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A fifth child, they say, was fathered by their eldest brother Wayne LeBaron, (who was married to Dawna Black Bistline's cousin at the time of this child's allegedly incestuous conception). "Fred was in charge of the cemeteries, the gravediggers, all of that. Dawna's husband is a brother to her older sister's husband, "but they're only half brothers, so him and I aren't blood-related at all, because he was from the youngest mother, which had no relation to us other than marriage, and then my sister was married to the older brother and his mom and my grandmother were full sisters.". was just as frugal as his brother he lived in a dilapidated shack with planks missing from the porch but he had a better head for business. 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. While his dad was running the order from Salt Lake City, Stephen grew up on a cattle ranch called Washakie, near the Idaho border. There was also testimony, during one hearing, that someone in the Kingston clan wanted to blow up the courthouse. Sisters married the same man in polygamous celestial weddings; brothers from one family married sisters from another (meaning their kids are double cousins). Another of the cults teachings was that soy can make you gay, an anti-government conspiracy theory popular in some right-wing circles. These specialty firearms can cost anywhere from $2,500 to $8,000 each. Tom Sizemore, Heat and Saving Private Ryan Actor, Dead at 61 Some outside the church have referred to the group as "the Kingston Clan" or the "Kingston Cult," although leaders believe that these terms are "inaccurate and derogatory." . The theft of the silver bars from Rachel Youngs basement, they concluded, had been a copycat crime. Kingston -- the late enigmatic leader and church prophet who built the 1,500-member Kingston clan into a multimillion-dollar business empire while allowing many of his purported 13 wives and dozens of children to survive on government assistance. Desert Tech and its rifles have been featured on Fox News, Mythbusters, Daredevil and The Blacklist, among other TV shows. This didnt belong to you anyway., As big as the heist was, it attracted almost no attention in Salt Lake. Come back, his dad will say. Fishing it out of his jeans, hell recognize the number. Still more, rather cryptically, feature child-size palm and footprints. All of the gay people would definitely be the first to go, he said. Given such incidents, could Order members be a threat to law enforcement? It was time. Everyone knows it., After the gold disappeared, the Knight brothers suddenly seemed to have a lot of money especially for young men on their own in the world for the first time. The Intelligence Report is the SPLC's award-winning magazine. The two groups split when Dawna was growing up. Like polygamy, incest is a third-degree felony in Utah, and as with polygamy, convictions are rare. Boys as young as 14 labored in the workshop. The two boys pulled into the driveway and shifted the green Honda into park. for Nathanael Allred's baby. Young declined to comment when asked if he practices polygamy. And the graveyard grew exponentially.". He orchestrated all unions within the cult, which was maintained with classic mind control techniques, corporal punishment, fasting and bizarre dietary practices. As time passed, his dogma became even stranger. 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. They got married and contacted the . SALT LAKE CITY A local non-profit with ties to the polygamous Kingston group is facing multiple questions and accusations regarding its taxes. 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." 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. "It's doesn't stop anybody," Dawna says. In the 1980s, the state of Utah sued John Ortell Kingston over welfare fraud related to his many wives. 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. Family members attribute the defects to the advanced 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 didnt take long for them to break down and confess that they had robbed their aunt. I think it scared them.. Theyre basically the Utah Mafioso of the white power world, Browning told Intelligence Report. At first, the two boys denied any involvement in the break-in at Youngs house. October 15, 2002: "There will be a viewing at father's house at 3p.m. She was definitely the pick of the litter, and thats why Paul got her, Ron recalls. The last infant grave marked in this cemetery is dated 2010; Warren issued an edict from prison banning sex in 2011, so few infants have been born since then (the few babies born each year are the product of institutionalized rape by cult-appointed seed bearers). When he noticed that the boys had stopped working, he became enraged. Luke and Scott often visited the home of one of their aunts, Rachel Young. She, in turn, wrote a letter to the judge on their behalf, and the case was settled without a trial. Theyd keep it in basements, in filing cabinets, in a big safe in one of Pauls offices, says Levi Kingston, a former clan member. It was also around then that Stephen, at the age of 14, began to see the clan for what it really was. Browning sees similarities between The Order and the religion-minded racists of the World Church of the Creator and the Christian Identity movement. One is a first cousin. 