April 18, 2008
ABC News
http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4680793&page=1
Fifteen years ago this week, the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, went up in flames, ending a tense 51-day standoff between the religious cult and the FBI.
David Koresh, the group's charismatic leader, and 70 others, including 20 children, died in the inferno.
There are some obvious parallels between the polygamist Branch Davidians and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints members whose Texas compound was recently raided by government officials.
Both sought refuge in remote parts of Texas, about 200 miles apart. Both involved polygamy and accusations of child brides. And both sects have children who will have to contend with the trauma of having the only way of life they've ever known invaded and upended.
Rick Ross, an expert on cults who has worked with former Branch Davidians and Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints members, said that children who come out of closed-off societies or cultlike groups face many of the same problems. But he says the current case in Texas and the fate of the FLDS children poses unprecedented and complex problems.
"I've worked with a number of children removed by the courts from cults, and I've never seen a case like this," Ross told "Good Morning America."
"These children have no support system on the outside. Everyone they know, they love, everything is tied up in that and that group. The Texas authorities have a tough road ahead," he said.
Sky Okimoto was nearly 4 when his mother, Koresh's sixth wife, left the Waco compound. Today he is a 19-year-old college student and still struggling with the confusion and sadness, and the fading memories of Waco.
"Being the son of David Koresh, yes it was pretty hard," Sky told "GMA." "I felt like something was wrong with me because so many people hated my father."
He continued, "I was angry when I was young because I had just lost my father. It was only until the eighth grade really when I decided to be a happy person again."
The Waco Branch Davidians, a splinter group of the Seventh-Day Adventist church, believed they were living in apocalyptic times. Their lifestyle was extremely austere, based on strict discipline, physical labor and intense Bible study.
Koresh, the group's self-proclaimed messiah, took multiple wives with whom he had at least 14 children. Koresh was also accused of abusing underage girls -- one of his wives was 14 years old and another was 12.
After beginning to question Koresh's doctrine, Okimoto's mom, Dana, left the group just months before the standoff with the government.
Still, she said watching her former home go up in flames was horrifying.
"That was probably the worst day of my life, because those were my friends, those were my family," she said in an ABC News "Primetime" interview in 2003. "What made it even harder for me was knowing I would have been in there."
Dana Okimoto told "GMA" that she has avoided watching TV coverage of the FLDS case because of the similarities she sees between the two groups and the emotions it brings back.
Sky Okimoto, who is also a budding actor, says that grappling with mixed feelings about his father has been difficult.
"I'm pretty much at peace with the fact that he existed," he said. "Sometimes I look up to him because of his charisma. Other times I think he was crazy."
Ross says that the Okimotos were lucky in many ways.
"Sky came out at a very young age and was very fortunate his mother had the critical thinking to leave the compound and he had something to go out to. They had extended family. They could build a life."
But the FLDS children and mothers are "like visitors from another planet" who know no other way of life, Ross said
"It's a group that's almost 100 years old. It's a group that represents generations of abuse, and the mothers that we're seeing on television were literally born into the group as were their mothers and grandmothers," he said.
"The children that we're seeing in CPS [Child Protective Services] custody, they have no one to go out to and their mothers completely endorse the group and continued abuse."
Ross said, though, that the state did the right thing in taking the children from their mothers; if the state had not, it would be tantamount to letting sexual abuse continue indefinitely.
The key to integrating the children into mainstream society, Ross said, is "communication and the fact that they've removed them from the controlled environment and cut off their information from the group itself."
"If they can gain their trust and move forward, and they have good people in Texas, I think they can make headway," he said.
Dana Okimoto says Sky is an example of kids' ability to bounce back.
"There are times he has been very, very angry." she said of Sky. "And other times where I learned about the resliency of children."
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
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ELDORADO, Texas (AP) — The guy didn't look much like a hunter. He was beanpole tall — scarecrow-ish, some might say, with a high, collegiate forehead and a reluctant handshake. Even in a pearl-snap shirt and jeans, this cowboy somehow seemed better suited for a college lecture hall than a saddle.
Still, he wanted land — lots of it — for a corporate hunting retreat. Said he might build a lodge, to entice some big-roller clients of his in Vegas. North of town, the old Isaacs ranch — rocky and dotted as it was with rusty oil rigs, cactus and gnarled mesquite trees — caught his eye. It was plenty cheap, he said, and plenty remote.
But it didn't take long for the sheriff and everyone else in Schleicher County to figure out that their new neighbor, David S. Allred, president of YFZ Land, LLC, had much more on his mind than the hunting of whitetail.
