The Road to Eldorado: They Saw it Coming

May 12, 2008
By Jennifer Litz
Editor

On March 29, Child Protective Services allegedly received a phone call from a 16-year-old girl inside the polygamist compound called Yearning for Zion Ranch at Eldorado, Texas. The compound, built under the direction of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints incarcerated leader Warren Jeffs, housed hundreds of women, children, and men recruited from polygamist camps in Utah and Arizona.

The still-anonymous caller claimed abuse from her 50-year-old “husband,” whom she claimed beat, choked, and sexually assaulted her. CPS officials needed backup to raid the heavily guarded compound, so state officials helped them infiltrate. Once inside, officials saw evidence of rampant underage marriage, pregnancies, and abuse. According to several reports, compound men recruited underage “spiritual wives,” not recognized by Texas law.

District Judge Barbara Walther signed a warrant to investigate further. By the end of the raid, the state took custody of hundreds of children, moving them and some mothers to San Angelo’s Fort Concho. Many of the children are now in foster homes across the state, and litigation is ongoing. Among the issues are whether girls were “spiritually married” to men before the legal age in Texas, which is 16. And DNA tests will reveal true mothers and fathers—and hold those mothers accountable as accomplices to rape if they knowingly allowed an underage marriage.

Randy Mankin says the last thing he could imagine is having throngs of corporate media descend on his little town of 3,000 inhabitants, chasing the story about the ongoing tragedy at the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) compound just north of town. When Mankin’s newspaper, The Eldorado Success, first broke the news in 2004 that the polygamist cult was building a large, self-sustaining village in their midst, no one outside of Eldorado seemed to care.

But in April 2008, when Texas Child Protective Services, the Texas Rangers, and legions of SWAT teams, the local sheriff, and even an armored personnel carrier borrowed from Midland County Sheriffs’ Department swarmed the compound to rescue 462 children from the FLDS compound, every media person wanted to be Mankin’s best friend.

He was the man with the background and the story. “Well actually, my wife Kathy is the biggest expert on these people,” Mankin says. Kathy is. She has everything, from pictures to facts, and articles searchable on her personal computer. Ask her about any character in this sordid mess and she’ll let you know everything about them.

Randy has a degree in political science from Texas Tech. “So I could go back into the oil fields after I graduated on the eight-year plan,” he jokes. But with an eye for news and the writing ability to report it, he and Kathy purchased Eldorado’s only newspaper in 1994. In 2005, they added the Big Lake Wildcat newspaper to their portfolio.

The Mankins take all of the exposure in stride, and add a little humor. You (and your prospective brides) can purchase an official Eldorado Polygamous Marriage Certificate at the newspaper’s offices. “We also sell the legal instrument needed for a divorce,” Mankin jokes, as he holds up a stick of whiteout.

Yet Mankin is very serious about allegations against what he calls a cult that decided to settle in Eldorado. We whisked him out of his reporter role for a few moments and this is what he shared with us.

You’ve covered the story since the compound was built in 2004. Did you ever suspect something unlawful was going on in the compound?

We all suspected it from the beginning; a leper can’t change it’s spots; it had been rampant in Short Creek, which is what they call Colorado City and Hilldale [The FLDS communities on the Arizona/Utah border]. They refer to it as ‘Short Crik’—they say ‘crick,’ we would say creek. Everyone suspected it, but you can’t go [into the compound] on a suspicion. You have to have a complaint, or someone with first-hand knowledge. And that didn’t happen until this raid.

What has been the attitude of Eldorado citizens these four years since the compound has been built? Has it always been a hot topic of conversation, or did its urgency to locals’ ebb and flow with your coverage?

It’s been a topic—when they first got here, there was a lot of concern, and it would die down, and there would be another development. The media would stream in, and all along, we were all trying to stay up with the events. We started our job here to inform ourselves and then inform the public, and try to find out who this group was, where they were from, and what they believed. Opinions here have run the gamut from both extremes. One extreme was to go in and run ‘em out, chase ‘em back to Utah, and the other extreme was, “hey, different strokes for different folks.”

Do you believe law officials should have intervened before they did? Do you know of any missed chances they had, where they could have had cause for a warrant, but didn’t pursue it?

Don’t know how they could have. [They] did not have a complaint. I don’t want anyone coming to my house and kicking my door down because [of suspicion]. No—none [missed chances]. And I have followed this more closely than anyone else in the news media. As much as the media would love to say cops screwed this up—quite frankly that’s the vibe I’m getting from you, I don’t know what else they could have done. Our sheriff has been in this compound time and time again, trying to make inroads in. But it is a closed society.