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 Two are nieces. David was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the incest, but served only four before being paroled. 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. From the outside it seemed like a typical suburban home, offering few clues of the secrets that were contained inside. 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. One day, for laughs, he and his half brother Ron Tucker stole some napalm from an Order army-supply store, drew lines of it in the street and lit it on fire as cars drove by. 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. The 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time 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. 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.'. According to many of the individuals interviewed for this story, these children are seen as special angels sent from God to the FLDS community. 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. This is all compounded by the split between the FLDS and an offshoot group of polygamists that moved to nearby Centennial Park following a disagreement over how the community should be governed, and by whom). But mostly he talked about the history of the Order and his ancestors, the men who had started the clan. 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. John Daniel Kingston seen here in 1999, pleading no contest to beating his 16-year-old daughter after she attempted to flee an arranged marriage with her uncle David, Kingstons brother. Youd show up for a welfare call, or a domestic-abuse call, and it was just real run-down.. But Dawna disagrees: "I think it was actually, you know." As for its anti-government views, allegations of fraud against government entities have long dogged the Kingstons. 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. A simple urine test will reveal. Im done with this shit.. On weekends, he was sent out to work at the Orders coal mine with other teenagers. If you have as much as one drop of that blood in your veins, says Carl, youre cursed from holding the priesthood.. There are baby graves year that date back as earlier as the 1950s, potentially even earlier: many are unmarked. For Stephen and the other kids on the ranch, the highlight of each week came on Sundays, when they traveled the hour and a half south to Salt Lake for church. It would be several more years before Stephen learned that Paul Kingston was his father, and that his mother was just one of his dads many wives. One crime had been solved but the chest of gold stolen from Patty Kingstons closet remained a mystery. Many children have had birth defects due to this inbreeding. . Over the next several years, Stephen bounced from the suburbs of Salt Lake to the clans ranch in Nevada. I honestly didnt even know there was any gold until they accused me of taking it, he says. By the time the teenagers sped away, they had made off with more than $80,000 in silver. But for their part, The Order and other fundamentalist sects believe the LDS church exists in a state of apostasy for abandoning what they see as a bedrock principle of their faith. He also preached a bizarre extrapolation of the Book of Mormon called the White Horse Prophecy, a dreaded prediction of a cataclysmic time when the black race will rise up and attempt to destroy the white man, only to be thwarted by Native Americans riding to the rescue. 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. If every generation includes three wives and 30 children, a man can - theoretically - flood a community with over 24 million of his descendants in. The Order was founded by Elden Kingston, Stephens grand-uncle, at the height of the Great Depression. Dawna's eldest son is now dating a Centennial woman whom he recently found out is a distant cousin. 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. Short and chubby, the Brown boys looked up to the Knight brothers. 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. As he grew older, Stephen turned out to be as rebellious as his own father had been as a boy. Jeremy was nearly 10 years her senior at the time. Concentrated in Salt Lake City, its 10,000 members control more. Or Aunt Martha did, or somebody did. Suddenly, Stephens brother David lost control of the truck and it rolled over, killing David instantly. Jonathan Turner, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside, hypothesized exactly that, in an article published by the ABC news network in 2008. As far as how you end up in heaven, thats up to God.. A scrappy white wooden fence runs the length of it along Canyon Street. Paul already had two wives, but he and Richaun were married in a secret ceremony at her parents house. In all likelihood, Stephen and his brothers had stolen the gold from Patty Kingston first and then the Brown boys, in an effort to emulate their cousins rebellious acts, had robbed their aunt weeks or even months later. 