Word: utah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...glance, the YFZ ranch has the look of other compounds built by apocalyptic cults led by charismatic tyrants. But this is a group with a tangled history many generations deep. Renegade sects have kept polygamy alive by settling far from neighbors in places like the desert canyon lands of Utah and Arizona, the villages of northern Mexico and the alpine valleys of western Canada. They have intermarried and interbred to the point that, in the words of author Jon Krakauer, their "relationships are almost impossible to make sense of without a flowchart." One figure in Krakauer's best-selling history...
...heart of the identity problem are the group's commitment to "celestial marriage" - polygamy - and its custom of allowing first cousins to marry. "Your family tree shouldn't be a wreath," says Randy Mankin, editor of the El Dorado Success newspaper, which unearthed the sect's Utah roots four years ago, when its first members, posing as businessmen, arrived in Eldorado under the pretense of building a hunting and game preserve. But the legal notices published in Mankin's paper listing the custody suits brought by the state against the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints of Jesus Christ...
...1930s, two families, the Jessops and the Barlows, settled the area around Hildale, Utah, along the border with Arizona, where they founded the FDLS - and began handing down to their descendants a recessive gene for a severe form of mental retardation called Fumarase Deficiency. The birth defect has become increasingly prevalent within the FLDS community since 1990 when it was first identified by Dr. Theodore Tarby, an Arizona pediatric neurologist, now retired but formerly with the Children's Rehabilitative Services in Phoenix. He saw his first case when an FLDS mother brought her severely retarded son to see him. Tarby...
...says Randy Mankin, editor and publisher of the weekly El Dorado Success, circulation 1,200. Sitting in an old office chair amidst an archive of yellowing newspapers and modern computer equipment, he says the massive construction at the Red Cheek site sparked suspicions. When the paper checked Allred's Utah connections, it discovered that the men were in Eldorado to set up a large gated compound for the Fundamentalist Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a religious group that believes in "celestial marriage" - polygamy. The FLDS admitted to town leaders they had lied and townsfolk became wary...
While the Success stayed on top of the story, Mankin's neighbor Sheriff David Doran was quietly working his own leads, developing an informant inside the FLDS community, where few outsiders were allowed. Doran traveled to Utah and met with state and local officials, including law enforcement officers who were members of the FLDS community. The sheriff also paid visits to the YFZ Ranch because he was occasionally called on by its residents to be a notary or to remove illegal aliens the FLDS found crossing their land, and even once to investigate a traffic death, making...