If $37.5 million for Neal Wanless’s 41,822-acre ranch up in Meade County is too rich for your blood, how about 140 well-developed acres in the southern Black Hills for $6.9 million? 11584 Farmer Road, about 30 minutes southwest of Pringle, has everything: six log structures with 77 bedrooms and 74 baths, a meeting hall with fifteen offices and ten restrooms, a 14,300-square foot storehouse, a 17,500-square-foot equipment shed, greenhouse, three generators, two wellhouses, shop, rock quarry, watchtower—and a history of weird Mormon sex and oppression!
The compound had been occupied by members of the secretive polygamous sect of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, a fringe offshoot of the Mormon religion.
…Rep. Timothy Goodwin (R-Rapid City) is a South Dakota legislator who became deeply involved in efforts to enforce state law within the compound. In 2019, he sponsored a bill that would make it a misdemeanor offense to not report births and deaths to the state.
…“It was the headquarters for Warren Jeffs, who’s in jail in a penitentiary in Texas for all kinds of sex crimes,” said Goodwin. Jeffs, the leader of the FLDS, is serving life in prison for child sexual assault.
“I used to get letters from Warren Jeffs,” Goodwin recounted, “from the penitentiary in Texas. You didn’t even want to read them because it was signed by ‘Jesus Christ.’ He was telling me that he was a prophet of God — it was so much blasphemy that you thought you were going to go to hell just reading it.”
…Goodwin contends that Roy Jeffs told him that babies born with irregularities, such as Down’s Syndrome, were killed. “He had no reason to lie to me — I’d say what happened if there was a deformed baby — Down’s Syndrome or whatever? He just said they just killed them at birth.”
Without birth and death records, these allegations cannot be confirmed, and no remains have been found. Goodwin says he was told the bodies were burned.
Child sex trafficking and sexual abuse are among the other allegations levied at the members of the compound by Goodwin [Jacob Newton, “Grim Past Surrounds For-Sale S.D. Compound,” KELO-TV, updated 2022.05.13].
Three former members of this Mormon fringe group bought the property at the sheriff’s foreclosure sale last year for $750,000. They didn’t actually spend any money to but the compound; they counted the purchase price as part of what the FLDS owes them from a federal lawsuit they won after cult leaders harassed and illegally arrested them in FLDS strongholds in Utah and Arizona. A judge ordered the cult to sell the Pringle compound as part of the judgment.
But hey, Representative Goodwin! Let’s quit talking about dead babies! Talk like that will only drive the sale price down, and we want to see this nice property in your District go for as high a big as possible and promote economic development! Let’s market it as a new headquarters and lodging for all those uranium miners!
Over three years later there are several possible outcomes for Serenity Dennard’s disappearance: she perished in another brutal South Dakota winter, she was killed by a cougar, she hooked up with the Bandidos or was lured into the fold by a representative of the FLDS Church.
in jail in a penitentiary in Texas. Isn’t that like double jeopardy or something?
That is a fine property, and you fellows know grudznick was a fan of The Watchtower back when it was first built. It is a fine property.
Here is the big question Mr. H does not ask. I have associates in the funeral world. I understand graveyards must maintain a perpetual access. If they buried a bunch of small humans here does this qualify?
Grudz, they supposedly burned them up. I guess they’ll only get a moon to rule.
I have heard that a man named Jay Shoemaker bragged about riding in the vehicle when they hit that little girl standing in the road that morning. I reported it to the most recent investigator. She later explained she read in Serenity’s file notes that the same claim was told to one of the many previous investigators and they gave Mr. Shoemaker a polygraph test and he passed.
So that was that.
The new investigator could not be certain it was even the same guy, or establish his alibi, or factor in what a loadie he is and so he may not remember that far back or he may just not have a conscience. People can learn to beat those machines from youtube.
I think any person going around saying egregious tales and wasting man hours, while a family endures their hearts ripping from their bodies needs to be investigated without relying on a non-admissible lie detector test. And if he has an alibi, he needs a consequence for boasting something so sick.
