Sunday, November 02, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

IN DEPTH: THE DYS-ORDER

Despite polygamous family's many financial holdings, some sister wives live like impoverished single mothers

Lu Ann Kingston, a former wife of a Utah polygamist, sits Monday in downtown Salt Lake City. "When I was getting ready to get married, I felt like my life was coming to an end. It pretty much did," she said. STEVE C. WILSON/SPECIAL TO THE REVIEW-JOURNAL Jeremy Kingston, a member of the Kingston polygamous clan, sits in the gallery before appearing in court on an incest charge Aug. 5 in Salt Lake City. Kingston was 24 when he married a 15-year-old cousin, Lu Ann Kingston, in 1995, authorities say. Photo by Associated Press C.E. Kingston The Order founder At his Salt Lake City office Tuesday, Ron Barton, criminal investigator for the Utah attorney general's office, points to a photo of his great-grandfather Peter Barton who was jailed for polygamy in 1889. STEVE C. WILSON/SPECIAL TO THE REVIEW-JOURNAL Standard Restaurant and Mountain Coin at Russell Road and Valley View Boulevard is owned by the polygamous Kingston family. Photo by Ralph Fountain. John Daniel Kingston listens to his attorney Ron Yengich before pleading no contest to third-degree felony reckless child abuse April 21, 1999, in Logan, Utah. Kingston entered the surprise plea to the reduced charge of having belt-whipped his daughter for fleeing an arranged polygamous marriage to her uncle. Photo by Associated Press David Ortell Kingston looks past his lawyer, left, to talk to his niece, the victim, before his sentencing on July 9, 1999. Judge David S. Young, declaring that polygamy was an undeniable factor in the case, sentenced Kingston to up to 10 years in prison for having sex with his teenage niece. Photo by Associated Press Jeremy Kingston, a member of the Kingston polygamous clan, and his family attorney, Carl Kingston, right, stand before a judge on an incest charge Aug. 5 in Salt Lake City. Jeremy Kingston was 24 when he married a 15-year-old cousin, Lu Ann Kingston, in 1995, authorities say. Photo by Associated Press THE WIVES OF PAUL KINGSTON The family patriarch has at least 25 wives and 145 children, according to the Utah attorney general's office. One of his marriages is legal. The rest are "spiritual" and not sanctioned by any government. Listed below are Kingston's wives and the number of children he has with each.

She knew it might come eventually, but Lu Ann Kingston had other plans. The 15-year-old dreamed of dating boys, hanging out at the mall, graduating from high school. Marriage to a blood relative in his mid-20s was not one of her dreams. But she had no choice.

Lu Ann was forced to marry in a secret ceremony, becoming the fourth wife of her first cousin. Their mothers are sisters.

They are members of the Kingston Group, a Salt Lake City-based family that practices its own fundamentalist brand of Mormonism that views multiple marriage as a guarantee of eternal life in heaven.

The Kingstons claim 800 to 1,200 members who operate more than 100 privately held businesses throughout the Western United States. The Southern Nevada headquarters of their Mountain Coin Machine Distributors, Able Amusement and Standard Restaurant Supply operate from offices at Valley View Boulevard and Russell Road.

The three businesses have helped underwrite the family's lifestyle through the sale and leasing of products over the past decade to a mix of government agencies, businesses and homes in Nevada. The Kingstons also own houses and undeveloped land in Henderson and Spring Valley and an Indian Springs mobile home park.

Their financial holdings are valued at more than $100 million nationwide, but their young wives rarely see evidence of the money, often living like impoverished single mothers in rundown Salt Lake City housing owned by the family.

"They like to say it's a religion, but it's more about money, power and sex," said Lu Ann, now 24, who left her husband three years ago after five years of marriage.

Kingston wives are expected to give birth to a child each year, starting when they are in their teens. A Kingston male may claim just one wife or more than 20, although the practice is forbidden by federal and state laws. A Kingston woman can have just one husband.

Paul Kingston, the family's 44-year-old patriarch, has at least 25 wives and 145 children, according to the Utah attorney general's office. One of his marriages is legal. The rest are "spiritual" and not sanctioned by any government.

