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YFZ: Part One

Law Enforcement served a search warrant on the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas in 2008.

SAN ANGELO, TX — “Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott says the 1,600-acre property near San Angelo was a refuge to avoid prosecution for sexually assaulting young girls. FLDS leader, Warren Jeffs, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison,” reported by our sister station WFAA in Dallas in 2008.

“The Newbridge Family Shelter received a call and the caller claimed to be a young girl by the name of Sarah Barlow and she was being held against her will at the YFZ Ranch,” Carol Constancio with the Newbridge Family Shelter said.

“I was the initial one who picked up the first hotline. I said, ‘what’s going on?’ She says, ‘I can’t talk to you much.’ In your mind, you’re like, ‘how am I going to help this little girl?’ She was telling me, there’s a fence. There’s people that are at the fence. People have guns out there; the men have guns. And I told her, ‘We will go to Eldorado, we will help you, tell me how we can help you escape.’ And then she says ‘I gotta go,’ And she hung up,” Constancio said.

“They opened the gate and in we went. We didn’t know the nature of the FLDS people. They were an anomaly to us at that time. We had heard stories, that if they were told to do something, they would do it. Just blindly follow. We started gathering the evidence, and documenting, and photographing it and so it was a really a challenge in the quantity of the evidence,” Hanna said.

“You’d see a young girl with a child and what you would be told is that’s her older sister and you start watching how the two interact and you realize, no, that’s a mother and child couple there. One thing people don’t think about this case is that there were no victims who came and testified. There were no children who came and testified. It all relied on the DNA. Who is the mom? Who is the dad? What are their dates of birth? And that’s what it really boiled down to,” Hanna said.

“Warren Jeffs highjacked that religion and made it into a criminal organization. Organized crime. Even when his instructions or his edicts came down and they were extreme, I think the members would silently question it to themselves…they would just view that ‘well, this is a test to see the depth of my belief and my commitment. So, this is obviously just a test.’ And so they would, they would follow the instructions,” Hanna said.

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