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." Send us a tip using our anonymous form. Still more, rather cryptically, feature child-size palm and footprints. Kingston is a member of the Order, the largest Mormon polygamist clan in the U.S. Sometimes he parked his immaculately buffed burgundy Ford Thunderbird on the curb, but it was rare to see the man himself. We havent gotten any big U.S. contracts, Young explained. Up to this point, Julie had treated the rumor like a joke. 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. This is your fault, he thundered, glaring at them. Kollene's father, John Daniel Kingston has 14 wives, and she is the fifth of her mother Shirley Hansen's 12 children. As lore has it, Elden was the one mighty and strong predicted by Scripture, who holding the scepter of power in his hand would set in order the House of God. With thick white hair, a lantern jaw and a commanding presence, he had no problem attracting followers. Which brings us back to the baby cemetery. On February 26th, 2009, the Salt Lake County Sheriffs Office got a call of suspicious activity in the foothills above the city. "It's like any inbred disorder," Tarby says. "There are times when it has gotten kind of gross, like when they marry an uncle to a niece," she continues. The family believed that discipline would rein in the boys and that hard labor would make the girls more supplicant to their husbands back in the city. Modern interpretations of this passage vary, but The Order apparently takes quite literally this idea of blackness being a sign of iniquity. The Order denies that it encourages racism and homophobia within its ranks. Theyd keep it in basements, in filing cabinets, in a big safe in one of Pauls offices, says Levi Kingston, a former clan member. . Rather than submit to DNA tests, which could have revealed the incest in his brood, he coughed up a more than $200,000 settlement. Jeremy was nearly 10 years her senior at the time. She was definitely the pick of the litter, and thats why Paul got her, Ron recalls. If you were more obedient, this wouldnt have happened., After that, everything changed, Stephen says. The clan was reportedly brought to justice by 10 victims, including Blaklyn, in early September. Health Gap. Seated on a couch, sipping lemonade in his home in a Salt Lake City suburb, he resembles Paul Kingston quite a bit. There have also been charges made that some plural wives and their children have . Through his brother LyleBishop of the FLDS and mouthpiece for his imprisoned brotherJeffs enacted a Judgment wherein FLDS members were asked a series of bizarre personal questions; their answers were judged, and the most righteous were welcomed into the United Order of FLDS elite. KUTV When several businesses inside the Kingston polygamist empire, including Washakie Renewable Energy, was raided by federal agents Wednesday, officials where tight lipped. There were so many young children who were born with abnormalitiesharelips, club feet, heart valvesthat were they were going to die within a year. 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. 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. Those twoand a fifth boyalso suffer from the condition that all of this family's sons were born with: x-linked hydrocephalus. He no longer believed in the Order, but he knew that leaving would mean being shunned by his own family, and because he had been forbidden from making friends outside the clan, there would be few people in the world he could turn to. The issue is available now on newsstands and in the digital archive. They belonged to the Order and had toiled in the cult for years. Pulling up, he noticed the getaway car parked in front of the house. These days Stephen works on a cattle ranch near the Idaho border, just down the road from where he grew up. 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. In order to maintain his familys superior bloodlines, Ortell married and had children with two of his half-sisters and two nieces. Future Planet. In one, Ortell warns that there is a movement afoot that wants to homogenize the people and make one race, by mixing all the races up. Premier Catering: Since 2017- $1,180,000. eu . "It's doesn't stop anybody," Dawna says. The two were playmates when they were boys. She called her sister-in-law Patty Kingston, who lived across town. Local Policing and Immigration Enforcement, Request for Legal Assistance Economic Justice. 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. Stephen moved in with his brother. No evidence directly linked him to the missing gold or silver, but his father was convinced he had played a part in the thefts. 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. I could see that the leaders of The Order really did believe we had black ancestors, Ron explained, with Christy next to him, and his adult daughters Emily and Julie nearby. He is not ready to forgive his father. One of them, Stephen Knight, made for the most unlikely of suspects. He says The Order regards homosexuality as a choice. 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. Its hard to leave when thats all youve known, says one former member, who was forced to marry her cousin when she was 15. Another of Ortells teachings: Adolf Hitler had the right idea about creating a master race, but didnt have the Lords help, so he failed. Snow began dating men when he was 22. When Paul turned 21, he married Richaun Dye. 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. As far as how you end up in heaven, thats up to God.. The son of the clans prophet, Knight, then 18, had once seemed destined for a leadership role within the Order. To cope with the disorientation and loneliness of leaving one world for another, many turn to drugs. 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. We would cause harm, he confessed. 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. The Intelligence Report is the SPLC's award-winning magazine. With the Orders leaders taking so many wives for themselves, the clans younger men were often unable to find anyone to marry. The mere rumor of black blood could condemn someone in the eyes of Order members. The boys were sentenced to two years of probation and taken back into the Order. 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. 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. 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 Kingston taught his followers that they are the literal descendants of Jesus and one of his wives, who had come down to Earth to found a race of chosen people. 