"My perception is they have the elite run the businesses and give them a chance for an education, but most of the Kingston women, the breeders, live in poverty," said Ron Barton, an investigator for the Utah attorney general. "Most of the men aren't supporting their wives or children."

Paul Kingston and his cousin Carl, the family's attorney, did not return phone messages seeking comment.

The Church of Jesus of Latter-day Saints officially renounced polygamy in 1890 in return for Utah's admission as a state, following decades of persecution by anti-polygamist federal officials. The practice was forced underground but continued to thrive in small communities and tiny family enclaves before receiving a Depression-era boost.

The Kingston Group, also known as The Order, was formed in 1935, pushing the communalist ethic of Brigham Young, who emphasized economic cooperation and self-sufficiency as church members settled the harsh Salt Lake Valley.

"What the Kingstons have done is what always happens. When we outlaw a group, we send them into the fringes," said Ed Firmage, a University of Utah law school professor who has written extensively about Mormonism and plural marriage. "Within 100 miles of where I stand now you can find 100,000 polygamists in any direction."

The Mormon church disavows any relationship with polygamists, ex-communica- ting many practitioners of plural or spiritual marriage.

Church spokesman Dale Bills wouldn't discuss the Kingstons or the issue of polygamy but instead supplied a three-page explanation of the church's attitude toward plural marriage.

"Today, polygamy is outlawed in the church -- and has been for a century," the statement read. "Any church members adopting the practice today would be excommunicated -- the most severe penalty the church can impose."

GOING FROM

MONO TO STEREO

The Kingstons are far from a secret. Salt Lake City newspapers periodically write about the family and their troubles with law enforcement officials.

Photos of Paul Kingston and The Order's late-founder, C.E. Kingston, regularly appear with the news stories. In fact, Utah's homegrown version of polygamy has received much regional and national media attention in recent years.

Salt Lake City teenager Elizabeth Smart is the focus of an upcoming TV movie, eight months after her rescue from a homeless couple that practiced their own version of polygamy. A recently released book by award-winning author Jon Krakauer focuses on the polygamous community of Colorado City-Hildale, along the Utah-Arizona border, where teenage girls are forced to quit school to marry older men. Neither Smart's kidnappers nor Colorado City-Hildale residents are members of The Order.

Last summer, Lu Ann's 22-year-old cousin Mary Ann Kingston filed a highly publicized civil suit in a Salt Lake City court seeking $110 million from the Kingstons. She was lashed 28 times on the back by her father after fleeing her uncle, whom she was forced to marry six years ago, becoming his 15th wife, according to court documents. The men, John Daniel Kingston and David Ortell Kingston, were convicted of abuse and forced to serve jail time.

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff has vowed to end the physical and sexual abuse tied to polygamy.

"We are not going after polygamy. We are going after crimes being committed in polygamous societies," said Shurtleff, who has polygamous ancestors.

Lu Ann's ex-husband, Jeremy, pled guilty Thursday to incest for his relationship with the then-teenage girl. He was 24 at the time. According to the terms of a plea bargain, the third-degree felony will be reduced to a misdemeanor if Jeremy Kingston successfully completes probation. Prosecutors have agreed to not seek a prison sentence of more than a year. Sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 5.

Shurtleff's office aggressively pursued the case after the freshman attorney general learned of the physical, social and sexual abuse of teenage wives through meetings with social activists and former child brides, including Lu Ann Kingston, whom he characterizes as highly credible.

"It just bothers me. I don't know why there haven't been efforts in the past. I'm not going to sit back knowing these crimes and abuses have been committed," Shurtleff said.

He has assigned Barton to serve as a full-time investigator on the issue. Like his boss, Barton is not offended by the concept of plural marriage. The 53-year-old father of six is the great-grandson of Bishop Peter Barton, a Kaysville, Utah, church leader who served time for the practice during the late 1880s.

A framed black-and-white photo of the elder Barton hangs on a wall by the investigator's desk. The old man is standing on the steps of the Sugar House Prison in Salt Lake City, surrounded by seven other convicted polygamists who are posed in a triangular formation. All are wearing their prison stripes.

