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had some 80 children by 13 wives, but his favorite was Paul, an excellent student who made friends easily. Situated at the base of a rugged mountain range, the Orders spread sat in a pristine valley of glistening hayfields and open pasture. She knows that they're. But it is likely that Kingston could recognize some of himself in Stephen. Pulling up, he noticed the getaway car parked in front of the house. I pass the dairy, the zoo, the park, the former birthing clinic, the condemned high school built on a foundation of adobe bricks, and so on. Mary Nelson, 23, tells "Whistleblower" host Alex Ferrer about how she escaped the Kingston clan, also known as The Order, with the help of her boyfriend Bryan. This is your fault, he thundered, glaring at them. Her parents and siblings eventually left as well. For fun he and other Order men would go to a park frequented by gay males, looking for victims. They would trek into state welfare offices, their kids in tow, claiming that they had no idea who the father of their children was, or that he was a truck driver who had left them destitute. "I didn't touch her; I just used a turkey baster," she mimics, rolling her eyes. Well, my sister had a little baby with a cleft lip; it was her first child and it had a cleft lip and cleft palate, because they were both Jessops, and Jessops are carriers of that gene. His seven sons and two daughters by LaDonna Peterson, the second of his 13 wives, are reputed to be the inner circle that runs the cult. Authorities call it an organized crime group. Due to the Kingstons convoluted genealogy, Lu Ann was both his first cousin and his aunt. He asked him if he was being obedient, then excused himself to talk to Stephens mother. Sometimes he parked his immaculately buffed burgundy Ford Thunderbird on the curb, but it was rare to see the man himself. The Knight brothers werent afraid to fight, or to stand up to authority. According to church lore, The Order came into existence when founder Charles Elden Kingston saw Jesus in the mountains above the familys settlement in Bountiful, Utah, inspiring him to create the DCCS in 1935. J.O. (KUTV) Weeks after a Kingston polygamist clan member was charged in the death of her child, former members of that group are speaking out about what they say is a much bigger problem. More troubling, during a contentious 2004 custody case that ensued when Jessica and her sister Andrea fled Daniel Kingstons household, a judge in the case reportedly was the subject of a death threat, allegedly from Kingston clan members. LeBaron Jr. has been accused by three of his own sons, who purport to have DNA evidence obtained by saliva samples, of fathering four children with his own biological daughter. The battle took place in the spiritual pre-existence that Mormons believe all souls come from. This racist display was no one-off. He also preached a bizarre extrapolation of the Book of Mormon called the White Horse Prophecy, a dreaded prediction of a cataclysmic time when the black race will rise up and attempt to destroy the white man, only to be thwarted by Native Americans riding to the rescue. But in a 2News . Snow also remembered being taught end-time prophecies, with a cleansing wherein the streets of Salt Lake City would run red with blood. When he was three, his mother led him into a building controlled by the clan and pointed out an intense man lifting weights in the gym. As he grew older, Stephen turned out to be as rebellious as his own father had been as a boy. His face was crushed, Stephen says now, matter-of-factly, his eyes going blank for a moment. was just as frugal as his brother he lived in a dilapidated shack with planks missing from the porch but he had a better head for business. Kingston forebears were among those who suffered this fate. "You have to either accept" the responsibility of caring for so many children with major healthcare needs "or let it destroy you," says this man, whose wife recently suffered a stroke. The two groups split when Dawna was growing up. Many of these men are also given stewardship of the Orders business holdings sent out to run the clans coal mine or ranches, or to oversee one of its many storefronts. One day, not long after the gold disappeared, Knight got an anonymous phone call. Known variously as Brother Paul, the leader, and the man on the watchtower by Order members, this unremarkable, balding middle-aged man reportedly has 27 wives and over 300 children. There are times when it has gotten kind of gross, like when they marry an uncle to a niece. You better check on your gold, Young told her. One man, who asks to remain nameless to protect his and his family's privacy, describes a lifetime of round-the-clock care and too-frequent hospital visits for his five sons. Former Order members remain convinced the Knights stole the gold. Some would say that is because it takes generations for certain inbred recessive genetic traits to manifest. Polygamy is outlawed in Utah, both by the states constitution, and in statute, where it is a third-degree felony, with a possible punishment of five years in prison. What were taught is to love our neighbor, that all