Criminal case against Texas sect members a possibility

SAN ANGELO, Texas -- The members of a polygamist sect raided by authorities two months ago have their children back, but with a criminal investigation looming, the sect's troubles may not be over.

"There have been criminal problems located out there," said Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran, who was with state troopers and child welfare authorities when they raided Yearning For Zion Ranch in west Texas on April 3.

The Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas attorney general's office have taken over the criminal investigation at the request of authorities in the rural ranching community. While they confirm they are investigating, neither will say how long the investigation may take.

Child-welfare officials have alleged members of the church that runs the ranch pushed underage girls into marriages with older men, but the evidence needed to support a criminal case could prove elusive.

DNA evidence acquired in the custody case is off-limits to criminal investigators without a court order, and a prosecution likely would go nowhere without at least one willing witness in the insular ranch community. Members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had a strong distrust of outsiders even before all of the roughly 440 children at the ranch were taken away.

The children were allowed to leave foster care after a judge bowed to a Texas Supreme Court ruling last week that the state overreached by taking all the children even though evidence of sexual abuse was limited to five teenage girls. Half the children taken from the ranch were no older than 5.

All the children were returned to parents by Wednesday.

'Going to take a while'

The high court ruling and Texas District Judge Barbara Walther's orders returning the children does not affect the criminal investigation, which involves several trailer loads of documents confiscated during a raid lasting nearly a week. Authorities removed all documents and photos they say might show relationships between underage girls and older men.

"It's going to take a while. With any criminal case we investigate, we do as much as we possibly can before turning the case over to the prosecutors," said DPS spokeswoman Tela Mange.

Last week, investigators from the attorney general's office took DNA from Warren Jeffs, the jailed prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, saying they were looking for evidence of relationships between Jeffs and four girls, ages 12 to 15.

Under Texas law, girls younger than 17 cannot generally consent to sex with an adult. At a custody hearing, state attorneys introduced a photo they said was a wedding picture showing Jeffs embracing a girl and kissing her on the mouth.

Jeffs has been convicted in Utah as an accomplice to rape in the marriage of an underage sect member. He faces similar charges in Arizona, though no trial date has been set.

Authorities have DNA from all the children and many of the parents at the YFZ Ranch -- 603 samples in all -- but those results cannot be used by law enforcement without a court order because they were taken from parents and children as part of the custody case, not under a criminal search warrant.

Even if the DNA shows children were born to underage girls and adult men, any prosecution is likely to be difficult unless a victim testifies.

Utah successfully prosecuted three FLDS members and got a no-contest plea from Jeffs after years of investigation, but Arizona authorities have had to drop some charges because the victim quit cooperating.

Without a victim's testimony, it's impossible to establish jurisdiction for prosecution, a key element that has prevented some charges of members who frequently move among the sect's residences in Arizona, Utah, Texas and elsewhere.

In any sexual assault case, it can be difficult to persuade victims to assist in prosecutions, but such cases are even more challenging when they involve a community as insular as the FLDS, said Paul Murphy, a spokesman for the Utah Attorney General's Office.

Sect members are raised and work within the community, developing few financial or personal resources away from other members.

After a raid by Arizona authorities in 1953, FLDS members lived on the Arizona-Utah line with little interaction with government officials, who got involved only when allegations of underage marriages and abuse surfaced in 2001.

Texas authorities raided the YFZ Ranch after three calls to a domestic abuse hot line, purportedly from a 16-year-old mother who was being abused by her middle-age husband. The calls -- which Doran said continued even after all the children were removed from the ranch -- are now being investigated as a hoax.

The children and their mothers were taken to a shelter in San Angelo, where they were later separated. E-mails obtained by The Dallas Morning News under Texas public records laws show state officials had proposed sending them to another location because of fears of violence. A judge rejected conducting the separations in Midlothian, and the children were taken from their mothers without incident.

The e-mails also showed state officials' concerns that some of the mothers were planning a "run" from the shelter before they were separated, something FLDS elder Willie Jessop called absurd.

"We never, never did anything other than to comply and to endure what they put us through," he told the newspaper in a story published Wednesday.

The FLDS, which believes polygamy brings glorification in heaven, is a breakaway sect of the Mormon church, which renounced polygamy more than a century ago. Jessop said this week that the church would not preside over marriages between sect members who were not of legal age.

He sidestepped questions about whether such marriages ever occurred but has said the sect has been unfairly portrayed.