The younger Barton didn't learn of his great-granddad's conviction until recently when a cousin phoned to tell him. Although he chuckles at the irony, Barton sees a great deal more subtlety to the issue.

"I don't have a problem with consenting adults who are not terrorizing someone else," he said. "I don't know that we ought to go after people in consensual relationships."

He sees two classes of polygamous men: those who marry adult women in consensual relationships or those who are little more than sexual predators.

"I think they're driven by sex, power, control," Barton said of the latter.

The challenge for Barton and others is to develop an evidence trail, including the DNA ties that link adult men to their underage wives and young children, at a time when financially stressed governments are struggling to provide the most basic services.

Polygamist wives say their chosen lifestyle provides a sense of spiritual fulfillment that is lacking in monogamous marriages. They speak reverently of large families and close, nonsexual relationships with multiple sister wives.

"For me, it's like going from mono to stereo. There's a depth there," said Mary Batchelor, a non-Kingston who has co-authored a pro-polygamy book.

In 1989, she married a man who had one wife. Batchelor was seeking a communal atmosphere, where husband, wives and children worked to create wholesome families.

"You hope the women will love each other, and you'll find a balance between the relationship of the husband and wives and the communal relationship of the whole family," she said. "You are closer than sisters because you both share a husband."

Her plural marriage dissolved three years later when the first wife left, feeling jealous and unfulfilled. Today, the 34-year-old Batchelor remains married to her husband, with whom she has six children.

She doesn't want his name to appear in print, fearing that his employers might fire him if they were to learn of his lifestyle. "He can't afford to lose his job. He's supporting 11 children."

The Batchelors are seeking another woman, an adult, to fill out their family. Batchelor said she is appalled by the allegations of pedophilia and child abuse that have been leveled against the Kingstons and some Colorado City residents.

"I was outraged. It was astonishing," she said. "I find incest distasteful."

Yet, she is convinced that laws forbidding polygamy have fostered the sort of paranoid atmosphere that dominates the Kingstons' world, creating an environment where underage marriage, incest and pedophilia persist.

Instead, she believes the practice should be legal, allowing polygamists to live openly. After all, she argues, adultery is no longer taboo in mainstream society, neither is gay marriage. Why not polygamy?

THE LAW OF ONE

ABOVE ANOTHER

Three houses line the front of a 5-acre plot in Bountiful, Utah, about 10 miles north of Salt Lake City. Family lawyer Carl Kingston lives here, the setting where The Order was founded in 1935.

To family members, it's the Home Place or Holy Spot. Thick trees and overgrown shrubs block the view from the street, but at the middle of the lush acreage sits a spacious stretch of grass where the Kingstons and their offspring pray for guidance.

They come when somebody is sick, when somebody is dying, when law enforcement officials are clamping down on their lifestyle. It's a large enough piece of land for hundreds of family members to gather at once.

Twice a year, on Labor Day and Utah's Pioneer Day of July 24, members of The Order come together for daylong celebrations with food, dance and prayer. Two sets of steel bleachers look toward a stage next to Carl Kingston's house, where talent shows are held. Eight-year-old family members are baptized in a nearby pool.

A public grade school sits across the street. Comfortable suburban homes circa 1960 fill the area.

"People come from all over to celebrate," Lu Ann said, sitting along the curb in front of Carl Kingston's house.

They travel from The Order's lucrative northern Utah coal mine and a trash-hauling business that serves the Utah state capitol. They own three ranches, including the old Jimmy Stewart spread in Northern Nevada.

The lives of family members have a sameness that is foreign to so much of mainstream society, yet somehow resonates throughout The Order. They shop in the Salt Lake City area at a Kingston-owned hardware store, purchase TVs and radios from a family-owned pawn shop and buy clothing from the Kingston's western-wear store.

Birth defects, including dwarfism and hemophilia, are not unusual in a family where cousins marry. But the Kingstons reject the aid of doctors. Instead, Paul Kingston and other Kingston males supervise the delivery of babies, often in the expectant mother's home.

