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- [00:01]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi, listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to take a brief moment to tell you about a show from Crime House's sister studio, Rewind, that I know you'll love. It's called Government that Doesn't Suck, hosted by professors Lindsay Cormack and Greg Jackson from History that Doesn't Suck. Ever wonder how the weather forecast on your phone is so accurate? Or how your mail still gets across the country for less than a dollar? Or who actually built the highway you drove on this morning? Each episode tells the surpr of an American institution that you'll never look at the same way again. Listen to and follow Government that Doesn't Suck every other Monday on Apple podcasts and Spotify, or watch video episodes on YouTube.
- [00:55]
Crime House Announcer
This is crime house.
- [01:01]
Vanessa Richardson
What would you do if one man controlled your entire life? How you dressed? Where you lived? Who you married? Whether you reached eternal salvation? For thousands of members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, that wasn't a hypothetical. It was reality. In a handful of isolated towns along the Utah Arizona border, the FLDS prevention preached obedience, purity, and devotion. But behind the modest prairie dresses and the promises of heaven was a system built on one thing. Control. At the center of it stood Warren Jeffs, a man who claimed to speak for God. He used that claim to separate families, exile young men, and force girls into marriages they were far too young to understand. For years, all of it stayed hidden behind closed doors.
- [01:53]
Crime House Announcer
And.
- [01:53]
Vanessa Richardson
But once investigators started paying attention, the outside world learned just how dark Warren's kingdom really was. This is the story of how one man built an empire on faith and fear and how it finally came crashing down. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, A Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. These cases are wild, and I want to hear what you think at the end of each episode. Leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review and follow so we can continue building this community together. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crime House plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Before we get started, this episode includes discussions of child sexual assault and incest. Please listen with care Today we're tracing the rise and fall of the flds, a polygamist offshoot of Mormonism that turned remote towns in Utah, Arizona, and Texas into tightly controlled religious strongholds. For years, Warren Jeffs called himself the Prophet of the FLDS and presented himself as God's mouthpiece on Earth Earth. His followers were taught that the only path to heaven ran straight through him, and that devotion came at a devastating cost. A man who could lose his wife and children to another follower at a moment's notice. Anyone who questioned Warren could be banished from the only life they'd ever known, and the children growing up inside were pulled into a world of abuse. By the time law enforcement finally closed in, Warren wasn't just leading a church, he was rapidly running a cult built on fear, secrecy, and absolute power. So how did one man convince thousands of people that his crimes were divine? And how did a community built around faith become a place where abuse could hide in plain sight? All that and more coming up. We've all been there. You look up Suddenly life has thrown so much at you that your to do list is completely out of control. For was last month when I moved and I needed to install a cabinet in my bathroom and fix a broken light fixture, I knew just where to turn. Finding A tasker on TaskRabbit makes tackling your to do list even easier, and I honestly felt this wave of blissful relief watching a seasoned tasker handle it all in a couple of hours. 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That's $15 off your first task using promo code crime house with the TaskRabbit app or@taskrabbit.com there's never been a better time to get outside and experience the benefits of nature, discover nearby trails, and explore the outdoors with alltrails. Download the free app today and find your outside. Picture a crowd of women standing shoulder to shoulder. They're dressed almost identically. Long prairie dresses, hair swept up in the same careful style. Soft voices, careful smiles. Now add children. Dozens of them. Maybe close to a hundred. From newborns to teenagers. And almost every one of them shares the same father. That was life inside the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the flds. One powerful man could have dozens of wives, hundreds of children, and total control over where they lived, how they dressed, and who they married. At