Posted on 10/13/2011 9:57:18 AM PDT by MizSterious
One of the wives of polygamist leader Warren Jeffs, who is currently serving a life sentence for child sexual assault, has escaped the confines of the isolated Arizona community where his 85 other wives live.
Arizona authorities have said that the 25-year-old woman who fled the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which was led by Jeffs, is now undergoing counseling and psychiatric care at a women's shelter. She was reportedly barefoot when she was found.
The secluded community of the church in Colorado City, Ariz., contains about 5,000 residents and is a world where outsiders are not welcomed. Now a woman that is highly familiar with the isolated community and its controversial former leader has escaped.
Willie Jeesop, a former FLDS spokesman who was kicked out of the religion by Jeffs, said that the unidentified woman was under duress when she sought refuge with Jeffs in Colorado City.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Chaz Bono?
I dunno, but you’d have a 1 in 86 chance of getting it right.
Good for her, but what about her kids? Hopefully, she can now get them out.
Warren Jeffs trial pinglist—if you want on or off, let me know via freepmail!
Technically, this is not about the trial—yet. But there is one of his wives who is about the same age as this lady who might have a lot of beans to spill about Jeffs. That would be interesting!
My guess, since it’s little more than a sex cult, is that since her husband is now dead and the woman must be married, she was probably being forced to be wife #16 to some other church father.
Sounds like the authorities should raid the whole place under suspicion of multiple instances of false imprisonment.
If these ladies are “escaping”, does that mean that they’re being held prisoners. If so, isn’t that a CRIME???!
Jeffs isn’t dead, he’s still serving a life sentence.
I thought he was the one that died, my mistake.
If it’s not him, I wonder who it was a few months ago that quit eating drinking and in about a week.
That's exactly what happened after Joseph Smith was killed in a blotched jail break in 1844.
The question of how to divvy up Joseph's harem was one of the primary factors leading to a 2.5 year civil war (as per the historian Hubert Bancroft), their second inter-denominational shooting conflict. The Danites were forced to enforce the law of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles whereby transgressors would be "cut close and square." The State of Illinois' reaction to all of this carnage was one of the main factors leading to the Saints' migration to Utah. The booty battles continued in one form or fashion in the main LDS sect into the early 20th century, and continue in some of the LDS breakaways to this day.
They commit lots of crimes, and only a few have actually been prosecuted for them. But at least the state of Texas is working on it—more than I can say for Utah, Colorado and Arizona.
Same guy, but he didn’t die. If you read the article, at the beginning, it even says the escapee is the wife of Warren Jeffs who is serving a life sentence.
Welcome to Mohave County, where you can have 85 wives, but only 3 dogs.
Ewww! Even Jeffers wouldn’t touch that.
Amazing, isn’t it? Defies all logic.
This has been tried at least twice. Arizona in 1953 and Texas in 2008. In both cases, it turned out to be a political nightmare for the states.
Few if any of the women turned on the church and most were quite vocal advocates. The states wound up "taking children from their mothers," and both liberals and libertarian-oriented conservatives were appalled by state "over-reaching."
The whole situation is a really tough nut to crack. The women are highly supportive of the system, so to remove them from it you have to impose your own version of what they should want on them by force.
Which of course brings up the question of whether the states or the federal government should be doing things like this.
I guess the article I read a few months here was incorrect, because I distinctly remember it saying he was dead, with fellow Freepers questioning how he could die in only a week.
But I did miss that detail in this article.
Colorado City is not that isolated. It is located along Arizona Highway 389 which becomes Utah Highway 59, the main route from Las Vegas—and, for that matter, Los Angeles—to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and other sites such as Pipe Spring National Monument.
In 2008, I visited Colorado City and shopped in a food market. Here, I was greeted by a most amazing site. Most of the customers were young women in their 20’s who wore long nineteenth-century-style dresses either in solid colors or a checkerboard pattern. Even the cashier was wearing one of these dresses. The few men I saw seemed to be older, in their 40’s or beyond. All were wearing western shirts and some wore Stetson hats. The men and women seemed to have come there from the 1880’s through a time warp.
A couple of women in the store were wearing short pants, and I figured they were probably travelers passing through and not residents of the community.
The homes in the residential neighborhoods of Colorado City are mostly much larger—for obvious reasons—than the houses usually found in small desert communities.
Speaking of that - there is an arrest warrant out for Willie 'the thug' Jessop for not appearing in Court in the Sam Brower case. Why didn't they pick him up?
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