We felt so hopeful that this could be the right lead. It made sense why the tracks were gone and the dogs lost the scent. It was a scenario we could live with and truthfully would have been the biggest relief; some druggies driving through the hills on a booze cruise, not expecting a kid in the road. Panicked when they realized what they hit and put her in the back and got the heck out of dodge. Could have happened within seconds.
I don’t know if the guy has ties with the club Mr. Kurtz suggests, but sounds like he could. I’m only repeating the scuttlebutt in an attempt to blow the dust off the missing child’s file and get some results for the family.
Serenity’s birthday was on Thursday. She turned 13:’(
Fascinating.
Goodwin, what’s the difference between Trump/Noem authoritarians and Warren Jeffs? Even Fox News’ lionization of Putin?
Not much.
“We have the power to destroy this business model. We could require all real estate transactions, everywhere in the United States, to be totally transparent. We could require all companies, trusts and investment funds to be registered in the name of their real owners. We could ban Americans from keeping their money in tax havens, and we could ban American lawyers and accountants from engaging with tax havens. We could force art dealers and auction houses to carry out money-laundering checks, and close loopholes that allow anonymity in the private-equity and hedge-fund industries. We could launch a diplomatic crusade to persuade other democracies to do the same. Simply ending these practices would make life much more uncomfortable for the world’s kleptocrats. It might have the benefit of making our own country more law-abiding, and freer of autocratic influence, as well.
In addition to changing the law, we also need to jail those who break it. [And not just Jeffs.]
We need to step up our enforcement of the existing money-laundering laws. It is not enough to sanction Russian oligarchs now, when it is too late, or to investigate their enablers [look at the difficulty Trump’s GOP obstructionism has led the country too!], when it is too late for that too. We need to prevent new kleptocratic elites [like Noem] from forming in the future. It must become not only socially toxic but also a criminal liability for anyone to handle stolen money, and not just in the United States.
***
Currently a Russian, Angolan or Chinese oligarch can own a house in London, an estate on the Mediterranean, a company in Delaware and a trust in South Dakota without ever having to reveal to his own tax authorities or ours that these properties are his. A whole host of American and European intermediaries makes these kinds of transactions possible: lawyers, bankers, accountants, real estate agents, PR companies. Their work is legal. We have made it so. We can just as easily make it illegal. All of it. We don’t need to tolerate a little bit of corruption, we can simply end the whole system, altogether.
…we now need a much more carefully targeted effort that would pull together some of the departments in the US government that think about communication, not to do propaganda but to reach more people around the world with better information and to stop autocracies from distorting that knowledge. The building blocks already exist, even if they are not currently coordinated. U.S.-funded international broadcasting, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Voice of America and the rest of the services now housed at the U.S. Agency for Global Media; the Global Engagement Center, currently in the State Department; the Open Source Center, a large media monitoring and translation service currently squirreled away in the intelligence community where its work is hard to access; research into foreign audiences and internet tactics; public diplomacy and cultural diplomacy.”ANNE APPLEBAUM, STAFF WRITER FOR THE ATLANTIC AND SENIOR FELLOW, SNF AGORA INSTITUTE, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
BEFORE THE SENATE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, ON “COMBATTING AUTHORITARIANISM: TOOLS AND RESPONSES”
MARCH 15, 2022
Warren Jeffs compound in Pringle? Yuk! Bandidos compound in RC? Yuk!
Fu*k off Sturgis Rally king pins and Harley Davidson king pins! Return the streets to citizens! Take Noem off her free Harley, her jet setting, and her misuse of the military for pet political dissension, and send her back to the rodeo where she came from!
Grudz, I don’t know where the statute on perpetual access to graveyards is, but SDCL Chapter 34-27 lays out a bunch of rules for establishing cemeteries and burying bodies. If the FLDS loons did bury anyone at their compound, they didn’t tell the authorities about it, so any legal protections for their unauthorized and thus illegal cemetery probably would not apply, and the FLDS could not make any legal claim to access the grounds under new ownership. Buyers and developers of the property would just have to report any human remains they find in their digging.
A modest proposal. Other than the fact the compound is in South Dakota, it might be a good place to train cadaver dogs. Where the funds would come from, I haven’t a clue.
Bonus! Set up a training site for GPR operators, too.
Well…it could become the Southern Hills Command Center for Rhoden’s Rangers.