FLDS, Warren Jeffs, and Zion Ranch

This is goin’ to sort of be my first big, deep dive story. It's not a local missing persons’ case or an unsolved homicide but it is one that happened in Texas and is definitely in the realm of true crime. So for this week’s true crime story, I’ll be covering Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Because this requires a bit of a history lesson on the LDS church I’m gonna get into that for just a second, because I also think it's a good thing to be able to know how and WHY this FLDS is so different from the main religion, which y'all, it's just Mormonism. Last Podcast on the Left actually did a six part series on it which I thought was really good, so def give it a listen if you want a super in-depth version cause I’m just gonna give the information you need to understand where the FLDS is coming from.

Here we go. The original Mormon church was founded by Joseph Smith on April 6, 1830. He published a book called The Book of Mormon that was translated by himself from these golden plates inscribed with stories from American prophets. His mission was essentially to establish New Jerusalem in American and it would be called Zion. The next year his church began setting up in Jackson County, Missouri. And this is where he essentially wanted the church headquarters to be. But two years later in 1833, the locals ran them out and they weren’t able to get their land back. So they moved on to Kirtland where they built a temple and Smith had many new revelations, cause he is also a prophet by the way.

That ALSO didn't work out cause in 1838 they hit some financial trouble. Because of the steadily growing Mormon population, they had essentially established their own bank, but it was not totally legal and was quite literally an anti-bank. Essentially their paper money wasn't official and it was useless to anyone who wasn’t Mormon. So these folks essentially just handed their money to Joseph Smith.

When that got out Smith just left, and went to meet up with some of the church’s followers who had moved to Far West after they were initially run out. But folks still weren’t a fan of the Mormons and there were MANY violent conflicts with the settlers of Missouri. The state was beginning to get afraid that there would be a bigger issue so they ordered the Mormons to be "exterminated or driven from the State."

So once again they picked up and moved out and this time they established themselves in Illinois and established Nauvoo, the church’s new headquarters. Which during this time, the church is getting a fuckton of new followers. During this time Smith introduced polygamy to a close group of people, (it was something that a HUGE majority of the church didn’t even know was a thing and Smith himself had multiple wives but denied it), and established ceremonies that would allow righteous folks to become gods in the afterlife, and also created the Council of Fifty. It was their belief that Jesus was going to show up any day, and that they needed to set a sort of government council to help guide the Kingdom of God when it was time. Its actually a sort of in depth thing, but to hit the high points, Joseph Smith was the president, and under him was Brigham Young, and then under him was John Taylor.

But whaddya know, people love violence and on June 27, 1844, Smith and his brother Hyrum were murdered by a mob in Carthage, Illinois. Now this caused a problem cause those were both of the men in charge, but ultimately Brigham Young took Smith’s place. And there were a few groups that didn’t agree of course, so they just sort of left and did their own thing.

Tensions were still really high with the local pioneer population even after two years and before his death Smith had predicted that they should move west to the Rocky Mountains, so thats exactly what Young did. In 1847 they established what became the Utah Territory, the LDS church was established as a legal entity and was able to govern as a theocratic leader in this territory. He also fully established the practice of plural marriage.

10 Years later in 1857 the anger behind the theocracy and plural marriages set off the other American and the Utah Mormon War happened. It lasted a year and He eventually stepped down from power and was replaced by a non-Mormon. That's essentially it.

But wait, you say! How do we get the FLDS out of the LDS? Well in 1904 polygamy was officially denounced by the church president at the time, Joseph F. Smith, and eventually there was a policy put in place to excommunicate members who continued to practice polygamy and they eventually separated themselves into fundamentalist groups.

So in regards to the specific FLDS church in regards to Warren Jeffs, its first president was John Barlow. When he died in December of 1949, Joseph White Musser took over and he was still in charge when the Short Creek raid happened. Essentially with that, the government was tipped off and feared an insurrection so everyone in the place was arrested, about 400 people 263 of which were children, and out of that 150 were not allowed to return to their parents for two years if at all.

The next leader for the main FLDS church was Charles Zitting, he died, and Leeroy Johnson took over in 1986. Then HE died and Rulon Jeffs took over. He started getting sick and THEN his son, Warren Jeffs took over in 2002 when his father finally died. He gained the titles of "President and Prophet, Seer and Revelator" as well as "President of the Priesthood".