After the closing in November 2003, dozens of Allred's associates arrived to make improvements on the property. Sunday to Sunday, day and night they toiled, completing three, three-story houses — each 10,000 square feet — within weeks. Soon, a cement plant shot up. Then fields of limestone were miraculously plowed into fertile farmland. And then, a superstructure unseen in these parts — a temple, masterfully clad with limestone quarried onsite — ascended into the west Texas sky.
And that, as it happened, was only the beginning.
The YFZ Ranch — which, as the townspeople would come to learn, stood for Yearning for Zion — would mushroom into a bustling, parallel city: a 1,691-acre, self-sustaining enclave carved, literally, into a rock pile for the innermost circle of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, FLDS, a 10,000-member sect that has continued to practice polygamy after it was banned by the Mormon Church in 1890.
Here, there would be enormous dormitories for enormous families, a cheese factory, a medical clinic, a grain silo, a commissary, a sewage treatment plant — and watchtowers with sentries, infrared night-vision cameras to monitor gated entrances, and 10-foot-high compound walls topped with spikes.
There would evolve a saga of "plural marriages," racism, underage "celestial" brides and allegations of child abuse, turning Eldorado upside down with frightening tales, rumors, and a flood of reporters and investigators. A raid on the polygamists' compound — the largest of its kind in more than a half century in the West, involving hundreds of law enforcement agents — would lead to the removal of 416 children and set up a child custody confrontation of unprecedented dimensions.
The episode would also fire up debate in the courts, and in this community of 1,951 residents, over the state's duty to protect children from alleged abuse and over the limits of basic constitutional rights like religious liberty and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.
In the end, the residents of Eldorado would lose a measure of their rural innocence and find themselves conflicted, caught between their love of traditional, family values and their powerful, west Texas beliefs in civil liberties.
___
On a chilly evening in January 2004, J.D. Doyle, a pilot, and his father, James, the local justice of the peace, climbed into their Piper twin-engine plane and took to the skies over Schleicher County to see if recent rains had greened the grazing fields owned by friends who were cattle ranchers.
But as they flew over the YFZ property four miles north of Eldorado, they noticed something different: Down below, jutting up between scatterings of cedar bushes and outcroppings of limestone, were three enormous, cabin-style barracks with enough room to accommodate two football teams.
What were those doing on a hunting retreat?
Later, they asked a friend, Joe Christian, a computer tech who lived adjacent to the YFZ ranch, what he made of it. Christian hadn't a clue, actually. His new neighbors had been reclusive, leaving him to puzzle over all that nonstop building. We should take some aerial photographs, he suggested; the Doyles agreed.
The photos intrigued Randy and Kathy Mankin, who published the town's weekly paper, The Eldorado Success, so they did a background check on the buyer, Allred. Initially, they saw no red flags: He was, as he'd claimed, a builder from Washington County, Utah. Still, why build such large residences on so remote a ranch?
Then, in late March, the paper got a call from Flora Jessop, an anti-polygamy activist from Utah who'd been raised in the FLDS and who, as a teenager, had run away from the sect. A polygamist group, she'd been told, was rumored to be establishing another enclave in west Texas.
In Randy Mankin's mind, polygamy had already taken its place on history's ash heap. But the caller wouldn't stop asking questions. When Mankin finally relinquished the name of the buyer, he heard a silence on the line, then:
"Oh, my God ... it's them ... "
___
"Them," Jessop went on to explain, was the FLDS, a renegade, splinter group of Mormons that by the 1930s were practicing polygamy (the ticket to heaven, followers believed) in secret ceremonies for "spiritual brides" that circumvented bigamy laws in the United States.
In recent years, sect members and their prophet, Warren Jeffs, were being investigated by authorities in the sister cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., for allegedly marrying off girls as young as 13 to much older men with multiple wives. Women and girls who fled the sect — and boys who'd been forced out or abandoned — told stories of forced marriages, incest and abuse; some who left called the FLDS a destructive cult.
The March, 25, 2004, story atop the Success' front page — "Corporate retreat or prophet's refuge?" — sent shockwaves up and down Eldorado's dusty streets. Everyone wanted to know: Were these outsiders like the Branch Davidians, whose compound near Waco was stormed in 1993, resulting in the deaths of 80 people?
Would they kidnap their sons and daughters? Brainwash them? Would they try to conquer Eldorado by ballot, voting as a bloc for judges, commissioners and school and hospital board members sympathetic to their ways?
At the local library, paperback, cassette and hardcover copies of "Under the Banner of Heaven," an unsparing look at similar sects, suddenly were in demand. The local paper featured articles almost every week on the FLDS, and posted online audio clips of Jeffs ranting in a steely monotone about the Beatles being covert agents of a "Negro race."