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. I tell her I'm not sure, given the context. You better check on your gold, Young told her. Yeah, I believe in it, he said. That's still gross." Julie left the cult at age 19. Their father rarely came by, and because the nearest town was 18 miles away, the kids forged a fierce bond among themselves. "And she's not the only one; three of her sisters married three of my brothers. Kingston forebears were among those who suffered this fate. Also, the birth certificate usually does not . Like polygamy, incest is a third-degree felony in Utah, and as with polygamy, convictions are rare. They predict the scale of the problem will increase dramatically in the future. 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. Spokesmen for both the U.S. State Department and for Picatinny Arsenal could neither verify nor deny Youngs claims. Meanwhile, Mary Ann Kingston, 22, has brought a $110 million civil suit against 242 Order members and 97 companies they operate, claiming that they share collective responsibility for abuse she. The knowledge that one's children are likely to be born with conditions like this one does not prevent FLDS couples from becoming pregnant; instead, they see it as a responsibility and blessing to have many children. Over the years, state law enforcement and the courts have sporadically addressed the incest in the Kingston ranks. 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. Until the 1990s, there were only 13 known cases of FD in the world. One day, not long after the gold disappeared, Knight got an anonymous phone call. 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. If you ever do that again, he said, Ill blow your head off., It was an astonishing moment in the history of the clan. It was a grimy, derelict-looking place. They got married and contacted the . Copyright 2023 Penske Business Media, LLC. I didnt even know the n-word was bad until I was like 15 or 16, she told Intelligence Report. Desert Tech and its rifles have been featured on Fox News, Mythbusters, Daredevil and The Blacklist, among other TV shows. Her disobedience incurred the wrath of her father Daniel, who took her to a family ranch near the Idaho border and savagely beat her. The boys also bought cigarettes wholesale through a small clan-owned market run by their older brother and sold them at school. By the time he was 30, he would have more than 10. The Knight brothers werent afraid to fight, or to stand up to authority. FOX 13 . Former Order members tell of babies being born nearly every week in the church. Young declined to comment when asked if he practices polygamy. Dawna's eldest son is now dating a Centennial woman whom he recently found out is a distant cousin. Short and chubby, the Brown boys looked up to the Knight brothers. Carolyn. for Nathanael Allred's baby. 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. Ortell is credited with expanding The Orders business empire and making the family immensely wealthy. "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.". 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. 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 girl, who as an adult would unsuccessfully sue the clan, then walked miles to the nearest gas station, where she called the police. 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. The quick answer for why this polygamous community has buried so many of its children is inbreeding, according to community members. 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. Then, moving quickly, the boy at the door let himself in and got to work. Chinese people were called stupid, and Mexicans were dirty, said Lu Ann, adding, because of their skin.. Tom Sizemore, Heat and Saving Private Ryan Actor, Dead at 61 He trained the women how to rip off the government, a scheme the Order called Bleeding the Beast. To hide the scope of his organization, J.O. As he grew older, Stephen turned out to be as rebellious as his own father had been as a boy. Everyone in the Order knew that she controlled the purse strings for the operation but few were aware that she was sitting on a hidden stash of silver. Noticing Stephen, he put the barbells down and came over to the boy. He was angry and confused, says a former member of the cult. The FLDS believe they are practicing the one true religion as Prophet Joseph Smith intended it to be. 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. 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." 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. But mostly he talked about the history of the Order and his ancestors, the men who had started the clan. 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. It empowered Stephen before that, no one had ever stood up to Daniel Kingston or any of them, says a former member. Now let me just simply state: He took care of them. Fishing it out of his jeans, hell recognize the number. Stephen hangs up and drives home in silence. While some despised Ben for his apostasy and refused to speak with him, Stephen had remained in touch with his brother. By the time the teenagers sped away, they had made off with more than $80,000 in silver. Johnson also acknowledged hearing family lore dating to the Depression era of Order families burying fetuses from late-term miscarriages on their respective properties.. Later the Order reportedly bought slot machines from mob-controlled companies. Similarly, his older brother John Daniel Kingston has had 14 wives, four of them his half-sisters. Knight was born in Salt Lake City, the sixth child of third-generation polygamists. Then their father said something they never expected. Young denied that The Order was racist or taught any form of bigotry, and said he had people of all races working for him. Many of the souls interred here lived not longer than a day, some just two days, two weeks, or two years. took great pains to never show his wealth and taught his followers to do the same. As for its anti-government views, allegations of fraud against government entities have long dogged the Kingstons. "Fred was in charge of the cemeteries, the gravediggers, all of that. If gay men stay in the closet, they are allowed to remain in the cult as worker bees.. They were finally getting even. 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 Order stays as far away as possible from police, and this was like inviting them in your front door., With its vast wealth suddenly exposed to public view, the clan moved quickly to hush up the scandal. Money, sex and power. But Dawna disagrees: "I think it was actually, you know." A sheriffs deputy traced the license plate of the Honda to a run-down house in a working-class suburb south of the city. 3 bd 2 ba 1.6k sqft. 