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If the Order doesnt have it, the clan teaches, we dont need it., Editors picks deficiency. Its his father, the prophet, calling to coax his wayward son back into the fold. Unlike other girls in the Order, Richaun was refined she didnt wear hand-me-downs, and at clan dances, a long line of boys waited to dance with her. 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. Boys work its coal mine and stack boxes at Standard Restaurant Supply, a massive discount store. 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. Daniels ultimatum: Stay in The Order, date no one, and have no contact with family. One afternoon, as Stephen and his cousin were taking a break from fixing a tractor that had broken down in a hayfield, Daniel Kingston pulled up. When Elden died in 1948, leadership of the Order fell to Stephens grandfather, J.O., a short, miserly man with bony shoulders and thinning hair. and last updated 1:46 PM, Feb 24, 2021. Stephen didnt know what the law said he only knew that the people he loved were being abused and exploited by his own father. I love the Order. After the wedding, Richaun chose the name Knight randomly a practice designed to prevent prosecutors from proving that men in the Order have multiple wives. There was a guy out here who was married to a couple of young girls, and he was going to get in trouble. They were finally getting even. Tom Sizemore, Heat and Saving Private Ryan Actor, Dead at 61 The two were playmates when they were boys. His life was in danger, the voice on the other end warned. We pass the house she grew up in with her mother, three eldest brothers, and father before he was kicked out of the cult. But the constant fear has subsided. Brother Elden died of penile cancer in 1948, despite the best efforts of some family members to burn away the cancer using acid. 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. If every generation includes three wives and 30 children, a man can - theoretically - flood a community with over 24 million of his descendants in. There is also some overlap with Sovereign citizens, he contends. I think it scared them.. Lost Index. If gay men stay in the closet, they are allowed to remain in the cult as worker bees.. Then one of them exhaled slowly, his breath shuddering in the cold air. Within the clan, the pieces started to add up. Immune Response. That sister, too, dealt with a lot of respiratory problems with her kids, "because of the relation," Dawna explains. That will open up for The Order to rise up and take over the world, Ron said. "Have you ever heard of the term The Turkey Baster?" 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. 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On February 26th, 2009, the Salt Lake County Sheriffs Office got a call of suspicious activity in the foothills above the city. Still stunned at the sudden loss of their brother, Stephen and his siblings were numb with grief. The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) is a polygamous sect straddling the Utah and Arizona state lines; the twin towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, are known collectively as Short Creek (pronounced "crick"). There lives Ross LeBaron Jr., a descendant of another polygamous sect (separate from the FLDS but quite similar in practice) called the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times. Many children have had birth defects due to this inbreeding. In 2011, Jeffs was sentenced to life in prison, plus 20 years. Mark Shurtleff, the Utah attorney general, has spent years investigating the clan, gathering birth certificates and genealogical data, and has come to believe that the cult is guilty of a long list of crimes, including child labor, tax evasion, welfare fraud, polygamy and the sanctioning of underage marriages to blood relatives. A rare neurological disorder characterized by water on the brain, muscular stiffness, adducted thumbs and aphasia, x-linked hydrocephalus is expressed only in men and carried by women. That Stephens father sat atop a mafialike organization was a secret kept from him for most of his childhood. To deaden his feelings of isolation, he started smoking a lot of pot and sitting around the house all day listening to country music. In the meantime, the police were closing in on the missing silver. The incest came to light after the girl tried to escape the arranged celestial marriage an illegal marriage, sans license. Over 75 years, the Kingstons have amassed a fortune worth an estimated $300 million, but the operation skirts the edges of the law. The letter asserts that one of the earliest members of the church was a Native American man and that the Co-op, as it is sometimes called, has been the victim of prejudice and harassment by Utahs majority religion (i.e., the LDS church) because of the formers progressive ideas. When one of his favorite wives died, he missed her so much that he dug her up from her grave. 