Trouble in the Hills

The church's members shun contact with all outsiders, including the media, and their lawyers declined to comment Wednesday.

As a police scanner crackles with news from "the compound," under the pressed tin ceiling of his dusty Main Street office, Mankin asked, "If they're not doing anything wrong then why are they behind locked doors? Why run from the law? Moses went and confronted Pharaoh."

Finally, a 16-year-old girl reportedly called a local family-violence shelter and said she had been married and impregnated at age 15 by a 49-year-old man, according to court documents. Last Thursday Texas troopers and child-welfare officials raided the YFZ, or Yearning for Zion, ranch. State officials launched what is thought to be their largest intervention in state history, taking 416 children during their six-day sweep of the complex into temporary state custody. Another 136 women, mostly mothers, left the YFZ compound to care for the children but are free to return home. The 16-year-old girl who reportedly called the shelter and her baby have not been identified among those who have been removed.

According to an affidavit released Tuesday, signed by Lynn McFadden, investigator for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, the 16-year-old repeatedly called a local shelter on March 29 and 30. Whispering into a cell phone, the girl said her husband would force her to have sex, and when he was angry he would beat and choke her while other women in the house held her baby. Once he even broke her ribs, she said. But church members warned her that if she tried to flee, she would be found and locked up, the affidavit states. If she left, she was told, outsiders would hurt her, force her to cut her hair, wear makeup and "have sex with lots of men."

The girl said she was pregnant and couldn't think of a way to escape from the ranch without leaving her infant baby behind. What's more, her parents were about to send her 15-year-old sister to the same fate. But at the end of one call she began crying and said, "She is happy and fine and does not want to get into trouble and that everything she had previously said should be forgotten," according to the affidavit.

Based on the girl's account authorities obtained the search warrant from a local judge, entered the ranch and found numerous underage girls either pregnant or already with infant children. They determined that all the children were being "indoctrinated and groomed" to participate in underage marriages, even the boys, so all were in danger of being abused.