Survivors recall polygamist sect raid
Some who lived at ranch where underage marriages were exposed say lives were saved
Around this time of year, attorney Carmen Dusek finds herself thinking about a woman named Merrianne.
Ten years ago, law enforcement officers and Child Protective Services investigators, acting on a tip, raided what was known as the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado, a small West Texas town, and found a scene that shocked the country.
The ranch was home to the most devout members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a polygamist group distrusting of the outside world led by Warren Jeffs. Among them were a dozen girls dressed in prairie dresses who had been married between the ages of 12 and 15, including Merrianne, who had been married to Jeffs.
The FLDS church swiftly built infrastructure for a community on its sprawling, 1,700acre former exotic-game ranch, which it purchased in 2004. Amid the desert landscape, there were orchards, log-cabin homes and a massive, shining white temple.
The April 3, 2008, raid resulted in one of the largest child welfare cases in Texas history, sparking controversy over whether and how the state could remove hundreds of children from their families without individual investigation. In an affidavit in support of removing the children, a CPS investigator said there was a “pervasive pattern and practice of indoctrinating and grooming minor female children to accept spiritual marriages to adult male members of the YFZ
Ranch resulting in them being sexually abused.”
In the days following the raid, state Child Protective Services removed 463 people who they believed were minors from the ranch. Seven of the girls married under 15 had children of their own. In all, 439 confirmed minors, including two born after the raid, were eventually placed in foster care until the state Supreme Court ruled on May 29, 2008, that the state had overstepped its bounds and ordered the children be returned to their parents.
“I don’t think any of us were prepared for the magnitude,” said Dusek, the attorney who organized the legal representation for the children.
For some in the FLDS church, what they saw and learned during the raid and subsequent criminal trials prompted them to break with the sect. But for an unknown number of others, some of whom are in hiding, their beliefs a decade later remain strong.
The state stopped tracking nearly all of the children that year. Only Merrianne remained in foster care longer than June, but Dusek does not know where she is now.
‘To protect the children’
Before the raid, little was known about the large complex that was being constructed outside Eldorado by members of an off-shoot of the Utah- and Arizona-based FLDS, which split from the Mormon Church decades ago after it renounced polygamy. Members were sometimes spotted in town, the women in their prairie dresses, but they largely kept to themselves.
Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran had built a relationship with some FLDS members. When he got the CPS call, based on a tip to a shelter from a teenager who never was located, the sheriff felt the situation was urgent, but he knew they had a good line of communication. He predicted they would resolve the situation quickly.
“It didn’t turn out that way,” said Doran, who still goes to the now state-owned property daily. “This has been a major part of my career.”
When the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services finalized its report in December 2008, it determined 263 children had been subject to neglect. Of the parents, 124 were deemed perpetrators. To help resolve the problems, 29 safety plans were signed, 170 parents attended eight hours of parenting classes, and 50 girls took four hours of education sessions on underage marriage and sexual abuse.
“In these cases, DFPS’s sole purpose was to protect the children, reunite them with their families when the children’s safety could be reasonably assured, and give those families better tools to protect their children from abuse or neglect in the future,” the report stated.
Separately, law enforcement saw 12 grand jury indictments of men that year, according to the report. The “prophet,” Warren Jeffs, was sentenced to life in prison following his 2011 conviction on child sexual assault charges. He declined a request for an interview, according to a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman, but former members say he continues dispensing orders from a lockup in Palestine.
The details of the life he created at the ranch were — and remain — shocking. But not even all FLDS members knew exactly what was going on there, including one of Warren’s half-brothers, Wallace.
Texas was described by “the prophet” as the place for elite and loyal people, said Wallace Jeffs, 57. To be invited was viewed as a great honor, even if it meant separating from family. It was also a matter of salvation: “If we weren’t called to Texas,” Jeffs said, “we were going to be destroyed with the wicked that year.”
Wallace Jeffs was exiled from the church — an experience that devastated him — then brought back before the raid. But he felt strange about the ranch. He was relieved when three invitations to go there fell through.
Only when Jeffs was cast out again in 2010, and he began to investigate what had happened at the ranch, did he find his suspicions confirmed.
“As far as my point of view of the raid, it was really the beginning of the end of Warren, and really of the whole church,” Jeffs said. “It was really what opened my eyes to what was really going on in the church”
He now calls the Texas property “Warren’s brothel.”
Leaving the ranch
Rachel Jeffs, a daughter of Warren Jeffs, first went to the ranch because her mother was there, dying. She, too, found it strange.
Rachel Jeffs alleged that her father sexually abused her between the ages of 8 and 16. Though they were taught the “prophet” could do no wrong, she knew he wasn’t a good person.
Her husband lived in South Dakota, but she stayed intermittently in her father’s house at the ranch. She remembers seeing him kiss the young girls he married. And still she didn’t know about everything going on. He stayed in his room for weeks at at time.
“It just made me sick,” Rachel Jeffs said. “I hated Texas.”
By the time of the raid, Rachel Jeffs had left the ranch. But some of her 52 siblings called her. They were sad to be apart from their children. They were unaccustomed to what they ate.
For the children in foster care, so much was unfamiliar. They startled officials when they awoke early, got dressed and tied on their shoes, as if getting ready to work. They had never been given toys. When asked about Iraq, one said, “Who’s Iraq?”
But they also had planned for this, in a way. They had been taught about the raid in Waco, where a siege on a Branch Davidian compound in April 1993 had ended in a fire and the deaths of about 80 sect members, including two dozen children. They expected to be persecuted.
Working behind the scenes was Rebecca Musser, who had broken with the church in 2002 at age 26. She had been in touch with law enforcement prior to the raid because she was trying to find a sibling. She agreed to help them with the raid. She feared it might trigger a mass suicide.
“I wanted things to change,” she said. “I was concerned for how they would respond to it.”
Some stayed still at the ranch, and life there became increasingly constrained by orders issued by Warren Jeffs from his prison cell. No sex. No hugging. No potatoes. No milk. They had to write Jeffs a letter every week. Rachel Jeffs was ordered to live alone — and she later decided she had tolerated enough.
Musser believes the raid has saved lives and credited the state for how they handled it.
“Texas had the guts to do what other states did not,” she says.
The evidence admitted into the record to her was the most powerful, allowing people to see for themselves what happened. All three former members quoted in this story have written books on their experience.
At the sheriff’s office, people who broke with the church after the raid occasionally stop by. The raid was controversial at the time. They tell the sheriff they are glad it happened.
But 10 years on, every April, Dusek wonders what became of Merrianne.