Evidence reveals Warren Jeffs' control

It was called the place of refuge — hundreds of acres in Schleicher County, Texas as isolated from the world as the people who would live there.

For Warren Jeffs, the self-declared prophet of the polygamous sect that owns the land, it was a new hope, a retreat for his closest allies to continue with God's work while they awaited the destruction of everyone around them.

He called it the "Center Stake of Zion."

The isolation was shattered April 3 — rent in the West Texas night amid allegations of forced marriage and sexual abuse, the temple desecrated by lawmen with a search warrant, 439 children taken into state custody.

The children have nearly all been returned and their cases closed, criminal cases are crawling through the courts, and the YFZ Ranch is slowly being repopulated — but the April raid destroyed the secrecy surrounding the Fundamentalist LDS Church, possibly forever.

In the largest release of evidence to date, hundreds of pages of dictations by Jeffs to his wife Naomie were unsealed last week, painting a picture in Jeffs' own words of a paranoid leader whose meticulous control over his flock knew no bounds, continuing even after his arrest and imprisonment for arranging a marriage between a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin.

The dictations, along with letters and sermons written from jail less than a week before the raid, provide the clearest glimpses yet of a prophet genuinely afraid of the corrupting influences of the world on his congregation — and the often draconian steps he took to purify his members.

"The report was there were many tears, much soberness and humbling among the family," Jeffs said after ordering four women and five children to leave the ranch in May 2004. "Even some of the young children cried, seeing some of their brothers and sisters going. I thank the Lord he reveals what to do to clean up the lands of refuge."

Jeffs frequently used the Schleicher County compound as a way to reward and punish FLDS members, removing even members of his own family if he believed they were no longer worthy to live there and sending them back to the border cities of Hilldale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz. — collectively known as Short Creek.

The decisions often took wives from their husbands and children from their siblings — many of the same actions the sect accused the state's Child Protective Services agency of during its investigation into the ranch.