FLDS raid in Texas: How did this happen?

Two weeks after 416 children were removed from the YFZ Ranch in Texas following allegations of child sexual abuse, the leader of the FLDS Church remains jailed in Arizona as his followers deal with the public consequences of private practices that he ordered and perpetuated after becoming leader of the group five years ago.

Warren Jeffs — who was convicted in September of rape as an accomplice for forcing an underage girl to marry her adult cousin — has directed the affairs of the Fundamentalist LDS Church since 2003, following the death of his father, Rulon Jeffs.

With that change in power, decades of living in relative harmony within their own Utah-Arizona border-town communities began to unravel as Jeffs sought to control personal property, family relationships and marriage within the community on an unprecedented scale, according to two authors who have written about the sect. Within two years of taking control of the group, Jeffs landed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list before his capture in 2006 and subsequent criminal conviction.

The authors agree that Jeffs' determination to wield control made him into something of a God-like figure among his followers, who seem to have taken his directives as divine decrees that bound them to do his bidding, regardless of the potential consequences.

Though he renounced his own leadership from prison during his criminal trial, calling himself a "false prophet" and "one of the most wicked men on the face of the earth," he later rejected those assertions, and followers regularly visit him in prison. Many observers believe he continues to direct the affairs of the FLDS group from behind bars.

Brian Hales, a Layton physician and historian who wrote "Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations After the Manifesto," said much of what has happened since Jeffs took the reins "has been unpredictable." FLDS leaders before him "followed similar goals. For Warren to waltz in, excommunicate people (he felt were a threat to his authority) and build a temple — those are brand new ideas and thinking which makes everything unpredictable with him."

As word of Jeffs' mistreatment of his own followers began to leak out in media reports, many of them moved to what is now the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado, Texas, constructing their first temple and shunning outsiders and the media. But with the fate of the FLDS children now in the hands of Texas authorities, the world press is both intrigued and baffled by polygamy's modern-day complexities as the women seek out reporters in unprecedented ways.