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.". and cousins. Those twoand a fifth boyalso suffer from the condition that all of this family's sons were born with: x-linked hydrocephalus. By the time he was 30, he would have more than 10. There are also graves lacking any dates whatsoever. 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. Its ominous-sounding moniker, The Order, is a reference to the United Order, a quasi-utopian society proposed by LDS-founder Joseph Smith, and practiced in some Mormon communities under the leadership of early church president Brigham Young. They predict the scale of the problem will increase dramatically in the future. $302,500. 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. 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. There is no sign. There were so many young children who were born with abnormalitiesharelips, club feet, heart valvesthat were they were going to die within a year. I honestly didnt even know there was any gold until they accused me of taking it, he says. The mere rumor of black blood could condemn someone in the eyes of Order members. The Knight brothers were driving new trucks, and so were their friends, says Levi Kingston. Or wed set traps and raise them as pets., In many ways it was an idyllic childhood, except for the fact that the ranch also doubled as a work camp for disobedient clan wives and rebellious kids. Unable to visit his mother, Stephen would leave a $100 bill in her mailbox or, with his brothers, buy her new furniture. Two of her sisters married their first cousinsmen with whom they share the same grandfather; the sons of their father's second wife, who is their mother's full sister. Fishing it out of his jeans, hell recognize the number. Well, my sister had a little baby with a cleft lip; it was her first child and it had a cleft lip and cleft palate, because they were both Jessops, and Jessops are carriers of that gene. "I didn't touch her; I just used a turkey baster," she mimics, rolling her eyes. 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 "There were so many young children who were born with abnormalitiesharelips, club feet, heart valvesthat were they were going to die within a year," says Ron. Browning sees similarities between The Order and the religion-minded racists of the World Church of the Creator and the Christian Identity movement. Two teenage boys had been spotted entering Rachel Youngs home. The Tuckers think this is all hogwash now, though they were programmed to believe it at the time. Which brings us back to the baby cemetery. 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. Structural birth defects are related to a problem with the structure of body parts. The first questions were about his background. They were the type of kids you didnt mess with, says Robert Owen, a former member of the clan. Authorities call it an organized crime group. 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. He snapped the padlock on the first crate and began stuffing the silver ingots into duffel bags, lugging them back out to the waiting Honda. I strongly believe they are an organized-crime family, Shurtleff says. 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. 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." . Kingston forebears were among those who suffered this fate. Because that one is going to be genius-level purity, and thats what The Order is looking for., Photo Credit: AP Images / Leah Hogsten, Pool (John Daniel Kingston); AP Images / Jeffrey D. Allred / Pool (Jeremy Kingston), SPLC is a nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization (EIN: 63-0598743). Ron Kingston says The Orders leadership has too much to lose for something like that to happen. The clan was reportedly brought to justice by 10 victims, including Blaklyn, in early September. Another of Ortells teachings: Adolf Hitler had the right idea about creating a master race, but didnt have the Lords help, so he failed. Everyone in the Order knew that she controlled the purse strings for the operation but few were aware that she was sitting on a hidden stash of silver. That's still gross." Over the years, state law enforcement and the courts have sporadically addressed the incest in the Kingston ranks. By the time the teenagers sped away, they had made off with more than $80,000 in silver. Still more, rather cryptically, feature child-size palm and footprints. He also shared his brothers fascination with herbs and natural medicine. Accounts of clan babies being born with congenital defects and other problems abound, including dwarfism, albinism and children born minus fingernails or without genitals. As he grew older, Stephen turned out to be as rebellious as his own father had been as a boy. KUTV A large police presence swarmed a well-known polygamous family's property in South Salt Lake Wednesday.A Department of Justice Spokesman Peter Carr confirmed to KUTV that it is involved in . It was a total spur of the moment thing, Brown says. Ortell is credited with expanding The Orders business empire and making the family immensely wealthy. Like Stephen, the boys were considered troublemakers by the Order and like Stephen, they knew a lot about how the clan handled its money. Dawna's eldest son is now dating a Centennial woman whom he recently found out is a distant cousin. 