people, all races no matter who they are deserve to be loved, he explained. The teacher was like, You can never get that out, that is always there now, recalled Jessica, now 29. Its hard to leave when thats all youve known, says one former member, who was forced to marry her cousin when she was 15. Lost Index. In the months after the robbery, Stephen couldnt shake the feeling he was being watched. Rather than submit to DNA tests, which could have revealed the incest in his brood, he coughed up a more than $200,000 settlement. The fact that most of the people in the Kingston clan were born into the lifestyle is very key to group think because this is all they know, and some may never question the beliefs even when they age because it has been their whole world all their life. His followers erected a crude stone cross nearby in his honor, covered with inscriptions of the letter K (for Kingdom or Kingston). I didnt even know the n-word was bad until I was like 15 or 16, she told Intelligence Report. Snow began dating men when he was 22. And they avoid the police, opting to handle any disputes in their own brutal manner. There are also accounts of dead babies being buried at the Holy Spot, a tree-shrouded patch of land across the street from a grade school in Bountiful, just north of Salt Lake City. Young is the owner of Desert Tech, a Utah gun manufacturer, which produces sniper rifles and so-called bullpup rifles, The latter, unlike conventional magazine-fed rifles, have shorter barrels, with the guns action located behind the trigger. According to former members of the Order, decades of inbreeding have resulted in rampant birth defects throughout the family. A sheriffs deputy traced the license plate of the Honda to a run-down house in a working-class suburb south of the city. The 200 Greatest Singers of All Time If you find a grave up there that's not marked, that's the way Fred wanted it.". But within the Order, where drinking soda pop was against the rules, it was a pretty big deal.. They both have the same high cheekbones, the same pale skin, the same wide-set eyes. If both parents carry the gene, the likelihood that their. So they would hand them over to Aunt Martha, who was the midwife," he says. By the time the teenagers sped away, they had made off with more than $80,000 in silver. It is bordered to the north by a well-maintained lot where there sits a stately red brick home with UEP (United Effort Plan, the church trust which is now controlled by the state of Utah in the aftermath of Jeffs' conviction) spelled out in white brick on its south-facing side. The Kingstons teach that they are descended from Jesus Christ and these incestous marriages are intended to keep the bloodline pure, but instead have resulted in numerous Clan members being born with disabilties or birth defects, and it's not really that surprising to note that at one point during the second season of Escaping Polygamy, one of The Order denies that it encourages racism and homophobia within its ranks. Many of the souls interred here lived not longer than a day, some just two days, two weeks, or two years. Another of the cults teachings was that soy can make you gay, an anti-government conspiracy theory popular in some right-wing circles. They were finally getting even. It empowered Stephen before that, no one had ever stood up to Daniel Kingston or any of them, says a former member. Martha's husband was "Uncle" Fred Jessop, longtime Bishop to the FLDS people, who died in 2005 at 94, after being dragged from state to state by Warren Jeffs in what many ex-members believe was a transparent scheme of murder-by-stress: Dragging around a physically ailing, elderly man in need of constant medication is one way to kill a person without committing any outright murderous act, they say. These specialty firearms can cost anywhere from $2,500 to $8,000 each. Stephen didnt know what the law said he only knew that the people he loved were being abused and exploited by his own father. The Knight brothers were driving new trucks, and so were their friends, says Levi Kingston. Hospital harm., While part of The Order, Val Snow, a twenty-something gay man with a wry sense of humor, believed being gay was like spitting in the eye of God. Snow is the son of Daniel Kingston, whom he paints as a little man with a lot of power.. The issue is available now on newsstands and in the digital archive. The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) is a polygamous sect straddling the Utah and Arizona state lines; the twin towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, are known collectively as Short Creek (pronounced "crick"). They had sped off in a Honda sedan. Like Stephen, the boys were considered troublemakers by the Order and like Stephen, they knew a lot about how the clan handled its money. Allison, a 17 year-old ex-Kingston member says not much has changed since Lu Anns day. She was definitely the pick of the litter, and thats why Paul got her, Ron recalls. . greatly increases, medical experts say. I strongly believe they are an organized-crime family, Shurtleff says. Over 75 years, the Kingstons have amassed a fortune worth an estimated $300 million, but the operation skirts the edges of the law. SALT LAKE CITY A local non-profit with ties to the polygamous Kingston group is facing multiple questions and accusations regarding its taxes. It was time. Boys work its coal mine and stack boxes at Standard Restaurant Supply, a massive discount store. