KEY POINTS:
From a cell in the Purgatory jail 10 months after his arrest, fundamentalist Mormon leader Warren Jeffs is still God's voice on Earth to thousands of polygamists in this isolated community.
"Warren Jeffs isn't gone. He doesn't have to be there to rule the place," said Enos Steed, a 21-year-old former member of Jeff's Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a polygamist sect that broke from the mainstream Mormon church 72 years ago.
To about 10,000 followers in the twin border communities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, Jeffs remains a spiritual leader who channels divine revelations and a feared prophet, even 40km away in Purgatory, a jail in the Utah city of Hurricane where he awaits trial.
"As long as he is alive he will be the prophet, unless he stands up before them and renounces the religion, denounces what he's been doing for the past decade. That's the only way, besides dying, he will not be the prophet," said Steed.
Steed is one of hundreds of so-called "lost boys", males who are exiled from the sect partly to reduce competition for young brides.
Jeffs, 51, was declared on May 28 mentally fit to stand trial in September, charged as an accomplice to rape for using his authority to order a 14-year-old girl against her wishes to marry and have sex with her 19-year-old cousin.
The mainstream Mormon Church, based in Salt Lake City, introduced polygamy before the Civil War but banned it in 1890 and now excommunicates any member who practices plural marriage. Jeffs' church, the nation's largest polygamist group, consider themselves Mormon purists.
But despite Jeffs' lingering power, there's an air of change in the sandstone desert plateau where locals still wear 19th-century clothes even in stifling heat and are taught to shun outsiders, avoid newspapers, television and the internet, and obey only the prophet, not the state.
Some authority is shifting to two of Jeffs' top deputies - Wendell Nielsen and William Timpson Jessop - whose pictures are appearing in the homes of members next to those of Jeffs, according to Gary Engels, assigned by the Mohave County attorney to investigate Colorado City.
He said members were becoming more friendly towards outsiders and that illegal marriages of underage brides - rampant under Jeffs - seem to have slowed or stopped.
The Deseret Morning News, owned by the Mormon church, reported in April that Jeffs apparently told a judge he abdicated his role as prophet in jail.
Local authorities say the news, if true, has not reached his loyal followers.
Former members say Jeffs, who through his influence over the trust holding the sect's US$114 million of assets, commanded loyalty by keeping members at constant risk of losing their homes.
"Warren was rewarding loyalty and punishing disloyalty and that's what gave him the real power," said former sect member Richard Holm, who lost his family in 2003 when Jeffs assigned his two wives and nine children to another man.
"The men that were fiercely loyal to him were generally motivated by desire for another wife," said Holm, 55, who has since renounced polygamy and organised religion.
"To them, I am the worst kind of apostate.
"But I think you can get to heaven through monogamy."
Holm, a former town official, said if Jeffs has surrendered as prophet, his deputies may resist passing that on to thousands of followers who contribute at least 10 per cent of their earnings a month to the FLDS.
"They have incentive to hush him up and carry on as though he is still dictating."
- REUTERS