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." It was Mothers Day in 2000, and Stephen and two of his brothers were speeding up a dirt road for dinner at an aunts house. So they would hand them over to Aunt Martha, who was the midwife," he says. Mysterious cars followed his girlfriend, and he once came home to find that someone had rifled through his drawers. According to historian Brian Hales Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations After the Manifesto, Brother Elden, as he was also known, had five wives and 17 children. Instead, he had walked away from the family three years earlier to make a life of his own. But The Order saves most of its bile for blacks and other non whites. We would cause harm, he confessed. Given such incidents, could Order members be a threat to law enforcement? Those affected by the genetic disorder suffer grand mal seizures and often have facial feature deformities and severe mental retardation, with IQs as low as 25. But the more the deputy pressed, the more their stories didnt add up. The clan, known privately as the Order, runs what prosecutors believe is one of the largest organized-crime operations in Utah, overseeing its far-flung empire from a string of secret locations and backrooms. Boys began to show interest in Julie as she matured, but Paul, as the clans leader, warned them away, because of Julies black blood. The theft of the silver bars from Rachel Youngs basement, they concluded, had been a copycat crime. Their neighbors had no idea that the family were prominent members of the Kingston clan, the most powerful polygamist cult in America and one of the most dangerous. 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. Similarly, his older brother John Daniel Kingston has had 14 wives, four of them his half-sisters. A 1999 Salt Lake Tribune article mapped the Kingstons incestuous family tree, quoting one of Ortells 65 kids, ex-Order member Connie Rugg as saying, My father experimented [with] inbreeding with his cattle and then he turned to his children.. When he had finished, he walked toward Stephen, who was sitting on the tractor. Wed sleep on the chicken coop in the summer and shoot raccoons. Ive lived a good life. Sometimes, lying in bed at night, he thinks of his brother who died not far from here, and the rest of his siblings who remain in the Order. His followers erected a crude stone cross nearby in his honor, covered with inscriptions of the letter K (for Kingdom or Kingston). eu . Back then, Paul Kingston stood around five feet ten and weighed close to 200 pounds. Rather than submit to DNA tests, which could have revealed the incest in his brood, he coughed up a more than $200,000 settlement. ), Related Spokesmen for both the U.S. State Department and for Picatinny Arsenal could neither verify nor deny Youngs claims. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Jessica Kingston was wed at age 16 in what she says was a marriage she felt pressured into by her parents and others in a polygamous sect. 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. Supposedly, LaDonna had a dream wherein it was revealed that anyone who left The Order would be tainted by black blood. Situated at the base of a rugged mountain range, the Orders spread sat in a pristine valley of glistening hayfields and open pasture. 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. Indeed, the group was founded during the Great Depression as a communal religious organization where members dedicated their earnings and possessions to building the Kingdom of God on Earth, as one church document attests. Children born into the clan make up much of the labor force. I am in love with old cars and horses. Jeremy was nearly 10 years her senior at the time. But The Orders critics say that cult members see nothing wrong with bilking the government, a time-honored tradition among FLDS sects, gleefully referred to as bleeding the beast.. Like other teenagers who leave fundamentalist Mormon communities, Stephen was not prepared to enter the world at large. The 43-year-old Kingston took the witness stand for the prosecution about 2:40 p.m. and is expected to answer questions through Thursday. At first, the two boys denied any involvement in the break-in at Youngs house. Desert Tech and its rifles have been featured on Fox News, Mythbusters, Daredevil and The Blacklist, among other TV shows. All of the gay people would definitely be the first to go, he said. The land had once been home to the Washakie Indians, and as