"The idea was if you inbreed you will get perfect, purebred children, children that aren't poisoned by any other blood," Lu Ann Kingston said. "They're considered to be extra smart. They said any perfect child would be worth all the birth defects we get from this."

Painkillers are forbidden during deliveries. Stillborn children are routinely buried in back yards, their mothers often denying they were ever pregnant, Lu Ann said. Intensive prayer and 40-day fasts are used to rid the body of illness.

Birth certificates list the name of the mother but rarely the father. Prosecutors and police are to be avoided at all costs, especially those attempting to enforce Utah laws forbidding men from marrying minors who are at least 10 years younger.

"When I first told people this was going on it sounded like a lie," Lu Ann recalled.

Lu Ann did not know her father's identity until she was 7 years old. In fact, she didn't know she had a dad. Many of her cousins thought the same way. They never heard their mothers speak of their fathers. To do so risked trouble with law enforcement. The youngsters knew men periodically visited their moms, ate dinner and stayed late, but the Kingston children thought the men were friendly uncles or church leaders who dropped by to check on the families.

Paul Kingston presided over Lu Ann's wedding in 1995 to Jeremy Kingston. The illegal weddings are not binding in the eyes of Utah courts.

There was little recitation of scripture, little time for prayer. Instead, the patriarch and others talked of the teenage girl's marital duties. Dozens of family members, especially women, stood by the couple. The 5-foot-5 bride with brown hair and hazel eyes was not excited.

"You can choose to be happy or not happy in this relationship," the patriarch told Lu Ann. "If you want to have a happy marriage, it's your responsibility to make sure you're happy."

The sentiment fit neatly with the Kingstons' doctrine of marital bliss. Dubbed, The Law of One Above Another, it requires a wife to obey her husband, no matter what.

"It's all on the wives because the guys are not required to make any effort in any of these marriages," Lu Ann said, as she recently rode in a car traveling through a rundown Salt Lake City neighborhood that is home to several Kingston wives. "If you go to somebody to complain about the guy, you're in the wrong because he is over you."

The modest homes are about a mile from Temple Square and in need of paint jobs. Dented family vans sat in driveways. A homeless man leaned against a corner building, swilling something from a brown paper bag. Litter blew down the street.

When Lu Ann was 16 she lived alone in a similarly rundown Salt Lake City apartment. She was a good student, not a great one, but was forced to drop out of school after graduating junior high school. Kingston women aren't expected to attend school beyond the eighth grade.

The teenager worked 12-hour days, five days a week, for the family's answering service and later as a bookkeeper for their property management company. She was making $6.50 an hour. Half her wages were deposited in a Kingston account, where she earned credits that could be spent at the family's stores.

The group limited her weekly spending to no more than $65 on groceries and utilities. They paid her other expenses, including rent and day care, which was provided by another Kingston wife.

"Even though I was working, I still wasn't allowed to spend," Lu Ann said.

She dressed modestly, wearing blue jeans and T-shirts, but with little money Lu Ann had no inclination to buy nicer clothes.

"I went through a stage where I wasn't happy," she said. "My situation wasn't going to change any time soon, and I thought, 'What's the point?'

"When I was getting ready to get married, I felt like my life was coming to an end. It pretty much did."

WORKING FOR

THE COMPANY

Salt Lake-based Standard Restaurant and Mountain Coin operate in seven Western states. Items for sale at Standard's Las Vegas facility range from napkins and cups to broilers and pizza ovens. Brochures tout a variety of brand name offerings.

The Clark County School District has spent $35,000 with the company since 1995 for a variety of equipment, with the largest single purchase, $15,000, going to buy three freezers for school cafeterias.

School district spokeswoman Pat Nelson said school officials were unaware of the company's polygamous ties until she was contacted by the Review-Journal.

"Standard Restaurant, who even knew?" Nelson asked, noting that the district does not conduct background checks before buying such items. Besides, she added, "These are really small purchases."

Standard's Las Vegas boss declined to be interviewed for this story.

