Enclave sits silent, but FLDS in eye of the storm
 
By Lee Benson
Deseret Morning News
 
SANDY — The gates are rusting, the grass is yellow and dead, the trout pond is stagnant, weeds are everywhere and the apple trees are loaded down with wormy apples.

What a difference six years makes.

You only have to go back as early as 2000 to a time when the five mostly abandoned acres here on Little Cottonwood Road housed the bustling polygamous compound lorded over by Rulon Jeffs, the man proclaimed prophet by members of the Fundamentalist LDS Church.

Jeffs and several of his followers, including anywhere from 20 to 75 wives (estimates vary), first settled into the mouth of what is arguably Utah's most picturesque canyon in the 1950s, gradually increasing in size and number until 7-foot-high concrete walls enclosed three large homes, two other buildings, the trout pond, the fruit orchard and a large garden. The compound had its own school, storehouse and a midwives' house for delivering babies. Theoretically, a person could live there until the end of the world.

Which is what Rulon Jeffs foretold, more or less, in 1998 when he prophesied that Salt Lake City and vicinity would be destroyed sometime after the commencement of the new millennium and sometime before the Salt Lake City Olympic Winter Games of 2002.

By the end of January 2000, the enclave was a ghost compound, evacuated like the Kansas prairie with a tornado on the way.

The Jeffs and everyone connected to them relocated 300 miles south to the polygamous border towns of Hildale and Colorado City on the Utah-Arizona border, joining some 10,000 FLDS faithful located there who rejoiced because they finally got their prophet full time.

Then they all hunkered down for the calamities sure to descend.

How were they to know they were to descend on them?

The travails of the FLDS Church in the new millennium are downright dizzying.

First, Rulon Jeffs died, at the age of 92, in September of 2002, six months after the end of the uneventful Olympics.

Not only did his death debunk a popular belief among FLDS faithful that "Uncle Rulon," as he was affectionately known, would never die, but it also ushered into power Rulon's son, Warren, who reportedly married several of his father's wives — thus becoming his own stepfather — and then set about excommunicating a number of high-ranking church officials, taking away their wives, their children and their homes.

Amid all this upheaval at the top, the church helped topple the Bank of Ephraim (it collapsed in 2004) by following Rulon Jeffs' counsel to "go out and borrow as much money as you can" because the world was coming to an end and it wouldn't have to be repaid.

As FLDS prophet, Warren Jeffs removed all FLDS kids from public schools (which caused the elementary school in Hildale to close), tightened dress codes (long pants and long-sleeved shirts for men; full-length dresses for women), increased financial obligations beyond the traditional 10 percent tithing, bought up property for FLDS outposts in Colorado, Texas, Nevada and South Dakota, and canceled church services on Sunday, telling people to only listen to instruction from him.

All of this radical activity succeeded in drawing attention to a place and to people for whom attention is as welcome as a brain freeze.

Before long, various FLDS men were charged with crimes of unlawful sexual conduct with minors, bigamy, misappropriation of public funds and so forth — all the things they had mostly gotten away with for the last 100 years.

By this past May, in what is believed to be a first for a proclaimed prophet of God, Warren Jeffs made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.

The hell-and-brimstone disciplinarian was caught wearing a T-shirt and shorts in a Cadillac Escalade outside Las Vegas a week and a half ago with $54,000 in cash, several cell phones and multiple wigs — and with just one wife.

I thought about all this as I walked past the old deserted compound in Sandy.

Who'd have thought that those quiet people who used to live here would move south and stir up so much trouble?

You cannot make stuff like this up.

Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.
 
deseretnews.com
Originally published Friday, September 8, 2006
 
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