its peak, the church had as many as 10,000 members, most of them packed into a few isolated towns with smaller pockets scattered across the west and up into Canada. By the early 2000s, the man in charge was Warren Jeffs. But Warren didn't come out of nowhere. He inherited a system that had been built over generations, long before the FLDS even had a name. To understand how he got there, we have to go back to the very beginning of Mormonism itself. It starts in the 1820s with a man named Joseph Smith. Smith claimed to have a series of spiritual visions that led him to write the Book of Mormon, a text he believed would restore the original Christian church. In 1830, he turned that belief into an institution and founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Smith's church looked like Christianity in a lot of ways, but with some major differences. The biggest was his devotion to polygamy. More specifically, polygyny. One husband with multiple wives. At that time, polygyny wasn't illegal, but it was deeply polarizing. So Smith kept his behavior a secret. But in 1844, a local newspaper exposed him. In response, Smith had the printing press destroyed by his followers. He was arrested for inciting the riot and later for treason. And while he sat in an Illinois jail awaiting trial, a mob stormed in and shot him dead. But the church didn't die with him, and neither did polygamy. In 1852, Brigham Young, the church's second president, publicly embraced the practice and gave it a softer name, plural marriage. From then on, it was official doctrine. That declaration kicked off a decades long war with the US government. Between the 1860s and the 1890s, Congress passed a string of laws to stamp out the practice. They made polygamy itself a felony, and to make it easier to prosecute. They also made it a crime for a man to so much as live with more than one woman as a wife. None of that stopped the church from carrying out plural marriages. But eventually, the hammer came down. In 1887, the government passed a law called the Edmunds Tucker Act. It dissolved the Mormon church as a legal entity, which meant the government could seize its land and money. It was the idea behind it was to cut off the funds that kept the polygamous community running. It was a blow the church couldn't survive. So on September 24, 1890, its new president, Wilford Woodruff, issued a manifesto telling members to give up polygamy for good. But not everyone fell in line. To some believers, plural marriage wasn't just a practice. It was a direct commandment from God. They broke away from mainstream Mormonism and started their own fundamentalist movement. For more than 30 years, those fundamentalists were scattered and disorganized, still practicing polygamy behind closed doors, but with no real structure holding them together. That changed in 1929, when seven fundamentalist leaders met in Salt Lake City and formed a new governing body. They called it the priesthood council, and they claimed it could speak directly with God. That gave the movement the authority it had been missing. Now they just needed a place to call their own. They found it in Short Creek, a tiny community straddling the Arizona Utah border. The Arizona side would become Colorado city and the Utah side would become Hilldale. But together, they were one isolated institution. Insular world. It was rural and easy to overlook, which also made it a great place to break the law. By the mid-1930s, thousands of fundamentalists had moved there, hoping to live out their plural marriages far from the government's reach. About a decade later, a wealthy church leader and businessman helped broker a land deal in Short Creek. By the time it was done, the church controlled more than 85% of the land in town. And then, in 1942, leaders took it a step further and created the United Effort Plan Trust, the uep. The idea was simple. Residents got free land to live on, and in exchange, they pledged their loyalty to the church. In practice, whether or not you had a roof over your head depended entirely on your standing with the church leadership. But all that control couldn't make Short Creek, indeed, invisible. And the outside world was about to come knocking. The cracks had already started forming years earlier, back in 1930 five years before that trust was even set up, Utah had made polygamy a felony under state law. The old federal laws had mostly been aimed at the mainstream church, which had abandoned the practice decades before, this new one was aimed squarely at the holdouts, the fundamentalists who'd refused to quit. And eventually law enforcement came for them. In 1944, the FBI and Utah authorities raided Short Creek and arrested dozens of people. Fifteen were convicted, including five members of the priesthood council. Then came the raid that changed everything. Just before dawn on July 26, 1953, Arizona authorities, who had also