Religion News Blog is a non-profit service providing academics, religion professionals and other researchers with religion & cult news

Religion news articles about religious cults, sects, world religions, and related issues

Navigation:

Search

Cult leader’s brother in court today

Rocky Mountain News, USA
Nov. 3, 2005
Karen Abbott
rockymountainnews.com

ReligionNewsBlog.com • Thursday November 3, 2005

The brother of fugitive polygamist leader Warren Jeffs is in federal court in Denver today on charges of hiding Jeffs from authorities.

Seth Jeffs, 32, younger brother of Warren Jeffs, was arrested Friday after a traffic stop in Pueblo led to the discovery in his car of $142,000 in cash, seven cell phones, letters addressed to “The Prophet” or “Warren Jeffs” and a donation jar, with Warren Jeffs’ photograph and a label reading “Pennies for the Prophet,” court documents said.

Warren Jeffs is president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which split from the traditional Mormon church in the late 1890s after Mormons renounced polygamy. A grand jury in Arizona indicted Warren Jeffs in June on felony child sexual abuse charges for allegedly arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old girl and an older married man in 2002.

Authorities have not been able to find Warren Jeffs. The church has a compound in southwest Colorado, near Mancos, a much larger center in El Dorado, Texas, and other facilities in the western U.S., Canada and Mexico.

Seth Jeffs told FBI agents he did not know his brother’s whereabouts but was delivering money and other items to a headquarters of the sect in Texas.