With God On Their Side
The decision to abruptly remove 437 children from a fundamentalist Mormon compound in Eldorado sparked the largest custody battle in U.S. history. But now that the last child’s case has been settled and all the kids are back home, a question still lingers: What really happened on the Yearning for Zion Ranch?
Rebeckah says: "When I was growing up in the U.S. and Texas we were taught that there was a Constitution that allowed for religious freedom. Also my Bible taught me that I should not judge; therefore I do not think that State of Texas should have ripped these children from their homes without some real investigation, which evidently did not take place prior to busting in and removing these children." Karen, you are right. All those children should NOT have been removed prior to in depth investigation. However, each and every pubescent and close to puberty girl child certainly should have been. There was evidence in plain sight that underage girls were pregnant, and since the ranch is one household (by FLDS admission) then all the girls at or near puberty were in clear danger of sexual abuse. I am angry and sad about the miscarriage of justice on behalf of the girls. Just as I am angry and sad that young children were traumatized by being removed from their children lacking clear evidence of danger to them. (October 17th, 2009 at 12:56pm)
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More worrisome to Childress was that even though Jeffs had been in prison since late 2006, his power had hardly flagged. Investigators found numerous letters in which Jeffs continued to direct the sect. He made calls that were broadcast over speakerphone to the members. He asked to be informed if members were too social in the kitchen. He warned one woman to overcome her laziness; another had to beware of her vanity. “Send me a list of the older unmarried daughters of Brother Merril Jessop and Brother Wendell Nielsen and who their mothers are and their exact ages,” he wrote. “Remind me of any marriages the Lord appointed in the record that have not been done.” And remember, he said, “Keeping the Lord’s confidence is life.”
Childress wasn’t terribly impressed with the state leadership’s understanding of the situation. “Going up to the governor, none of them had any idea what was going on,” he says. “They had no clue.” As he worked through the cases, he says, all the department saw was numbers. “ ‘The department is losing two hundred some-odd cases!’ That’s what was all in the news,” he says. Nonsuits were not “losses,” a subtlety overlooked in most accounts. Having formed a clearer picture of family structures by way of DNA testing, the DFPS was identifying the individual circumstances of each family and coming up with specific tasks that needed to be done, such as psychological evaluations or parenting classes. By mid-September, more than 250 children’s cases had been nonsuited.
As the months wore on, Childress went down to Austin to attend several meetings and explain his approach. One meeting included Albert Hawkins, the Health and Human Services commissioner; one included representatives from the attorney general’s and governor’s offices. Childress said he wanted to take some cases to trial. “They’d ask, ‘Well, can you guarantee us it will win?’ ‘No, there’s no such thing as a guarantee in a jury trial,’ I said, ‘but I’m pretty doggone certain that a West Texas jury hearing what all these people have been doing the last ten years is gonna be real reluctant to send these kids back to be raised by Warren Jeffs,’ ” Childress says. “I didn’t get any feedback . . . I think they just frankly lacked the courage.”
And so, on October 23, Childress quit.
People close to the cases had by this point suspected that anyone who wanted to pursue Childress’s course would get the same results. The day Childress left, Debra Brown, the executive director of the Children’s Advocacy Center of Tom Green County, sat down to write a letter to Governor Perry. “Child Protective Services seems determined to sweep this case under the rug and call it quits,” she wrote. “CPS recently nonsuited most of the families and now has only ten cases involving thirty-seven children remaining. . . . We have a goldmine of evidence corroborating abuse of children and need to act upon it now, as we will never have this opportunity again. This situation is only going to get worse.” She received a reply dated November 13 from Beth Engelking, CPS’s director of special projects. “I was surprised by many of the issues raised in your letter to the Governor,” Engelking wrote, “as you had not previously raised these same issues as a concern in any of our previous meetings.” Brown, who says she was never shy about her opinions, was stunned. “She had been in these meetings with us where we’d go over case X where we’ve got this problem and this problem,” Brown says. “She was sitting right there.”
While several people interviewed for this article suggested that the DFPS received pressure from its superiors to nonsuit even the extreme cases, Brown said that Engelking made a point of taking responsibility for the decisions herself. She called a meeting with some of the interested parties in San Angelo. “Beth Engelking told us that it was her decision to start nonsuiting these cases,” Brown remembers. “I’m not saying the kids should have never been returned, but we had legitimate concerns and questions on about thirty-five cases.” Brown said that Engelking had struggled with the cases but told the group, “I think this is in the best interest for these children and this organization, and I think this is the right thing to do.”