children, Stephen and his 15 full brothers and sisters played among the wind-swept ruins of a Native American cemetery. At clan gatherings, girls who were still in their teens danced with men old enough to be their uncles, whom they were sometimes forced to marry. Health Gap. Young told Intelligence Report that his company has sold weapons, with the approval of the U.S. State Department, to governments in Europe and the Middle East, Saudi Arabia being one. His father stood on the stage and called out the names of the men who were to receive one of the clans highest honors. As for its anti-government views, allegations of fraud against government entities have long dogged the Kingstons. And another one of her sisters married one of my half-brothers, but we have the same blood and genetics because our moms are full sisters." The lot is unmarked and unremarkable. Her disobedience incurred the wrath of her father Daniel, who took her to a family ranch near the Idaho border and savagely beat her. Some people say they funneled the money through Mexico. In the polygamist cult of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, cousins were encouraged to marry in order to preserve certain bloodlines. Allison, a 17 year-old ex-Kingston member says not much has changed since Lu Anns day. Young also claimed Desert Tech had sold guns to Picatinny Arsenal, the research division of the U.S. military. Later the Order reportedly bought slot machines from mob-controlled companies. Or leave. He was angry and confused, says a former member of the cult. But the Kingstons have remained in Salt Lake, operating virtually undetected in a city of more than 1 million people. It empowered Stephen before that, no one had ever stood up to Daniel Kingston or any of them, says a former member. "Well, needless to say, we had a lot of, uh. Sex. Until the 1990s, there were only 13 known cases of FD in the world. Something along the lines of, to build a superhuman, if you have four or five defects to get the one good one, its worth it, he recalled. In the kitchen, he opened a closet and popped a hatch in the floor that led down to a dark, musty basement. J.O. There are also accounts of dead babies being buried at the Holy Spot, a tree-shrouded patch of land across the street from a grade school in Bountiful, just north of Salt Lake City. Sometimes he parked his immaculately buffed burgundy Ford Thunderbird on the curb, but it was rare to see the man himself. I could tell she loved him, and it seemed like he loved her too. Within a year, Paul Kingston would take a fourth wife. As a favored son of the prophet, Paul had the freedom to disregard the strict discipline his father imposed on other members of the Order. These specialty firearms can cost anywhere from $2,500 to $8,000 each. These days Stephen works on a cattle ranch near the Idaho border, just down the road from where he grew up. Former Order members remain convinced the Knights stole the gold. The discovery by this project that Co. Cork Kingstons share a common Kingston ancestor with Kingstons from the villages around Towcester in the southern part of Northamptonshire, as determined by Y chromosome analysis, is crucial to our understanding of the origins of Co. Cork Kingstons. I tell her I'm not sure, given the context. In a portion of Warren Jeffs' Priesthood Record a mostly dry document that details his every move and meeting one entry, a written transcription of an announcement made by Warren at lunch with his late father's family, stands out as particularly creepy. They maintain a secretive but powerful presence in Utah's Salt Lake Valley, and their estimated 7,500. 17226 Horsetooth Canyon Dr, Houston, TX 77095. Short and chubby, the Brown boys looked up to the Knight brothers. 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. He orchestrated all unions within the cult, which was maintained with classic mind control techniques, corporal punishment, fasting and bizarre dietary practices. Look around, Stephen says. We were off on our own out there and really close, Stephen says. Theyll do what they need to do to defend whats theirs.. They steer clear of banks,. (Like most kids in the clan, Stephen wasnt told who his father was until he was old enough to be trusted to lie to protect the Order.) Nothing has come of the raids yet, and the IRS refused comment on the matter when contacted by this publication. He no longer believed in the Order, but he knew that leaving would mean being shunned by his own family, and because he had been forbidden from making friends outside the clan, there would be few people in the world he could turn to. Or Aunt Martha did, or somebody did. for Nathanael Allred's baby. We're sitting in Ron's large kitchen, eating a meal of homemade tomato sauce and sweet Italian sausage that his wife Geria retired marriage and family therapist originally from Hurleyville, NY, who he met six years ago on Zoosk!has prepared in a slowcooker. While some despised Ben for his apostasy and refused to speak with him, Stephen had remained in touch with his brother. Snow began dating men when he was 22. Black people supposedly suffered from multiple scriptural curses, from the mark of Cain and Noahs curse on Ham in the Old Testament to the racist tenets of early Mormonism that have since been renounced or abandoned by the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the LDS or Mormon church. greatly increases, medical experts say. According to former Order members, they worked long shifts sorting coal and operating heavy machinery in unsafe conditions. You better check on your gold, Young told her. 