Arizona man had 21 "wives" in Texas cult

NY Times:

As the supper dishes were being cleared away and the rice pudding brought out for dessert, Marvin Wyler’s two wives, along with some of their children and a group of friends, began poring over the list.

The 44-page document, from a court in Texas, gives a glimpse of who is married to whom in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or F.L.D.S. — and in the hothouse world of religious polygamy, a list like that is a sort of Rosetta Stone to the usually hidden relationships of power, politics and piety.

“We are adding up the number of men who may be going to prison,” said Isaac Wyler, 42, the eldest of Mr. Wyler’s 34 children, who was examining the list on Sunday to see which men may have had wives under the legal age when they married.

Scenes like this have played out in recent days in polygamist communities on the Arizona-Utah border as the marriage list and other records, seized last month from the polygamist sect in Eldorado, Tex., along with 462 children in an investigation of possible under-age brides, have filtered west.

The information has families like the Wylers talking about some of polygamy’s best-kept secrets. Who would have guessed, for instance, that Wendell Nielsen, a high-ranking sect official with family here, had 21 wives in Texas, too? Or that he has 35 children on top of those here?

As law enforcement officials from Utah and Arizona prepare for what they expect to be a capacity crowd town-hall-style meeting on polygamy on Thursday — planned north of here in St. George, Utah, before the Texas raid but now proceeding with an added urgency — polygamist gossip is only one of the many consequences of the raid that they are encountering.

Rumors of an imminent Texas-style police crackdown — the authorities say none is contemplated — are among the new constants of life here, the historic heartland of the F.L.D.S. Some polygamists, who had considered moving to Texas, are putting down roots again here, even cooperating with the authorities. Others are speaking out publicly, trying to distinguish their forms of plural marriage (no under-age brides) from what the authorities say was practiced by the sect in Texas.

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It sounds like Utah's AG is not going to do anything about bigamy as long as it does not involve underage girls.

Having 21 "wives" boggles the imagination. I think Texas will probably find a case in there somewhere. All of the men with underage wives are certainly at risk of indictment. The DNA tests should be coming back shortly.

Some of the Texas mothers were really young and may have been preteen when their child was conceived. Besides the pedophilia aspects of the practice, I think the breeding was a way of binding the young women to the cult making it harder for them to leave. Utah and Arizona would be wise to examine these groups closely.