Former Leaders of Polygamous Sect Due in Cook County Court Next Week

GRAND MARAIS – A man who was once on the FBI’s “10 Most Wanted List” at the same time as Osama Bin Laden has a court appear­ance scheduled for next week in Cook County.

Warren Jeffs, the imprisoned leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-Day Saints, is on the court docket for a “mo­tion hearing” Monday, March 31 at the Cook County Courthouse.

“The fact this man is on your court calendar there in the North Woods is significant,” said Sam Brower, a private investigator who has continually pursued legal battles against the FLDS and Warren Jeffs.

Also on the court calendar Monday is Seth Jeffs, who has become something of a house­hold name in Cook County after he purchased property on Pike Lake Road, about 8 miles west of Grand Marais, in 2018.

The most recent legal wranglings attached to the Jeffs brothers involve money transfers and the sale of the Pike Lake Road property in 2023. The civil case they, or at least their legal team, will appear for next week involves the transfer of money between the Jeffs brothers and mon­ey owed to a woman listed on court documents as “MJ, aka Elissa Wall.” During the past two years, the case has involved an ex parte order, freezing funds in Seth Jeffs bank account, and a collection of back-and-forth legal discord in Cook County between Wall, the Jeffs brothers, and their attorneys.

According to testimony she’s previously giv­en in court and her highly publicized story, Wall was only 14 when Warren Jeffs and others in the FLDS church forced her to marry her 19-year-old first cousin. Warren Jeffs officiated the wed­ding. Wall’s testimony about the 2001 marriage helped convict Jeffs in Utah of being an accom­plice to rape, Brower said in a conversation with this reporter March 24, though the verdict was overturned on a technicality. Warren Jeffs was later convicted in Texas for assaulting his child brides and is serving a life term there, Brower pointed out.

In 2017, Wall won a $16 million lawsuit against Warren Jeffs and the FLDS church. Wall’s legal team, including Utah-based attor­ney Alan Mortensen, maintain that the decision lets attorneys investigate the secretive group’s bank accounts and property held in states all over the country. That’s why the current case against Seth and Warren Jeffs in Cook County is significant, Brower said. If they can convict the Jeffs brothers on civil charges related to the case, it could help dismantle whatever frag­ments remain of the FLDS church, at least those directly connected to Warren Jeffs.

At issue is how Seth Jeffs bought the Pike Lake Road property in 2018 for $88,000 and what will happen with the $130,000 he sold it for in 2023. Wall and her legal team, which includes attorneys from Grand Marais based Smith Law, maintain some or all of the money belongs to her as she is still owed funds from the 2017 settlement. “It would be inequitable and unjust for Warren Jeffs to be allowed to frustrate (Wall’s) collection efforts by his use of a fraudulent transfer,” Attorney Tyson Smith wrote in a July 2023 statement of case to the court. According to court documents, Warren Jeffs still owes Wall significant sums of money and the settlement “remains unsatisfied.”

“They’re like the mafia,” Brower told this re­porter March 24 of the FLDS and Jeffs family. “The way they move money around is just like the mafia. And they don’t stop. When they get caught doing it one way, they just get more pol­ished at it or find another way to do it.”

What’s scheduled for March 31 in Cook Coun­ty courtroom is a basic legal proceeding known as a “motion hearing.” In civil cases in Minne­sota, during motion hearings, parties’ attorneys submit documents to the court before the hear­ing explaining what their side wants and why it should be granted, according to documents reviewed by this reporter. Except in special cir­cumstances, witnesses do not typically testify in these hearings. Regardless, the court documents in Cook County list a jury trial for this case that will start in late June.

Brower said that even though the property on Pike Lake Road sold for $130,000, keeping the pressure on the FLDS church to pay money they owe in settlements is the bigger issue rather than specific dollar amounts. At the same time, Brower said it’s important victims like Wall get what the courts determine is owed to them. Seth Jeffs and his attorneys, meanwhile, argue that he earned the money in question, providing the court with invoices for work he performed in Cook County while he was living here.

Seth Jeffs purchased the 40-acre property in Cook County in August 2018 along Pike Lake Road. The property at 932 Pike Lake Road was purchased by Jeffs under the business name Emerald Industries, LLC. A land use permit was approved in December 2018 for the rugged and then undeveloped property. The permit includ­ed a driveway approximately 900 ft. in length and an approximately 6,000 sq. ft. building to be put on the property, according to dated coun­ty records. The permits to build have long since expired.

After facing community backlash for being present in Cook County, Jeffs more or less van­ished into obscurity before he ever established a place to reside for himself or members of the FLDS. The property on Pike Lake Road was listed for sale in 2023 and sold that August to Ryan and Jennifer King, who list a mailing ad­dress in Circle Pines, Minn.

Seth Jeffs whereabouts are unclear in the past year, though there was a report from a Wiscon­sin TV station in 2023 that indicated he was at­tempting to build a “compound” in Dunn Coun­ty, similar to the vision he potentially had for the Pike Lake Road property before Brower and media exposed his intentions and whereabouts. Current court documents list an address for him in Menomonie, Wisc.

Brower visited Cook County in 2019 to serve Seth Jeffs court papers for being a “deadbeat dad” and to raise awareness about a possible compound being built by the extremist branch of the Mormon church. Brower is well known for his best-selling book and the subsequent documentary, Prophet’s Prey, about Warren Jeffs and the FLDS church. He also participated in the 2022 Netflix documentary, “Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey,” which is also about the FLDS church, child brides, and Warren Jeffs.

Warren Jeffs’ involvement in facilitating mar­riages between underage girls and adult men led to him being placed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list in May 2006, Brower explained. The FLDS is a radical offshoot of mainstream Mormonism whose members believe polyg­amy brings exaltation in heaven, according to Brower’s book. When polygamy was outlawed by the Mormon Church in 1890, splinter groups formed, including the FLDS, Brower writes. As was shared in the documentaries, the FLDS was able to flourish in the small community of Short Creek, located in a remote part of the country along the border of Utah and Arizona near Zion National Park. After he took over as the prophet of the faith, Warren Jeffs established a series of rules for how people could dress, relate to the modern world, and, more or less, live. Further­more, women were told to “keep sweet,” and most importantly, to obey Warren Jeffs — the supposedly all-knowing prophet, Brower said.

In a 2024 interview with ABC News, Briell Decker, Warren Jeffs’ 65th wife, said that to “’keep sweet’ meant you could have no emo­tions except for sweetness. That was the only emotion allowed.”