By Tom Leonard
Daily Mail
August 6, 2011
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023066/Warren-Jeffs-trial-verdict-Monster-church-leader-facing-life-sex-abuse-24-children.html
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| The 'prophet': Warren Jeffs at a previous trial |
The leader of a polygamist Mormon sect has been found guilty of sexually abusing girls aged 12 and 15 among his two dozen child ‘wives’.
Warren Jeffs, 55, faces a possible life sentence.
The self-proclaimed prophet and head of the shadowy Fundamentalist Church of Jesus of Latter Day Saints told females in his 10,000-strong flock they would find favour with God if they pleased him sexually.
He defended himself and spent much of his trial in west Texas angrily claiming he was being religiously persecuted.
Prosecutors said they will present evidence to his sentencing hearing that he had 78 so-called ‘spiritual wives’ – 24 of them under 17 – in addition to his legal one.
They said they would also show how Jeffs either witnessed or performed more than 500 unlawful polygamous marriages, as well as 67 others involving under-age girls.
Jurors were given DNA evidence showing that Jeffs had fathered a child by the 15-year-old.
And prosecutors reduced some jurors to tears when they played an audio tape of Jeffs, breathing heavily and panting as he had sex with the 12-year-old.
At one point he told the girl: ‘Take your clothes off. Do it right now.’
The sounds of crying followed and he then said: ‘Just don’t think about the pain, you’re going to heaven. The world’s view of sexual relations is selfish, the celestial view is now.’ In another recording he could be heard instructing a 14-year-old and another young wife how to excite him. ‘A good wife is trained for her husband and follows the spirit of peace,’ he said.
‘You have to know how to excite sexually and be excited. You have to be able to assist each other.’ Jeffs could be heard telling the girls to shower, wear white robes and even shave their bodies before coming to him, softly singing a ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’ refrain at the end of his ‘training’ session.
When prosecutors played another tape of him instructing 12 young women, Jeffs stood up and talked over it, claiming a holy trust had been broken. ‘I am but a mortal man seeking peace,’ he said. ‘I am not a threat to anyone. My faith is my only weapon.’
On another occasion, he threatened that God would bring ‘sickness and death’ unless the trial were stopped.
Jeffs kept meticulous written and audio records of his sexual abuse because he believed it was his duty.
Lead prosecutor Eric Nichols told the court in San Angelo: ‘This individual considers himself to be a prophet. Everything he did, hour after hour, he was required to keep a record of that.’
Seven other leaders of the sect, which broke away from the official Mormon church over its insistence that polygamy brings exaltation in heaven, have already been convicted of similar offences.
Much of the evidence against Jeffs was seized after the police raided the sect’s 1,700-acre Yearn For Zion ranch compound in Eldorado following a call to a child abuse hotline in April 2008.
They found under-age girls who were pregnant, while the sect’s women wore full-length frontier-style ‘prairie dresses’.
Seized property: Texas Ranger Nick Hanna moves a computer from the back of a truck with the rest of the evidence for the trial against Warren Jeffs
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| Seized property: Texas Ranger Nick Hanna moves a computer from the back of a truck with the rest of the evidence for the trial against Warren Jeffs |
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| Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, left, and Rebecca Musser, as does former member of Jeffs' church. At 19 she was married to Warren Jeffs' father Rulon, 83, the then-prophet, who died in 2002. She left the church shortly after his death when Warren tried to force her to remarry. She testified against Warren in an earlier trial on behalf of her younger sister, who at 14 was forced to marry her 19-year-old cousin | |
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| Child disciples: Young girls are taken away in the raid on the Yearn For Zion ranch compound in Eldorado, Texas |
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| Worship: Temple of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in El Dorado, Texas, where the 'heavenly sessions' with the young girls are said to have taken place |
More than 400 children were placed in protective custody before being returned to their families.
Investigators searching the compound’s huge, fortress-like white limestone temple reported finding a bed which was reserved for men to have sex for the first time with their under-age wives.
Jeffs’s journals and other incriminating documents were discovered in a vault at the end of a secret passageway in the compound’s temple.
The papers included his marriage ‘for time and all eternity’ with the 14-year-old in January 2004.
An excerpt from hundreds of pages of his personal journals said the child was ‘pure and innocent and willing to obey’ and that he summoned her parents and ‘informed them of their girl belonging to me’. Former sect members say Jeffs had a god-like status within the group, exerting a tyrannical rule over members. They described how women were forced to give birth each year to ‘replenish the earth’.
Prosecutors told Jeffs’s trial that the case was about child abuse, not his church or beliefs.
Jeffs succeeded his father, Rulon, as the sect’s leader in 2002. In 2006, he was briefly on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List as they searched for him over other sex crime charges.
In 2007, he was convicted of two counts of being an accomplice to rape but the conviction was
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| Mugshot: Jeffs after being arrested following the 2009 raid on his church |
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