![]() One of Blackmore’s wives, Zelpha Chatwin, said it would be wrong to blame her community’s polygamous lifestyle on the allegations that young brides were taken across the U.S. Minivans drove in and out of the community, with women in the driver’s seats wearing traditional dresses. Over the weekend, the community sat frozen with the smell of wood-burning fireplaces hanging in the frigid air, with fenced off horses eating hay.Ĭhildren were playing outside despite temperatures that dropped to -20, but they ran when they caught sight of a journalist touring Bountiful. “You could make the same argument that monogamy is harmful to women and children, because of the statistics out there in relation to monogamous marriages.”īountiful is a small rural commune south of Creston, sitting in a valley carved out of the surrounding mountains by the Kootenay River. “I think that’s not true, it’s just not,” he said. Those charges were thrown out in court after a judge ruled the attorney general of the day, Wally Oppal, was wrong to appoint a new special prosecutor after previous prosecutors had decided against laying charges.īlackmore, who has been fiercely critical of Oppal, said the case cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars.Įxperts and former residents have told the court that polygamy is always harmful to women and children, inevitably leading to physical and sexual abuse, child brides, teen pregnancies and human trafficking between polygamous communities.īlackmore categorically rejected those claims. The Mounties have targeted the community several times in the past, most recently when Blackmore and Oler were each charged with practising polygamy in 2009. The province’s attorney general forwarded details of the allegations to the RCMP, which announced last week it had launched a new criminal investigation. Oler was present for some of those so-called celestial marriages, the documents say, and he “personally delivered” some of the girls to be wed. Jeffs, who was in his late 40s and early 50s when the marriages occurred, is currently in a Texas jail awaiting trial on charges of sexual assault and bigamy.įive other girls from Bountiful, between the ages of 16 and 18, were married to other American men. ![]() The court documents allege three girls - two 12-year-olds and a 13-year-old - were taken to the United States by their parents and married to jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs. Oler’s faction is officially linked to the FLDS, while Blackmore’s congregation split from that church nearly a decade ago. Records produced in court stem from the sensational 2008 raid on the Yearning for Zion ranch, a polygamous compound run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints - also known as the FLDS - near Eldorado, Texas.īountiful has about 1,000 residents who follow the same branch of fundamentalist Mormonism. The alleged marriages took place between 20 and involved a total of nine girls - eight from Bountiful, who were married to American men, and a 16-year-old girl from the U.S., who was married to man from Bountiful and subsequently moved there. If that is a fact, I’m really disturbed about that myself.” ![]() “If they’re investigating the story we read about, I think they should look into it and see what’s happening there. “I heard about it from the media, I had not heard about it,” Blackmore told The Canadian Press during a weekend interview, sitting inside a newly constructed building that contains a community centre and a prayer space. ![]() His side of the community has very little contact with Oler’s, which is thought to be more traditional and strict. They appear to involve girls from the other side of the divided commune, led by James Oler.īlackmore says he has only heard details of the alleged marriages - and the latest criminal investigation to target the community - from news reports. The shocking allegations of cross-border marriages involving girls as young as 12 surfaced at court hearings into Canada’s polygamy laws and have prompted a renewed criminal investigation by the RCMP. Residents practise a form of fundamentalist Mormonism, which, unlike the mainstream church, still condones polygamy. Winston Blackmore leads one of two divided factions within Bountiful, an isolated community in southeastern B.C.’s Creston Valley, not far from the U.S. Allegations that eight underage girls from the small polygamous commune of Bountiful, B.C., were married off to American men are disturbing and should be investigated, says one of the community’s leaders, who himself is believed to have as many as two dozen wives. ![]()
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