Trouble in the Hills

The men in Western shirts and jeans who appeared in the west Texas town of Eldorado in 2003 said they were shopping for land to build a corporate hunting retreat. The 1,691-acre former exotic game ranch was just what they were looking for. Set amid rolling hills of rocky scrub dotted with mesquite trees, oil rigs and goat ranches, it was remote, and the land was cheap.

But the sheriff and other residents of Schleicher County soon discovered that their new neighbors had much more on their agenda than deer hunting. Leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), a renegade sect that broke with mainstream Mormons (who banned polygamy in 1890), were under siege by authorities in Utah and Arizona. Their enclave of 10,000 based in the twin cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., openly practiced "plural marriage"—their ticket to heaven, they believe—via clandestine ceremonies for "celestial" brides to circumvent bigamy laws.

Yet polygamy, though illegal, didn't spark the crackdown in recent years. Church members, including their prophet Warren Jeffs, were under investigation for marrying off girls as young as 13. Women and girls who fled the group, and boys pushed out or abandoned, told stories of forced marriages, incest and abuse. Some who left called it a destructive cult.

Jeffs, the group's powerful and reclusive patriarch, was convicted last year in Utah of being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl for forcing her to marry her cousin. Sentenced to 10 years to life, he is also awaiting trial on similar charges in Arizona. At least four other FLDS men were convicted in the past two years in Arizona and Utah of having sex with underage girls they'd married.

But long before Jeffs even became a fugitive on the FBI's Most Wanted List, his followers began moving to Texas. They mined limestone quarried on their gated compound near Eldorado (pronounced el-do-RAY-do) and dedicated a massive, gleaming white temple topped with a cupola in April 2005. (Jeffs slipped out of public sight soon after and was arrested in 2006.)

The tax revenue from their property, valued at $7.9 million at one point, was a boon for this community of ranchers and cotton farmers. But law-enforcement officials and residents in nearby Eldorado, population less than 2,000, were afraid of what else the sect might bring. "They're followers of Warren Jeffs, there's been multiple convictions, they practice polygamy. That moved my town," said Randy Mankin, publisher, editor and reporter of the weekly Eldorado Success. The problem was a lack of evidence. "We've known all along that it was going on behind closed doors, but no one filed a complaint."