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The prosecution of Raymond Jessop, Allan Keate, and the other FLDS men indicted in Texas hinges on the evidence seized during the raid on the YFZ Ranch in April of 2008. The very warrants under which this evidence was obtained, however, were hopelessly flawed so that any convictions based on such evidence should be reversed when the case is reviewed in a neutral court.

 

The first search warrant only authorized law enforcement to arrest Dale Evans Barlow, to identify and photograph Sarah Jessop, and to search and seize records pertaining to these individuals and to any child born to Sarah Jessop. Officers proceeded, however, to conduct a fishing expedition in all of the homes as well as in the sacred Temple and the Temple annex, searching and seizing records, pictures, and information that in any way could be construed to relate to the marriage or pregnancy of any person under the age of seventeen.

 

By the evening of April 6, 2008, all of the children and their mothers had been removed from the Ranch; the Temple and other sacred sites had been desecrated; the homes had been searched several times; and books, diaries, genealogical records and photographs, as well as the records and artifacts of earlier Church prophets had been seized. At 10:12 p.m. that night Ranger Brooks Long signed a second affidavit and at 10:15 p.m. Judge Barbara Walther signed a search warrant to authorize the very searches and seizures that already had taken place.

 

The new warrant expanded the description of the “Suspected Place and Premises” to include “all buildings, temples, temple annexes, places of worship, vaults, safes, lockboxes, locked drawers, medical facilities, structures, places and vehicles on said premises…” As in the case of the first warrant, the same flawed reasoning was used to classify the entire community as a single household.

 

In addition to the search warrant’s being signed after the searches had been conducted, the affidavit used to obtain that warrant relied on flimsy hearsay evidence that should not have been deemed probable cause for a warrant to issue at all.

 

Ranger Long asserts in his affidavit that he was advised by Sheriff David Doran that Doran has had a confidential informant from whom he has received reliable information on more than twenty occasions over the past several years. There are a number of bitter ex-FLDS members from whom Sheriff Doran, Brooks Long, and others have received information. One of the FLDS men on the Ranch at the time of the raid wrote in his journal, “At about 7:00 p.m. of the Sunday of April 6, 2008 I saw Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran in his tan government vehicle on the street directly in front of my residence on the YFZ Ranch driving around with Rebecca Wall Musser, an alleged enemy of our people…”

 

Rebecca Musser’s sister, Elissa Wall also has provided Texas authorities with considerable information about the FLDS people. In the “Acknowledgements” at the end of her book Stolen Innocence, she extends her thanks “To Sheriff David Doran of Schleicher County for his untiring efforts to understand the FLDS people. To Capt. Barry Caver, Sgt. L. Brooks Long, and all the Texas Rangers for taking time to listen and learn about the FLDS.”

 

Another notable source of misinformation Doran has relied upon for years is Flora Jessop. On March 25, 2004, Flora Jessop and David Doran appeared together at a press conference in front of the Schleicher County Sheriff’s Office, discussing the FLDS presence on the Ranch. The Eldorado Success of April 1, 2004, quotes Doran as saying, “Flora has provided us with a lot of information and I find her very credible. However, at this time we have no firm evidence of any wrongdoing associated with the ranch. If and when we have evidence that a law has been broken out there, we won’t hesitate to act.” 

 

Over the years Flora Jessop has made numerous outrageous allegations about the FLDS and is hardly a source of credible information.  (See “The Truth about Flora Jessop”) Some of the information Flora gave Doran likely was responsible in part for the presence of the armed personnel carrier, SWAT team, and superabundance of heavily armed officers. The Custer County Chronicle of March 30, 2006, quotes Flora as saying in regard to the FLDS, “They are very much armed. They have many, many weapons. The possibility for violence is there.” Referring to Warren Jeffs, she said, “We’re talking about David Koresh, Jim Jones and 9-11 all wrapped up in one nice little package. These guys are very dangerous.”

 

The event most charged with the potential for violence, if this had been the character of the FLDS men, was the desecration of the Temple. Instead of offering resistance, the men fell to their knees in quiet prayer, seeking for strength to endure with rejoicing whatever the Lord would allow to happen. There was a deathly silence. The only sound was the cocking of guns from the snipers. One FLDS man later remarked, “There was more than once during those six days that I wondered if it would be my last day on earth, and that was one of them. When we heard those rifles cocking, chambering those shells—if they were going to shoot someone, they were going to shoot them while they were praying.” One of the game wardens knelt briefly with the men. When they had finished their prayers, they noticed that several officers had put their guns down, and one state trooper was crying.

