FLDS Church History: Warren Jeffs, Short Creek, and YFZ Raid

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or FLDS, is a polygamist sect that broke from the mainstream Mormon church in the early twentieth century after the LDS Church renounced plural marriage. The history of the FLDS church runs from a dissenting faction in 1890s Utah through decades of theocratic control over the twin border towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, to the 2011 life sentence of prophet Warren Jeffs for sexually assaulting underage girls and the gradual unwinding of the sect’s hold on the communities it once ran.

Where the FLDS Came From

The FLDS traces itself to the 1890 Manifesto, in which LDS Church President Wilford Woodruff officially withdrew support for new plural marriages, a precondition for Utah’s admission to statehood. A faction of believers refused to abandon polygamy, which they considered a divine commandment. They pointed to what they described as an 1887 revelation received by Church President John Taylor, in which Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith purportedly instructed that plural marriage must continue. Taylor is said to have charged several men, including John W. Woolley and his son Lorin C. Woolley, with perpetuating the practice.

Lorin Woolley later organized a “Priesthood Council,” and by the 1930s the movement had consolidated into a distinct religious body. Under John Y. Barlow, who led the group until his death in 1949, the community grew to roughly 2,500 followers and settled in the remote border town of Short Creek, which would later incorporate as Hildale on the Utah side and Colorado City on the Arizona side. The faction that eventually became the FLDS retained control of Short Creek and the communal property trust that sustained it.

The 1953 Short Creek Raid

On July 26, 1953, Arizona Governor Howard Pyle sent roughly 60 to 70 law enforcement officers and National Guard troops into Short Creek in a predawn operation he called a strike against “insurrection and rebellion.” Pyle described the community’s children as “the product and the victims of the foulest conspiracy you could imagine.”¹ The operation was funded with $50,000 in state legislative money originally earmarked for insect control.²

Authorities served 122 arrest warrants and placed 263 children in state custody.¹ The legal aftermath was thin. Twenty-six men received one-year suspended sentences and were ordered to stop practicing polygamy, and the Arizona Supreme Court overturned the state’s attempt to permanently remove the children from their families.³ News footage of children being torn from their mothers produced widespread public sympathy. The Arizona Republic editorialized that the police tactics “resembles too closely the hated police-state roundups of the Old World,” and Pyle lost his reelection bid in part because of the backlash.²

Rather than dismantling the community, the raid entrenched it. Former Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard later said FLDS leaders used the event for decades to frame the government as “evil” and “out to get you and destroy your life and family,” deepening members’ distrust of outsiders.¹ Short Creek grew to more than 4,500 residents within four decades.²

Life Under the Prophet

Leroy S. Johnson led Short Creek from the mid-1950s until his death in 1986. Rulon Jeffs succeeded him and formally incorporated the group as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.⁴ Under Rulon, and especially under his son Warren after 2002, the FLDS functioned as a theocracy in which the prophet held absolute authority over nearly every aspect of members’ lives.

Central to FLDS theology was the belief that plural marriage was essential for salvation, and that the more wives a man had, the closer he came to God.⁵ The prophet did not merely sanction marriages. He assigned wives to men through a practice sometimes called the “law of placing,” and he could reassign them, breaking apart families by declaring a man “unworthy” and giving his wives and children to someone else.⁶

Warren Jeffs tightened behavioral controls beyond what his father had imposed. Television, movies, popular music, and fictional books were banned. Birthdays and Christmas were eliminated. Even dogs were forbidden.⁷ Women wore prairie-style dresses that covered their skin from the neck down and were forbidden from cutting their hair. Girls and women were told to “keep sweet” and suppress every emotion other than cheerful compliance.⁵

The Lost Boys

The system that gave older men multiple young wives required removing younger male competition. Estimates of the teenage boys and young men expelled from FLDS communities range from 400 to 1,000. Church leaders characterized them as delinquents punished for breaking rules. Utah officials and attorneys representing the boys said the real purpose was demographic. Boys as young as 13 were reportedly driven out and left on the roadside in Arizona and Utah.⁸

