Life goes on in FLDS enclaves

HILDALE, Washington County — In the polygamous border towns along the Utah-Arizona border, residents appear to be carrying on with their lives even as the man some consider to be a prophet sits in a Nevada jail cell, facing charges in two states.

And Jeffs' mounting legal troubles may yet spread to others.

The FBI has begun poring over ledgers seized from the car in which polygamist leader Warren Jeffs was a passenger when it was stopped outside of Las Vegas this week. Investigators want to know where the Fundamentalist LDS Church leader has been for the past several years — and who has been hiding him as he evaded lawmen.

Here in Hildale and across the border in Colorado City, Ariz., men were seen Friday out in their yards working on vehicles.

Women were tending to gardens. Children were seen playing. The local mercantile was busy again, as women and children scurried in empty-handed and out with groceries.

FLDS people continue to maintain silence with the outside world — especially about Warren Jeffs.

"I just want to be left alone," said one Colorado City man, politely declining to speak to a Deseret Morning News reporter.

Whether that is possible for the man and for his community at large remains to be seen.

Inside the Cadillac Escalade in which Jeffs was stopped outside Las Vegas, the FBI found letters addressed to "the prophet." "There were a lot of letters containing money," said Special Agent Deborah McCarley from the FBI's office in Phoenix.

"As far as where he's been and who he's been in contact with, our investigation is still open," McCarley said.

In Utah, court papers filed in Washington County by prosecutors said that FBI agents seized lists of people who had been providing Jeffs with money and shelter while he has been on the run and on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.

An investigator who has been looking into Jeffs and the FLDS Church wants to take a look at those papers.

"We'll have to wait and see what comes to us as far as the evidence they found in the vehicle," Gary Engels, an investigator for the Mohave County, Ariz., Attorney's Office, said Friday.

Engels met briefly with Jeffs after the FLDS leader waived extradition in a Las Vegas court Thursday, paving the way for his return to Utah.

"He was trying to do his 'prophet thing' with me," Engels said.

Jeffs will be coming back to Utah to face charges of rape as an accomplice, a first-degree felony. He is accused of forcing a teenage girl into a polygamous marriage with an older man. He is facing similar charges in Mohave County.

More legal problems