Some of the subject matter in this podcast is difficult, including sexual abuse of adults and children.

While the more graphic details will be left out, the specifics can be triggering.

Please take care when listening.

Those yards were such perfection that it's hard to even describe.

I mean, it's just so perfect and spotless and trying to

think about the horror that happened inside there, inside those homes with such a pretty facade.

It just didn't make sense. Such ugliness covered by such a beauty.

It was a still summer night on August 2nd, 1991, and Detective Mike King was lying in his bed,

staring wide-eyed at the dark shadows the moonlight cast on his bedroom ceiling,

while his alarm clock ticked faintly and relentlessly through the night.

Past midnight.

Past 1 a.m.

He glanced over at his wife soundly sleeping, wishing he could do the same.

It had only been 24 days since Aaron Anderson walked into the Ogden Municipal Building and first told him of the abuse occurring behind the closed doors of the Zion Society cult.

24 days of working in virtual secrecy for 16, 18 hours a day alongside his two partners,

Detective Dave Lucas and county attorney Reed Richards,

building a case that would stand up in a court of law so that when they could finally go in

and rescue those children, they would stay rescued, never to return to their tormentors.

And now, in only a few hours, Mike King, along with a SWAT team, a cadre of social workers,

and two-thirds of Ogden's entire police department, would descend on nearly a dozen Zion Society homes,

just as the sun's first light began to crest over the peaks of the looming Wasatch Mountains.

A surprise raid at dawn.

...