Locals, buzzing regularly over the property in their planes, snapped photos of FLDS women in long, pioneer dresses tending gardens, men digging small graveyards, erecting thick walls around their temple, and building enough dwellings to establish a mini-city.
"They never shut down," says Gloria Swift, who runs the Hitch'n Post Coffeeshop with her husband, Jerry, in town. "Even when you drive by that ranch at night, you see this glow of lights from the highway. They're out there with heavy machinery, building, 24 hours a day."
The sect's members, meanwhile, shunned nearly all contact with outsiders, including the media, insisting they wanted to be left alone to practice their religious beliefs in peace. The women didn't shop in local stores; the children were home schooled on the ranch.
As a group, sect members bought most of their merchandise in the much larger city of San Angelo, 45 miles up the road past sun-baked fields of cotton and mesquite trees. There, they shopped in bulk for warehouse staples, and were often seen at the Lowe's home-improvement store hauling away dozens of appliances at a clip.
When drivers waved to the men, who occasionally came to town in their trucks to buy propane, housewares or tools, they didn't wave back. They did maintain a cordial, if not friendly, relationship with Curtis Griffen, who ran Eldorado's only fuel depot with his father.
"They were always nice, polite," Griffen says. They bought thousands of dollars in fuel each month, always paying their monthly bills on time, in cash. "From what I could gather, they had no intention of creating problems here in town. In all my dealings with them, them seemed like any other regular customer."
Most other Eldorado residents, however, remained wary. Owners of neighboring ranches were warned to keep an eye out for young girls fleeing the compound. Some days the sheriff, David Doran, stood at the gates, in view of the sect's sentries, peering at the group through binoculars. (As time passed, Doran established a rapport with the sect's leaders; he was one of a handful of outsiders ever allowed inside before the raid.)
State Rep. Harvey Hilderbran became alarmed by reports from Eldorado, former sect members and the Utah attorney general. In 2005 he pushed into law a bill that raised the legal age of consent to marry in Texas from 14 to 16.
"Every now and then you'd hear something about alleged child abuse, but there was never any hard evidence of it," says Randy Mankin, publisher of Eldorado's local paper.
___
As the months passed without incident, the townspeople's' fear of the group morphed first into a generalized disgust of the sect's polygamous practices, then a morbid curiosity with the now-finished, gleaming white temple (which had 4-foot-thick outer walls of poured concrete), and its priesthood rites, marriage ceremonies and secretive ordinations.
When Jeffs, the self-styled prophet, predicted Armageddon in 2005, an Eldorado resident paraded in front of the ranch's outer gate in a grim reaper costume. Caps were sold in town with ELDORADO: POLYGAMY CAPITAL OF TEXAS stitched across them. A resident songwriter had a local hit with "The Plural Girl Blues," a tune about polygamy.
"People would stop each other on the street and ask, 'So, what's the latest on our polygamists?'" recalls J.D. Doyle, the pilot. "They'd ask, 'How many houses do they have now?' Or, 'Have you ever met one yet?' See, those people were like an itch on the back of your neck, and you needed a way to make light of it."
Gradually, interest waned, except for those times that reporters came to town, or when Jeffs made headlines in Utah with his legal troubles. (Last year, he was convicted in Utah for being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl for forcing her to marry her cousin.)
Indeed, the taxes the county collected from the YFZ ranch — the sect's property at one point was valued at $8 million — was a boon to a community of sheep and cattle ranchers and cotton farmers. And yet, the nagging doubts, the scuttlebutt and rumors about what was going on behind the fences and walls of the sect's compound wouldn't die.
A Mormon who had lived in town with his family for years moved away with his wife and children, after first writing a letter to the editor of the local paper which said the FLDS was not representative of mainstream Mormons.
"Those people came under false pretenses to our area," says Lynn Meador, 62, a local sheep and cattle rancher. "Even though they brought a lot of things to our community, I think people deep down were afraid this thing would end up like Waco. We were all just waiting for the other shoe to drop."
___
It came in late March, when a 16-year-old girl reportedly called a local domestic abuse hot line to report that a 49-year-old man had married her, impregnated her at 15, and beaten and choked her repeatedly, according to court documents.
In one of several phone calls to the hot line, the girl said her husband had broken her ribs. But church members had warned her to not to flee — otherwise she would be found and locked in a room, according to an affidavit signed by an investigator for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.
On April 3, hundreds of agents — a SWAT team, FBI agents, Texas Rangers, San Angelo police, highway patrol, and sheriff's department officers from four counties — raided the YFZ ranch, backed by an armored personnel carrier, K9 dog units and ambulances. For six days they searched the compound for evidence of child abuse and illegal marriages, hauling away a cache of computers, photographs, and birth and marriage records.
