In 2003, Order member Jeremy Kingston pleaded guilty to incest for taking his first cousin, 15-year-old Lu Ann Kingston, as his fourth wife. In a portion of Warren Jeffs' Priesthood Record a mostly dry document that details his every move and meeting one entry, a written transcription of an announcement made by Warren at lunch with his late father's family, stands out as particularly creepy. Browning sees similarities between The Order and the religion-minded racists of the World Church of the Creator and the Christian Identity movement. One of her brothers married a woman whose grandmother is a sister to their father. for Nathanael Allred's baby. J.O. Fishing it out of his jeans, hell recognize the number. Modern interpretations of this passage vary, but The Order apparently takes quite literally this idea of blackness being a sign of iniquity. All I like to do is work on cars and hang out with friends and ride my ponies, he wrote one night on his MySpace page. [W]e directly condemn in action and in words, racist, homophobic or hateful actions against any group or individual, Johnson wrote. And they are growing. Her disobedience incurred the wrath of her father Daniel, who took her to a family ranch near the Idaho border and savagely beat her. 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. Wed sleep on the chicken coop in the summer and shoot raccoons. 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. Over the next several years, Stephen bounced from the suburbs of Salt Lake to the clans ranch in Nevada. . These days Stephen works on a cattle ranch near the Idaho border, just down the road from where he grew up. "I'm like, Really? It was a wild place, says Scott Cosgrove, a former detective with the Box Elder County Sheriffs Office, who remembers the ranch as a broken-down spread, guarded by a feral pack of boys who patrolled the fence line from the back of a pickup armed with shotguns. According to former members of the Order, decades of inbreeding have resulted in rampant birth defects throughout the family. Thats your Uncle Paul, she said. In another, Order attorney Carl Kingston warns listeners about marrying up with Hams kids, a reference to the aforementioned Biblical curse. The clan believed he had their treasure, and they were sending someone to kill him. Bad harm. He bragged that he had worn the same black shirt every day for a year. If the Order doesnt have it, the clan teaches, we dont need it., Editors picks But for their part, The Order and other fundamentalist sects believe the LDS church exists in a state of apostasy for abandoning what they see as a bedrock principle of their faith. Come back, his dad will say. I strongly believe they are an organized-crime family, Shurtleff says. Chinese people were called stupid, and Mexicans were dirty, said Lu Ann, adding, because of their skin.. 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). The discovery by this project that Co. Cork Kingstons share a common Kingston ancestor with Kingstons from the villages around Towcester in the southern part of Northamptonshire, as determined by Y chromosome analysis, is crucial to our understanding of the origins of Co. Cork Kingstons. Dawna says that, when people refer to what's going on over in the Cane Beds, they say it's probably another turkey baster situation. 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.. Ron Tucker went so far as to call his former brethren white supremacists, and ten times more racist than your run-of-the-mill skinhead. So they would hand them over to Aunt Martha, who was the midwife," he says. The Tuckers think this is all hogwash now, though they were programmed to believe it at the time. If you messed with one of them, you were messing with them all., When Stephen was nine, an accident at Washakie set in motion a chain of events that would eventually prompt him to leave the cult. The son of the clans prophet, Knight, then 18, had once seemed destined for a leadership role within the Order. Money, sex and power. "I didn't touch her; I just used a turkey baster," she mimics, rolling her eyes. He seemed like the most amazing guy, Stephen recalls. KUTV When several businesses inside the Kingston polygamist empire, including Washakie Renewable Energy, was raided by federal agents Wednesday, officials where tight lipped. Geri and I ask the same question at the same time: "What exactly do you mean by took care of them? Jonathan Turner, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside, hypothesized exactly that, in an article published by the ABC news network in 2008. 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. Due to the Kingstons convoluted genealogy, Lu Ann was both his first cousin and his aunt. Intelligence Report then read the names of women believed to be his wives four in all. Family Tree. If both parents carry the gene, the likelihood that their. 17226 Horsetooth Canyon Dr, Houston, TX 77095. "And she's not the only one; three of her sisters married three of my brothers. 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. Young declined to comment when asked if he practices polygamy. Ross LeBaron Jr. recently took to the Internet to express his support for the Bundy family in Oregon, as well as for LaVoy Finicum, the lone fatality in that ordeal. This article appears in the June 23, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. Julie left the cult at age 19. But I do have children with other women., Asked if two women named were in fact his first cousins, Young paused, finally replying, I guess Im curious as to what youre trying to get at here.. Still more, rather cryptically, feature child-size palm and footprints. Nevertheless, former members of The Order say that incest and racism are inextricably linked in The Orders teachings. 