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. 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. They also knew that much of the clans wealth was stashed inside the unassuming suburban house on the corner. Premier Catering: Since 2017- $1,180,000. With the Orders leaders taking so many wives for themselves, the clans younger men were often unable to find anyone to marry. He kept his office on a side street in central Salt Lake. The family believed that discipline would rein in the boys and that hard labor would make the girls more supplicant to their husbands back in the city. The familys dedication to the principle of polygamy already had been established by Kingstons father, who had three wives. 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. When it comes to racist Sunday school lessons, the polygamous Kingston clan could teach the Ku Klux Klan a thing or two. A scrappy white wooden fence runs the length of it along Canyon Street. He was usually off visiting one of his 30 or so wives, or checking on one of the clans many businesses, or in a backroom getting his muscles rubbed in preparation for one of his painful, 40-day fasts, a purification ritual that he endured in order to get closer to God. Two are nieces. She directs me to the houses she lived in after that: her stepdad Jim Jessop's home; then the rotten, roach-infested house she and her mother shared with nearly two dozen cousins and friends after being removed from Jim's following the Judgment. The Kingston clan is an endogamous (preaching unity between members of the same family) and polygamous sect formed by a split in the Mormon church - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They sat there for a moment, warming their hands against the sputtering heater. A retired Arizona law enforcement officer, Browning is the president and founder of the Skinhead Intelligence Network and is in charge of security for the A&E show, where his wife Tawni works as the casting producer. A simple urine test will reveal. When people hear organized crime, they think of mobsters. On the show's pilot, the trio bring a burly security guard along as they help a woman sneak into her own home to grab belongings for herself and her two young daughters. To cope with the disorientation and loneliness of leaving one world for another, many turn to drugs. Future Planet. During an interview with this reporter, Lu Ann Kingston, whose defiance of the cult led to the conviction of her former spiritual husband Jeremy, recalled that Order members saw intermarriage as a way to keep the bloodline pure., All outsiders are considered to be beneath Order members, she explained. It's not really talked about; I don't think [people here] even research to see how related they are. She called her sister-in-law Patty Kingston, who lived across town. So what about polygamy? (Paul Kingston and other leaders of the family ignored repeated requests for comment for this story. The deputy heard the Brown boys knew who stole the gold but suddenly, without explanation, they and everyone in the clan clammed up. ", "They took their lives," Ron says. Seated on a couch, sipping lemonade in his home in a Salt Lake City suburb, he resembles Paul Kingston quite a bit. This didnt belong to you anyway., As big as the heist was, it attracted almost no attention in Salt Lake. He was. Sisters married the same man in polygamous celestial weddings; brothers from one family married sisters from another (meaning their kids are double cousins). But in a 2News . The most common birth defects for children born of close cousins, anywhere, are: harelip, cleft palate, clubfoot, and certain forms of heart valve conditions. 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. Then one night, a clan member called and told him that the Order planned to kill him. The company was founded in 2007 with an investment from family members. There was also testimony, during one hearing, that someone in the Kingston clan wanted to blow up the courthouse. 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. Youd show up for a welfare call, or a domestic-abuse call, and it was just real run-down.. The Brown boys, charged with felony counts of burglary, wrote a letter to their aunt apologizing for stealing the silver in her house.