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. I guess I just had too much soy, Snow smiled. The first questions were about his background. She talked about how you cant associate with black people or anybody of a different race., Based on available evidence, including the accounts of numerous former Order members, the SPLC has designated The Order as a hate group under the category of `general hate.'. He bragged that he had worn the same black shirt every day for a year. Some read simply, "Baby Keate," or "Baby Bateman," or "Baby Cooke," with holes where numeric date tiles might otherwise be placed. The Order was founded by Elden Kingston, Stephens grand-uncle, at the height of the Great Depression. The Order can rightly claim discrimination by mainstream Mormonism, but this is due to its embrace of polygamy, which the LDS church officially abandoned in 1890 in order for Utah to become a state. The clan avoids hospitals, believing government-backed doctors might inject them with a mysterious disease or demand birth records exposing the Order's lifestyle. It was February in Salt Lake, cold and gray, and in the foothills above the city, a low fog hung over the mountains. 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. Over the years, the Order has armed itself to ward off rivals, and once stalked and intimidated a judge who was meddling in the clans affairs. The two boys pulled into the driveway and shifted the green Honda into park. 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. 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. They did it, says Christian Kingston. 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). As a favored son of the prophet, Paul had the freedom to disregard the strict discipline his father imposed on other members of the Order. 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. When it comes to racist Sunday school lessons, the polygamous Kingston clan could teach the Ku Klux Klan a thing or two. 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. Sex. 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. Structural birth defects are related to a problem with the structure of body parts. But it is likely that Kingston could recognize some of himself in Stephen. Or leave. Another brother, Ben, showed him how to mend fences. 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 . According to former members of the Order, decades of inbreeding have resulted in rampant birth defects throughout the family. Thanks, it read. David Lindley, Multi-Instrumentalist Who Shaped the Sound of Soft Rock, Dead at 78 He slept with a different one each night, in accordance with their ovulation cycles, and sometimes disappeared during lunch to have sex with a favorite. Some people say they funneled the money through Mexico. Three of his wives are his half-sisters. My mom was never the same. He asked him if he was being obedient, then excused himself to talk to Stephens mother. We pass the house she grew up in with her mother, three eldest brothers, and father before he was kicked out of the cult. The Idol: How HBOs Next Euphoria Became Twisted Torture Porn. This didnt belong to you anyway., As big as the heist was, it attracted almost no attention in Salt Lake. But because they were the sons of the prophet, they got away with it., Stephen vehemently denies that he or his brothers had anything to do with the heist. $302,500. If you find a grave up there that's not marked, that's the way Fred wanted it.". Ortell died in 1987, but his progeny continued the polygamy, the inbreeding and the marriages to young female teens that he instituted. October 15, 2002: "There will be a viewing at father's house at 3p.m. 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. It was a total spur of the moment thing, Brown says. But the Kingstons have remained in Salt Lake, operating virtually undetected in a city of more than 1 million people. Paul would rather have the wealth and the money than the isolation and the conflict, he said. Dawna's younger sister has a little boy with two clubfeet. I love the Order. 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. Luke and Scott often visited the home of one of their aunts, Rachel Young. During an interview with this reporter, Lu Ann Kingston, whose defiance of the cult led to the conviction of her former spiritual husband Jeremy, recalled that Order members saw intermarriage as a way to keep the bloodline pure., All outsiders are considered to be beneath Order members, she explained. Utahs polygamous Kingston clan mixes incest and white supremacy with old-fashioned capitalism. She, in turn, wrote a letter to the judge on their behalf, and the case was settled without a trial. One baby deemed to have too many deformities was allegedly put in a shoe box and left to die. But The Order saves most of its bile for blacks and other non whites. The Kingstons operate in a self-contained universe, completely cut off from the outside world. Stephen didnt know what the law said he only knew that the people he loved were being abused and exploited by his own father. The Tuckers think this is all hogwash now, though they were programmed to believe it at the time. presided, while Richauns father officiated the wedding, promising the bride that if she obeyed her husband, she would be guaranteed a spot in the Celestial Kingdom, the highest level of heaven. She didnt want to be in that house anymore; it reminded her of my brother. To test her devotion, Stephens father began calling her in the middle of the night and telling her to move the family to a new location. Matt Browning seems less sure. Still, he conceded that some Order members may have prejudiced beliefs because in our organization people have freedom of choice.. Lost Index. 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. Obviously, we would love to.. I felt for his pulse, but he was already gone., That night, Paul Kingston arrived at the ranch. 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. Older teenagers were crammed five and six to a room, sleeping on the floors of trailers. "There was a guy out here who was married to a couple of young girls, and he was going to get in trouble because he was having children with these young girls, so he said, 'Well, I never had sex with themI used a turkey baster.'" "Finally exposed in the news, the facts of life inside [the Mormon offshoot Kingston clan's] religious/cult compound are stunning Mormons, Utahans, the nation, and the world.