Following his father’s death he made a statement towards the other high ranking men of the church saying,” I won't say much, but I will say this—hands off my father's wives.” He also then told the widows, “You women will live as if Father is still alive and in the next room.” and in the following two week proceeded to marry all but two of them. Which by the way. His father had at LEAST 75 wives. ( and about 65 kids if you were wondering) There were two he did not marry. One of them wasn’t named but she just straight up refused and then was prohibited from every marrying again. The other, Rebecca Wall, actually left the compound entirely.

Some of Warren Jeffs’ 70 wives via The Sun

And in regards to the marriages, in this entire portion of the FLSD church it was solely up to Warren Jeffs to assign wives to these men and then DO the actual marriage. He also had the power to punish men by reassigning wives, children, and their homes to other men. He also specifically taught his church that a devoted man is expected to have at least 3 wives to get into heaven, and that the more wives he has the closer to heaven you’ll be.

So. Now we’re gonna get into the ore criminal history of Warren Jeffs, and big trigger warning for, essentially the rest of this story, child abuse and sexual assault, and just abuse and sexual assault in general.

So in July of 2004 Brent Jeffs, his nephew, filed a lawsuit that claimed that Warren Jeffs had raped and abused him, as well as his brothers and other family members when he was either 5 or 6 living in the Salt Lake Valley compound. Brent’s brother has also committed suicide shortly after accusing Warren Jeffs of sexually assaulting him as a child, and even two of Brent’s children had made similar claims publicly as well. Now I don’t actually know the direct results from this cause I;m mainly going off of the Wikipedia pages. But from what I can tell this is the beginning of the big snowball for Warren Jeffs.

Next year in June of 2005, Warren Jeffs was charged with sexual assault on a minor with conspiracy to commit sexual misconduct with a minor in Mohave County, Arizona. He had allegedly arranged a marriage in April of 2001 between a 14 year old girl and her first cousin who was 19, which by the way she was the younger sister of Rebecca Wall. She claimed that Allen repeatedly raped her and she miscarried often. But thankfully she was able to leave the community.

The following month, the Arizona Attorney General’s office started putting out posters for Warren Jeff’s arrest with a $10,000 reward.

Warren Jeff’s brother was actually arrested on October 28th when police were called about a possible drunk driver near Pueblo, Colorado at around 3AM. The brother, Seth, was actually asleep in the back but once the police realized who he was they got a warrant to search the SUV. And in it they found $140,000 in cash, a bunch of letters for Warren Jeffs, multiple cell phones, and $7,000 in prepaid credit cards.

The state of Utah had an arrest warrant issued for Jeff’s on the felony charge of being an accomplice in the rape of a girl between 14 and 18. A month later he was placed on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted with a $60,000 reward initially, but it was raised to $100,000 shortly after.

In June of 2006 Jeffs went back to Colorado City where he was doing more marriages, and two years later Smoking Gun released pictures of Warren Jeffs celebrating his one year anniversaries in ‘05 and ‘06 with his two underage wives. One of which was only 12 years old.

So thank fuck. In August 28th of 2006 at around 9PM, Jeffs was pulled over in Utah for the temporary plates on this vehicle not being visible. In the SUV was four computers, sixteen cellphones, disguises (wigs and shitty sunglasses) and more than $55,000 in cash.

This is how the charges and trials went.

Utah, two first-degree charges of accomplice rape, from 5 years to life. On Sept 25th he was found guilty and was sentenced to ten years to life and started his sentence in the Utah State Prison. However, on July 27th 2010, that was overturned because the Supreme Court stated that “the trial judge should have told the jury that Jeffs could not be convicted unless he intended for Elissa's husband to engage in non-consensual sex with her” She actually wrote a book after called Stolen Innocence about the whole thing.

Arizona, there were sex charges coming from arraigned marriages between three teenage girls to older men . On February 27th 2008 he entered with a not-guilty plea. But eventually all charges were dropped because the victims no longer wanted to testify. He spent two years in jail waiting for the trial, which by the way, was MORE time than if he would have actually been convicted and found guilty.

He was also waiting on pending charges in Texas, which I will get into now. Cause its a whole fuckin thing. So I think I mentioned it super briefly before but in case I didn’t. In Texas the FLDS church had a bunch of its followers that were getting away from Utah and Arizona move to a sort of secret community that Jeffs called Yearning for Zion Ranch. Which the people left cause of the media, but also because Jeffs suspended all further religious meeting but still let them pay tithes and offerings to him.

This ranch was home to about 500 people. The ranch has a temple, a waste-treatment facility,a 29,000 sqft house for Warren Jeffs, a meeting house, and several log and concrete homes. There were generators, gardens, a grain silo, and a quarry that was cut FOR the temple. This is all from like 2003 to 2005 by the way.

