Word: ranches
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Texas New Charges For Jeffs A grand jury indicted breakaway Mormon sect leader Warren Jeffs on charges of sexually assaulting a girl under age 17. Five of his followers also face counts stemming from an April raid on the polygamist group's Texas ranch. Jeffs was convicted in Utah last year as an accomplice to the rape of a child bride and awaits trial in Arizona on similar charges...
...Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) had basked in victory after the Texas Supreme Court ordered the return of the children taken from its ranch in Eldorado in April. But the state's attorney general Greg Abbott pledged to prosecute FLDS members to the full extent of the law. And this week, after going through evidence taken from the Yearning for Zion Ranch, Abbott indicted Warren Jeffs - the "Prophet" of the polygamists - along with four of his followers on charges of first-degree felony sexual assault of a minor. (The four men were not named, and law-enforcement officials...
...year-old shown kissing Jeffs is a stepdaughter of Carolyn Jessop, whose book Escape details her flight from the FLDS. Married at 18 to 50-year-old Merrill Jessop - now the 72-year-old leader at the YFZ Ranch - she said one of her daughters had a recent conversation about the photograph with her half brother who still lives at the ranch. "What's wrong with it?" the boy asked. "There is a lot of denial," Carolyn Jessop says, and Jeffs still commands loyalty despite his imprisonment. Jeffs moved the FLDS "aristocracy" to Texas, Jessop says, and little girls were...
...page and start anew with few questions raised about his past. "They thought they were safe behind those walls and that Texas would never mess with them," says Randy Mankin, the editor of the Eldorado Success, the small-town newspaper that has chronicled events at the nearby FLDS ranch from the compound's founding through the April 2008 raid by Texas officials that swept up more than 400 children...
...Mafia analogy may play out in other ways. Following the raid on the YFZ Ranch, the FBI executed a search warrant and removed several boxes of papers and materials. Earlier this month, a summit was held by Utah, Arizona, Nevada and Texas law enforcement officials along with representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice and the IRS. Hamilton of Yeshiva University says she expects federal authorities may develop racketeering charges against the FLDS leadership using federal RICO laws. "There's reason to hope after that summit meeting," she says...