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. (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. The Order was founded by Elden Kingston, Stephens grand-uncle, at the height of the Great Depression. Family members attribute the defects to the advanced As far as how you end up in heaven, thats up to God.. He mandated that children should drink tea brewed from the herb every morning, and that Order members should feed it to their cows. At the lot's northwest corner, a metal gatethe kind you might find on a cattle ranchhangs open on its hinge. and last updated 1:46 PM, Feb 24, 2021. His life was in danger, the voice on the other end warned. They threw away their possessions, donned matching blue overalls, and pitched canvas tents on a patch of land north of Salt Lake that would come to be known as the Home Place.. Accounts of clan babies being born with congenital defects and other problems abound, including dwarfism, albinism and children born minus fingernails or without genitals. And another one of her sisters married one of my half-brothers, but we have the same blood and genetics because our moms are full sisters." He was. Home births and the frequency of miscarriages and still-borns among the Kingstons have led to macabre legends of dead infants buried in Kingston back yards. Boys as young as 14 labored in the workshop. Over the years, state law enforcement and the courts have sporadically addressed the incest in the Kingston ranks. Once free of the cult, Lu Ann, Allison and other ex-Order members have had to unlearn the hatred that was drilled into their heads. Towards Net Zero. 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 weekends, he was sent out to work at the Orders coal mine with other teenagers. They maintain a secretive but powerful presence in Utah's Salt Lake Valley, and their estimated 7,500. They both have the same high cheekbones, the same pale skin, the same wide-set eyes. The grave side funeral services will be at the grave side in Babyland at 4p.m.". Then their father said something they never expected. But the constant fear has subsided. Okay, I have one legal wife, he said. Tom Sizemore, Heat and Saving Private Ryan Actor, Dead at 61 In the meantime, the police were closing in on the missing silver. Still, he conceded that some Order members may have prejudiced beliefs because in our organization people have freedom of choice.. The clan kids from there would come to school not properly dressed for the cold, and they were always getting in fights. One crime had been solved but the chest of gold stolen from Patty Kingstons closet remained a mystery. Ex-order members interviewed by the Intelligence Report generally agreed with the characterization of the Kingston clan as a hate group.. Before the call ended, Young insisted that he didnt admit to any kind of incest or anything. When Intelligence Report inquired if Young thought there was anything wrong with first cousins getting married, Young opined that such issues were between the individuals involved and God. But within the Order, where drinking soda pop was against the rules, it was a pretty big deal.. The Kingstons are a Mormon splinter group, founded in the 1930s by Mary's great-uncle Elden. 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. (Paul Kingston and other leaders of the family ignored repeated requests for comment for this story. A sheriffs deputy traced the license plate of the Honda to a run-down house in a working-class suburb south of the city. Structural birth defects are related to a problem with the structure of body parts. 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. But it is likely that Kingston could recognize some of himself in Stephen. As time passed, his dogma became even stranger. They got married and contacted the . She directs me to the houses she lived in after that: her stepdad Jim Jessop's home; then the rotten, roach-infested house she and her mother shared with nearly two dozen cousins and friends after being removed from Jim's following the Judgment. 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. There was also testimony, during one hearing, that someone in the Kingston clan wanted to blow up the courthouse. The mere rumor of black blood could condemn someone in the eyes of Order members. Paul already had two wives, but he and Richaun were married in a secret ceremony at her parents house. One ex-Order member, who asked to be referred to as Scott, instead of his real name for fear of retribution by clan members, said hatred of gays was big in the Kingston clan, with the word f----- in frequent use. Nothing has come of the raids yet, and the IRS refused comment on the matter when contacted by this publication. His arms are sunburned and his hands calloused from long days moving the irrigation pipes that water the fields. As part of a plea bargain, Jeremy spent just one year in prison. While his dad was running the order from Salt Lake City, Stephen grew up on a cattle ranch called Washakie, near the Idaho border. 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. Dawna asks me. And the graveyard grew exponentially.". Nearby homes. In its place, someone had left a note. (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.) 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. If you find a grave up there that's not marked, that's the way Fred wanted it.". You better check on your gold, Young told her. His eldest died six years ago at 10 years old, he says, and another died in infancy, leaving behind two remaining brothers from a set of spontaneous identical triplets. You had to be, like, a son of the prophet to know where it was.. They sat there for a moment, warming their hands against the sputtering heater. Its ominous-sounding moniker, The Order, is a reference to the United Order, a quasi-utopian society proposed by LDS-founder Joseph Smith, and practiced in some Mormon communities under the leadership of early church president Brigham Young. 