| Polygamist charged in sex case Jeffs leads sect that is putting together Colorado compound | |||||||
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By Gwen Florio Rocky Mountain News | |||||||
COLORADO CITY, Ariz. - The reclusive leader of a breakaway polygamist branch of Mormonism - whose members are building a compound in southwestern Colorado - has been charged with felony child sex abuse. Authorities in Arizona last week indicted Warren Jeffs, 49, for allegedly arranging the "celestial" marriage in 2002 of a 16-year-old girl to a married man at least 10 years older. The charges are the first criminal complaints against Jeffs, who has not been seen since January, according to Andrea Esquer of the Arizona Attorney General's Office. Jeffs is the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, whose members are believed to make up the largest polygamist community in the United States. He exerts total control over his followers, according to law enforcement authorities and former members of the sect. It is Jeffs who determines who a man will marry and how many wives he'll take - and Jeffs who can order a man out of his own home and turn his wives and children over to other men, they said. About 5,200 of his followers live in Colorado City and Hildale, Utah, its twin town on the Arizona-Utah border. But sect members recently bought land in southwestern Colorado outside Mancos, west of Durango, and in Eldorado, Texas, where they are building compounds. Jeffs is the subject of a 2004 lawsuit by a former sect member accusing him of sodomy. Late last month, Arizona and Utah moved to freeze assets of a church-run trust that authorities believe may control as much as $100 million. About 200 of Jeffs' followers have moved to the Texas site, where they are building an imposing temple. Fewer are in Colorado, where they are constructing large, lodge-style homes, said Gary Engels, an investigator for the Mohave County Attorney's Office in Arizona. Most sect members live in this isolated high-desert community, where nearly all aspects of life are controlled by the church. Every member of the municipal government in Colorado City and Hildale is a member of the sect; so is every police officer, and every member of the public school administration, according to state investigators and former sect members. Some of them are polygamists, even though polygamy is illegal in Utah and banned by the Arizona Constitution. "They are a priesthood police with badges from the state," said John R. Llewellyn, a retired lieutenant with the Salt Lake County (Utah) Sheriff's Office, and a former polygamist who renounced the practice more than a decade ago. Mayor is suspicious The freezing of the group's assets and the indictment against Jeffs, as well as Arizona's recent move to take over Colorado City's public school, threaten to break the sect's implacable control. Nothing in those actions mentions polygamy. But many residents here believe that is the states' true focus. "They're trying to destroy it, just like they did in 1953," said Hildale Mayor David Zitting, referring to an ill-fated raid by Arizona authorities in which the community's men were separated from their plural wives and children. Zitting was 12 when he saw his father being taken away in the raid. Although the men were released after several days, Zitting's bitterness remains fresh a half-century later. "It was disgusting to a young boy to see something like that happening in America," he said. Even residents who are no longer members of the sect are wary of the states' motives in the most recent actions. Ross Chatwin was excommunicated from the sect last year after pursuing teenage sisters as plural wives without Jeffs' permission. He said the sect has repeatedly tried to evict him from his home, and suggested that his wife, Lori, and their six children, be reassigned to another man. She refused. But Chatwin said his beef is with Jeffs, not his faith or its practices. "We're not trying to destroy the whole polygamy thing," Chatwin said, as Lori - who often voices her wish for a "sister wife" - nodded emphatic assent. This community has been a haven for polygamists since 1926, when a handful of Mormons defying the church's ban on the practice founded a community they called Short Creek on the Utah-Arizona border.From its inception, isolation defined Short Creek. The copper-colored walls of the Vermilion Cliffs, which leap precipitously skyward behind the town, lend it the appearance of being nestled within a fortress. Salt Lake City, headquarters of the mainstream Mormon church that banned polygamy more than a century ago as a condition of statehood, is more than 300 miles away.On the Arizona side, the Mohave County seat of Kingman is almost as far because there is no direct route between Kingman and Colorado City. The Grand Canyon forces travelers to Kingman to detour through Nevada before returning to Arizona.Short Creek's remote location worked in its favor until the 1953 raid, which was prompted by allegations of plural marriage and welfare abuse. But the images of distraught wives and children being torn from their men prompted a backlash that cost then-Gov. Howard Pyle his re-election. The town, trying to escape the resulting notoriety, also changed its name to the present-day Colorado City and Hildale. However, the raid bought the community a few more decades of neglect by state authorities fearful of another public relations disaster. "Things were pretty much normal," said Benjamin Bistline, a former Colorado City resident who has written a history of the community. Sect members have become far more conservative in their appearance in recent years, Bistline said. The women of Colorado City and Hildale looked as though they've stepped back a century in time. Women and girls wear prairie-style long-sleeved dresses with wide shawl collars and full, ankle-length skirts over leggings and sensible shoes. Young girls fasten their hair in braids that swing to their waists; women wind the braids, crownlike, around their heads. Their dress and hairstyles make them instantly identifiable when they leave the familiar confines of Colorado City and Hildale to shop in surrounding communities. Many members expelled Richard Holm, whose father had 11 "celestial wives" and 60 children, remembers cruel comments about "pligs" - a derogatory term for polygamists - on the rare occasions when family members would troop into a restaurant. Holm said his father was one of the most respected men of the sect. That makes it all the harder for Holm to stomach his own fate under Jeffs. Holm, like Chatwin, is one of as many as 300 members expelled from the sect in the last seven years, according to an estimate by Engels, the investigator. Holm said he was caught flat-footed when he got a summons in late 2003 to meet with a church elder who informed him he'd fallen from grace and that Jeffs was reassigning his two wives (a third had earlier left him) and seven of his 17 children to Holm's younger brother, Edson. To this day, said Holm, he has no idea how he offended Jeffs. "It seemed like what the victims of the tsunami must have felt," said Holm. "I had trusted Warren. . . . But this was the beginning of my realization of what a devious (person) he is." Chatwin and others who have been excommunicated from the sect said they and their families are shunned by sect members - including their own relatives - who remain loyal to Jeffs. Chatwin's next-door neighbor put up a privacy fence after Chatwin got kicked out. "They don't want to look upon us anymore," he said. "We're such a disgrace." Antipathy toward apostates - those who leave the sect or are excommunicated - is so severe that about five years ago, Jeffs ordered church members to pull their children from the public school system so they would not come into contact with apostates' children. In two years, the population of the Colorado City Unified School District went from 1,300 to about 300, according to Mohave County Superintendent Mike File. But church members continued to run the school, approving the purchase of a $220,000 airplane, he said. By last fall, the district was so broke that teachers' checks bounced. The situation spurred a new Arizona law allowing state takeovers of school districts, with Colorado City being the first. Investigators have seized school records, but are finding the probe into the sect's finances more problematic. "We really don't know where the money is," said Esquer, of the Arizona Attorney General's Office. "I'm not even sure the IRS knows where it is." However, after the order freezing the trust's assets, large buildings began disappearing from sites in Colorado City and Hildale, where nearly all the land is owned by the church trust. Engels has tracked at least one dismantled building to another site in the community. Buildings aren't the only things that have disappeared. No one can find Jeffs. Schleicher County, Texas, Sheriff David R. Doran issued a statement Monday saying he'd been in contact with people at the Texas compound. "But there is no evidence or information indicating that Jeffs is on the property," he said. Engels said authorities in Colorado also had been contacted. Meanwhile, he said, the tension level in this community is palpable. "People here are very nervous," Engels said. "They seem to believe, he said, that "their way of life is going to come to an end." floriog@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2361 | |||||||
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rockymountainnews.com Originally published June 14, 2005 | |||||||
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