On February 26th, 2009, the Salt Lake County Sheriffs Office got a call of suspicious activity in the foothills above the city. David Lindley, Multi-Instrumentalist Who Shaped the Sound of Soft Rock, Dead at 78 Because of the clans distrust of banks, the Order had cash hidden all over the place, a poorly kept secret within the family. Boys work its coal mine and stack boxes at Standard Restaurant Supply, a massive discount store. 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. 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. The fact that most of the people in the Kingston clan were born into the lifestyle is very key to group think because this is all they know, and some may never question the beliefs even when they age because it has been their whole world all their life. Because that one is going to be genius-level purity, and thats what The Order is looking for., Photo Credit: AP Images / Leah Hogsten, Pool (John Daniel Kingston); AP Images / Jeffrey D. Allred / Pool (Jeremy Kingston), SPLC is a nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization (EIN: 63-0598743). It was a grimy, derelict-looking place. Thanks, it read. The Kingston clan is also known as the Davis County . It felt like it was us against the world. His older brother Richard, a burly diesel mechanic, taught him how to fix cars. After the wedding, Richaun chose the name Knight randomly a practice designed to prevent prosecutors from proving that men in the Order have multiple wives. "My father and her grandmother were full brother and sister," she explains, recognizing the bloom of confusion on my face. This didnt belong to you anyway., As big as the heist was, it attracted almost no attention in Salt Lake. Some would say that is because it takes generations for certain inbred recessive genetic traits to manifest. eu . But in a 2News . But we paid it all back.. Martha's husband was "Uncle" Fred Jessop, longtime Bishop to the FLDS people, who died in 2005 at 94, after being dragged from state to state by Warren Jeffs in what many ex-members believe was a transparent scheme of murder-by-stress: Dragging around a physically ailing, elderly man in need of constant medication is one way to kill a person without committing any outright murderous act, they say. Something along the lines of, to build a superhuman, if you have four or five defects to get the one good one, its worth it, he recalled. The clan was reportedly brought to justice by 10 victims, including Blaklyn, in early September. Her younger sister Emily thought it was a joke, too, until one day another Order kid told her, We cant play with you because the Tuckers are n------.. If they are money-laundering or making money in support of polygamy and incest, then they probably meet the statute.. 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. Dawna's husband is a brother to her older sister's husband, "but they're only half brothers, so him and I aren't blood-related at all, because he was from the youngest mother, which had no relation to us other than marriage, and then my sister was married to the older brother and his mom and my grandmother were full sisters.". A simple urine test will reveal whether there is an excess of fumaric acid in the urine, if the other, more external symptoms aren't obvious enough. The most common birth defects for children born of close cousins, anywhere, are: harelip, cleft palate, clubfoot, and certain forms of heart valve conditions. Family Tree. The clan avoids hospitals, believing government-backed doctors might inject them with a mysterious disease or demand birth records exposing the Order's lifestyle. The two groups split when Dawna was growing up. Send us a tip using our anonymous form. The boys also bought cigarettes wholesale through a small clan-owned market run by their older brother and sold them at school. The Knight brothers were driving new trucks, and so were their friends, says Levi Kingston. 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. deficiency. The Mormon Church officially banned polygamy in 1890, and some of the defiant bands of fundamentalists who refuse to give up the practice have been pushed out of the city and into the desert, where they eke out an existence in rusted-out trailers and sprawling compounds. When it comes to racist Sunday school lessons, the polygamous Kingston clan could teach the Ku Klux Klan a thing or two. Dawna's younger sister has a little boy with two clubfeet. Paul was upset any of this had been reported at all, says a former member close to the boys. "I'm like, Really? Seated on a couch, sipping lemonade in his home in a Salt Lake City suburb, he resembles Paul Kingston quite a bit. "There were so many young children who were born with abnormalitiesharelips, club feet, heart valvesthat were they were going to die within a year," says Ron. Kingston -- the late enigmatic leader and church prophet who built the 1,500-member Kingston clan into a multimillion-dollar business empire while allowing many of his purported 13 wives and dozens of children to survive on government assistance. They predict the scale of the problem will increase dramatically in the future. He kept his office on a side street in central Salt Lake. "They were called the Second Warders and we were called the First Warders; we weren't supposed to hang out with kids from the Centennial group because they were wicked for having left," she says. Scott remembered that Ortell had an answer for that question. Concentrated in Salt Lake City, its 10,000 members control more. He picked fights at school, shot a teacher in the face with a water gun and refused to do homework or answer questions. A lawyer and an accountant by trade, Stephens father hardly looked like the sort of man who could command the unquestioned loyalty of thousands of followers. The letter asserts that one of the earliest members of the church was a Native American man and that the Co-op, as it is sometimes called, has been the victim of prejudice and harassment by Utahs majority religion (i.e., the LDS church) because of the formers progressive ideas. Two of her sisters married their first cousinsmen with whom they share the same grandfather; the sons of their father's second wife, who is their mother's full sister. 