State and local officers have set up a series of roadblocks around the Yearning for Zion ranch outside the West Texas town of Eldorado, home to several hundred members of the polygamist Mormon breakaway sect the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
A girl living in the FLDS’ gated compound called officials to report she’d been sexually abused, says Dept. of Public Safety spokesman Tom Vinger, prompting an investigation that is currently ongoing inside the nearly 2,000-acre compound. Schleicher Co. Sheriff’s officers joined by a raft of DPS officials have accompanied Child Protective Services investigators to the ranch where they’ve been since Thursday evening, conducting interviews inside the compound. So far, Vinger says, everything is running “smoothly” inside the YFZ, where FLDS members have been helpful to investigators.
Meanwhile, over at the offices of the Eldorado weekly paper, the Eldorado Success, publisher Randy Mankin — who with his wife, the paper’s editor, broke the story about the FLDS moving to Eldorado in 2003 — says his phones have been ringing off the hook. Several national television crews are planning to descend on the Schleicher Co. seat this afternoon, including CNN fave Anderson Cooper, who has asked Mankin — every reporter’s “man on the ground” in Eldorado — to appear on tonight’s broadcast (9pm).
Members of the FLDS moved to Eldorado in 2003, where they’ve built the group’s first-ever temple. Since then they have worked steadily, building on the property, which now includes vast gardens, numerous dormitory-style buildings, and its own quarry. Meanwhile, the FLDS’ spiritual leader, the “prophet” Warren Jeffs was convicted last year in Utah and sentenced to two terms of five-to-life on charges of rape-as-accomplice, for his role in arranging marriages between underage girls and older, sometimes already married men. Jeffs is now in jail in Arizona where he is awaiting trial on similar charges.
This article appears in April 4 • 2008.