Kingston Clan

Eleven years after she ran away from a plural marriage, suffered a brutal beating and renewed the spotlight on polygamy in Utah, Mary Ann Nichols’ legal battles appear to be over.

A string of litigation filed by and against the former polygamous wife, who as a member of the Kingston clan was married to her uncle at 16, has been settled out of court.

Salt Lake City attorney Mark Hansen, who represented defendants in the lawsuit, said Friday none of the settlements involved an exchange of money.

“Everybody walks,” Hansen said. “Nobody has any liability. It’s what we thought should have happened the very first day, but it took five years to get there.”

Nichols and her attorneys could not be reached for comment Friday. But Rowenna Erickson, co-founder of Tapestry Against Polygamy, said despite its ending, the lawsuit still helped to raise public awareness about the practices of the Kingstons and other polygamous groups.

“She certainly deserved restitution,” Erickson said, “but [the Kingstons] have a way of getting around almost anything — burying people in paperwork, stringing things out.”

Hansen dismissed Erickson’s claim, saying her understanding of the case was based on third-hand knowledge of what happened to Nichols. “She’s not familiar with what has gone on with the case,” he said.

Source/Full Story:: Salt Lake Tribune

Source: Salt Lake Tribune

A coal mining company affiliated with the polygamous Kingston clan has been ordered liquidated by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for Utah.

C.W. Mining Inc., which until mid-year mined coal near the base of Huntington Canyon in Emery County, was ordered into Chapter 7 after the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that found it owed a Midwestern utility $24 million for coal it failed to supply.

The order by U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Judith Boulden represents the latest twist in the case that began in early January.

At that time, Kansas City, Mo., utility owner Aquila Inc. and two Utah companies — House of Pumps and Owell Precast of Sandy — filed a petition contending C.W. Mining wasn’t paying its debts and asking the court to place it involuntarily into a Chapter 11 reorganization.

C.W. Mining, which also conducted business as Co-op Mining Co., was ordered into Chapter 11 in late September despite its contention that it was “generally paying its debts as they became due.” Aquila subsequently requested that either a Chapter 11 trustee be put into place to take over the company, or that it be ordered into Chapter 7.

“Essentially we were seeking an independent third party to gain control of the company’s remaining assets and ensure they were distributed fairly [to the creditors],” said Chuck Caisley, spokesman for Kansas City Power & Light, which acquired Aquila in July.

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Source: Deseret News

A circuit judge has ruled against a Utah mining company owned by the polygamous Kingston clan, upholding a $24 million award in a breach-of-contract lawsuit.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an appeal by C.W. Mining that would have overturned a lower court decision on a lawsuit involving utility coal deliveries. The company operates several coal mines in Bear Canyon in Emery County.

C.W. Mining had a contract to supply public utility Aquila Inc., based in Kansas City, Mo., with 1.6 million tons of coal over two years from 2004 to 2006, with an option to extend the contract through 2008.

A labor strike hit the company within a week of the contract signing and lasted for two years.

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Source: clippertoday.com

For many, living a polygamist lifestyle seems almost impossible to comprehend. For former members of the Davis County-based Kingston clan, however, it was simply the structure on which most of their lives have been based. “You don’t just give up your religion all of a sudden,” said former Kingston member Christy Tucker, who left with her husband and children in 2001.

For members of the Kingston clan, which started in Bountiful in the 1930s and has since spread to other parts of the state, religion is the controlling force in everyone’s daily life. Behaviors are determined by what group leaders call heavenly “directions,” and can cover everything from marriage to schooling to the foods that members eat.

“You already know what you can and can’t do — it’s been ingrained in you since birth,” said Rowenna Erickson, a former Kingston member who is now leader of Tapestry Against Poly-gamy. “You struggle, but you think you’re sacrificing so you can gain eternal salvation.”

Money and food are common subjects of the directions that come from church leaders. According to Brian C. Hales, noted Davis County author of several LDS books and books on polygamy, the leaders retain tight control over their members’ finances.

“We all turned in money we’d earned, even if we were only five years old and it was only five cents or a penny,” remembers LuAnn Cooper, a former Kingston who left the group 10 years ago.

This financial focus is sometimes reflected in the cost-consciousness in the approved menus. An example of this is an emphasis on raw oats, which can be bought cheaply and in large quantities and can feed a large group of children for quite some time.