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. During a recent interview with the Intelligence Report, Jessica Kingston, a former member of the secretive, Salt Lake City-based cult and a star of the A&E reality series Escaping Polygamy, remembered, when she was 12, her Sunday school teacher coming into class with a bucket of water and a vial of black food coloring. Sometimes he parked his immaculately buffed burgundy Ford Thunderbird on the curb, but it was rare to see the man himself. Thats your Uncle Paul, she said. I tell her I'm not sure, given the context. "Well, needless to say, we had a lot of, uh. Boys as young as 14 labored in the workshop. The 43-year-old Kingston took the witness stand for the prosecution about 2:40 p.m. and is expected to answer questions through Thursday. And they avoid the police, opting to handle any disputes in their own brutal manner. After the boys were taken into custody, one of their first calls was to Stephen. In its place, someone had left a note. But Dawna disagrees: "I think it was actually, you know." Incest is endemic in the clan, with uncles marrying much younger female relatives; in 2003, police showed up at an Order barbecue and arrested a clan member for marrying his underage cousin. But The Orders critics say that cult members see nothing wrong with bilking the government, a time-honored tradition among FLDS sects, gleefully referred to as bleeding the beast.. ", "They took their lives," Ron says. Kollene's father, John Daniel Kingston has 14 wives, and she is the fifth of her mother Shirley Hansen's 12 children. I dont really have too many friends, but the ones I do, I wouldnt trade for anything., Among Stephens friends were two of his cousins, Luke and Scott Brown. Pentecostal Short and chubby, the Brown boys looked up to the Knight brothers. Up to this point, Julie had treated the rumor like a joke. One man, who asks to remain nameless to protect his and his family's privacy, describes a lifetime of round-the-clock care and too-frequent hospital visits for his five sons. Modern interpretations of this passage vary, but The Order apparently takes quite literally this idea of blackness being a sign of iniquity. Ron says the cults justification for its racism goes back to early Mormon teachings about a war in heaven between the forces of Satan and those of Jesus. Like polygamy, incest is a third-degree felony in Utah, and as with polygamy, convictions are rare. These days Stephen works on a cattle ranch near the Idaho border, just down the road from where he grew up. Or leave. $302,500. 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. He says The Order regards homosexuality as a choice. See the Beths Deliver Refreshing 'Expert in a Dying Field' Mini-Set on 'CBS Mornings', Sex, Drugs, and the Biggest Cybercrime of All Time, I could boil down what theyre about in three words, says a member who broke with the Order. The two were playmates when they were boys. I love the Order. That sister, too, dealt with a lot of respiratory problems with her kids, "because of the relation," Dawna explains. According to many of the individuals interviewed for this story, these children are seen as special angels sent from God to the FLDS community. Like Stephen, the boys were considered troublemakers by the Order and like Stephen, they knew a lot about how the clan handled its money. According to historian Brian Hales Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations After the Manifesto, Brother Elden, as he was also known, had five wives and 17 children. 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. At Washakie, he forced clan children to decapitate cows with chain saws to toughen them up, and sometimes beat the children for some infraction of the Orders rules like forgetting to face the Home Place three times a day and pray. "Have you ever heard of the term The Turkey Baster?" 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. girl, born to John Ortell and Isabell Johnson, was not the product of an incestuous marriage. And it would be several years after that before he stole from his father for the first time. The FLDS split off from the mainline Mormon (LDS) church in 1890 after the church denounced the principal of plural marriage. Bad harm. The mere rumor of black blood could condemn someone in the eyes of Order members. Stephen hangs up and drives home in silence. The battle took place in the spiritual pre-existence that Mormons believe all souls come from. They belonged to the Order and had toiled in the cult for years. Those affected by the genetic disorder suffer grand mal seizures and often have facial feature deformities and severe mental retardation, with IQs as low as 25. John Daniel Kingston seen here in 1999, pleading no contest to beating his 16-year-old daughter after she attempted to flee an arranged marriage with her uncle David, Kingstons brother. If you were more obedient, this wouldnt have happened., After that, everything changed, Stephen says. It's the kids who are disproportionately handicapped as compared to the demographics of any other comparably small town. It was a total spur of the moment thing, Brown says. Recordings of church testimony given by various Kingstons serve as further evidence of the cults bigoted teachings. He orchestrated all unions within the cult, which was maintained with classic mind control techniques, corporal punishment, fasting and bizarre dietary practices. The quick answer for why this polygamous community has buried so many of its children is inbreeding, according to community members. 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." There are baby graves year that date back as earlier as the 1950s, potentially even earlier: many are unmarked. The clan believed he had their treasure, and they were sending someone to kill him. . Sometimes his father read the Book of Mormon from the pulpit and talked about things regular Christians would recognize, like tithing or repentance. . All of this is to say that incest and inbreeding have been going on for so longand so prevalentlyin the polygamous sects along the Utah/Arizona border that these stories have been woven into the fiber of the communities. Barlow/Jessop descendants carry the recessive gene that causes fumarase. Suddenly, Stephens brother David lost control of the truck and it rolled over, killing David instantly. 