State Finalizes Seizure of the YFZ Ranch

On January 6, 2014, the State of Texas obtained a final judgment of forfeiture from the 51st Judicial District Court, which directed the State to take possession of the forfeited property, known as the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado, Texas.  The final judgment was the result of the Attorney General’s Office filing for the seizure of this property in 2012.

At approximately 2 p.m. Wednesday, April 16, the Schleicher County Sheriff’s Office and the Texas Department of Public Safety met with current residents of the property and provided them with copies of the court orders applicable to the forfeiture – the residents have agreed to vacate the property. 

Law enforcement personnel are working with the occupants of the ranch to take all reasonable actions to assist with their departure of the property, to preserve the property, and to successfully execute the court order. 

Continuing activities on the property will include obtaining a court-ordered inventory of real property and protecting the remaining assets.

For those unfamiliar with the FLDS epic story that occurred in 2008, here is the initial report from the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado:

On March 29, 2008 Child Protective Services received a phone call from a 16-year-old girl claiming to be inside the polygamist compound called Yearning for Zion Ranch at Eldorado, Texas. The compound, built under the direction of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints incarcerated leader, Warren Jeffs, housed hundreds of women, children, and men recruited from polygamist camps in Utah and Arizona.

The still-anonymous caller claimed abuse from her 50-year-old “husband,” who she claimed beat, choked, and sexually assaulted her. CPS officials needed backup to raid the heavily guarded compound, so state officials helped them infiltrate. Once inside, officials saw evidence of rampant underage marriage, pregnancies, and abuse. According to several reports, compound men recruited underage “spiritual wives,” not recognized by Texas law.

District Judge Barbara Walther signed a warrant to investigate further. By the end of the raid, the state took custody of hundreds of children, moving them and some mothers to San Angelo’s Fort Concho. Many of the children are now in foster homes across the state, and litigation is ongoing. Among the issues are whether girls were “spiritually married” to men before the legal age in Texas, which is 16. And DNA tests will reveal true mothers and fathers—and hold those mothers accountable as accomplices to rape if they knowingly allowed an underage marriage.

The anonymous caller, named "Sarah", was later found to have been a prank caller from Colorado. Nonetheless, the raid revealed widespread abuse of young girls under the guise of underaged "marriages."

The FLDS cases were tried in San Angelo. In all, 12 FLDS men were put on trial for offenses related to underaged marriages. 

Here is an interview with the publisher of The Eldorado Success, the newspaper reporter who saw it all, from start to finish. This interview with Publisher Randy Mankin originally was published in the May 2008 edition of San Angelo LIVE! magazine.

On the national coverage the compound has now gotten:

We’ve just done our job. Had we not reported this, no one in San Angelo would have known about it. The San Angelo Standard-Times [newspaper] certainly wasn’t going to do it. Someone’s got to draw it to their attention before they come out and cover it. Just like anyone else in the media, they say, ‘bring me up to speed,’ and I say, ‘Do some investigating like we’ve done.’ It’s the herd mentality.

This story has everything; sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. It has all the elements of a story that sells: underage girls, older men, it has the cult connection, a group that’s all around one personality.

On the comparisons to Waco:

I didn’t think they were warranted at first, and I don’t think they were warranted at the end. Everyone kept trying to drag that [Waco] up. Law enforcement learned a lot from Waco: The feds—had Waco been left to the local sheriff, he could have arrested [Branch Davidian leader David Koresh] on a county road sometime when he was out jogging. But The feds got involved. Fortunately here, The feds stayed out of it. These crimes that are being alleged [now] are not federal crimes, they are state crimes. The feds can get involved in very specific areas.

[In this case it was an] outcry for help from a girl; whether she’s coming forward or not and identifying herself, CPS felt they had a legit concern in Eldorado and San Angelo. When CPS gets a cry for help, they can drive right up and knock on the door. They couldn’t do that here. You can’t approach any direction here without being confronted; [the whole compound is on] lockdown. So CPS asked the feds for assistance to get them on the compound. And that’s what happened. I bet they haven’t slept much since then. Once they got on the compound they saw evidence of other crimes; i.e., young girls that were pregnant, and they went back to judge Walther and got the warrant expanded, and that gave them power to go into every building on the ranch, and they did.

On the special plight of men in the polygamist sect:

I would like to point out a couple of things: There have been more children removed form their parents by Warren Jeffs and the FLDS Church than the state of Texas had ever thought about… he routinely kicked men out of this group and told them to go repent from a distance. He would take their wives and children and reassign them to other men. I’ve talked to the men. They’re out there. One of them is named Richard Holm. I’ve been to Short Creek. Certainly the Standard-Times could have been there. But there are people out there who will talk . . .

There’s a private investigator, Sam Brower, he is in San Angelo right now, he was down here [recently]. He has birth certificates from these men trying to find their children. So where is the moral outrage when Jeffs and this cult do this to their own people without a court hearing, without due process and law, without a search warrant, with nothing?

And when you think about polygamy—when a man loses his family, he loses more children than the women, because the man is married to many women. So for every woman at the YFZ with her children removed, [you] can produce more men who had more children removed. But nothing’s being said about that.

The attorney out here, Mr. Rod Parker from Salt Lake City [who represents the FLDS], is putting on a dog and pony show. I saw the same scripted statements from them all [the Eldorado women]; and when you’d try to jog them off their story, they wouldn’t talk about polygamy or how many times they’d been reassigned, all they had to do was try to portray it the way they wanted it. So that’s what I would add to the story. It is a lot deeper than anyone realizes. The crimes [being asserted] are the tiptop of the iceberg.