Warren Jeffs

Warren Jeffs (born December 3, 1955, Sacramento, California, U.S.) is the leader (2002– ) of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), a splinter group that developed from communities that broke away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, Mormonism) and continued to practice polygamy after the LDS church abandoned official support for plural marriage in 1890. He was arrested in 2006 and convicted in 2007 of rape as an accomplice for his involvement in a forced marriage of an underage girl, and in 2011 he was convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child and sexual assault of a minor. As a result of the 2011 conviction, he was sentenced to life in prison.

Early life

Warren Jeffs was born to Rulon Jeffs, the head of the FLDS from 1986 to 2002, and his fourth wife, Marilyn Steed. After he graduated from Jordan High School in Sandy, Utah—a suburb of Salt Lake City—Warren Jeffs worked as an accountant for his father, who was a member of the leadership council of FLDS at the time, and taught at the Alta Academy, a private school near Sandy run by the FLDS. In 1976 he became the principal of the school, where he was known for his strict rules and harsh discipline. According to reports from students, girls were encouraged not to talk to boys in order to “keep sweet” (meaning to be obedient and agreeable), and boys were physically beaten as punishment. His nephew, Brent Jeffs, later alleged in a lawsuit (partially settled in 2007 and dismissed, at Brent Jeffs’s request, in 2008) that Warren Jeffs and two of Jeffs’s brothers sexually assaulted him when he was a five-year-old student at the school.

The Alta Academy closed in 1998, ending Jeffs’s tenure as principal, after Rulon Jeffs claimed to have a revelation that Salt Lake City would be destroyed because of the upcoming 2002 Winter Olympics. Rulon Jeffs ordered his followers to move to Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, a location known as Short Creek on the border of those two states, that had been a stronghold of the Mormon fundamentalist movement since the 1920s.

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Emergence as a leader

Jeffs began helping his father lead the group in the early 2000s as Rulon Jeffs’s health declined from a series of strokes. In 2000 Warren Jeffs instructed FLDS followers to pull their children from public schools in order to teach them in the community. When his father died in 2002, Jeffs succeeded him as prophet and president.

In contrast to his father, the younger Jeffs enforced stricter regulations for his flock to follow. FLDS doctrine dictates that men must have at least three wives to be able to reach the highest level of heaven. Jeffs had control over marriages within the group, and he assigned wives to husbands or reassigned them if he determined that a husband had violated teachings of the group. He also excommunicated younger male members, officially for violating moral codes but allegedly because Jeffs saw them as competition to older male members’ accumulation of wives. Additionally he restricted his members’ actions by enforcing strict dress codes and outlawing television and movies, fictional books, and popular music within the community.

Legal troubles and incarceration

In 2005 a Utah court froze the assets of FLDS’s United Effort Plan trust, which included much of the group’s community assets, including houses and land in the Short Creek area, valued at about $110 million. That same year Jeffs was indicted in Arizona for arranging a marriage between an already-married 28-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl, and a warrant was issued for his arrest (the charges were dropped in 2010). While he was on the run from legal proceedings, Jeffs continued to orchestrate the construction of a large temple and settlement in Eldorado, Texas, called Yearning for Zion, on land that had been purchased in 2003. In 2006 Jeffs was charged in a Utah court with two counts of rape as an accomplice for arranging a marriage between a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin; the Federal Bureau of Investigation placed him on its Ten Most Wanted list of fugitives.

Jeffs remained at large until August 2006 when he was arrested in a traffic stop near Las Vegas. He made a nonfatal suicide attempt while in jail awaiting trial. In 2007 he was convicted of two counts of accomplice to rape for his role in forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry and have sex with her 19-year-old first cousin. He was sentenced to two consecutive terms of five years to life, but the sentence was overturned in 2010 because of findings of errors in instructions to jurors, and after his 2011 conviction the charges were dismissed.

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A 2008 raid on the group’s Yearning for Zion ranch in Eldorado, Texas, resulted in the removal of more than 400 children from the premises and further legal troubles for some FLDS members. The raid was launched in response to a phone call alleging that a 16-year-old girl was being sexually assaulted in the compound. The state of Texas took custody of the children and allowed more than 100 FLDS women to accompany them in custody as a courtesy but later returned them to their families. Jeffs and other FLDS members, however, were indicted by a Texas grand jury on charges of sexual assault and bigamy in 2008.

In 2011 Jeffs stood trial in Texas on charges of aggravated sexual assault of a child and sexual assault of a child. During the trial, in which Jeffs acted as his own defense, prosecutors presented DNA and audio evidence, gathered from the Texas compound raid, that they said demonstrated that Jeffs had sexually assaulted two of his underage spiritual wives, one 12 and one 15. The girls were two of the dozens of spiritual wives—both adult and underage—that Jeffs had taken over the years. In August 2011 he was sentenced to life in prison on the first count of aggravated sexual assault of a child and 20 years for the second count of sexual assault of a child.

Jeffs resigned as president of the FLDS in 2007 and officially gave authority over the group to William Jessop. Jeffs’s brother Lyle Jeffs was appointed bishop of Short Creek, but he later faced his own legal issues and became a fugitive. Warren Jeffs then appointed Nephi Jeffs, another brother, as bishop. But Warren Jeffs remains acknowledged as the current living prophet by his followers, and reports suggest that Jeffs continues to exert significant influence over his community even after his incarceration.