outlawed polygamy, descended on Short Creek. They arrested 36 men, and they took 86 women and 263 children, busing them off to foster homes across the state. The men pleaded guilty to misdemeanors and were released, but the women and children were held for more than two years before they were finally allowed back home in 1955. To outsiders, it had seemed like a rescue mission until the images got out. Armed officers, sobbing children, mothers pulled away from their kids. Public opinion turned hard against the state, and within a few years, the families had drifted back to Short Creek. And in the end, the raid only made things worse. Inside the community, it proved exactly what the leaders had been preaching all along. That the outside world was hostile, dangerous, and out to destroy them. So they pulled back even further. They continued plural marriage, but became more secretive, more certain that everyone beyond their borders was an enemy. But the raid had shaken things up, and the group had a decision to make. The original priesthood council the leaders meant to govern together was aging and dying off, and a bitter fight broke out over what should replace place it. Should the group keep being run by a council of equals? Or should one man rule them all as a single Supreme Prophet? By 1954, that fight split the movement in two. The faction that wanted to keep a council broke off, moved away, and renamed themselves the Apostolic United Brethren. The ones who stayed in Short Creek who believed in a single ruling prophet and took a new name, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the flds. And before long, their new prophet stepped up, a man named Leroy Johnson. Johnson ran the FLDS with an iron grip. He alone decided who married whom, and he forbade boys and girls from so much as talking until he'd arranged their marriage. He seemed to take place pleasure in denying couples who actually wanted to be together, instead handing teenage girls to much older men who often already had a dozen wives or more. And he took that idea of a single ruling prophet to its logical extreme, a doctrine called one man rule. Johnson believed one man himself should control the entire church. So as the remaining council members died off, he simply refused to replace them eventually. He was the only one left when Johnson died in November 1986 at the age of 98. The fundamentalists needed a new leader and they turned to the same wealthy businessman who helped the church corner the Short Creek land and set up the uep. His name was Rulon Jeffs. Rulin kept one man rule firmly in place and declared himself the sole prophet of the flds. He was a true believer in plural marriage too. By this point he had dozens of wives and at least 60 children. One of those children was Warren Steed Jeffs. Warren was born prematurely in 1955 to Rulin's fourth wife, Marilyn Steed. He survived the early birth and slowly built himself into into a figure of authority. But not down in Short Creek. By his early 30s, Warren was living up near Salt Lake City, running an FLDS private school called Alta Academy. By all accounts, he was thin, soft spoken and cold. Then in 1998, Warren got a call from his father. Rulin wanted him to come down to Short Creek and help run the flds. Almost as as soon as he arrived, Warren pushed the church deeper into isolation. He banned radio and television. He ordered fences built around the six acre compound, not just to keep outsiders out, but to keep members in. By 2001, even with Rulin still alive, 45 year old Warren was already acting like the prophet. He delivered the sermons, he arranged the marriages. He was quick to cast out anyone who disobeyed. He was also incredibly cruel. Warren arranged the marriage of 14 year old Elisa Wall to her 19 year old cousin, Alan Steed. Alisa cried through the ceremony and later begged Warren to let her out of it. He told her that if she didn't stay and submit to her husband, she'd be condemned to hell. She said that Allen went on to sexually assault her and alleged that one assault was so violent that it caused a miscarriage. Marriages between cousins weren't unusual under Warren. In fact, marrying within such a small bloodline became so common that the short kriegeria ended up with the highest known rate of fumarase deficiency in the world. It's an extremely rare genetic disease, the kind that only takes hold when the same bloodline marries over and over. And it's devastating. Children born with it may have severe brain damage, profound intellectual disabilities and seizures. And many don't survive childhood. None of it slowed Warren down. He kept arranging cousin marriages and plural marriages right alongside his father until September 8, 2002, when Rulan Jeffs died at the age of 92. That left the entire FLDS in Warren's hands, he'd learned every lesson his father could teach him and was ready to turn it into something even darker.
