If $37.5 million for Neal Wanless’s 41,822-acre ranch up in Meade County is too rich for your blood, how about 140 well-developed acres in the southern Black Hills for $6.9 million? 11584 Farmer Road, about 30 minutes southwest of Pringle, has everything: six log structures with 77 bedrooms and 74 baths, a meeting hall with fifteen offices and ten restrooms, a 14,300-square foot storehouse, a 17,500-square-foot equipment shed, greenhouse, three generators, two wellhouses, shop, rock quarry, watchtower—and a history of weird Mormon sex and oppression!
The compound had been occupied by members of the secretive polygamous sect of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, a fringe offshoot of the Mormon religion.
…Rep. Timothy Goodwin (R-Rapid City) is a South Dakota legislator who became deeply involved in efforts to enforce state law within the compound. In 2019, he sponsored a bill that would make it a misdemeanor offense to not report births and deaths to the state.
…“It was the headquarters for Warren Jeffs, who’s in jail in a penitentiary in Texas for all kinds of sex crimes,” said Goodwin. Jeffs, the leader of the FLDS, is serving life in prison for child sexual assault.
“I used to get letters from Warren Jeffs,” Goodwin recounted, “from the penitentiary in Texas. You didn’t even want to read them because it was signed by ‘Jesus Christ.’ He was telling me that he was a prophet of God — it was so much blasphemy that you thought you were going to go to hell just reading it.”
…Goodwin contends that Roy Jeffs told him that babies born with irregularities, such as Down’s Syndrome, were killed. “He had no reason to lie to me — I’d say what happened if there was a deformed baby — Down’s Syndrome or whatever? He just said they just killed them at birth.”
Without birth and death records, these allegations cannot be confirmed, and no remains have been found. Goodwin says he was told the bodies were burned.
Child sex trafficking and sexual abuse are among the other allegations levied at the members of the compound by Goodwin [Jacob Newton, “Grim Past Surrounds For-Sale S.D. Compound,” KELO-TV, updated 2022.05.13].
Three former members of this Mormon fringe group bought the property at the sheriff’s foreclosure sale last year for $750,000. They didn’t actually spend any money to but the compound; they counted the purchase price as part of what the FLDS owes them from a federal lawsuit they won after cult leaders harassed and illegally arrested them in FLDS strongholds in Utah and Arizona. A judge ordered the cult to sell the Pringle compound as part of the judgment.
But hey, Representative Goodwin! Let’s quit talking about dead babies! Talk like that will only drive the sale price down, and we want to see this nice property in your District go for as high a big as possible and promote economic development! Let’s market it as a new headquarters and lodging for all those uranium miners!
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