According to other affidavits, investigators saw numerous underage girls who were pregnant, and took statements from others who told of entering into polygamous marriages in their early teens. They described finding beds on a top floor of the temple, including one that had what looked like a long strand of female hair.
The long-feared bloody conflagration didn't materialize. Tela Mange, a spokesperson for the Texas trooper and Department of Public Safety, said agents had been much more "diplomatic" with the sect that they have been in other raids. "Not a shot was fired," she said, "and there wasn't even a twisted ankle in this one." (She declined to say whether weapons had been found on the ranch.)
But the sight of the confused, anxious faces of women and children gazing out the bus windows as they were transported to local churches, then mass shelters in San Angelo, was enough to shake Eldorado's townfolk, and stir a debate over whether the authorities may have gone too far.
Some were uncomfortable that the 16-year-old who reportedly called the child abuse hotline wasn't identified. A man authorities thought could be her alleged abuser had not set foot in Texas in the last five years. No arrests have been made on any abuse charges in the compound.
Others wondered if it was legal for the agents to keep the sect's men in their homes the first 24 hours after the raid, without charges. Later, at the group shelter in San Angelo, authorities took the cell phones away from mothers who remained in contact with their husbands back at the ranch.
Since the women hadn't been charged with a crime, folks asked, did the police have that right?
"A lot of people here are starting to ask those questions," says Griffin, the oil dealer. "If those women weren't under arrest, how could the police do that to them?"
Others were less bothered by it. "It's about time they went in there and busted that thing up," says Lisa Lopez, a 43-year-old homemaker. "I couldn't understand how people in Eldorado could sit back and let them have sex with underage girls for so long."
You've got it all wrong, say the people of the YFZ ranch, finding their voices after years of near silence. Children were not abused here. Eldorado — indeed, all the outside world — does not understand.
"We are all Heavenly Father's children," says an FLDS mother of two boys, ages 11 and 14, who identified herself only as Brenda. "You have your religion. I have mine. You choose to live how you want. I choose how I live mine. Is this not freedom? Can't we choose?"
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Experts Question Whether Polygamist Sect Members are Victims of Brainwashing
EMILY FRIEDMAN ABC News.go.com
April 16, 2008
Is it just the FLDS or the LDS in a whole?
Between hysterical sobs, the women of the Yearning for Zion Ranch in rural Texas tearily pleaded Monday for the return of their children from state custody, but at the mere turn of a phrase, those tears mysteriously, uniformly stopped.
When conversations with reporters shifted away from the 416 children in state custody toward touchier subjects surrounding the mysterious religious sect, the overflowing emotions were quickly replaced with blank stares and terse replies.
Clad in conservative prairie dresses, hair back in buns and tight braids, the women stuck to monotone, emotionless responses in declining to answer reporters’ questions concerning allegations of plural marriages and sexual assault within the sect.
Asked whether 14- and 15-year-old girls get married on the compound, a tight-lipped woman who would only give her first name, Marilyn, gave what appeared to be a rehearsed response.
“We are talking about our children now,” she said, shaking her head, unwilling to stray from the subject of her children.
The shift to blank-faced denial was jarring in both its immediacy and consistency. Not a single one strayed from the script, an impressive display of solidarity, if a bit peculiar to the outsiders granted unprecedented access to the members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
To outsiders, everything about these people is strange — from the way they dress to the way they talk and especially the way they live. To the uninitiated, it may even appear that these women must be brainwashed to live within the confines of the isolated, controlled sect.
Questions about rumored child brides, teen pregnancies and men assigned multiple wives garnered stoic expressions and a relentless determination to defend the sect’s lifestyle.
“Do you know the definition of Zion?” responded Marie, when asked by a reporter what life within the sect’s gate is really like. “Heaven on Earth.”
It’s an extreme statement, and the women of the sect have begun to realize that their devotion to their lifestyle is unusual to those on the outside.
So, are these women just fanatically, independently religious, or are they victims of something more sinister, like mind control?
Mental health professionals told ABCNEWS.com that it may all depend on how you define brainwashing.
Brainwashed or True Believers…
“Just because they are different doesn’t mean they’ve been brainwashed,” said H. Newton Malony, a senior professor of psychology at the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. “Brainwashing occurs when a person is physically incarcerated in order to believe something.”
As far as we know, said Malony, these women and children — and even men, for that matter — have not been held against their will, but rather, have grown up in the sect and have become socialized to its customs.