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Jessica Kingston was wed at age 16 in what she says was a marriage she felt pressured into by her parents and others in a polygamous sect. LGBT people fare little better in the Kingston clan. Im done with this shit.. Kingston Polygamy Order Birth Defects Glutenous Kalvin asphalts lentissimo. According to former Order members, they worked long shifts sorting coal and operating heavy machinery in unsafe conditions. Over the years, the Order has armed itself to ward off rivals, and once stalked and intimidated a judge who was meddling in the clans affairs. He then severed her index finger, cleaned off the three bones, and carried them with him the rest of his life, believing that the totem kept her spirit with him. I t is often used to treat severe acne. Advance Copy and Printing: Since 2017-$62,450. He became particularly obsessed with a plant called comfrey, which he believed would protect his clan from the nuclear war that would usher in the apocalypse. The Mormon Church officially banned polygamy in 1890, and some of the defiant bands of fundamentalists who refuse to give up the practice have been pushed out of the city and into the desert, where they eke out an existence in rusted-out trailers and sprawling compounds. One of them, Stephen Knight, made for the most unlikely of suspects. This didnt belong to you anyway., As big as the heist was, it attracted almost no attention in Salt Lake. The FLDS split off from the mainline Mormon (LDS) church in 1890 after the church denounced the principal of plural marriage. But mostly he talked about the history of the Order and his ancestors, the men who had started the clan. In 2011, Jeffs was sentenced to life in prison, plus 20 years. After the boys were taken into custody, one of their first calls was to Stephen. Those twoand a fifth boyalso suffer from the condition that all of this family's sons were born with: x-linked hydrocephalus. He bragged that he had worn the same black shirt every day for a year. "It wasn't until I left the FLDS and moved away from the community that I realized I'd been to an unusually high number of funerals growing up in the Creek," says Alyssa Bistline over a crackling phone connection. Daniels ultimatum: Stay in The Order, date no one, and have no contact with family. Over the years, state law enforcement and the courts have sporadically addressed the incest in the Kingston ranks. They predict the scale of the problem will increase dramatically in the future. And during a recent picnic to honor the birthday of patriarch John Ortell Kingston, Order families descended on a Salt Lake Valley park, where hundreds of children of all ages blanketed the parks green expanse. All Rights reserved. One of her brothers married a woman whose grandmother is a sister to their father. "It's not really talked about; I don't think [people here] even research to see how related they are" before getting married or pregnant, she adds. Dont the infant deaths and tales of horrific deformities belie Ortells homespun eugenics? Andrea grew up in a small two-bedroom home in a Kingston-owned coal More recently, the Kingston-owned Washakie Renewable Energy (WRE) agreed to pay a $3 million fine after it was sued by the federal government for raking in tax credits for biofuels it never produced. So far, however, despite Shurtleffs efforts, the insular and highly secretive nature of the Order has prevented him from finding sufficient evidence to bring a case strong enough to dismantle the clan. He picked fights at school, shot a teacher in the face with a water gun and refused to do homework or answer questions. Former clan prophet John Ortell Kingston, who died in 1987, paid the Medicaid bills for a child born with severe birth defects after Utah investigators linked the wealthy father of more than 65 children to the baby. Vandoliers Play Tennessee Concert in Dresses to Protest State's New Drag Bill One is a first cousin. The Intelligence Report is the SPLC's award-winning magazine. The renunciation of polygamy is now church doctrine, and the Mormon church has a policy of excommunicating polygamists. Later that afternoon, in another house across town belonging to the Order, a woman named Patty Kingston opened her closet to discover that a chest of gold coins worth as much as $5 million had vanished. One crime had been solved but the chest of gold stolen from Patty Kingstons closet remained a mystery. Former Order members tell of babies being born nearly every week in the church. He snapped the padlock on the first crate and began stuffing the silver ingots into duffel bags, lugging them back out to the waiting Honda. Ron Rohbock, 64, who was kicked out of the FLDS in 2002 after serving on church security for decades at Warren and Rulon Jeffs' side, has a different answer. Or wed set traps and raise them as pets., In many ways it was an idyllic childhood, except for the fact