In 2004, several of them sued the FLDS and its property trust, the United Effort Plan. One plaintiff was Brent Jeffs, Warren Jeffs’ nephew, who alleged his uncle had sexually abused him as a child.⁹ Six other plaintiffs alleged they had been systematically driven out. In 2007, the group reached a partial settlement with the UEP Trust under which each plaintiff received a three-acre lot in Hildale, and a $250,000 education and assistance fund was created for displaced community members, replenished at $50,000 per year through 2011.¹⁰ Brent Jeffs later described the FLDS in his memoir Lost Boy as a place where girls were “valued property” but boys were “expendable.”¹¹

Warren Jeffs’ Rise, Flight, and Conviction

Warren Jeffs took over the FLDS in 2002 after his father Rulon’s death. He arranged marriages between underage girls and older men, and the practice drew the attention of law enforcement. In May 2006, the FBI placed him on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, the 482nd person ever added, and offered a $100,000 reward.¹² The federal charge enabling his inclusion was unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.¹³

His time as a fugitive ended on August 28, 2006, when a Nevada Highway Patrol trooper stopped an SUV with invalid plates near Las Vegas and recognized Jeffs as a passenger from a wanted poster. He was taken into custody without incident.¹²

Utah convicted Jeffs in 2007 on two counts of rape as an accomplice tied to a marriage he had arranged between an underage girl and an adult man, but the Utah Supreme Court unanimously reversed the convictions in July 2010, finding that the trial judge had given erroneous jury instructions on the law of consent.¹⁴¹⁵ The Utah charges were eventually dropped after Texas convicted him.

The Texas case was built on evidence seized in the 2008 raid on the Yearning for Zion Ranch. Jeffs was tried in San Angelo before District Judge Barbara Walther on charges of aggravated sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl and sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl, both of whom he had taken as polygamous wives.¹⁶ He fired his defense team and represented himself at trial. Prosecutors presented DNA evidence proving Jeffs had fathered a child with the 15-year-old victim, along with audio recordings of the assaults.¹⁷

On August 9, 2011, after roughly 30 minutes of deliberation, a Texas jury sentenced Jeffs to life in prison on the aggravated sexual assault count and 20 years on the sexual assault count. The judge ordered the sentences to run consecutively, meaning Jeffs must serve at least 45 years before becoming eligible for parole.¹⁶ He is incarcerated at the Louis C. Powledge Unit in Palestine, Texas, with a parole eligibility date of July 22, 2038.¹⁸

The 2008 Yearning for Zion Ranch Raid

In late March 2008, a domestic violence shelter received a phone call from someone claiming to be a 16-year-old resident of the Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado, Texas, alleging sexual and physical abuse by a 50-year-old husband. Authorities later indicated the call may have been a hoax, and reports suggested the purported caller may never have lived at the ranch.¹⁹²⁰ The call still provided the basis for a search warrant. On April 3, 2008, Texas authorities raided the property, which exceeded 1,000 acres and housed more than 700 FLDS members, and removed 464 children.

What investigators found at the ranch was striking. Of 53 girls between the ages of 14 and 17 removed from the compound, 31 were pregnant or already had children.¹⁹ Most children were eventually returned to their families, but the documents, recordings, and DNA evidence seized during the raid became the foundation of the criminal case that sent Warren Jeffs to prison for life.¹⁷

Dismantling the FLDS Hold on Hildale and Colorado City

For decades the FLDS controlled the twin towns through the United Effort Plan, a property trust created in 1942 that held title to most of the land in Hildale and Colorado City.²¹ Members contributed their property and labor to the trust, and the trust in turn allocated housing. In practice, FLDS leaders used that control to decide who lived where, and the threat of losing one’s home enforced obedience.

In 2005, the Utah Attorney General’s Office petitioned the courts to take over the UEP, alleging that Warren Jeffs and other church leaders were mismanaging assets and diverting resources meant for members.²² The Third Judicial District Court of Salt Lake County placed the trust under court supervision and reformed its governing documents, establishing a seven-member board of trustees, mostly former FLDS members, to manage and distribute property.²¹ Many FLDS members refused to participate, leading to evictions from hundreds of homes, meetinghouses, and schools. On June 18, 2019, Judge Richard McKelvie ended 14 years of court oversight.