 

Had the FLDS been a violent people, weapons would have been discovered in the thorough searches of every home and other building. All that the searches turned up were a bow and a few hunting rifles. Flora has horrified her listeners for years with her wild stories of the baby cemetery and the killing of baby boys. Cadaver dogs were brought on the Ranch to locate unmarked graves, but of course nothing of the sort was discovered.

 

At present even those who have believed Flora in the past are attempting to distance themselves from her. Sheriff Doran, in a phone conversation about Flora with author and investigative reporter Gary Naylor, stated that "anything that comes out of her mouth is not credible." According to Naylor, Doran also said that “she uses the media to advance her self-serving agenda and to propagate her grandstanding lies.” After reading Naylor’s article on Flora, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff told him, "We learned many years ago from our own due diligence and investigations that her information was, as you state, unreliable and even detrimental."

 

These are the “credible sources of information” used by law enforcement and CPS. Scholars have realized for some time that the stories of disgruntled ex-members are usually distortions of reality if not outright fabrications. (See “The Unreliability of Apostate Narratives”)

 

A significant source they did not care to listen to was Dr. John Walsh, a religious studies expert specializing in the LDS Church and fundamentalist Mormons, particularly the FLDS. Prior to the 14-day hearing, Dr. Walsh offered his services free of charge to CPS and the State Bar of Texas. He received an email response from a representative of CPS, saying in effect, thanks, but no thanks. 

 

The Salt Lake Tribune’s Polygamy Files of April 24, 2008, quoted Dr. Walsh’s comments on the CPS rejection:

 

 

 

Much of the “evidence” cited in Ranger Long’s affidavit stems from CPS interviews with YFZ girls and women conducted during the raid. The “Petition for Orders in and of Investigation of a Report of Child Abuse or Neglect,” on which the Court based its order to investigate, contains a glaring misrepresentation that should invalidate the entire CPS investigation.

The Texas Family Code, Section 261.303 states the condition under which the Court must issue an order to investigate: “If admission to the home, school, or any place where the child may be cannot be obtained, then for good cause shown the court having family law jurisdiction shall order the parent, the person responsible for the care of the children, or the person in charge of any place where the child may be to allow entrance for interview, examination, and investigation.”

 

In an attempt to satisfy this provision of the Code, the “Petition” referred to above includes the following passage: “As more particularly shown in the attached affidavit, the Department has attempted to make a thorough investigation of the report, but cannot obtain admission to the home or school, or access to the children, or cooperation of the parents or others responsible for the care of the children.”

 

The attached affidavit by Ruby Gutierez merely relates the “Sarah” story and makes no reference to investigators ever being denied access to the Ranch. Indeed, no attempt had even been made to gain admittance to the Ranch to investigate the report. Had the request been made, it would have been treated with the same consideration already given to requests by other government officials. Sheriff Doran had visited the Ranch on approximately twenty occasions, being invited to be present whenever any State or Federal agency had business there. The most recent of these visits occurred a week before the raid, when he accompanied County Tax Appraiser Jani Mitchell on March 26, 2008.

 

At the hearing in Judge Walther’s Court in May of 2009 on the motion to suppress evidence seized in the raid, the following interchange took place with CPS attorney Dan Edwards on the witness stand:

 

A. No, sir.      

 

From the CPS interviews conducted pursuant to this illegal investigation order, Ranger Long included in his affidavit for a second search warrant the following information.  One woman, who is now nineteen, is reported to have said that she gave birth to a son when she was sixteen years eight months. A second woman, now age twenty, said that she gave birth to a daughter at age sixteen. In neither of these cases is there any indication where the marriages took place or whether the children were born, or even conceived, in Texas. A third young woman, who identified her age as sixteen, said that she was due to give birth in June of 2008.

 

Four other girls who were supposedly married or gave birth underage are named in the affidavit, but three of these cases are only supported by hearsay evidence and the other by visual observation. In one case an interview with an eight-year-old girl produced the astounding “fact” that another girl under age sixteen is married and has four children. If true, this information belongs not just in Ranger Long’s affidavit but in the Guinness Book of World Records.

 

The last girl said that she was eighteen years old, but the CPS investigator said that she “appeared to be approximately sixteen years of age.” CPS has a very poor track record for determining ages by “eyeballing” the girls. They claimed twenty-six women were underage mothers when they had valid driver’s licenses and birth certificates to prove their real age and were all later certified to be adults.

 

This is the “evidence” on which law enforcement and CPS desecrated a temple and other sacred buildings, repeatedly searched over forty individual residences and seized irreplaceable personal belongings, terrorized an entire community, and kidnapped almost 450 children.