- [18:35]
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- [19:03]
Vanessa Richardson
21/TNCS apply hi listeners, it's Vanessa Richardson on a special four episode Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crime series. I'm taking you to find four kinds of dream getaways that went from paradise to deadly A woman vanishes while snorkeling off Aruba. Two backpackers murdered on a moonlit beach in Thailand. An NBA champion who disappears off his own catamaran in the South Pacific. These were supposed to be the trips of a lifetime. Listen to our special Deadly Destinations series every Sunday on conspiracy theories, cults and crimes. Or if you don't want to wait, all four episodes are available right now ad free on Crime House Plus. To join Crime House plus, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or at crimehouseplus.com
- [19:55]
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- [20:29]
Vanessa Richardson
By 2002, Short Creek had become its own sealed off world. A place where one man's word decided where you lived, who you married, and whether you'd ever reach heaven. For years, that man had been ruling Jeff's. Now it was his son. And under Warren, life inside the FLDS was about to get much, much darker. The day after rulin died in September 2002, 46 year old Warren stepped into his father's place as prophet. No discussion, no vote, no mourning period. Not everyone accepted it Especially not the FLDS members who lived outside the tight knit Short Creek community. For years, that outside group had followed a bishop named Winston Blackmore. And when Warren took over, most of them sided with Blackmore. Warren responded the way he'd responded to nearly every threat. From then on, he made it disappear, excommunicating Blackmoore from the church entirely. Most of the outsiders left with Blackmore. But Warren wasn't worried, because he hadn't just inherited a church. He'd inherited a financial machine. His followers lived in homes owned by the UEP Trust, paid at least 10% of their income back into it, and handed over everything extra to Warren himself. In other words, he didn't just control their faith, he controlled the roof over their heads.
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- [21:57]
Vanessa Richardson
And he controlled the towns themselves. For decades, the FLDS had quietly taken over the local governments of Colorado City and Hilldale. The mayor, the city council, even the police were all church members. So in Short Creek, the prophet didn't just speak for God. He was the law. That let Warren think even bigger. The FLDS owned a couple of large construction companies staffed by boys raised inside the church. The boys weren't paid, so the companies could underbid everyone else and rake in profits. Then there was the welfare. A man could only legally marry one wife, so all his other spiritual wives counted on paper as single mothers with no income. That qualified them for government assistance. And about half of FLDS women at Short Creek collected it. The FLDS even had a name for the scheme. Bleeding the Beast. And every dollar flowed back to Warren. By the end of 2003, he was funneling all of that money into a brand new stronghold. More than a thousand miles from Short Creek, on nearly 1700 acres outside El Dorado, Texas, he built a gated compound and called it the Yearning for Zion Ranch. It was just as remote as Short Creek, but bigger and far more self contained. Ranch. Rows of enormous log homes, a dairy, even a cement plant. And rising above it all was a gleaming white temple. It was meant to be a refuge for his most devoted followers and conveniently, even harder for outsiders to reach. As his territory grew, so did his rules. Warren banned patterned fabric, the color red, and almost all music. The only songs allowed were tapes of war. Warren himself singing hymns. His sermons turned openly hateful. He preached that the devil worked through black people. That interracial marriage was evil, and that same sex marriage was worse than murder. Then, according to investigator Sam Brower, he ordered every dog in Short Creek killed. And that didn't mean a trip to the shelter. The dogs Were rounded up, hauled to a pit outside town, and electrocuted. And because the flds ran the towns, it was the prophet's own followers, the local police, who carried it out. But Warren saved his tightest grip for his own family. By the time he became prophet, Warren already had around a dozen wives. But soon after taking over, he made an announcement that stunned even people raised in polygamy. All of his father's wives were going to become his. Part of that was lust. Part of it was pure strategy. By marrying Rulon's widows, Warren absorbed his father's household, his status, and his power. And he moved fast. Within weeks, he'd married almost all of them. Everyone except his own biological mother and one woman who managed to escape. That made Warren the stepfather to many of his own half siblings, which tells you just how warped these family structures had become. From