Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, sit along the Arizona-Utah border near Zion National Park, but the towns’ recent history has long been entwined with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. For years, residents described a pattern of closed compounds, prairie dresses, and a general distrust of outsiders—hallmarks of a community environment shaped by FLDS authority. Since courts wrested control from the sect and ended court-ordered supervision last summer, the towns have looked increasingly like other communities in the region, with everyday activities such as youth sports, bars, and a winery.
The transformation followed a legal and institutional overhaul that began after federal prosecutors alleged that the towns functioned as an arm of the church and restricted basic services for people outside the faith. In 2017, a court placed Colorado City and Hildale under supervision and moved to excise the church from their governments and from shared public safety arrangements, including the shared police department. Separately, supervision of a trust that controlled FLDS real estate was shifted to a community board, which has been selling properties.
The scope of the change reflected how deeply FLDS control had been embedded in local governance and land arrangements. The court-appointed monitor Roger Carter said in progress reports that the communities, which had functioned for about 90 years as a theocracy, had to learn how to operate “a first-generation representative government.” Carter also described how the FLDS had controlled much of the towns’ land through a trust, shaping where followers could live, and that private property ownership was new for many people accustomed to a system that offered less clarity about whether civic decisions were based on religious affiliation.
That period of legal control also unfolded alongside the incarceration of Warren Jeffs, the FLDS leader and prophet. Jeffs was charged in 2005 with arranging the marriage of a teenage girl to a 28-year-old follower who was already married, went on the run and appeared on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, and was arrested the next year. In 2011, he was convicted in Texas of sexually assaulting two girls, ages 12 and 15, and sentenced to life in prison.
Residents and former members described what “life after Jeffs” has meant in practical terms. Willie Jessop, who left the sect and later broke with the FLDS, said the outcome represented “the outcome of a massive amount of internal turmoil and change within people to reset themselves,” and he described it as “life after Jeffs” that he said had become “a great life.” Shem Fischer, who left the towns after the church split up his father’s family, said things worsened after Jeffs took charge following his father’s death in 2002, describing a shift toward a “sinister, dark, cult direction.” Fischer said the church leadership cast out some men it deemed unworthy, reassigned wives and children, and imposed restrictions including pulling children from public school and altering community life.
With Jeffs in prison and the church stripped of control over town institutions, many FLDS members departed or moved away. Other places of worship opened, and officials said practicing FLDS members now make up a small portion of the population. Hildale Mayor Donia Jessop, who said she was once distantly related to Jessop through marriage, told of reconnections with relatives who had been divided by the church. She also described how she returned to help during a 2015 Hildale flood that killed 13 people, including time with a sister she had not spoken to in years. Jessop said that reconnection helped “open doors that weren’t open before,” and she described how the enduring relationship returned as an ordinary family bond rather than a sect-driven rupture.
Not everyone described an immediate return to normalcy. Isaac Wyler, a longtime resident who said he was expelled in 2004, described being ostracized and blocked from ordinary services, including being refused service at a burger joint and describing police ignoring complaints about vandalized farmland. Wyler said the dynamic changed after the sect’s control weakened, saying his religious affiliation no longer factored into encounters with police, and that local commercial options had expanded to include a supermarket, bank, pharmacy, coffee shop and bar. He summarized the shift as “Like a normal town.”
People outside the FLDS also have been arriving in greater numbers. Gabby Olsen, who said she came to the towns in 2016 as an intern for a climbing and canyoneering guide service, said she sometimes fielded questions about whether she was really moving to a place known for polygamy. Olsen’s husband, Dion Obermeyer, said that conversations with outsiders often led to surprise after they arrived, mentioning that there was “a winery” among other everyday features.
Even with FLDS influence waning, residents said it has not disappeared, and the communities are now confronting new challenges alongside the social changes. Residents described drug use as one problem that has accompanied greater openness. They also pointed to ongoing criminal accountability within the broader polygamy ecosystem: a Colorado City sect member with more than 20 spiritual “wives,” including 10 underage girls, was sentenced in late 2024 to 50 years in prison for coercing girls into sexual acts and other crimes.
Briell Decker, who said she was 18 when she became Jeffs’ 65th “wife” in an arranged marriage, said she later left the church and now works for a residential support center in Colorado City that serves people leaving polygamy. Decker said it could take several generations for the community to recover from FLDS abuses under Jeffs, and she said, “I do think they can, but it’s going to take a while because so many people are in denial,” adding that some people, she said, want to “blame somebody” rather than take accountability.