In an isolated, rural community in a far southern corner of Utah, oversized houses stand testament to a fundamentalist Mormon sect whose followers believe that plural marriage, as they call polygamy, can lead to eternal salvation.



Amid a dramatic landscape of copper-red mountains and achingly blue skies, women wear modest, ankle-skimming dresses and keep their hair long so they can anoint and wash their men’s feet with their locks in the afterlife. A dozen “sister wives” might be married to a single man, and they all raise their children by him together. Their life in the hardscrabble region, where unpaved roads predominate, has always been half a century behind the rest of the US.

But now the modern world is intruding. Allegations of child sexual abuse, welfare fraud and child labor trafficking have culminated in the leaders’ imprisonment and a breakdown of the community support system. Poverty and homelessness are the result: sister wives and their many children live in RVs and converted shipping containers, or are what the church calls “stacked up” in crowded, cramped homes.

One of those women in trouble is Esther Barlow, 38, a single mother of 11 children, who grew up with 16 siblings. “Only three of them are left” in town, she said, as one of her daughters braided her long hair. “Everybody else moved out.”

Barlow used to work as a clerk in two businesses owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints (FLDS). After they closed down, it fell to the church to take care of all her family’s needs, but almost overnight, “everything just shut down”, she said. “We had a huge support system. Now that’s not available.”

FLDS members have been living in sheds and run-down buildings. At bottom left, members help sort donations.

Now her only income is from a 16-year-old son working in construction. Her home is decrepit and has no furniture. She’s had to ask her brothers, scattered beyond the townships, for help paying utilities. But even with their help, “I don’t have money to get basic needs, like toilet paper, laundry detergent, things I need to take care of my family.”

A local therapist, Stacy Heaps, provides counseling for residents and worries about how they will achieve self-sufficiency in the 21st century US. “When you’ve grown up sewing and you don’t know how to do a checkbook,” she said – while the outside world has no understanding of your religious values or culture – “and all of a sudden to have to go out and support yourself, I would say, yes, there’s a crisis.”

Lydia Richter and Kathy Bistline, both eight, play on top of a makeshift stable and shipping container in Colorado City, Arizona.

In this isolated rural backwater, where the vermillion cliffs provide a majestic backdrop to the red-sand townships, chickens inhabit front yards, and boys in jeans and heavy shirts and girls in long dresses roam free. Pale young women in pastel dresses sweep leaves outside a church-run municipal office, while ruddy-faced men drive pickups or farm equipment down dusty lanes. In its prime, 6,000 members of the sect lived in Hildale, Utah, and its neighboring Colorado City, Arizona, both of which locals know by the name Short Creek.

After the Mormon church banned polygamy in 1890 in exchange for the recognition of Utah as a state, polygamists went underground, some moving to Mexico, others settling in Short Creek. Following decades of leadership by a priesthood council, a member named Rulon Jeffs, his son Warren and their supporters fashioned a system of one-man rule.

After his father died in 2002, Warren Jeffs introduced a regime of authoritarian control under which multiple wives were allocated to the most favored, older men, and TV and the internet were banned. While women had once been allowed to wear dresses with a diversity of colors, prints and flowers, the Jeffs imposed a uniform style with few permitted hues, setting them even further apart from a world they already shunned.

Still, the church could be generous: as long as you were a member of the faith, it provided a house to live in.

In 2006, Warren Jeffs was arrested after a year on the run over allegations of illegally arranging marriages between adult males and children. Five years later he was sentenced to life for child sexual assault; whether through faith or a fear of exile, many members have remained committed to him. His younger brother Lyle took over the sect – enforcing restrictions on the consumption of certain food items, such as milk and chocolate, as well as sex between spouses – but was himself arrested on welfare fraud charges in February 2016.

Now the community has begun to fall apart.

Warren Jeffs is said to have ordered his people to leave Short Creek and settle across the US and in Mexico. In early 2017, the US supreme court declined to hear a case that sought to decriminalize polygamy in Utah.

Compounding these problems, the state had wrested away from the FLDS control of a trust containing many of the members’ homes. When the members declined to follow rules or pay property taxes, believing the buildings were consecrated to their church, they were evicted.

Fred Richter, 11, and his mother, Norma Richter, in one of their home built homeschool classrooms.

The response to the escalating poverty crisis has come from women inside the sect. “How do we tell people we’re really in trouble?” asked Norma Richter, 50, who has banded together with a group of women to fight for those in need in their faith, whether through patrolling the highway to sound the alert when the locksmith arrives to evict a family or recording evictions on iPhones or collecting and distributing emergency food boxes from an Arizona pantry. “It’s unreal. It feels like we’re being cast out.”

Richter recalled that on a visit to Walmart with FLDS children, who grew up in a money-less system, one said: “Mother, can I take this?” Some FLDS women who struggle with food insecurity won’t reach out for help, perhaps out of pride or to avoid jeopardizing their “good standing” in the church. One agency dropped off food in Ziploc bags in weeds by the highway for several FLDS mothers who didn’t want it known they had sought assistance.

Richter drove the Guardian around the dusty back streets on a tour of recently erected homeless camps. Initially, the sect’s response to the evictions was to set up a tent city behind metal fences in early 2015. Harsh winters and summer desert heat saw them shift gears. She pointed out FLDS-owned warehouses and industrial properties such as a mechanic’s shop, where evicted families lived, as well as a fenced-off colony of 13 cargo containers converted into homes.

An official involved with managing the land trust, Jeff Barlow, said blame did not lie with the trust. Claims of homelessness were simply “people not liking the consequences of their own decisions”, he said. He complained that the FLDS “run[s] the houses into the ground”, and that seven out of 10 are intentionally vandalized.

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Barlow says the answer to the poverty is simple: pay the $2,500 to $3,000 annual property taxes. But the FLDS won’t enter a “taken” property.

Trauma stemming from either being evicted or living under its threat takes its toll. Angela Bistline, an 18-year-old FLDS woman, softly said she had long “shoved down” her anxiety, even as most of her relatives were kicked out of their homes. An aunt who home-schooled her was also evicted, so she has resorted to an online high school study course. She’s afraid her immediate family is next, “and we’ll have nowhere to go”.

Today perhaps only 2,000 members of the sect still inhabit the community. Cementing the appearance of the area’s transformation, earlier this month the town of Hildale elected a non-fundamentalist, ex-FLDS female mayor.

For someone like Esther Barlow, there seems no easy way out. A six-bedroom rental in nearby St George costs an unaffordable $2,500 a month and with no work, no credit or rental history, applying for a mortgage is impossible.

When Barlow looks at the red-sand streets where she grew up, all she sees is a ghost town. “Friends lived next door to me as I was growing up, I had support, I knew everybody in the neighborhood,” she said. “Now I don’t know anybody. It feels like home but everybody’s gone.”

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