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 . Noticing Stephen, he put the barbells down and came over to the boy. I felt for his pulse, but he was already gone., That night, Paul Kingston arrived at the ranch. This is all compounded by the split between the FLDS and an offshoot group of polygamists that moved to nearby Centennial Park following a disagreement over how the community should be governed, and by whom). Some feature more expensive-looking gravestones, and include, beyond names and dates, terms of endearment such as: "Sweet baby girl," "Our son," and "Heaven's very special child." A stern disciplinarian, who in later years looked and dressed like a mortician, Ortell made incest a tenet of the clans faith, informed by his work breeding Holstein cows on the Kingstons dairy farm. They're given the utmost attention and care because the FLDS faithful believe everything in this life is a test before entering the celestial kingdom, and caring well for all of Heavenly Father's children is part of that test. 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. Asked about these legends, Kingston spokesman Kent Johnson, explained via email that on occasion Order families have asked to spread the ashes of a child lost before or after birth at the Holy Spot. Sometimes he parked his immaculately buffed burgundy Ford Thunderbird on the curb, but it was rare to see the man himself. By the time the teenagers sped away, they had made off with more than $80,000 in silver. He had yet to lose his hair, and thanks to his fanatical devotion to healthy food and alternative medicine, he had the ropy build of a well-toned athlete. 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. 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Its a quiet, haunting place, with massive hayfields that stretch to the horizon. Thats what happened with Ron Tuckers family. According to experts and former Jeffs followers, the cause of the birth defect is clear: Intermarriage among close relatives is producing children who have two copies of a recessive gene for a debilitating condition called Fumarase Deficiency. 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. Given such incidents, could Order members be a threat to law enforcement? Another is a first cousin. 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. Come and get me, Stephen said. ", "They took their lives," Ron says. A passerby might catch a glimpse of children in the windows, but for the most part, the Young family kept to themselves. $302,500. But Dawna disagrees: "I think it was actually, you know." The quick answer for why this polygamous community has buried so many of its children is inbreeding, according to community members. 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. We were taught to be polite, but to never make friends with outsiders. The clan avoids hospitals, believing government-backed doctors might inject them with a mysterious disease or demand birth records exposing the Orders lifestyle. Their neighbors had no idea that the family were prominent members of the Kingston clan, the most powerful polygamist cult in America and one of the most dangerous. Structural Birth Defects. Stephen hangs up and drives home in silence. If gay men stay in the closet, they are allowed to remain in the cult as worker bees.. He orchestrated all unions within the cult, which was maintained with classic mind control techniques, corporal punishment, fasting and bizarre dietary practices. Future Planet. Situated at the base of a rugged mountain range, the Orders spread sat in a pristine valley of glistening hayfields and open pasture. Or leave. Boys began to show interest in Julie as she matured, but Paul, as the clans leader, warned them away, because of Julies black blood. . Ron Kingston says The Orders leadership has too much to lose for something like that to happen. She is guiding me all around town, following my route, turn by turn, on Google maps. He was angry and confused, says a former member of the cult. I love the Order. One such. had some 80 children by 13 wives, but his favorite was Paul, an excellent student who made friends easily. In 2003, another clan member, Jeremy Kingston pleaded guilty to incest for taking 15-year-old Lu Ann Kingston as his fourth wife. There was a guy out here who was married to a couple of young girls, and he was going to get in trouble. Instead, he had walked away from the family three years earlier to make a life of his own. In the months after the robbery, Stephen couldnt shake the feeling he was being watched. After the chest of gold was stolen, suspicion among the clans leadership immediately fell on a group of rebellious teenagers who had left the cult a few years before. It's the kids who are disproportionately handicapped as compared to the demographics of any other comparably small town. They are paid not in cash but in scrip, an arcane form of credit used by the Mormon pioneers that can only be redeemed at company stores. The Kingston clan is an endogamous (preaching unity between members of the same family) and polygamous sect formed by a split in the Mormon church - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 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. It was February in Salt Lake, cold and gray, and in the foothills above the city, a low fog hung over the mountains. I guess I just had too much soy, Snow smiled. He thinks about his mom, and wonders if she misses him. Authorities call it an organized crime group. "Well, needless to say, we had a lot of, uh. Luke Brown now insists that he and his brother simply borrowed the silver, and planned to return it to their aunt later. Others say they buried it out in the desert and are slowly cashing it out. There is also some overlap with Sovereign citizens, he contends. 