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. I dont think theyre organized crime in that regard, but the racketeering statute defines it as any conspiracy or pattern of illegal activity done in concert with others. It was all just innocent teenage stuff, recalls Ron, who has since left the clan. Blacks were the less valiant people in heaven who sat on the sidelines while others took sides, according to The Order. Structural birth defects are related to a problem with the structure of body parts. His eldest died six years ago at 10 years old, he says, and another died in infancy, leaving behind two remaining brothers from a set of spontaneous identical triplets. 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 is guiding me all around town, following my route, turn by turn, on Google maps. He bragged that he had worn the same black shirt every day for a year. and cousins. deficiency. Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire. Among the polygamous Kingstons, a number of children have been born with birth defects, among them one born with two vaginas and two uteruses but no Outwardly, she appeared to have no sex organs. Incest is endemic in the clan, with uncles marrying much younger female relatives; in 2003, police showed up at an Order barbecue and arrested a clan member for marrying his underage cousin. The Kingstons are a Mormon splinter group, founded in the 1930s by Mary's great-uncle Elden. 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. In 2003, another clan member, Jeremy Kingston pleaded guilty to incest for taking 15-year-old Lu Ann Kingston as his fourth wife. 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. Kingston is a member of the Order, the largest Mormon polygamist clan in the U.S. See the Beths Deliver Refreshing 'Expert in a Dying Field' Mini-Set on 'CBS Mornings', Sex, Drugs, and the Biggest Cybercrime of All Time, I could boil down what theyre about in three words, says a member who broke with the Order. As he talked to the woman who lived there, Luke Brown came out of the house, and his brother Scott soon joined him. "Many of the parents did not want to have to deal with some of those children. Seated on a couch, sipping lemonade in his home in a Salt Lake City suburb, he resembles Paul Kingston quite a bit. 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. At the lot's northwest corner, a metal gatethe kind you might find on a cattle ranchhangs open on its hinge. The two were playmates when they were boys. 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. When he was three, his mother led him into a building controlled by the clan and pointed out an intense man lifting weights in the gym. Then one night, a clan member called and told him that the Order planned to kill him. It felt like it was us against the world. His older brother Richard, a burly diesel mechanic, taught him how to fix cars. By 18, she. 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. His life was in danger, the voice on the other end warned. Copyright 2023 Penske Business Media, LLC. He picked fights at school, shot a teacher in the face with a water gun and refused to do homework or answer questions. 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. It's also still rape with a foreign object, I remind us both unnecessarily. The boys were sentenced to two years of probation and taken back into the Order. 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. Within the clan, the pieces started to add up. Paul was upset any of this had been reported at all, says a former member close to the boys. 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. As part of a plea bargain, Jeremy spent just one year in prison. 17226 Horsetooth Canyon Dr, Houston, TX 77095. Ortell is credited with expanding The Orders business empire and making the family immensely wealthy. We pass the house she grew up in with her mother, three eldest brothers, and father before he was kicked out of the cult. offspring will be affected by the disease or become carriers of the gene. . Young is the owner of Desert Tech, a Utah gun manufacturer, which produces sniper rifles and so-called bullpup rifles, The latter, unlike conventional magazine-fed rifles, have shorter barrels, with the guns action located behind the trigger. 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 bucket of water and a vial of black food coloring. The deputy heard the Brown boys knew who stole the gold but suddenly, without explanation, they and everyone in the clan clammed up. Rather than submit to DNA tests, which could have revealed the incest in his brood, he coughed up a more than $200,000 settlement. She also had a child with a clubfoot, and I think probably half of her children had respiratory problems when they were babies, because they were so related.". J.O. That Stephens father sat atop a mafialike organization was a secret kept from him for most of his childhood. If they kill me, they kill me, he says. We would cause harm, he confessed. Structural Birth Defects. If you were more obedient, this wouldnt have happened., After that, everything changed, Stephen says. When he