that the ranch also doubled as a work camp for disobedient clan wives and rebellious kids. Or leave. Boys as young as 14 labored in the workshop. KUTV A large police presence swarmed a well-known polygamous family's property in South Salt Lake Wednesday.A Department of Justice Spokesman Peter Carr confirmed to KUTV that it is involved in . "There was a guy out here who was married to a couple of young girls, and he was going to get in trouble because he was having children with these young girls, so he said, 'Well, I never had sex with themI used a turkey baster.'" ), Related In the meantime, the police were closing in on the missing silver. She talked about how you cant associate with black people or anybody of a different race., Based on available evidence, including the accounts of numerous former Order members, the SPLC has designated The Order as a hate group under the category of `general hate.'. Through his brother LyleBishop of the FLDS and mouthpiece for his imprisoned brotherJeffs enacted a Judgment wherein FLDS members were asked a series of bizarre personal questions; their answers were judged, and the most righteous were welcomed into the United Order of FLDS elite. Those who did not make it into the UO were separated from their families, placed in patchwork homes of other UO "orphans," and told to repent. Obsessed with the purity of their bloodline and empowered by a sense of entitlement on par with the divine right of kings, the Kingstons have made incest the cornerstone of a self-serving theology that loathes non whites, fosters homophobia and abhors government authority. My mom was never the same. These conditions are disproportionately common, relative to the size of the general population, in Short Creek. deficiency. Obviously, we would love to.. Luke and Scott often visited the home of one of their aunts, Rachel Young. So what about polygamy? Family Tree. And they are growing. While the Order preached strict abstinence to its children, forbidding even incidental contact between the sexes, there seemed to be no rules after marriage especially for the clans leaders. Something along the lines of, to build a superhuman, if you have four or five defects to get the one good one, its worth it, he recalled. Fumarase deficiency (FD) is an autosomal metabolic recessive disorder, meaning it is necessary for an individual with the condition to receive the mutant allele from both parents. Come and get me, Stephen said. For Stephen and the other kids on the ranch, the highlight of each week came on Sundays, when they traveled the hour and a half south to Salt Lake for church. Another is a first cousin. Look around, Stephen says. "How do you keep track of that?" The polygamous town facing genetic disaster - BBC Future. Like other fundamentalists of that era, he believed the Mormon Church had lost its divine authority when it renounced polygamy in 1890, so he persuaded three other families to join him in establishing their own sect. These men are living freely in the Cane Beds area. The Tuckers think this is all hogwash now, though they were programmed to believe it at the time. Come back, his dad will say. Still stunned at the sudden loss of their brother, Stephen and his siblings were numb with grief. October 15, 2002: "There will be a viewing at father's house at 3p.m. Its his father, the prophet, calling to coax his wayward son back into the fold. The deputy heard the Brown boys knew who stole the gold but suddenly, without explanation, they and everyone in the clan clammed up. The knowledge that one's children are likely to be born with conditions like this one does not prevent FLDS couples from becoming pregnant; instead, they see it as a responsibility and blessing to have many children. A retired Arizona law enforcement officer, Browning is the president and founder of the Skinhead Intelligence Network and is in charge of security for the A&E show, where his wife Tawni works as the casting producer. They got married and contacted the . As the first of Paul Kingstons many wives, Patty enjoyed a privileged role in the Order including access to vast wealth. Structural Birth Defects. It was a grimy, derelict-looking place. Older teenagers were crammed five and six to a room, sleeping on the floors of trailers. Daniel was arrested and eventually spent 28 weeks in a county jail for felony child abuse. On the show's pilot, the trio bring a burly security guard along as they help a woman sneak into her own home to grab belongings for herself and her two young daughters. A short, blustery man with a hair-trigger temper, Daniel Kingston had reportedly once kidnapped two boys at gunpoint and led them out to the Great Salt Lake (the charges were later dropped). Some read simply, "Baby Keate," or "Baby Bateman," or "Baby Cooke," with holes where numeric date tiles might otherwise be placed. (Like most kids in the clan, Stephen wasnt told who his father was until he was old enough to be trusted to lie to protect the Order.) The lawyers words call to mind another heavenly curse, described in 2 Nephi, Chapter 5 of the Book of Mormon, where God caused a skin of blackness to come upon a group called the Lamanites, supposedly ancestors of Native