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. The FLDS started out as a few fringe families in the late 1890s; as more seeking to follow the principal of plural marriage moved to the polygamous towns in the early-to-mid 20th century, the gene pool grew, but by the 90s, under the stricter control of prophet Rulon Jeffs (Warren's father), they were tightening up and selectively marrying and breeding in a sort of misfired eugenics experiment that ultimately yielded its own genetic disorder: fumarase deficiency (FD), otherwise known as Polygamist Down's. She called her sister-in-law Patty Kingston, who lived across town. Or Aunt Martha did, or somebody did. "You have to either accept" the responsibility of caring for so many children with major healthcare needs "or let it destroy you," says this man, whose wife recently suffered a stroke. Im done with this shit.. It would be several more years before Stephen learned that Paul Kingston was his father, and that his mother was just one of his dads many wives. Black people supposedly suffered from multiple scriptural curses, from the mark of Cain and Noahs curse on Ham in the Old Testament to the racist tenets of early Mormonism that have since been renounced or abandoned by the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the LDS or Mormon church. 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. So what about polygamy? 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. A loyal Order member for years, he lost his faith and ended up leaving the Order over a curse of sorts, leveled at his family by LaDonna. Former clan prophet John Ortell Kingston, who died in 1987, paid the Medicaid bills for a child born with severe birth defects after Utah investigators linked the wealthy father of more than 65 children to the baby. Years of inbreeding have resulted in children born with serious birth defects. The teacher added a drop of dye to the water, and the children watched as the blackness slowly spread. LGBT people fare little better in the Kingston clan. Immune Response. Some children are born blind, others with missing fingernails or undersize heads. Due to the Kingstons convoluted genealogy, Lu Ann was both his first cousin and his aunt. One afternoon, as Stephen and his cousin were taking a break from fixing a tractor that had broken down in a hayfield, Daniel Kingston pulled up. All of the gay people would definitely be the first to go, he said. But mostly he talked about the history of the Order and his ancestors, the men who had started the clan. Mysterious cars followed his girlfriend, and he once came home to find that someone had rifled through his drawers. Sex. When Paul turned 21, he married Richaun Dye. At clan gatherings, girls who were still in their teens danced with men old enough to be their uncles, whom they were sometimes forced to marry. 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.. Like other fundamentalists of that era, he believed the Mormon Church had lost its divine authority when it renounced polygamy in 1890, so he persuaded three other families to join him in establishing their own sect. He shares a last name and a not-too-distant relation with the polygamous LeBaron group in Chihuahua, Mexico. In 2003, another clan member, Jeremy Kingston pleaded guilty to incest for taking 15-year-old Lu Ann Kingston as his fourth wife. 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. Paul Kingston wore secondhand suits that hung off his slender shoulders, and he spoke in a flat, emotionless monotone. Only the inner circle knew the hoard even existed, says Christian Kingston, a former Order member. Their father rarely came by, and because the nearest town was 18 miles away, the kids forged a fierce bond among themselves. He bragged that he had worn the same black shirt every day for a year. At first, the two boys denied any involvement in the break-in at Youngs house. Fumarase deficiency, however sensationalized, is not the only genetic disorder found here. Another of Ortells teachings: Adolf Hitler had the right idea about creating a master race, but didnt have the Lords help, so he failed. 17226 Horsetooth Canyon Dr, Houston, TX 77095. Towards Net Zero. Structural birth defects are related to a problem with the structure of body parts. 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). and cousins. He then severed her index finger, cleaned off the three bones, and carried them with him the rest of his life, believing that the totem kept her spirit with him. They steer clear of banks,. "I didn't touch her; I just used a turkey baster," she mimics, rolling her eyes. But by 2006, Dr. Theodore Tarby, of Arizona, had discovered at least 20 more children living with the condition in Short Creek, all within just blocks of each other. Another brother, Ben, showed him how to mend fences. Eventually, I pull up to the corner of Canyon Street and Jessop Avenue, where I find the baby cemetery. Obsessed with the purity of their bloodline and empowered by a sense of entitlement on par with the divine right of kings, the Kingstons have made incest the cornerstone of a self-serving theology that loathes non whites, fosters homophobia and abhors government authority. The two boys pulled into the driveway and shifted the green Honda into park. One of the Orders leaders did jail time for severely beating his own daughter after she fled an arranged marriage to his brother. Structural Birth Defects. To cope with the disorientation and loneliness of leaving one world for another, many turn to drugs. Then, moving quickly, the boy at the door let himself in and got to work. They seemed happy, Ron says. They did it, says Christian Kingston. There lives Ross LeBaron Jr., a descendant of another polygamous sect (separate from the FLDS but quite similar in practice) called the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times. Local Policing and Immigration Enforcement, Request for Legal Assistance Economic Justice. Dawna Black Bistline (Alyssa Bistline's father's brother's wife) has seen firsthand how the children of cousins suffer. The son of Pauls sister Rachel herself a daughter of Ortell and LaDonna Kingston Young was the only current member of the Kingston clan, out of the many contacted for this story, who consented to a live, on-the-record interview.