ELDORADO, TEX. — The Yearning For Zion ranch a few miles west of nowhere was built to keep the secrets of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints hidden from prying eyes.
But the church's days of splendid isolation and impenetrable secrecy – only the top fringe of the temple's white limestone walls visible from a distant rural road at the edge of the 1,700-acre spread – are rapidly ending.
The Texas Rangers raid of the secluded ranch in early April led to sensational allegations of grooming underage girls for marriage and sexual abuse. And the discovery of a 17-year-old girl at the ranch from an FLDS community in British Columbia could expose a part of the church's life that governments on both sides of the border have long ignored.
Her parents say she had been visiting her grandmother who was living at the Texas ranch. But a weeklong Globe and Mail investigation indicates the trip may have been a ride on a little-known underground railway that takes young girls across the Canada-U.S. border – in both directions – for one purpose: to be assigned as a so-called celestial bride to FLDS men.
A member the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints stands outside the Tom Green County Courthouse during a short break from the second day of a custody hearing in San Angelo, Tex., on April 18. (Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press)
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Flora Jessop, a former FLDS member who fled at age 16 after she was forced to marry a cousin, said the practice of “trading” young women across the border was akin to international trafficking of young women for sexual purposes.
“It happens all the time,” she said in an interview. “They are not concerned about citizenship… They just walk across on a dirt road,” she said, adding that no one ever tries to stop the border crossings.
Brenda Jensen, who was born into a polygamist FLDS family in B.C., said the insular communities require new blood “so they will not be so badly inbred.” The FLDS communities have problems from too many children marrying their close relatives, including vulnerability to a rare genetic disorder called fumarase deficiency, which causes mental retardation and possibly early death.
The girls are taken across the border quietly at night and never return, Ms. Jensen said, adding, “The handsome ones go to the leaders.”
Ms. Jensen broke away from the church at age 17. Her family had moved to an FLDS community in the U.S. three years earlier and she had been assigned to an American husband she did not want to marry. She said she does not regard the FLDS as a religion.
“This is an abusive cult.”
The religious practices of the FLDS, a breakaway sect of the Mormon church, have been in the media spotlight since the sheriff of Eldorado, accompanied by the Texas Rangers, went to the Yearning For Zion compound on April 3.
A woman, who identified herself as Sarah, had telephoned a crisis-centre hotline, saying she was a 16-year-old at the compound with an eight-month-old baby who had been forced into a marriage with an older man and had been sexually assaulted. She appealed to be rescued.
Within hours, the cry for help had morphed into possibly the biggest child-abuse case in U.S. history. The government alleges it found what appears to be a pervasive pattern of underage girls being forced to marry older men, and of sexual abuse that created an unsafe environment for children. Authorities took 463 boys and girls into custody. The court placed the children in foster care for up to 60 days while the investigation continues.
The alarming allegations reverberated through FLDS communities in several U.S. states and in Bountiful in the southeast corner of British Columbia. They were amplified by former FLDS women from those communities who said they had been sexually abused and that underage girls were often assigned to marry older men.
Rod Parker, the lawyer and spokesman for the FLDS, has told the media that the government is misrepresenting what it found at the ranch in order to justify the raid.