Americans. At clan gatherings, girls who were still in their teens danced with men old enough to be their uncles, whom they were sometimes forced to marry. He shares a last name and a not-too-distant relation with the polygamous LeBaron group in Chihuahua, Mexico. There was also testimony, during one hearing, that someone in the Kingston clan wanted to blow up the courthouse. I guess I just had too much soy, Snow smiled. The theft of the silver bars from Rachel Youngs basement, they concluded, had been a copycat crime. Is it a requirement to gain the highest levels of heaven? To her horror, all that remained was a ring of dust, marking the place where a chest of gold coins had once stood. But Dawna disagrees: "I think it was actually, you know." By signing up, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy & to receive electronic communications from Vice Media Group, which may include marketing promotions, advertisements and sponsored content. When he had finished, he walked toward Stephen, who was sitting on the tractor. His arms are sunburned and his hands calloused from long days moving the irrigation pipes that water the fields. His life was in danger, the voice on the other end warned. [W]e directly condemn in action and in words, racist, homophobic or hateful actions against any group or individual, Johnson wrote. We pass the house she grew up in with her mother, three eldest brothers, and father before he was kicked out of the cult. Local Policing and Immigration Enforcement, Request for Legal Assistance Economic Justice. And then there are the more livable genetic conditions. Still more, rather cryptically, feature child-size palm and footprints. Among the polygamous Kingstons, a number of children have been born with birth defects, among them one born with two vaginas and two uteruses but no Outwardly, she appeared to have no sex organs. Its a quiet, haunting place, with massive hayfields that stretch to the horizon. He charged across the field and started brutally beating Stephens cousin. The land had once been home to the Washakie Indians, and as children, Stephen and his 15 full brothers and sisters played among the wind-swept ruins of a Native American cemetery. WREs influence earned special scrutiny in February 2016 after the IRS, the EPA and other government agencies raided owner Jacob Kingstons house as well as The Orders bank and other locations, carting away bankers box after bankers box of records. Dawna's younger sister has a little boy with two clubfeet. A 1999 Salt Lake Tribune article mapped the Kingstons incestuous family tree, quoting one of Ortells 65 kids, ex-Order member Connie Rugg as saying, My father experimented [with] inbreeding with his cattle and then he turned to his children.. Now let me just simply state: He took care of them. I'm driving around Short Creek with Alyssawho is in Boise, Idaho, where she is a college sophomorepiped in through the bluetooth-enabled speakerphone in the rental car I'd picked in Las Vegas the previous night. On the surface, the operation is legit: From Salt Lake, the Order controls some 100 businesses spread out over the Western states, from a casino in California to a cattle ranch in Nevada to a factory that makes lifelike dolls in Utah. She called her sister-in-law Patty Kingston, who lived across town. Luke Brown now insists that he and his brother simply borrowed the silver, and planned to return it to their aunt later. The family believed that discipline would rein in the boys and that hard labor would make the girls more supplicant to their husbands back in the city. The grift was exposed decades later, in the 1980s, when the clan paid a $350,000 settlement for swindling the government through welfare fraud. The adult residents of Short Creek todayboth those still in the FLDS and those who have left the cultare mostly able-bodied, seemingly healthy individuals. girl, born to John Ortell and Isabell Johnson, was not the product of an incestuous marriage. Chinese people were called stupid, and Mexicans were dirty, said Lu Ann, adding, because of their skin.. The clan kids from there would come to school not properly dressed for the cold, and they were always getting in fights. Nevertheless, former members of The Order say that incest and racism are inextricably linked in The Orders teachings. The son of Pauls sister Rachel herself a daughter of Ortell and LaDonna Kingston Young was the only current member of the Kingston clan, out of the many contacted for this story, who consented to a live, on-the-record interview. The well-kept yellow house sat on the corner of a tidy cul-de-sac called South Bonner Circle surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence. Black blood was the worst thing you can have, Jessica said, particularly since the Kingstons consider themselves to be the whitest of the white, descended directly from Jesus Christ and King David, the Middle Eastern origins of both men notwithstanding. and cousins. They belonged to the Order and had toiled in the cult for years. According to historian Brian Hales Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations After the Manifesto, Brother Elden, as he was also known, had five wives and 17 children.