The federal government went after the local government itself. In June 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Colorado City, Hildale, their joint Marshal’s Office, and their joint water company, alleging a decades-long pattern of using municipal services to enforce FLDS religious dictates and discriminate against non-members.²³ The complaint cited violations of the Fair Housing Act, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.²⁴

In March 2016, a federal jury found that the towns had systematically discriminated against non-FLDS residents in housing, utilities, and policing, and that the Marshal’s Office functioned as an arm of the church. Officers were found to have “turned a blind eye” to crimes by FLDS members, including underage marriages and food stamp fraud. The court approved a $1.6 million damages settlement and in April 2017 ordered new police hiring and training practices, revised municipal policies, and a federal monitor, all to remain in effect for ten years. Arizona’s police standards board revoked the certifications of six of the seven sworn officers in the Marshal’s Office.²⁵

Prosecutions After Warren

With Warren Jeffs in prison, his brother Lyle Jeffs took over day-to-day management of the sect. In February 2016, a federal grand jury indicted Lyle and ten other church leaders and members on charges of large-scale food stamp fraud and money laundering. Prosecutors alleged that church leaders ordered members to surrender their SNAP benefits, which were then used to purchase unauthorized items like trucks and tractors, or cashed out at church-owned stores without the exchange of food. The scheme diverted an estimated $11 to $12 million in benefits.²⁶²⁷

In June 2016, Lyle Jeffs escaped home confinement in Salt Lake City by reportedly using olive oil to slip out of his GPS ankle monitor. The FBI caught him nearly a year later near Yankton, South Dakota, where he was living out of a pickup truck at a marina.²⁸ On December 13, 2017, U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart sentenced him to 57 months in prison, 45 for conspiracy to commit benefits fraud and 12 for failure to appear, along with $1 million in restitution.²⁹ Separately, in October 2021, a federal court ordered the FLDS, Lyle Jeffs, and contractor Brian Jessop to pay nearly $1 million for child labor violations after the U.S. Department of Labor found that children from the community had been put to work harvesting pecans on a southern Utah farm without pay between 2008 and 2013.³⁰

The sect’s Canadian offshoot in Bountiful, British Columbia, also faced prosecution. The British Columbia Supreme Court found Winston Blackmore, who had married 24 women, and James Oler, who had married five, guilty of polygamy under Section 293 of Canada’s Criminal Code.³¹ Oler and two others were later convicted of unlawfully removing children from Canada for sexual purposes, charges connected to Warren Jeffs’ practice of arranging marriages for underage girls across international borders.³²

A newer offshoot has drawn federal attention. Samuel Rappylee Bateman, a self-proclaimed prophet with ties to the FLDS, was arrested in 2022 after authorities found him transporting child brides in a box trailer.³³³⁴ All 11 adult co-defendants were convicted, two by jury and the rest by guilty plea.³⁵

Where Things Stand Now

Hildale and Colorado City look nothing like they did under FLDS control. The towns were released from federal court-ordered supervision in the summer of 2025, having transitioned from a theocracy to what court-appointed monitor Roger Carter called a “first-generation representative government.”⁶ The towns now have a supermarket, a bank, a pharmacy, a coffee shop, a bar, and a winery. Youth sports are common. In 2018, Donia Jessop was elected as Hildale’s first female mayor.⁵ Practicing FLDS members now represent only a small percentage of the local population.

The sect has not disappeared. Warren Jeffs continues to issue religious edicts from prison, distributed through intermediaries including his son Helaman Jeffs. A recent directive called for some former members to return to the faith while forcing others out, and the Utah Attorney General’s Office has said it is monitoring the situation.³⁶ Former members have reported that one 2022 revelation stated that “within five years, the children will be translated to heaven,” which, according to the message, requires them to “die first.”⁵ Remaining followers have dispersed to other parts of Utah and surrounding states, and the church continues to dictate family structures for those who remain, including the redistribution of children among households. Members also remain in Texas, South Dakota, Colorado, Nevada, British Columbia, and Mexico.³⁷

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26
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27
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31
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33
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34
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