there, he pushed plural marriage harder than ever. He taught that a man needed at least three wives to reach heaven, and that the more he had, the higher his place in the afterlife. Women could only be saved through their husbands, and yet, almost no one ran. That's because for most of them, there was nowhere to go and no other life they'd ever known. Almost no one joined the flds. They were born into it. Raised from infancy to believe. The prophet spoke for God. Walking away meant losing your family and your soul in one move. And staying wasn't easy either. Parents and leaders enforced the rules harshly, sometimes through physical abuse, and children learned to fall in line fast. Girls were raised to see marriage and motherhood as their sacred purpose. By their teens, many were handed off to men Warren chose, often men old enough to be their grandfathers. Parents rarely objected, mostly because they were held responsible for their children's behavior. If a daughter resisted, the parents paid for it. And if a father refused to give up his daughter, Warren could take every everything. His home, his wives, his children, and his control reached into the most private corners of their lives, where his own rules didn't apply to him. He preached that selfish pleasure and anything homosexual could cost a man his place in the priesthood. But according to former members, he invoked a higher law of sarah that allowed him to subject his own wives, including underage girls, to group sexual training. Former members say women were pressured into sexual acts with one another to prepare to please the men at the top. A woman who refused could be cast out, her children handed off to be married or raised by someone else. And casting people out wasn't a rare threat. It was how Warren ran the church. In January 2004, four he expelled 21 men from the FLDS, claiming he'd had a revelation, that they were plotting against him. They were told to keep sending money from exile and maybe if they repented from far enough away, be forgiven. Only one ever was. The rest had their wives and children reassigned to men Warren favored. And there was a sickening bonus. Once a man took in another family or Warren let him marry his new stepdaughters too. It was a horrible, perfect engine of control. Warren could remove the fathers who challenged him, reward the men who obeyed, and place girls wherever he wanted. And while girls were traded like currency, teenage boys were treated like the competition inside the flds. Boys and girls weren't even supposed to look at each other, let alone talk. Officially, that was about purity. Really, it was about getting teenage boys out of the way so the older men could take young wives. And the math of plural marriage created a problem. As each older man took more and more wives, it left a growing surplus of young men with no one to marry. So the boys who didn't fit Warren's plan were pushed out. More than 400 of them were eventually exiled. The so called Lost Boys. Teenagers were dropped at a bus station or a roadside motel and told not to come back. With no money, no real education, and no idea how the outside world worked, some ended up sleeping in cars or on the street. But Warren's control over the girls inside was even more dangerous. FLDS leaders often sprang arranged marriages on them at the last century second, so they'd have no time to process what was happening to them. But one girl decided she'd rather risk everything than go through with it. 16 year old Vanessa Roebuck was told she'd been assigned to become the third wife of a much older man. She refused. Instead, she and her sister slipped away from the community. And Vanessa fell for a boy her own age. For a few weeks, she had something almost no FLDS girl ever got. A choice. It didn't last. One night, the young couple was followed, caught and dragged in front of Warren. When Vanessa said she wanted to marry the boy she'd chosen, Warren didn't just say no. According to investigator Sam Brower, he reached for one of the darkest doctrines in early Mormon history. Blood and atonement. The idea that some sins are so grave they can only be paid for with the sinner's own blood. The prophet had allegedly called for a teenage girl to be killed. But before he could make it happen, Vanessa ran again. This time all the way to an FLDS offshoot in Canada. For years, all of this had stayed sealed behind the community's walls. But that was about to change. The outside world was finally going to get a look. But behind the curtain. The first glimpse came just months after Warren took power. In October 2002, a Short Creek police officer was arrested for bigamy and unlawful sex with a minor. His name was Rodney Holm, and he was a faithful member of the FLDS. Years earlier, FLDS leadership had handed him a 16 year old girl named Ruth Stubbs as a police plural wife when Rodney was 32. In August 2003, Rodney was convicted on both counts and sentenced to a year in jail. Some thought that was way too light, but it was one of the first times the