She was worried about an ugly showdown if the FLDS did not cooperate. She said it was hard to get information because law enforcement was keeping the media out of the area. "Randy asked one of the law enforcement officers where they were all coming from, and he said they were coming in from everywhere," she told me. This time,though, her voice sounded urgent. Kathy and I had been in touch since 2006, when she called to find out what might be going on at the ranch and to broaden her knowledge of the FLDS. On March 24, 2004, with the headline "Corporate Retreat or Prophet's Refuge?" the Mankins broke the news to the residents of Eldorado-a town of roughly two thousand residents, thirteen churches, three restaurants, and an aging motel-that their new neighbors were members of an extreme polygamous sect. Kathy and Randy had been covering the FLDS since 2003, when the ranch was bought under false pretenses as a corporate retreat and lodge.
My ex-husband, Merril Jessop, had been running the ranch since becoming one of the highest- ranking men in the FLDS in 2006. The YFZ Ranch is owned and operated by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the polygamous Mormon cult in which I'd spent my entire life until fleeing in April 2003. Kathy Mankin and her husband, Randy, publish The Eldorado Success, the local newspaper in Eldorado, Texas, the town nearest to the Yearning for Zion Ranch, a $20 million compound spread across seventeen hundred acres in West Texas. Law enforcement is at the gate, and the country road has been shut down."
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