‘I genuinely believed I would be destroyed because my dad told me that constantly’ 10 years after Texas ranch raid, some of Warren Jeffs’ children are talking
ELDORADO, Texas – Until he was about 10, life had been good for Roy Jeffs, son of the president and prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
❚ Despite not having TV or toys — among the rules his father, Warren, put in place — he still had his family.
❚ Things started to change once his father began to separate him from the rest of the family and community, a tactic Jeffs commonly used to punish members he said needed to repent.
❚ The sect believes in plural marriage, which polygamists call celestial marriage. Texas authorities raided its compound April 4, 2008, taking 437 children into state custody after police received a tip alleging sexual abuse.
Roy first was sent away when he was
12, along with his mother, Gloria Barlow, and about seven more of Jeffs’ wives. At
14, Roy was sent to a ranch in Wyoming, this time without his mother, while the rest of his family lived on the Yearning for Zion Ranch about 5 miles northeast of Eldorado, which had a little less than
2,000 residents.
“I didn’t have other kids to grow up with in some of those crucial years,” Roy said. He has 54 full and half siblings.
Eventually, the teen received a call from his father, who was incarcerated after the raid on the sect’s compound, telling him his punishment had ended. He returned to YFZ Ranch but was allowed to stay only three weeks because he confessed that he was attracted to some of his father’s wives — those who were also 14 years old. Jeffs has up to 80 wives, including several who were married to his father, Rulon, who died in
2002.
By 2010, the teen was sent to the twin communities of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, where the FLDS church has its headquarters more than 250 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. In 2012, he was sent out to work.
“I was isolated from all of the family after that,” he said.
Roy was the first of Jeffs’ children to leave the church. It wasn’t until he did so in 2014 that he realized his father always knew what he was thinking because the boy was always confessing — not because Jeffs could read minds, as he told church members. The confessions were necessary, his father said, because if his followers didn’t confess, they weren’t being honest, and “that in itself is a sin. You’ve got to do it as an insurance policy,” said Roy, now 24.
By the time he left the church, he had not been allowed to see or speak with his mother for two years. They have not communicated for six years.
Repercussions of the raid
Roy sees a benefit to the raid that splintered his family in 2008.
His father wouldn’t be in prison without it.
Evidence collected in the raid included audiotapes of Jeffs having sex with several underage girls, and those tapes helped a San Angelo, Texas, jury sentence him to prison for sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl and a 15-year-old girl who he claimed were his spiritual wives.
Jeffs, 62, contends that he is still leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He will be eligible for parole July 22, 2038, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He is incarcerated in Palestine, Texas.
The commotion of the raid in 2008 briefly loosened Jeffs’ grip over church members, who were scattered around Texas for months. He had not banned Internet use — yet — but Roy said it was closely monitored before the raid, and very few people would have had phones with Internet access.
That changed after the raid. It “definitely opened our eyes to what the world was really like and that peace and happiness exist out here,” Roy said. “Without it, I don’t think this many people would’ve left.”
Roy’s brother Raymond, 23, has a tough time seeing the raid in a positive light.
Raymond said he agrees that the opportunity to be in the world showed that everybody outside the church wasn’t terrible. But the raid was traumatizing, turning the children’s strictly structured lives into chaos. For some members, it proved Jeffs’ warnings that the rest of the world wanted to persecute and ruin the church.
“It was scary. It was uncertain,” Raymond said. “We were told the world wanted to kill us, that people wanted to destroy us and our moral values.”
Disobedience equals damnation
Raymond, who was removed from the compound 10 years ago, left the church in September 2015 — the fifth of six children from his family to do so.
His younger brother, Issac, also was removed during the raid and left the FLDS church, joining Roy, Raymond and their three sisters. Isaac’s decision to leave was captured in an Aug. 28 episode of A&E Networks’ Escaping Polygamy.
“Growing up the way we did, we were very protected,” Raymond said. “We didn’t have access to anything outside of the land there and only really knew what we were taught by Father and the people he had telling us.”
Government involvement would not have stopped church members from doing exactly as their leader said, Jeffs’ sons said.
From his jail cell in San Angelo before his trial, Jeffs wrote to his followers: “Know I am soon to judge all in government positions of unrighteous persecution against my people, to show my will concerning present court persecuting power; which judge is now to be of my holy judging upon her and others who have mocked my holy religious and pure Holy Law of Celestial Plural Marriage in open court: let all such proceedings cease now!”
Jeffs said Jesus gave him 854 pages of revelations that he wrote down.
He instilled in FLDS members the belief that disobeying his orders would mean eternal damnation, causing a constant fear of being unworthy, Raymond said.
After the raid, Raymond was sent to Cal Farley’s Boys Ranch in Amarillo.
Roy said, “It definitely took a couple of years of thinking about it before I got the nerve” to leave the church.
He was working for a church-owned company building a hotel in downtown Des Moines. He hadn’t talked to his family in two years, didn’t get along with any of the other men on the job and hadn’t been paid for his work in months. “I felt super alone,” he said.
Yet he dreaded leaving the church. “I genuinely believed I would be destroyed because my dad told me that constantly,” Roy said.
Roy’s views began to change after his sisters told him their father had sexually abused them.
“The kind of pedestal I had him on kind of disintegrated,” he said.
Roy said his father also had sexually abused him, but he hadn’t thought of it that way until after hearing his sisters talk about their experiences.
“All of those years, I had thought that was my fault because of the way he did it,” Roy said. “Basically, he was like ‘Don’t ever do this,’ then he touched me.
“I felt like I was, somehow I had done something wrong from that early memory,” Roy said.
Raymond said the abuse of his sisters was the reason he left the church.
Leaving was “basically like going into a whole new world,” he said. It was “the freedom you never had: able to make your own decisions, do whatever you want without worrying about what people are going to say, not living in fear of being corrected or judged for what I do.
“I never want to go back to that lifestyle,” Raymond said. “I’m 100 times happier since leaving.”