state had ever successfully prosecuted an FLDS member for bigamy. Then the accusations started coming from inside Warren's own family. In July 2024, his nephew Brent Jeffs filed a civil lawsuit claiming Warren had sodomized him at Alta Academy when Brent was just five years old. For someone raised in the flds, dragging the profit into court was almost unthinkable. It meant losing your family, your faith, and your whole world in one move. Brent did it anyway. A civil suit couldn't put Warren behind bars, but it put his alleged crimes on the public record for the first time. And Brent wasn't the last. More of Warren's nephews came forward, and years later, two of Warren's own children would accuse him of sexual abuse. By 2005, the walls were closing in. First Rodney's conviction, then Brent's lawsuit, and now criminal charges of Warren's own. Arizona indicted him on two counts. Sexual conduct with a minor and conspiracy to commit sexual conduct with a minor. The second count stemmed from him marrying off a 16 year old girl to an older married man. Instead of facing music, Warren simply vanished. That pushed the FBI to charge him with unlawful flight and offer a $100,000 reward for his capture. On top of that, the the state seized the UEP Trust, the foundation that owned all of the community's land, worth A staggering $110 million. But catching Warren proved easier said than done. He went underground, moving between FLDS safe houses, shielded by followers who believed hiding the profit was holy work. For more than a year, no one could find him. Then in October 2005, Warren's younger brother Seth was pulled over during a late night traffic stop in Colorado. When deputies searched the car, they found about $142,000 in cash and a stack of sealed envelopes, many addressed to the Prophet. It was obvious Seth knew exactly where his brother was. Prosecutors charged him with Harmony harboring a fugitive, and in 2006 he pleaded guilty and got probation. Seth never gave Warren up, but the cash and the letters told investigators something important. Warren's own family was bankrolling his life on the run. Around the same time, Utah added a charge of its own. Prosecutors went after Warren for rape as an accomplice for the marriage he'd forced on Alisa Wall, the 14 year old he'd handed to her cousin years before, and she wasn't staying quiet. Alisa had left the FLDS for good and was ready to testify against the Prophet in open court. That decision would come back to haunt him. But Warren's reach hadn't weakened a bit around then. The man who'd married the 16 year old girl was set to stand trial. Then at the last minute minute, she refused to testify. Her parents, other followers, and Warren himself had pressured her into recanting. So instead of the man facing justice, she was charged with contempt and he walked free. It was a chilling reminder that Warren's power didn't depend on him being anywhere nearby. Even in hiding, he could reach into every corner of his followers lives. But he could only stay hidden for so long because after years of acting untouchable, the law was finally closing in on Warren himself. What's the business idea you've been putting off because it feels too complicated? Shopify is the ultimate excuse killer, designed to help you start your business with every necessary tool ready on day one. Taking the leap is a big deal, but Shopify makes it incredibly simple. 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- [36:47]
Vanessa Richardson
by the summer of 2006, Warren Jeffs had been on the run for more than a year. He was wanted in two states for arranging marriages between underage girls and grown men. He'd been added to the FBI's most wanted list, sharing that page with the likes of Osama Bin Laden. And there was a reward out for his capture. But in the end, it wouldn't be the FBI that brought him down. It it would be a routine traffic stop. On August 28, 2006, 50 year old Warren was cruising down Interstate 15 just outside Las Vegas when a Nevada trooper pulled him over. It was a small thing. The license plate on his SUV wasn't properly displayed. Warren gave a fake name and had a paper receipt with the alias printed on it, but no actual ID to back it up. That was enough to make the trooper look closer. Inside the car, the officer found stacks of cash, a pile of cell phones and a couple of wigs. The road kit of a man who'd spent more than a year on the run. It was all the trooper needed. This was the man from the wanted posters. After years of claiming to speak for God, Warren Jeffs was arrested on the side of the highway, undone by a bad license plate. Three days later, at a hearing in Nevada, he agreed to be extradited to Utah. But here's the thing. Warren didn't dig in. Behind bars, he came apart. While awaiting trial, Warren began to spiral. He fasted for weeks at a time and prayed so intensely that he developed ulcers on his knees. At one point, he even tried to hang himself at the aptly named Purgatory Correctional Facility. After the suicide attempt, doctors found he was