Polygamist sect's arrival alarms Texas town
 
By Jean Marbella
The Baltimore Sun
 
ELDORADO, Texas -- The jokes have already started, in the cafes and on Main Street, but they draw more nervous laughter than actual merriment. Some men ask where they can apply to be a husband; others say, no thanks, one wife is trouble enough.

Polygamy is funnier from afar and less so with proximity.

This west-central Texas town is about to become home to about 200 members of a renegade Mormon group that, in defiance of the law, practices polygamy, with the men taking multiple wives and raising dozens of children under a single roof.

"Everybody's shocked," Jimmy Doyle, the justice of the peace, said with little exaggeration.

They've talked of little else in this remote town since private pilots such as Doyle began noticing some odd construction sprouting up on a former ranch just north of town. The ranch had been sold some months back to a man from Utah who said he was going to turn it into a hunting retreat -- but instead of a lodge or cabins that might be expected to house sportsmen, five large dormitory-style buildings have been built.

Residents began poking around, and someone noticed that the buildings looked much like those shown on a television report about a group called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or FLDS, the nation's largest polygamist sect with 10,000 members.

The group, which broke away from the mainstream Mormon church over the issue of polygamy, largely lives in the adjacent towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., where, increasingly, it has attracted unwanted attention from law enforcement officials and the media investigating charges of underage marriages, child abuse and welfare fraud.

Highly secretive, the group finally broke its silence here in Eldorado about a month ago, when four FLDS elders confirmed what the townspeople had already figured out -- that polygamists were moving in, practically next door.

The newcomers have not made many -- if any -- friends here in this town of about 2,000, where residents are offended both by the cloak of secrecy under which the group moved to town, as well as by its practice of multiple marriages.

"This is a small town, and it's scary for us that these people don't believe the same as we do," said Connie Andrews, a longtime resident who owns an insurance agency here. "If they were on the up and up, if they're not embarrassed of themselves, why don't they just say, 'This is who we are.' "

For months, all the residents had to go on was that the 1,400-acre ranch had been bought by someone named David S. Allred. They learned that he was a trusted lieutenant to the reclusive leader of the FLDS, Warren Jeffs, who imposes a highly restricted life on his followers: Women must wear old-fashioned dresses that cover them from neck to toe, children are home-schooled, and contact with the outside world via newspapers, television or the Internet is prohibited.

Most disturbingly, Jeffs arranges his followers' marriages, sometimes ordering sisters or mothers and daughters to wed the same man, creating highly entangled family trees.

"You end up being your own grandma," sighed Flora Jessop, a Phoenix-based anti-polygamist activist.

Jessop, who is one of 28 siblings in a polygamous family, escaped from the FLDS rather than be forced into marriage at age 16, and now tries to help other girls get out.

Until recently, the FLDS has largely been left alone in its remote locale north of the Grand Canyon, where the church is said to have gotten around bigamy laws by having the men marry only their first wives and then cohabit with subsequent ones. The communities run essentially as theocracies, with church members serving in all the official positions, such as mayor and sheriff, ensuring that the group is undisturbed.

But in recent years, alarming stories told by members who have left the groups have put into play numerous troubling allegations: that underage girls are forced to marry much older men who are sometimes their relatives, that the unofficially married wives have applied for and received millions of dollars of welfare benefits given to single mothers, and that sexual and physical abuse goes unreported within the closed society.

It is these reports that have so alarmed residents here. That and the fact that the newcomers don't seem to be shopping in town or otherwise getting acquainted -- highly strange behavior in these parts where the assumption is you'll introduce yourself and sit a spell.

Instead, as the buildings were being constructed and some of the church members started moving in, residents in town noticed that the newcomers seemed to go out of their way to avoid contact. Those entering and exiting the fenced-off compound would take circuitous back roads rather than the main gateway that puts them on a paved county road.

The FLDS is drawn to remote areas as a way of keeping members from easily escaping, Jessop said, and one of the many ways Jeffs maintains absolute control.

"He keeps control of the men with the threat of losing their families, and he controls the women by the threat of losing their children," Jessop said.

"Young girls get married off immediately, and if they can get these kids pregnant, they don't have a chance. Where do they go? They have a fourth- or fifth-grade education, how do you take care of yourself, much less a kid?"

Jeffs, who does not speak to the media, has been embattled of late. He took the church over from his father, Rulon Jeffs, after he died in 2002, and several recent events have exposed cracks in the normally united front that the church presents to the outside world.

This year, Jeffs expelled about 20 to 30 men from the community for reasons that have not been fully explained, and has been embroiled in a legal battle to evict them from their homes, which are considered church property. There has been talk that some of the men's wives and families have been transferred to other church members of good standing.

Facing internal and external problems at their home base on the Arizona-Utah line, the church may have turned to Eldorado at least temporarily, suggested Rod Parker, the FLDS' lawyer. "I see the Texas thing as more of a place to retreat from some of the pressure they're now under," Parker said.

Concerns over the secrecy surrounding the Eldorado site strike him as unwarranted.

"People buy property all the time without publicly announcing it," he said. "Why is it such a big deal? It's not like al-Qaida is moving in there."

The county sheriff, David Doran, has been trying to quell the anxieties among residents, urging them to take a wait-and-see attitude.

"It's got the community stirred up, but it's not as big a monster as the initial hype. It's a religious community coming in," Doran said. "We won't treat them any differently than anyone else. If we get a complaint, we'll follow up on it."
 
BaltimoreSun.com
Originally published June 5, 2004
 
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