Seth Jeffs is back in the news.
A South Dakota TV station, KELO-TV, reported that the Seth Jeff’s led Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints property near Pringle is in foreclosure. KELO-TV reported that the 140-acre property located in the Black Hill would be sold at an auction on February 25 at the Custer County Courthouse. The sect forfeited on a $1.6 million loan.
In December 2018, Seth bought 40-acres of property just off the Pike Lake Road in Cook County, Minnesota, with the hopes of building a 5,760-square-foot pole barn complete with living quarters. So far, all he has done is push in a 900-foot long road and tried to level and clear some ground with heavy equipment, but he didn’t always have permits for this work.
In early July 2019, Cook County placed a temporary cease and desist order on Jeffs, asking him to halt construction on his 40-acre Pike Lake property after they noted 13 violations to his permit.
The order came from Cook County Land Services after they conducted a site visit to the property.
Who is Seth Jeffs?
Seth is the brother of the infamous polygamist Warren Steed Jeffs, the President of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints (FLDS Church).
In 2011, Warren Jeffs was sentenced to life plus twenty years after being convicted of two felony counts of child sexual assault. He had been the leader and prophet of the church since 2001 or 2002, depending on which source is used.
Seth purchased the 40-acre parcel on Pike Lake Road as the registered agent of Emerald Industries LLC for $88,000. The LLC is registered at Seth’s Eden Prairie address and an address in Helena, Montana.
The Jeffs family has had many legal entanglements with the law.
Seth was convicted in 2006 of harboring or concealing his brother Warren and in 2016, he pled guilty to multi-million dollar food stamp fraud.
In 2017, Lyle Jeffs was sentenced to prison for his role in the same food stamp fraud case and for leaving home confinement while he was on trial.
Since December 2018, an attorney from Salt Lake City, Utah, Alan Mortensen, had been looking for Seth after Seth had defaulted on a lawsuit alleging Seth had watched and helped arrange for his brother Warren to perform ritual sexual child abuse on underage girls and had done nothing to stop the abuse. Seth was one of several people named in that complaint, as well as the FLDS Church.
As part of an FLDS religious ritual, Alan Mortenson alleged his client had been sexually abused by Warren Jeffs “regularly, between five and six times a week, from the age of 8 years old until she turned 14.”
All of the FLDS defendants in the case were alleged to have come out of an organization in the 1990s called the Priesthood Work, which originated to preserve and perpetuate the practice of sex with underage and multiple women.
To maintain the polygamous practice, the UEP Trust was established under Utah law in 1942 by Priesthood Work followers.
Tewell and Brower
Helping educate Cook County residents about the FLDS church was Tonja Tewell and author/detective Sam Brower. They were brought to Cook County by a group of concerned citizens to talk about their encounters and knowledge about the FLDS church.
Coming from a banking background before she became a stay at home mom for ten years, Tewell sort of fell into her role as the founder of the nonprofit organization Holding Out Help.
“I was at church when I was approached about helping a family who had left the FLDS church. I had a basement with a kitchenette in it, and these ladies didn’t have anywhere to go, so my husband and I decided to take them in,” Tewell said at the time.
“When they come out of the church, they come out with just the clothes on their back. They don’t own anything. The church owns everything. They don’t even have birth certificates or social security cards. They are like refugees coming to America. They came to us with nothing.”
As for Sam, he has been pursuing FLDS leaders for the last 17 years and helped gain convictions of FLDS men who were found guilty of sexually abusing children.
When asked at the time who hires him, Brower responded, “My clients are people who have escaped the church. I have had a lot of them; unfortunately, they don’t have any money,” he said with a smile.
Instead, Brower earns a living from clients who can pay, and he has worked cases that involve “Pretty much any type of crime you can think of ” that can span the entire country.
Sam did catch up with Seth Jeffs on his trip to Cook County and presented him with a warrant.
What about the FDLS Church?
The FLDS church broke away from the Mormon Church in 1898, so they could continue practicing polygamy, where older men often marry young girls. The main branch was located in Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, known as Short Creek. Under the sect’s rules, women are assigned to marry men, keep their hair in a bun, and wear prairie dresses that drape to their ankles.
When Warren Jeffs took over, he banned contact with the outside world, split families up, took young girls for his brides, and excommunicated young men from the church. He was arrested and convicted of sexually assaulting girls that were aged 12 and 14. He called them his “spiritual wives.”
When Warren was convicted, it was estimated that he had married 80 women and girls. It is not known how many wives Seth Jeffs has.
When the county was contacted and asked if Seth Jeffs had applied for building permits, Tim Nelson said that Seth hadn’t submitted any requests for permit applications, and he hadn’t been in contact with county staff for some time.
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