had finished, he walked toward Stephen, who was sitting on the tractor. "My father and her grandmother were full brother and sister," she explains, recognizing the bloom of confusion on my face. Or leave. Eventually, Stephen was sent back to Washakie and was placed under the supervision of his uncle, one of the familys most feared enforcers. Nevertheless, former members of The Order say that incest and racism are inextricably linked in The Orders teachings. The Knight brothers were driving new trucks, and so were their friends, says Levi Kingston. Kingston forebears were among those who suffered this fate. Recordings of church testimony given by various Kingstons serve as further evidence of the cults bigoted teachings. Others say they buried it out in the desert and are slowly cashing it out. Three of his wives are his half-sisters. Another of Ortells teachings: Adolf Hitler had the right idea about creating a master race, but didnt have the Lords help, so he failed. He mandated that children should drink tea brewed from the herb every morning, and that Order members should feed it to their cows. One day, not long after the gold disappeared, Knight got an anonymous phone call. J.O. 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). Instead, he had walked away from the family three years earlier to make a life of his own. Local Policing and Immigration Enforcement, Request for Legal Assistance Economic Justice. Ron Kingston says The Orders leadership has too much to lose for something like that to happen. Authorities call it an organized crime group. "You have to either accept" the responsibility of caring for so many children with major healthcare needs "or let it destroy you," says this man, whose wife recently suffered a stroke. When it comes to racist Sunday school lessons, the polygamous Kingston clan could teach the Ku Klux Klan a thing or two. One of her brothers married a woman whose grandmother is a sister to their father. 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. Her parents and siblings eventually left as well. One of them, Stephen Knight, made for the most unlikely of suspects. Another is a first cousin. Jessica said she and other children of the Kingston clan a group also known as The Order, the Davis County Cooperative Society, and the Latter-Day Church of Christ dropped the N-bomb all the time, as did their parents. 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 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. 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. Many of the souls interred here lived not longer than a day, some just two days, two weeks, or two years. The issue is available now on newsstands and in the digital archive. I t is often used to treat severe acne. Unable to visit his mother, Stephen would leave a $100 bill in her mailbox or, with his brothers, buy her new furniture. girl, born to John Ortell and Isabell Johnson, was not the product of an incestuous marriage. Known variously as Brother Paul, the leader, and the man on the watchtower by Order members, this unremarkable, balding middle-aged man reportedly has 27 wives and over 300 children. Its his father, the prophet, calling to coax his wayward son back into the fold. He went days at a time without eating, convinced it helped provoke visions, and believed that by the laying on of hands he could heal his followers from sickness and disease. I tell her I'm not sure, given the context. We want to hear it. Andrea grew up in a small two-bedroom home in a Kingston-owned coal "A rare, severe birth defect is on the rise in an inbred polygamous community on the Arizona-Utah border, according to a doctor who has treated many of the children. Like other fundamentalists of that era, he believed the Mormon Church had lost its divine authority when it renounced polygamy in 1890, so he persuaded three other families to join him in establishing their own sect. The polygamous town facing genetic disaster - BBC Future. Obviously, we would love to.. Thats what happened with Ron Tuckers family. The Knight brothers werent afraid to fight, or to stand up to authority. Brother Elden died of penile cancer in 1948, despite the best efforts of some family members to burn away the cancer using acid. The incest came to light after the girl tried to escape the arranged celestial marriage an illegal marriage, sans license. Similarly, his older brother John Daniel Kingston has had 14 wives, four of them his half-sisters. And it would be several years after that before he stole from his father for the first time. You better check on your gold, Young told her. They were the type of kids you didnt mess with, says Robert Owen, a former member of the clan. Is it a requirement to gain the highest levels of heaven? Some read simply, "Baby Keate," or "Baby Bateman," or "Baby Cooke," with holes where numeric date tiles might otherwise be placed. "You had a fairly diverse pool to start with, so only if that went on for a long time within this same population would you see real effects," he told ABC. [W]e directly condemn in action and in words, racist, homophobic or hateful actions against any group or individual, Johnson wrote.