suffering from malnutrition, sleep deprivation, and dehydration. By the time his Utah trial began on September 11, 2007, he'd lost 30 pounds. The charges came down to one young woman, Elisa Wall. Warren had forced her into marriage at 14. Now that she'd grown up and left the FLDS, she took the stand to testify against the prophet who had shaped her entire childhood. Prosecutors argued that Warren didn't have to lay a hand on her to be guilty by forcing her into that marriage. Pressuring her to stay and selling all of it as the will of God. He'd acted as an accomplice to the assault that followed. The jury agreed. On September 25, 2007, Warren was convicted of two counts of rape as an accomplice and sentenced to two consecutive terms of five years to life. That same day, he resigned as president of the flds corporation and let a man named wendell neilson take over. But the flds's real day of reckoning was just beginning. On April 3, 2008, Texas authorities entered the yearning for zion ranch, Acting on a call from a teenager who said she was being physically and sexually abused. By then, hundreds of the most devoted flds families had relocated from short creek to the texas compound. And over the next week, authorities took more than 400 children into custody. They bust them to a shelter in nearby san angelo, where the state started running DNA tests just to sort out who belonged to who. It became the largest child custody case in u. S. History. Investigators also hauled away hundreds of boxes of evidence tied to warren and other flds men, including marriage records for girls as young as 12. But the raid got complicated fast. That desperate teenager didn't exist. The call had come from rosita swinton, A colorado woman with no ties to the flds and a history of phoning in fake abuse reports. For weeks, hundreds of children sat in state custody, separated from their parents, while the courts argued over what to do with them. Then the texas supreme court ruled there hadn't been enough evidence to remove them in the first place. And just like that, they were loaded back up and returned behind the gates. It was a near perfect replay of 1953. Hundreds of children almost pulled out of danger, only to be returned. And for flds members, the lesson landed exactly the way it had half a century earlier. It reinforced the idea that the outside world was dangerous, the government was the enemy, and only the profit could keep them safe. Still, the raid gave investigators a real edge. They'd recovered a mountain of evidence showing exactly what the flds men had been doing. Courts later ruled the search warrants were valid, and prosecutors used what they found to charge warren and several other men. This time, texas wasn't backing down. On July 22, 2008, Warren was indicted in texas on sexual assault charges built from the ranch evidence. Several other flds men were also charged with crimes ranging from sexual assault of a minor to bigamy and failure to report child abuse. And one by one, they were convicted. Raymond Jessup got 10 years for raping his 16 year old spiritual wife. Alan Kate was sentenced to 33 years after fathering a child with a 15 year old girl. And Meryl Leroy Jessup received one of the harshest sentences of all 75 years for raping a 15 year old. But Warren's own case kept twisting. In Arizona, he faced charges related to the underage marriages of three girls, but only all three refused to testify after relentless FLDS pressure and the state had to let him go. Then his 2007 Utah conviction was overturned on a technicality involving the jury instructions. For a moment, it looked like Warren might slip away entirely. But in reality, every road was leading back to Texas. With Utah's conviction confirmed gone and Arizona's charges dropped, Texas was the only state left that could prosecute him. On July 28, 2011, Warren went on trial for two counts of sexual assault of a child. He'd hired a team of high profile attorneys, then at the last minute made a bizarre choice to represent himself. Not that he did much defending. He gave no opening statement and didn't cross examination a single witness. He mostly just sat there while prosecutors laid out the evidence. Photos of him kissing underage girls, DNA proving he'd fathered their children, and audio of him raping a 12 year old. When the state finally rested, Warren rose to speak. But instead of defense, he delivered a rambling half hour sermon on religious persecution, insisting he was being punished for his faith. The jury wasn't moved. In less than four hours. They found him guilty on both counts. Then came the sentencing, and the case turned personal. His own nephew, Brent Jeffs, took the stand, telling the jury what he'd first put in a lawsuit years earlier. He said Warren had raped him as a child and called it the will of God. Warren responded with a threat. He warned that God would unleash a whirlwind of judgment on the court if it dared to punish his prophet. The threat fell on deaf ears. The jury sentenced him to life in prison, plus 20 