The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints became a household name in 2008 when federal law enforcement raided a church compound in Texas, which led to the arrest and eventual conviction of the church’s named prophet, Warren Jeffs, for child sexual assault.
Lesser known, however, is the connection between the churches’ headquarters on the Utah-Arizona border and 1,100 miles away in Bountiful, British Columbia.
Salt Lake Tribune polygamy reporter Nate Carlisle recently went on assignment for Vice, to report on this connection, and an alleged child bride pipeline.
Carlisle said the FLDS church in British Columbia has been around since the 1940s, forming an early connection between the community in Utah and the one in B.C.
In 2004, however, when Warren Jeffs started marrying many of his wives, he took at least three Canadian teenagers as wives. The rape of one of those wives was taped by Jeffs and eventually used against him during his trial.
The tape was also used by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to build the case against the young woman's parents for taking a child across borders for sex. That case is still pending.
Carlisle said the Mounties haven't said whether they're building more cases against other parents who took their children across international lines to get married to Jeffs or other leaders in the church.
“Canada has had this evidence since at least 2011 and yet they’re still trying to build cases,” he said.
One of the reasons the cases could be stalled is some of the women involved don't feel they are victims. Carlisle spoke with some women who are grown now, but were minors when they were married.
“Some of them don’t consider themselves to have been child brides, or at least they don’t consider themselves to be exploited,” he said.
Another obstacle is the inability of law enforcement, on either side of the border, to find some of the women and girls. Carlisle said he doesn't know the whereabouts of the three Canadian teenagers married to Warren Jeffs in 2004.
"This is another mystery of the FLDS: where are they putting all of these brides, not just these three but there's a whole slew of people who are missing among the FLDS," he said.
Carlisle said Bountiful, B.C. is similar to Short Creek, where people who are still loyal to Warren Jeffs and those who have left the church - or were forced from it - live side by side.
Nate Carlisle, polygamy reporter, Salt Lake Tribune