FLDS After Warren Jeffs: Is It Really Over? — Pt. 5
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
True Crime Today
3.3 • 907 Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2026
⏱️ 16 minutes
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Summary
The conviction was life plus twenty years. The civil judgment was $152 million. And Warren Jeffs is still issuing orders from a prison cell in East Texas. According to multiple reports, his brothers have served as conduits—using coded letters and allegedly hidden recording devices to relay instructions. A 2022 edict called former members back to the FLDS and triggered the redistribution of children among families deemed worthy or unworthy by a man who will never walk free.
The final episode of the Hidden Killers investigation into Warren Jeffs and the FLDS examines the aftermath of the conviction. The $152 million judgment that may be uncollectible. Elissa Wall’s pursuit of Jeffs’ hidden money through shell companies and remote land purchases. Seth Jeffs’ guilty plea in a $12 million food stamp fraud scheme. The faithful remnant scattered in hidden compounds. The rise and fall of Samuel Bateman—the self-declared prophet who filled the vacuum Jeffs left. And the transformation of Short Creek, where the community Jeffs controlled for decades has been released from court supervision ahead of schedule.
The FLDS is fractured. It is not dead. And the question this investigation ends on is whether the system that produced Warren Jeffs can outlive the man who built it.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Colts, Hidden Killers Investigates. Here now, Tony Bruske. In 2022, a document began |
| 0:09.2 | circling among current and former members of the FLDS, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus |
| 0:16.6 | Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was an edict. An edict. |
| 0:21.8 | Have ever delivered an edict? |
| 0:23.7 | I don't know. |
| 0:24.5 | I don't think I've ever done one either. |
| 0:25.9 | But I think most of us call, like, a memo. |
| 0:28.1 | But when you're calling your memo's edicts, I guess it's more godly and official. |
| 0:33.2 | Distributed by a son named Helen Jeffs. |
| 0:41.2 | Named after the mayonnaise, not quite. purportedly written by Warren Jeffs from his prison cell in East Texas. The message was direct. Former members were |
| 0:47.7 | to return to the FLDS. They were to bring their children. They were to pray for Warren Jeff's |
| 0:53.6 | release. Needless to say for Warren Jeff's release. |
| 0:57.2 | Needless to say, the fallout was immediate and brutal. |
| 1:01.6 | Former members reported that families were being told their children were being taken away and redistributed to other deemed more spiritually worthy. |
| 1:06.6 | People who had left the church years earlier were being summoned back. |
| 1:10.9 | Some who returned were welcomed. |
| 1:13.0 | Others were gathered with other families and then sent away again within a week. |
| 1:19.5 | One former member told a reporter that she had relatives whose children were removed from their custody within weeks of the edict going out. |
| 1:28.8 | The nonprofit cherished families began receiving calls from people impacted by the directive requesting emergency housing, food, and supplies. |
| 1:37.1 | Warren Jeff's is serving life in prison plus 20 years for assaying two children. |
| 1:43.3 | That's the only charges. But there's obviously, yeah, |
| 1:46.7 | a lot more. He has been behind bars since 2006. He was convicted in 2011. And from a |
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