He seemed like the most amazing guy, Stephen recalls. 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. Some read simply, "Baby Keate," or "Baby Bateman," or "Baby Cooke," with holes where numeric date tiles might otherwise be placed. Unlike other girls in the Order, Richaun was refined she didnt wear hand-me-downs, and at clan dances, a long line of boys waited to dance with her. In the 1980s, the state of Utah sued John Ortell Kingston over welfare fraud related to his many wives. Recordings of church testimony given by various Kingstons serve as further evidence of the cults bigoted teachings. 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. They predict the scale of the problem will increase dramatically in the future. Girls, many of them teen brides, answer phones at the Orders law office, bag groceries at its supermarket or tend to the clans many children. Accounts of clan babies being born with congenital defects and other problems abound, including dwarfism, albinism and children born minus fingernails or without genitals. There, stacked on the concrete floor, were crates filled with bars of silver. According to people who have left the Order, the cult exploits its 2,000 members as virtual slave labor and hides profits from tax collectors. 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. While the Order preached strict abstinence to its children, forbidding even incidental contact between the sexes, there seemed to be no rules after marriage especially for the clans leaders. This racist display was no one-off. Situated at the base of a rugged mountain range, the Orders spread sat in a pristine valley of glistening hayfields and open pasture. Brother Elden died of penile cancer in 1948, despite the best efforts of some family members to burn away the cancer using acid. The battle took place in the spiritual pre-existence that Mormons believe all souls come from. He also had dozens of children a brood that would eventually grow to around 300 and he had a hard time telling them apart. I am in love with old cars and horses. Ive lived a good life. Sometimes, lying in bed at night, he thinks of his brother who died not far from here, and the rest of his siblings who remain in the Order. Many children have had birth defects due to this inbreeding. 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. 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. I was scared to death when I left. From a clan ranch in Nevada, Stephen called his brother Ben, who had left the Order a few years before. 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. . Theyre basically the Utah Mafioso of the white power world, Browning told Intelligence Report. Ron Kingston says The Orders leadership has too much to lose for something like that to happen. Lost Index. The clan believed he had their treasure, and they were sending someone to kill him. The well-kept yellow house sat on the corner of a tidy cul-de-sac called South Bonner Circle surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence. Brother Ron Tucker, he would intone, come and get your number. According to the Orders interpretation of the Book of Revelations, only 144,000 numbered men will be allowed to rule in heaven under God. In the meantime, the police were closing in on the missing silver. In secret videotapes of Order church meetings aired on Escaping Polygamy, Pauls nephew Nick Young, speaking from a church lectern, identifies himself as a numbered man, number 72, to be precise. Geri and I ask the same question at the same time: "What exactly do you mean by took care of them? Its who I am., To keep the police from prying into the matter any further, the clan also hired a private investigator to track down the missing gold. More troubling, during a contentious 2004 custody case that ensued when Jessica and her sister Andrea fled Daniel Kingstons household, a judge in the case reportedly was the subject of a death threat, allegedly from Kingston clan members. It was also around then that Stephen, at the age of 14, began to see the clan for what it really was. Everyone knows it's happening, few talk about it unprompted, it just sort of..is. I could tell she loved him, and it seemed like he loved her too. Within a year, Paul Kingston would take a fourth wife. Her parents and siblings eventually left as well. We would cause harm, he confessed. took great pains to never show his wealth and taught his followers to do the same. 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 . . If gay men stay in the closet, they are allowed to remain in the cult as worker bees.. 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. The 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time If you find a grave up there that's not marked, that's the way Fred wanted it.". When he had finished, he walked toward Stephen, who was sitting on the tractor. He says The Order regards homosexuality as a choice. In a letter to the Intelligence Report responding to allegations made by former members, Kent Johnson, a spokesman for the Davis County Cooperative Society, claimed that The Orders foundational principles include the Golden Rule, and that the church rejects any form of racism or bigotry. One crime had been solved but the chest of gold stolen from Patty Kingstons closet remained a mystery. David Lindley, Multi-Instrumentalist Who Shaped the Sound of Soft Rock, Dead at 78 FOX 13 . Mysterious cars followed his girlfriend, and he once came home to find that someone had rifled through his drawers. . The Knight brothers were driving new trucks, and so were their friends, says Levi Kingston. Sex. 