years. But prison didn't end Warren's reign. In some ways, it just handed him a new, new stage. From behind bars, Warren kept running the FLDS through letters, phone calls and messengers, even though for a few years, legal documents still listed Wendell Nielsen as the church's president. Then, in January 2011, Warren pushed Nielsen out and made it clear that prison hadn't changed anything. He was still the prophet. And his rules only grew more extreme. He excommunicated another wave of members and banned sex outright. In 2012, he kicked out 50 people for breaking that ban, accusing them of using birth control to hide Their disobedience. Then came one of his most disturbing orders yet. Warren handpicked 15 men and commanded them to father children with with all of the women, including women, already married to other men, every other man in the community was forced to become a caretaker for those children or risk excommunication. At least 200 members walked away, and they were just one wave. Warren's escalating demands kept driving people out, shrinking a church that once had as many as 10,000 members down to a a fraction of that. But for those who stayed, life only got worse. One former member described husbands being forced to sit in the room and watch while the chosen men, the seed bearers, raped their wives. As of this recording, Warren Jeffs is still in prison. But many FLDS members still see him as their prophet, a man wrongly convicted. Some have stayed on the Texas ranch, tucked behind its gates, deeply suspicious of anyone on the outside. Others have scattered across the country to avoid attention, keeping in touch with Warren over zoom. His brother Lyle acts as a kind of go between, carrying Warren's messages back to the faithful. And his son Helaman has stepped up as another authority figure, reportedly officiating hundreds of people polygamous marriages himself. The patterns keep repeating. In 2019, an FLDS member named Samuel Bateman broke away and declared himself the prophet of his own splinter group. The apple didn't fall far from the tree. Bateman took more than 20 wives, 10 of them underage girls. In 2022, police pulled him over and found three young girls locked in an unventilated trailer. That arrest unraveled everything. He was later convicted of conspiracy to kidnap and transport a minor for sex and sentenced to 50 years. Still, Bateman was just an offshoot. The main church, the one Warren built, is still very much alive, albeit smaller, more scattered, and harder to track. But almost every piece of Warren's system is still intact. The secrecy, the control, and the belief that one man can wrap abuse in the language of God and call it salvation. And behind those gates, kids are still raised to see a man in a Texas prison cell as the closest thing they'll ever have to God. Maybe that's the most chilling part. Warren Jeffs was caught, convicted, and locked away for life. But his cult was never really about one man. It was about the walls that kept the world out and the children who were taught to trust a prophet over their own parents. And unfortunately, the FLDS is far from the only group to hide child abuse behind the COVID of faith. In Cult Watch this week, I'm highlighting Lev Tahor an ultra Orthodox Jewish sect that former members and the media have long described as cult like. Like the flds, it's accused of using religion to control every part of members lives, separating the sexes, enforcing extreme modesty, even putting girls as young as 3 in head to toe black coverings. But the most disturbing parallels involve children. Lev Tahor has faced allegations of child abuse, child marriage, kidnapping, trafficking and sexual assault. In one case, members were charged after a 14 year old girl was taken out of New York and out of the country to reunite her with her adult husband. And like Warren Jeffs, Lev to Horsley have responded to outside pressure by running. The group has bounced from Israel to the US and Canada, and most recently to Central and South America. In December 2024, Guatemalan authorities raided a Leb Tahor compound and removed 160 children and teens on suspicion of abuse and neglect. And in late 2025, Colombian authorities took 17 more miners into protective custody after Lev Tahor tried to set up there. Today, several of its leaders sit in prison and the group is scattered and shrinking down to a few hundred members spread across a handful of countries. But it hasn't disbanded. Like the flds. Lev to Horror proves that the danger doesn't simply vanish when the authorities show up. Sometimes it just crosses a border. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, Rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes Wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show show page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories Cults and crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Elena Johnson, Kaylee Pine, and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening.
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