Tell me about some of the escaped critics of FLDS you’ve interviewed over the years. Can you quickly profile them? What have been their stances on the sect?

Flora Jessup; she’ll tell you all types of things, but she never gives you proof. Show me the proof; show me something I can hang my hat on. Richard Holm, he’s more level-headed . . . I know lots of people like that—but none of these people has ever been at the YFZ Ranch. It’s one thing to say we know this is going on—but it happened in Hilldale, Utah, or Colorado City, Arizona. The only ones who came here were the most loyal followers…they are hand-picked; they are Warren Jeffs’ most loyal foot soldiers; the ones who have given him the least trouble and most money, and these are the least likely to reach out to outsiders.

Why did those overseeing the Eldorado compound’s construction lie about the compound being a hunting retreat? What prompted them to come clean about it?

I think to escape the scrutiny as long as they could; we just kept hammering them with our stories about who they were, where they were from. And our coverage promoted others in the media to pay attention. For five or six weeks, they lied.

What are some of the rumors you’ve heard circling around about the compound that you don’t believe to be true? One I’ve heard is that they have incinerators on the compound…

Oh, heinous rumors. Rumors that there’s a crematorium; I’ve heard rumors of baby sacrifice; they’re coming from everywhere. I bet I got 20 e-mails from people accusing them from everything of cannibalism to white slavery. I mean just all over the map.

I could tell you, yes, I fully suspect they were doing a lot of what they were doing, but a suspicion will not get you a warrant.

On the national coverage the compound has now gotten:

We’ve just done our job. Had we not reported this, no one in San Angelo would have known about it. The San Angelo Standard-Times [newspaper] certainly wasn’t going to do it. Someone’s got to draw it to their attention before they come out and cover it. Just like anyone else in the media, they say, ‘bring me up to speed,’ and I say, ‘Do some investigating like we’ve done.’ It’s the herd mentality.

This story has everything; sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. It has all the elements of a story that sells: underage girls, older men, it has the cult connection, a group that’s all around one personality.

On the comparisons to Waco:

I didn’t think they were warranted at first, and I don’t think they were warranted at the end. Everyone kept trying to drag that [Waco] up. Law enforcement learned a lot from Waco: The feds—had Waco been left to the local sheriff, he could have arrested [Branch Davidian leader David Koresh] on a county road sometime when he was out jogging. But The feds got involved. Fortunately here, The feds stayed out of it. These crimes that are being alleged [now] are not federal crimes, they are state crimes. The feds can get involved in very specific areas.

[In this case it was an] outcry for help from a girl; whether she’s coming forward or not and identifying herself, CPS felt they had a legit concern in Eldorado and San Angelo. When CPS gets a cry for help, they can drive right up and knock on the door. They couldn’t do that here. You can’t approach any direction here without being confronted; [the whole compound is on] lockdown. So CPS asked the feds for assistance to get them on the compound. And that’s what happened. I bet they haven’t slept much since then. Once they got on the compound they saw evidence of other crimes; i.e., young girls that were pregnant, and they went back to judge Walther and got the warrant expanded, and that gave them power to go into every building on the ranch, and they did.

On the special plight of men in the polygamist sect:

I would like to point out a couple of things: There have been more children removed form their parents by Warren Jeffs and the FLDS Church than the state of Texas had ever thought about… he routinely kicked men out of this group and told them to go repent from a distance. He would take their wives and children and reassign them to other men. I’ve talked to the men. They’re out there. One of them is named Richard Holm. I’ve been to Short Creek. Certainly the Standard-Times could have been there. But there are people out there who will talk . . .

There’s a private investigator, Sam Brower, he is in San Angelo right now, he was down here [recently]. He has birth certificates from these men trying to find their children. So where is the moral outrage when Jeffs and this cult do this to their own people without a court hearing, without due process and law, without a search warrant, with nothing?

And when you think about polygamy—when a man loses his family, he loses more children than the women, because the man is married to many women. So for every woman at the YFZ with her children removed, [you] can produce more men who had more children removed. But nothing’s being said about that.

The attorney out here, Mr. Rod Parker from Salt Lake City [who represents the FLDS], is putting on a dog and pony show. I saw the same scripted statements from them all [the Eldorado women]; and when you’d try to jog them off their story, they wouldn’t talk about polygamy or how many times they’d been reassigned, all they had to do was try to portray it the way they wanted it. So that’s what I would add to the story. It is a lot deeper than anyone realizes. The crimes [being asserted] are the tiptop of the iceberg.