Sects with strangers: an offshoot of the Mormon Church that's big on polygamy has set up shop in West Texas. Multiple partners we can handle. It's the possibility of another David Koresh freak show that worries us.(Texas Monthly Reporter)

Publication: Texas Monthly

Publication Date: 01-NOV-04

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It was the local pilots who first started noticing construction work. Whenever they took off in their single-engine airplanes from the dirt runway just outside Eldorado, the tiny West Texas town "about 45 miles south of San Angelo, they would see buildings being erected on a ranch 4 miles north of town. Like many of the community's 1,900 residents, the pilots had heard the story that the 1,691-acre ranch was being turned into a hunting retreat. At least that's what the man who bought the property had told the real estate agent who brokered the deal back in November 2003. The man had said that he was a builder in Utah and that he needed a place to take his clients, many of whom were based in Las Vegas, for hunting trips. It was a strange story. Why would a man who could hunt elk and bear in Utah want to come to heat-baked West Texas to hunt for white-tailed deer and quail? Maybe, some townspeople speculated, this man's Las Vegas clients were members of the Mafia. A couple of months after the ranch had been purchased, one of the pilots, a retired engineer named Joe Christian, handed Randy Mankin, the editor of the weekly Eldorado Success, a disc filled with photographs he had taken of the property from his airplane with his digital camera. "Tell me if you think a hunting lodge is getting built out there," said Christian. Mankin popped the disc into his computer and studied the photographs. He noticed that three buildings were going up, each one three stories tall and as wide as a Holiday Inn. Together, they could probably hold at least a couple hundred people. In other photos, he saw rectangular patches of dirt: Apparently, foundations were being laid for even bigger buildings.

The burly, 49-year-old Mankin had been an off-field worker in Eldorado before he bought the newspaper a decade ago. He sold the ads, took the photos, compiled the community news, laid out the paper, and wrote a weekly opinion column, Over the Back Fence. The one thing he had not done was investigative reporting, but he decided that this was as good a time as any to start.

He drove down County Road 300 to take a look at the ranch. There was a lock and a No Trespassing sign on the gate, and on a pole next to the gate was an infrared surveillance camera. Mankin drove back to the office and asked his wife, Kathy, who worked for him as his assistant reporter, assistant...

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