“The church leader’s favorite wife would get up in church and say that you can feed your children two meals of raw oats and one normal meal, and they’ll do just fine,” said Tucker with a laugh. “Now my kids won’t eat oats on principle.”
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First of four parts

www.clippertoday.com

It started in February 2007 with a letter by a former member of Davis County’s secretive Kingston clan to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other prominent national leaders. The letter, signed by anti-polygamy crusader Victoria Prunty, then executive director of Tapestry Against Polygamy, supported Reid’s call for a federal investigation of crime within polygamy groups and charged Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff with not doing enough to stop the abuses.

“A few months after Tapestry was organized,” the letter said of the Kingston clan, “a 16-year-old girl who was the 15th wife of her uncle made national headlines when her father maliciously beat her for running away from the forced marriage. This incident shone an ominous light onto the hidden abuses that are endemic in the Mormon polygamist subculture, inspiring newspapers around the country to conduct a series of investigative reporting. However, state and local law enforcement turned a blind eye to the results.”

Last week, the letter’s hope for federal action became a reality when Reid, D-Nev., and other government officials met in Washington, D.C., before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he denounced polygamist groups as a form of “organized crime” suspected of offenses against young women and children.

That hearing, and the federal investigations that are likely to follow, could reverberate all the way to Davis County.

Utahns have battled the stigma of polygamy for years. Most people know it still exists in places like Hilldale, Utah; Colorado City, Ariz.; and now in Texas.

But it’s an open secret that the roots of the large Kingston polygamist group took shape and grew in Bountiful.
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Full Story at: Newsweek.com

Lu Ann Kingston was 15 when she married her first cousin Jeremy Kingston in a hush-hush 1995 wedding in Bountiful, Utah. As members of a secretive society of “fundamentalist Mormons” whose leaders practiced polygamy, Lu Ann’s family thought nothing of the fact that Jeremy, then 24, was such a close relative–or that he had three other wives. So entwined were the branches of the family tree that Lu Ann’s cousin-husband was also her nephew.

But the Kingstons’ tangled family ties are threatening to unravel, thanks largely to the efforts of Lu Ann and another former Kingston wife, her niece Mary Ann. In 2000, Lu Ann and her two children fled the 1,000-person society that members call The Order, and she later cooperated with state prosecutors cracking down on sexual abuse of teen girls by polygamists. Last week Jeremy Kingston was sentenced to one year in jail after pleading guilty to felony incest. Meanwhile, Mary Ann Kingston, 22, has brought a $110 million civil suit against 242 Order members and 97 companies they operate, claiming that they share collective responsibility for abuse she suffered at the hands of her father and the uncle she married to become his 15th wife. The two men went to prison in 1999 on charges ranging from child abuse to incest.

Via ABC4.com

What is happening in El Dorado, Texas almost happened here in Utah. ABC 4 News has learned recently that Utah’s Attorney General almost launched a raid in Salt Lake against another polygamist group.

Tuesday, ABC 4 asked Attorney General Mark Shurtleff had he ever thought about doing what Texas did, and Shurtleff said, “It occurred to us, we thought about it. I’ll tell you with another polygamous sect.”

He then confirmed he was talking about the Kingstons.

Heirs of dead man seeking inheritance from polygamous group

By Pamela Manson
The Salt Lake Tribune

“Heirs of a man who spent years working in a cooperative managed by the polygamous Kingston clan are asking a judge to order the group to turn over $1.2 million and two residences to them.
In a lawsuit filed last week in 3rd District Court, they claim the money and property belong in the estate of Deward John Peterson, who died in 1996 without a will.
According to nine of his heirs, Peterson – a member of the Davis County Cooperative Society and the religious order that holds plural marriage as a central tenet – transferred daily proceeds from a door-to-door fruit selling enterprise into an account run by cooperative and church leader Paul Kingston. In addition, he allegedly bought residential real estate in Woods Cross and Murray.
The descendants filed suit in 2003 asking to be identified as heirs. A judge determined that 21 people were heirs and on March 5 awarded an equal portion of Peterson’s estate to each one.
The latest suit, filed Friday, asks that a trustee be appointed to take charge of the money and property that allegedly belongs in the estate and to distribute the assets. In addition, it seeks unspecified monetary damages from the cooperative, its businesses and Paul Kingston.”

From the SLTRIB

A coal mining company owned by Utah’s polygamous Kingston clan is fighting back against its creditors who are trying to force the company involuntarily into a Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
    The creditors – Aquila Inc. of Kansas, House of Pumps and Owell Precast of Sandy – asked the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for Utah in early January to place C.W. Mining Co. into Chapter 11 after alleging the company wasn’t paying its debts.
    C.W. Mining Co., which mines coal near the base of Huntington Canyon in Emery County, also does business under the Co-op Mining Co. name.

Kingston Clan