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." He didnt have anyone to help him process what had just happened., Taking advantage of his status as a son of the prophet, Stephen began bending the rules even further. If you knew where to look and the Knight boys did it was easy to find. In his teens, Stephen and five of his half brothers stole $4,000 from their father. The FLDS split off from the mainline Mormon (LDS) church in 1890 after the church denounced the principal of plural marriage. And, because this cult is so tight-knit and averse to strangers, the gene pool is rather limited. They sat there for a moment, warming their hands against the sputtering heater. We figured it was ours anyway, says Stephen, explaining that the clan hadnt paid the boys for bagging coal. From the outside it seemed like a typical suburban home, offering few clues of the secrets that were contained inside. 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. On the surface, the operation is legit: From Salt Lake, the Order controls some 100 businesses spread out over the Western states, from a casino in California to a cattle ranch in Nevada to a factory that makes lifelike dolls in Utah. Until the 1990s, there were only 13 known cases of FD in the world. 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. 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. The Brown boys, charged with felony counts of burglary, wrote a letter to their aunt apologizing for stealing the silver in her house. deficiency. Stephen hangs up and drives home in silence. The baby cemetery is a mess of overgrown weeds and dry, cracked dirt, home to hundreds of infant and toddler-size graves, not all of them marked. Dawna asks me. He kept his office on a side street in central Salt Lake. 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. and cousins. 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. If both parents carry the gene, the likelihood that their. The Kingstons teach that they are descended from Jesus Christ and these incestous marriages are intended to keep the bloodline pure, but instead have resulted in numerous Clan members being born with disabilties or birth defects, and it's not really that surprising to note that at one point during the second season of Escaping Polygamy, one of Blacks were the less valiant people in heaven who sat on the sidelines while others took sides, according to The Order. One of her brothers married a woman whose grandmother is a sister to their father. "I didn't touch her; I just used a turkey baster," she mimics, rolling her eyes. 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------.. J.O. More recently, the Kingston-owned Washakie Renewable Energy (WRE) agreed to pay a $3 million fine after it was sued by the federal government for raking in tax credits for biofuels it never produced. 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. Mormons, however, take care to denounce the FLDS "polygs" as having absolutely no relation to their Latter Day Saints. 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. Young denied that The Order was racist or taught any form of bigotry, and said he had people of all races working for him. That Stephens father sat atop a mafialike organization was a secret kept from him for most of his childhood. "It's doesn't stop anybody," Dawna says. "Fred was in charge of the cemeteries, the gravediggers, all of that. NBA 'Investigating,' Team Suspends Ja Morant After Allegedly Flashing Gun on Social Media Given such incidents, could Order members be a threat to law enforcement? Others say they buried it out in the desert and are slowly cashing it out. I t is often used to treat severe acne. A scrappy white wooden fence runs the length of it along Canyon Street. 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. But given that the Kingstons command an estimated 6,000 adherents, boast a business empire reportedly worth as much as $1 billion and have outlasted myriad bouts with law enforcement and the press, these dreams of world domination may be less delusional than they first seem. Mark Shurtleff, the Utah attorney general, has spent years investigating the clan, gathering birth certificates and genealogical data, and has come to believe that the cult is guilty of a long list of crimes, including child labor, tax evasion, welfare fraud, polygamy and the sanctioning of underage marriages to blood relatives. Still more, rather cryptically, feature child-size palm and footprints. Boys as young as 14 labored in the workshop. Supposedly, LaDonna had a dream wherein it was revealed that anyone who left The Order would be tainted by black blood. His father stood on the stage and called out the names of the men who were to receive one of the clans highest honors. From a young age, Snow worked for Order companies to help feed his siblings, a responsibility some Kingston men are known to shirk. Years of inbreeding have resulted in children born with serious birth defects. I strongly believe they are an organized-crime family, Shurtleff says. That will open up for The Order to rise up and take over the world, Ron said. Daniel was arrested and eventually spent 28 weeks in a county jail for felony child abuse. It empowered Stephen before that, no one had ever stood up to Daniel Kingston or any of them, says a former member. There are also graves lacking any dates whatsoever. "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. 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).