'Cult' US town run by polygamist leader where everyone asks 'what are you hiding?'

Colorado City, Arizona, was ruled for years by the sickening polygamist cult-leader Warren Jeffs who has reportedly had as many as 78 wives – many of them underage

Daily Star, UK/May 22, 2024

ByTom McGhie

A creepy town in Arizona used to be home to the polygamist cult-leader Warren Jeffs and was dubbed online as “somewhere you don’t stop for gas”.

Colorado City, Arizona, makes up part of a fundamentalist Mormon community that straddles the Arizona-Utah border, known as Short Creek. The area was first settled in during the 1930s and was ruled for years by Warren Jeffs, a leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, also known as FLDS.

Fathers who gave their young daughters to Jeffs were rewarded with young brides of their own. Girls who proved reluctant to have sex with Jeffs were sent away.

Now some people have taken to Reddit to confirm just what a weird place Colorado City was. Many mention road trips where they stopped for petrol and were met by locals who “stopped what they were doing and watched our every move".

They added: “Nobody would speak to us even after we said hello. Strange. We always thought, what are they hiding?”

Someone else issued a warning to fellow drivers. “Never stop in Colorado city,” they wrote. “Their society is rife with abuse and paedophilia, I would always feel so bad for the women in their pioneer style dresses and giant dresses and giant 80s braids.”

Another gave a chilling account of what happened when they found themselves there as a “hippy student”.

“When I was in college a few friends and I were on a road trip and we rolled through Colorado City. We had no idea about the town, the cult, polygamists, fundamentalists etc. So there we are, a bunch of college hippies in a van,” they wrote.

“We stopped somewhere to eat and a man came out and said ‘you are not welcome here…they don’t take kindly to strangers here’. The guy got in a pickup and followed us out of the town. We were scared because we thought we were about to be the victims of some homicidal cult."

Although it has a grim past and many of its devout Mormon residents still remain, it looks as though there might be some reason for hope in Colorado City. In 2018 NBC reported “change is coming to this tiny community,” following the reintroduction of alcohol – something that was once banned.

“A lot of things are changing and we just kind of hoped people would be open to the idea,” said Maria Jessop, who owned the first bar to open in Colorado City.

However, though some may consider this progress, many of the town’s Mormon residents saw it as a threat to their very way of life.

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