 children,’ ” Gibson said. “He’s going from wife to wife to wife, so why should I look any better than the other ones?”
    Still, it’s not outlandish to imagine the prairie look influencing today’s styles, given that trends can come from unexpected places, and Sevigny is known as a style-setter. You can already find blouses with high necks and ruffles in stores, and puffed shoulders on short and longsleeved shirts.
    Prairie skirts are in fashion this season, while dusty pastels and neutrals are being introduced to offset trendy bold colors and patterns.