Brown wasn’t the only person concerned by the more problematic nonsuits. Charles Childress’s replacement, attorney Jeff Schmidt, was also disturbed, as were some attorneys representing the children. In fact, a few attorneys involved in the cases met with the governor’s office to address the issue, though it is unclear if they made a strong impression. According to state records, not a single e-mail was exchanged between the governor’s office and the HHSC, the DFPS, or CPS from October 1 to November 20, 2008. Brian Newby, who was Perry’s chief of staff until mid—October 2008, says that CPS lawyers and the attorney general’s office spoke with the governor’s office but that the governor’s office didn’t indicate a specific preference on which strategy to pursue. “We followed the advice of our lawyers, CPS, and attorney general lawyers,” he says.
Schmidt didn’t last long. A few days after replacing Childress, he was transferred to Corpus Christi. The DFPS said that he disagreed with its decisions and could no longer represent it. Schmidt was outraged. In an administrative complaint Schmidt filed on November 5, 2008, he stated that the DFPS legal unit was “in possession of evidence that supports aggravating circumstances on many of these cases. Even though these facts exist, the DFPS is still refusing to allow their attorneys to amend the live pleadings to allow for termination of parental rights.”
The department stood firm. Schmidt received a reply from the new DFPS commissioner, Anne Heiligenstein, explaining that “the decisions in these cases were made only after careful deliberation and consultation with DFPS executive management, HHSC, and the Attorney General’s office. The decisions were made with a conscious consideration of the needs of the children, the professional assessments of the families, and the viewpoints of experts in this department regarding the best interests of the children.”
Debra Brown didn’t see it that way. She told me, “A lot of the workers I worked with felt like they just didn’t have a say.” And Schmidt felt that the department’s response defied logic, since some of the FLDS men had been indicted for crimes. “Children’s lives and welfare are at stake,” he wrote in a later response, “and it appears all the Department is willing to do is deny any wrongdoing.”
After Schmidt left, the department filed nonsuits on almost all the remaining cases. “The thing I’m angriest about,” said Susan Hays, who was an attorney for several of the YFZ children, “is you spend twelve million plus, traumatize hundreds of kids, then drop the real cases? They ran it like a political campaign. How deep a hell do you burn in for that?”
This past summer, Commissioner Heiligenstein told me that if allegations of abuse resurfaced at the YFZ Ranch, she wouldn’t hesitate to intervene, though she believed such a scenario was unlikely. In her opinion, the FLDS had learned from this ordeal that Texas was intolerant of underage marriages. “It is our belief that future abuse to these and other children will no longer occur,” she said. “The FLDS has too much to risk and too much to lose if they don’t abide by the laws of Texas.” In the end, the DFPS said that it had identified twelve girls, ranging from age twelve to fifteen, at the YFZ Ranch who had been victims of sexual abuse with the knowledge of their parents. Seven reached adulthood by the end of 2008, and three more have since reached adulthood. Two were twelve when they were married, three were thirteen, two were fourteen, and five were fifteen. Seven of those girls had one or more children. All were nonsuited with the exception of Merrianne Jessop, who was sent to live off the ranch with her new guardian, Naomi Carlisle.
If the plan all along has been to take aim at the problem of bigamy and underage marriage within the FLDS from a criminal angle instead of through civil proceedings, one can only imagine that the attorney general is holding his breath as the criminal trials get under way. (Perhaps he is also counting on additional convictions from an ongoing federal investigation regarding violations of the Mann Act and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.) Jeffs is one of the twelve men who will be tried in Texas, though his court date has not yet been scheduled. But even if the state convicts all twelve and puts them in prison, nothing can stop Jeffs from continuing to direct his members with total disregard for the law.
“This is just a lose-lose deal,” said a child psychiatrist who testified before the court. No clear pathway was without potentially devastating results. Charles Childress acknowledged that adoption was a traumatic option. But was it better, he asked, to return girls to families in which underage marriages had occurred and might occur again? “They think they’re going to wind up happily holding hands in heaven,” he said. “That doesn’t make it something we can tolerate in a decent society.”
But of course, to the parents on the Yearning for Zion Ranch, the more decent society is the one located behind their tall white gate. At the end of my visit last August, I stood outside the home of Bob Barlow and watched his well-behaved children wander out of the house and onto the lawn surrounded by a large flower bed. “I think folks are in shock that it’s still happening,” Barlow told me, when I asked about the upcoming trials. “When people see the truth, they’ll see we were vilified. I hope people judge us by what we are instead of emotions or a vendetta.”
Naomi Carlisle smiled as she told me that even though the group still has two years of trials ahead of them, she was more confident than ever that “heaven would prevail.” “It’s more than ‘We believe in Christ’; it’s that we want to be like Christ,” she said. “That’s what our life is.” Merrianne agreed. She goofed around with Willie Jessop for a minute, pretending to steal his truck, then, seeing that a small audience was forming on the porch of the house, she brushed the dirt off her dress and excused herself. She really needed to get back to the garden.
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