“Are these woman just parroting strong pleasure or is this a strong religious conviction?” asked Malony. “I doubt it; they grew up in this [environment].
“This is just an example of a different culture,” added Malony.
But Joe Szimhart, a cult information specialist for more than 25 years, told ABCNEWS.com that even true believers can be brainwashed.
“I have no doubt that they’ve been brainwashed,” said Szimhart. “Just because it’s different doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but there are levels of being different.
“Any common definition of brainwashing or of a totalistic cult is when someone is involved in a self-sealing belief system,” said Szimhart. “They see themselves apart from the rest of the world, and elitist, and think that everything outside is evil.”
Without Access, Little Evidence
Nancy Ammerman, professor of the sociology of religion at Boston University and author of “Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World,” also discourages the labeling of the West Texas polygamists as victims of brainwashing.
“Brainwashing is actually extraordinarily rare,” said Ammerman. “It implies that the person has literally lost the ability to think independently and to make choices.
“We really don’t have any evidence that anything even vaguely resembling that is going on with this particular group or with most religious groups,” Ammerman told ABCNEWS.com.
“What you see is people, who have spent their lives talking to only each other, now suddenly talking to reporters and people on the outside,” said Ammerman. “They develop a group jargon and a particular posture. Their gestures, their language, is all going to look like each other because they are so tied to each other.
“That’s not because someone has forced them to do that — it’s simply coming out of living together in a relatively isolated kind of situation where they’re not interacting with a lot of people,” added Ammerman. “You’d find the same thing if you interviewed cloistered nuns.”
According to Szimhart, one can be socialized and brainwashed.
“When you’re looking at the fundamentalist Mormons within an American society, you have to look at it within the context of reasonable human behavior,” said Szimhart. “They’ve been socialized in an extreme way.
“When I exit counsel someone, I see a person waking up, their brain function begins to expand and integrate to a wider frame of reference,” said Szimhart. “They don’t necessarily lose their belief in Jesus, they just have a more sophisticated belief.”
If You Can Leave, It’s Not Mind Control, Some Say
While experts may argue that the members of the West Texas sect were born into the lifestyle and know no other way to exist, what about those who join cults like The Family and The Moonies later in life?
“Many of them were looking for a kind of meaning for life in their 20s, and found it in the influence of the group,” said Malony, who has counseled members of several religious groups during and after their involvement.
“There are new religious movements, which are examples of what we would call high demand religious groups,” explained Malony. “Scientology, for example.”
“But as far as we know, nobody is forced to become a scientologist, and although there is a lot of pressure to stay, once you’re in, you can always leave,” he said. “It only becomes brainwashing when a person is physically held against their will.”
According to Szimhart, one can be socialized and brainwashed.
“When you’re looking at the fundamentalist Mormons within an American society, you have to look at it within the context of reasonable human behavior,” said Szimhart. “They’ve been socialized in an extreme way.
“When I exit counsel someone, I see a person waking up, their brain function begins to expand and integrate to a wider frame of reference,” said Szimhart. “They don’t necessarily lose their belief in Jesus, they just have a more sophisticated belief.”
If You Can Leave, It’s
Not Mind Control, Some Say
While experts may argue that the members of the West Texas sect were born into
the lifestyle and know no other way to exist, what about those who join cults
like The Family and The Moonies later in life?
“Many of them were looking for a kind of meaning for life in their 20s, and found it in the influence of the group,” said Malony, who has counseled members of several religious groups during and after their involvement.
“There are new religious movements, which are examples of what we would call high demand religious groups,” explained Malony. “Scientology, for example.”
“But as far as we know, nobody is forced to become a scientologist, and although there is a lot of pressure to stay, once you’re in, you can always leave,” he said. “It only becomes brainwashing when a person is physically held against their will.”
But in his own counseling experience, Szimhart said he’s seen individuals join cults as a result of their naivete, not because they were incarcerated.
“Someone convinces a group that what they’re saying is the truth, and the group is too naive to question it properly,” said Szimhart. “[Getting brainwashed] is like having an illness or a sickness.”
Texas authorities took the 416 children into state custody for what may become the largest child abuse custody battle in the nation’s history, stemming from a reported phone call from a teen girl claiming she had been beaten and forced into marriage with a 50-year-old man. The members are now clamoring to get their children back.
But before a trial is held, the sect is free to exist — no matter how foreign and bizarre their customs may seem to the general public.
“[The Yearning for Zion Ranch] is a religious community that, like many other religious communities, has a chosen way of life that is different from mainstream American culture,” said Ammerman. “Until they step over the line of the law, American culture and American constitutional law protects their right to do odd things in the name of religion.