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. Some would say that is because it takes generations for certain inbred recessive genetic traits to manifest. "It's doesn't stop anybody," Dawna says. If you ever do that again, he said, Ill blow your head off., It was an astonishing moment in the history of the clan. But in a 2News . About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features They had sped off in a Honda sedan. But we paid it all back.. There, stacked on the concrete floor, were crates filled with bars of silver. Older teenagers were crammed five and six to a room, sleeping on the floors of trailers. The Brown boys, charged with felony counts of burglary, wrote a letter to their aunt apologizing for stealing the silver in her house. "You had a fairly diverse pool to start with, so only if that went on for a long time within this same population would you see real effects," he told ABC. That Stephens father sat atop a mafialike organization was a secret kept from him for most of his childhood. Still stunned at the sudden loss of their brother, Stephen and his siblings were numb with grief. Those in the Order, Kingston preached, are responsible for building a master race, which is why all marriages are arranged within the original four families that started the cult. When he noticed that the boys had stopped working, he became enraged. Copyright 2023 Penske Business Media, LLC. 6.3M views 6 years ago Profiles by VICE S1 E23 Although the mainstream Mormon church abandoned polygamy over 100 years ago, many splinter groups across Utah still practice plural marriage. Is Jasper always unspirited and stony-broke when outvalue some Heisenberg very . We figured it was ours anyway, says Stephen, explaining that the clan hadnt paid the boys for bagging coal. Elden had predicted that he would be resurrected from the dead, so clan members kept his body on ice for three days, to no avail. Some read simply, "Baby Keate," or "Baby Bateman," or "Baby Cooke," with holes where numeric date tiles might otherwise be placed. As he grew older, Stephen turned out to be as rebellious as his own father had been as a boy. Theyre basically the Utah Mafioso of the white power world, Browning told Intelligence Report. Another group of kids called the Lost Boys, who were kicked out of the polygamist cult the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, ended up on the streets of Las Vegas and Phoenix, some turning tricks for drugs like meth and heroin. The most common birth defects for children born of close cousins, anywhere, are: harelip, cleft palate, clubfoot, and certain forms of heart valve conditions. Similarly, his older brother John Daniel Kingston has had 14 wives, four of them his half-sisters. Short and chubby, the Brown boys looked up to the Knight brothers. Kingston is a member of the Order, the largest Mormon polygamist clan in the U.S. Daniels ultimatum: Stay in The Order, date no one, and have no contact with family. There are times when it has gotten kind of gross, like when they marry an uncle to a niece. Control of The Order then passed to Ortells well-educated son Paul Kingston, one of several lawyers in a cult whose members dress normally and try not to draw attention to themselves. It wasnt like we thought about it a lot. Utahs polygamous Kingston clan mixes incest and white supremacy with old-fashioned capitalism. Send us a tip using our anonymous form. Then one night, a clan member called and told him that the Order planned to kill him. You could be such an asset to the Order., Trending In summer, the kids swam in the reservoir as their mother, Richaun, watched, the boys doing back flips off the rope swing into the water; at night, as the sun set behind the mountains, they all sat together to watch the clans buffalo herd grazing in the pastures. "Outside, people don't die that often, and usually they're really old.". Paul Kingston wore secondhand suits that hung off his slender shoulders, and he spoke in a flat, emotionless monotone. One of the Orders leaders did jail time for severely beating his own daughter after she fled an arranged marriage to his brother. 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. The Knight brothers were driving new trucks, and so were their friends, says Levi Kingston. 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. Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire. The teacher added a drop of dye to the water, and the children watched as the blackness slowly spread. Paul was upset any of this had been reported at all, says a former member close to the boys. The family gathered in the living room. They steer clear of banks, fearing theyll steal their money. "And my oldest daughter, she's 18 and she's dated a couple of my cousins, which makes them her second cousins, and we're like, Eww, that's gross.". Read more: Women Who Escaped a Polygamist Mormon Cult Share Their Story. Dawna's eldest son is now dating a Centennial woman whom he recently found out is a distant cousin. 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. According to many of the individuals interviewed for this story, these children are seen as special angels sent from God to the FLDS community. The battle took place in the spiritual pre-existence that Mormons believe all souls come from. 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. "A rare, severe birth defect is on the rise in an inbred polygamous community on the Arizona-Utah border, according to a doctor who has treated many of the children. . Boys work its coal mine and stack boxes at Standard Restaurant Supply, a massive discount store. In 2011, Jeffs was sentenced to life in prison, plus 20 years. In the polygamist cult of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, cousins were encouraged to marry in order to preserve certain bloodlines. But the more the deputy pressed, the more their stories didnt add up. Jessica said she and other children of the Kingston clan a group also known as The Order, the Davis County Cooperative Society, and the Latter-Day Church of Christ dropped the N-bomb all the time, as did their parents.