Yearning for Zion Ranch via San Antonio Express News

Well, on March 25th, 2008, a local domestic violence hotline got a call from a girl identifying herself as Sarah, a 16 year old girl who was claiming to be a victim of physical and sexual abuse at Zion Ranch. They eventually found out that the call actually came from an older woman named Rozita Swinton who had actually been arrested multiple times before for making hoax calls claiming to be abused women.

But fortunately Texas law enforcement and child welfare groups actually began cordoning off the ranch as of April 3rd. And enforcement showed up with the whole fuckin deal, a SWAT team, helicopters, an armored transport vehicle, and snipers. They were met with zero resistance.

According to a state spokesman they believed the kids “had been abused or were at immediate risk of future abuse.” And proceeded to search, literally everything in the ranch. And when they searched the temple they found beds and evidence that led them to believe that these were the places where the under-aged girls were being assaulted. But there was a religious scholar who later said in court that no no, the beds are there because their service can last a couple hours so they have em in case somebody needs to lay down.

When CPS was making statements in court they said that there was no evidence that the children under 5 were abused and neither were the boys. But they did say this about the girls. “There was a systematic process going on to groom these young girls to become brides” and from interviewing the kids they gathered that “... several underage girls were forced into 'spiritual marriage' with much older men as soon as they reached puberty and were then made pregnant”

After that there was a court order to remove all 462 children from the ranch. Most of them were held by CPS in Fort Concho and San Angelo. There were over a hundred women who left to go with these kids and the one under 4 were actually able to stay with their mothers until they finished DNA testing, but only the ones under 18 months could stay indefinitely. Eventually it could come out that CPS didn’t have nearly enough evidence to prove these kids were in danger or abused and they were returned to their families within 10 days.

So uh now I’ll just list the charges and convictions to come from all this. I;m getting it just from Wikipedia so bear with me as this is gonna be a wall of text on the site.

On November 10, 2009, Raymond Jessop was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $8,000 for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl on or about November 19, 2004.] On December 18, 2009, Allan Keate was sentenced to 33 years in prison. He fathered a child with a 15-year-old girl.

On January 22, 2010, Michael George Emack pleaded no contest to sexual assault charges and was sentenced to seven years in prison. He married a 16-year-old girl at YFZ Ranch on August 5, 2004. She gave birth to a son less than a year later. On April 14, 2010, Emack also pleaded no contest on a bigamy charge and received a seven-year sentence that will run concurrently with the sentence he received for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl.

A Utah court found Jeffs guilty of two counts of rape as an accomplice in September 2007. He was sentenced to imprisonment for 10 years to life but while serving this sentence at the Utah State Prison, Jeffs' conviction was reversed by Utah's Supreme Court on July 27, 2010 because of a flaw in the jury instructions. Jeffs was extradited to Texas, to face trial on charges facing him there. The Texas jury found him guilty of sexual assault and aggravated sexual assault of children. He was sentenced to life in prison plus twenty years, to be served consecutively, and a $10,000 fine, for sexual assault of both 12 and 15-year-old girls.

On March 19, 2010, Merril Leroy Jessop was sentenced to 75 years in prison for one count of sexual assault of a child. Jessop was convicted of illegally marrying and then fathering a child with a 15-year-old female

On April 15, 2010, Lehi Barlow Jeffs pleaded no contest to bigamy and sexual assault of a child, avoiding a trial that had been set for April 26. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.

On June 22, 2010, Abram Harker Jeffs was found guilty of sexual assault of a child.

On August 9, 2011, leader Warren Steed Jeffs was found guilty of one count of aggravated sexual assault of a child and one count of sexual assault of a child and sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years to be served consecutively.

During Warren Jeffs time in prison he tried to hang himself in 2007 and at some point got transferred over 100 miles from one hospital to another cause he got extremely sick. He also started long ass hunger strikes that he claimed were for religious reasons and in 2011 he was put into a medically induced coma after some excessive fasting even though a few years earlier a judge had ordered him to be force fed. In 2019 he had a mental breakdown that prevented him from giving deposition in court in a sex case against him.

If you need more of a reason to hate him, go check out the “views” section on his Wikipedia, he's a racist piece of shit and I’m not about to repeat any of it.

There is an abundance of accounts from folks who have escaped. There are dozens of interviews, books, you name it. They’re definitely worth looking into if you want to go on a full on deep dive with this topic.

Sources: Cults Podcast, Last Podcast on the Left, Biography, Wikipedia (1, 2, 3), Seattle Times Archive