AUSTIN — Forty women opted Thursday to go to a family violence shelter rather than return to the West Texas ranch where authorities allege children are unsafe because of the polygamist group's practice of "spiritually marrying" underage girls to older men.

Seven of the women who had been staying with their children in public shelters for the past three weeks returned to the Yearning for Zion ranch near Eldorado.

The number of women choosing to go to an undisclosed family violence shelter was a turnaround from last week, when six sought shelter and 51 returned to the isolated compound.

"It was entirely up to them," said Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

As the women boarded separate buses for their chosen destination, they were given a packet explaining how their children would be cared for in coming weeks.

The state will work with all of the mothers, no matter where they went, to ensure they can visit their children, Crimmins said.

The women who were allowed to stay with their children included 17 who have babies under the age of 1. They will be housed at Baptist Children's Ministries in San Antonio, officials there and at Child Protective Services confirmed. The mothers and their infants will be kept away from other residents at the facility.

Sixty-three children also left the San Angelo Coliseum on Thursday. The department again revised its count of children in state custody upward to 462, saying it believes that 25 females who had said they were adults are instead minors.

About 260 children remain in the coliseum and will go to foster group homes as soon as possible, Crimmins said.

Individual hearings sought

Meanwhile, an appeals court agreed to consider arguments Tuesday from a group of mothers who want the state to present evidence on a child-by-child basis to support allegations of abuse or neglect.

The Austin-based 3rd Court of Appeals said it would review state District Judge Barbara Walther's decision to keep all children in state custody after hearing generalized evidence about the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Robert Doggett, a legal aid attorney representing about 48 mothers, said many of the mothers were confined to the coliseum during the two-day hearing, where they were not allowed to consult with attorneys or watch the proceedings.

"Rather than having individualized hearings with actual evidence," Doggett said, "this was a ... cattle call where everyone was presumed to have been physically harmed or to be at risk of physical harm."

Doggett said he will ask the appeals court to order individual hearings for the children in the counties where they are placed in foster care. He also will seek rulings that very young children be kept with their mothers, and that siblings be placed together.

Also Thursday, lawyers for the FLDS and two of its members seized on allegations that probable cause for the warrant to search the ranch may have been based on calls from a Colorado woman with a history of making false abuse reports.

Court records unsealed on Wednesday show that the calls made to a San Angelo domestic violence shelter were made with prepaid mobile phones that had previously been used by Rozita Swinton. The Colorado Springs woman has been charged with making a false report in Colorado and is on probation there for a similar offense.

Texas authorities have characterized her as a person of interest in connection with their search for a purported 16-year-old who called the San Angelo hot line to say she had been physically and sexually abused by her much older "spiritual" husband.

The motion alleges that authorities had spoken to the alleged abuser in Arizona by cell phone before they executed an arrest warrant for him. The man told Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran that he did not know the girl and had not been to Texas in 20 years.

Motion to keep files secret

"Thus, before the search warrant was executed, the officers had been apprised, and even verified, that the only person these officers alleged to be suspected of criminal activity or to pose 'an immediate risk of physical or sexual abuse of a child' was not located on the premises, or even in the state of Texas," said the lawsuit filed by San Antonio attorney

The motion seeks to restrict the release of any information from documents and records seized at the YFZ property.

The Schleicher County Sheriff's Department said Thursday that Doran would not be available for comment.

But in an interview with the Eldorado Success published April 17, the sheriff said that the abuse report stemming from the hot line calls was "essential" to obtaining the search warrant. Doran said he also provided information from a confidential informant who was a former member of the FLDS, but that person had never been to the YFZ ranch.

Bid for new trial denied

After executing the search warrant April 3, officials said they saw what they believed to be underage pregnant girls and began removing children and women from the ranch.

An affidavit for a second, broader search warrant alleged that investigators found evidence that underage girls were "spiritually married" to older men and forced to have sex.

One young mother told investigators that she was 15 when she gave birth to her first child. Texas law prohibits children under 16 from being married.

CPS investigators said those practices put all girls at risk of sexual abuse and all boys at risk of becoming men who abuse minor girls.

Also Thursday, the head of the FLDS, Warren Jeffs, lost a bid for a new trial. A Utah judge rejected the request from Jeffs, who was convicted in September in southern Utah for his role in arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to an older cousin. He is jailed in Arizona awaiting trial in another case.

The Associated Press and reporter Nancy Martinez of the San Antonio Express-News contributed.

janet.elliott@chron.com