Sect ‘used its temple for sex withchild wives’
By Tom Leonard
Daily telegraph, April 9, 2008
INVESTIGATORS searching the compound of a polygamous sect in Texas say they have discovered a bed inside its temple building that was reserved for men to have sex for the first time with their underage “wives”.
Girls as young as 13 were “spiritually married” — a process that has no legal binding — to middle-aged members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, according to officials who raided the Yearn For Zion ranch temple in Eldorado on April 3.
The girls were then required to have sex with their new husbands in a special area of the huge temple building, which dominates the 1,700acre site.
Agents found a bed in the temple with disturbed linen and what appeared to be a female hair, said an affidavit signed by Leslie Brooks Long, an agent with the Texas Rangers, the state’s law-enforcement arm.
According to the affidavit, which quotes an anonymous informant who left the sect, investigators also found documents showing that one man living at the site had 20 wives. It also mentions a 16-year-old girl who has four children.
The temple building “contains an area where there is a bed where males over the age of 17 engage in sexual activity with female children under the age of 17”, the affidavit added.
The authorities also want to open locked safes, vaults and desk drawers as they search for records that may show that unions with underage girls endorsed by the sect were the cause of multiple teenage pregnancies.
The state of Texas has taken legal custody of 416 children, including several pregnant teenagers, who were discovered at the ranch — which is run by a fundamentalist splinter group from the Mormon church — on the grounds that they are in danger of abuse.
The raid followed two calls from an unidentified 16-yearold girl to a local domestic violence shelter to say that her 50-year-old husband had raped and beaten her.
Texas law prohibits both polygamy and the marriage of girls under 16.
Lawyers for the sect had tried to stop the search of the ranch, which was completed on Wednesday, claiming that the raid breached US laws concerning religion.
Investigators will now sift through what is expected to be hundreds of boxes of records, computers and even family Bibles for evidence.
Gerry Goldstein, a lawyer hired by the sect, said the search of the temple was comparable to a trawl of the Vatican or other holy places.
The church lawyers claim that three men were dragged from the temple as officials tried to get in.
Allison Palmer, a prosecutor, said that the search was to uncover any evidence of criminal activity, not to malign a religion.
The ranch was bought in 2003 and built by Warren Jeffs, who considers himself the sect’s prophet and who was jailed for life last year for being an accomplice to rape.
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