Next door sits the offices of Mountain Coin, the nation's 25th largest supplier of video arcade games with gross 2002 sales of $37 million, according to an industry trade publication.

Mountain Coin and its sister company, Able Amusement, tout business relationships with Sam's Town, the Stardust, Green Valley Ranch, Sunset Station, Luxor, Excalibur and Circus Circus. The trail is often murky between the suppliers and the businesses that use their games, with third parties often selling or operating Mountain Coin products unknowingly in casino arcades.

Rob Stillwell, a vice president for Sam's Town and Stardust operator Boyd Gaming, said company officials were unaware of the polygamous background of Mountain Coin and Standard Restaurant, but they intend to look into their business dealings with the Kingstons' operations.

"If that's the case we won't do business with them anymore," Stillwell said. "We have too much at stake."

There's a small family presence at the Kingston's Southern Nevada operations. A leading family member, Elden Kingston, runs the businesses, but the vast majority of the staff positions are held by nonfamily members who know little of the Kingstons' lifestyle. Elden Kingston failed to return a phone message seeking comment.

Mountain Coin's Las Vegas office employs nine people, including sales people, secretaries and a delivery man. The showroom in their Las Vegas office displays a mix of video arcade games, pinball machines, coin changers and vending machines. Their newest games have such trendy names as Nintendo's F-Zero AX, Sega's OutRun 2, and Stern Pinball's Monopoly.

Profit margins are solid if not spectacular, ranging from 8 percent to 12 percent, said Mountain Coin Division Manager Dave Palmer, who described the Kingstons as good bosses who treat their customers and workers fairly.

"They're a good company to work for. They let you do your work," he said. "They don't gouge their prices. Their philosophy is if somebody buys products from them it will be taken care of and supported. We're like any business out there. We sell a product and service what we sell."

Competitors have used past stories about the family in Salt Lake City newspapers to slice into Mountain Coin's customer base. One of those stories was shown to MGM Mirage bosses, who later dropped Mountain Coin as a supplier, Palmer said.

Through the years, Lu Ann Kingston has watched young girls drop quarters in Mountain Coin arcade games. She has watched suburban families with young daughters buy napkins and trash cans and freezers at Standard Restaurant's Salt Lake City offices. Lu Ann shakes her head at the thought.

"It makes me want to go up to them and ask, `Do you realize what you're supporting? You're supporting a polygamous group that's all about money and power, and you're supporting all of this abuse that's happening to these women and children.' "

Lu Ann vividly recalls the day when she left Jeremy. It was the first Friday of May 2000. She had arranged to take her two young children and stay with a cousin who also had left The Order.

"I was hoping to move out when everybody was in church," she said.

She had grown tired of the spiritual and mental abuse, of living in seedy housing, of being forced to have sex with a first cousin, a man she did not love. Months earlier, she had begun working for Jeremy in another Kingston business. That was it.

"He always treated me like garbage," she remembered, "but I only had to deal with it once a week when he visited. Now I had to deal with it every day."

Family members learned of her plan and tried to block her move, but Lu Ann called the police, who helped her leave. She moved in with her cousin, finding a job that earned $150 a week selling photo portraits. She wanted to complete her education and took night courses, eventually earning a high school diploma.

Lu Ann remarried a year ago. Her new husband is a man from outside of The Order who knows some but not all of her Kingston past. He has not visited the Holy Spot, has not met the men who run the family.

"If he did, he'd probably want to hit them," Lu Ann said.

She is seven-months pregnant with her third child, a boy. Her 4- and 5-year-old daughters by Jeremy are healthy, apparently lacking any of the birth defects that plague other Kingston children.

"Thank God," Lu Ann said.

Her ex-husband occasionally pays monthly child support of $147, but the kids have no contact with him, although Jeremy is seeking visitation rights through mediation. The last time the kids saw their biological father was days before she left the marriage. Lu Ann wants to maintain that distance.

"They don't know who he is, and he's never been a part of their lives," Lu Ann said. "From what I've told my oldest, he wasn't very nice to us and we had to leave so we could be safe. I didn't lie to them."