The Kingston Group - also known as the Davis County Cooperative Society - has grown from its humble beginnings during the Great Depression into a massive polygamist affiliation with over 3500 (known) members and over $150 million in assets. The group has also become notorious for abuse, money laundering, white collar crime, fraud, child marriage and incest. In this episode, we take a deep dive into this mysterious and prolific group and find ourselves much closer to the story than we thought.
This episode was produced with support from:
M. Dante and friends' erotic anthology Cin Sado Noir, a time capsule tribute to sadomasochistic, femme fatale, and neo noir romance.
Genre-busting, multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Neriah Stone Hart. Check out his music on YouTube, Apple Music, and Pandora, and follow him on Facebook at Neriah Stone Hart to keep up with his new tracks, upcoming albums, and live performances.
Critically acclaimed musical comedian and one-mom-band Jessica Delfino on Instagram and Twitter @JessicaDelfino and on TikTok @JustSomeMom.
Want to support CrimeJuicy? Join our Patreon community at www.Patreon.com/CrimeJuicyGang for access to ad-free episodes, unaired episodes, bonus content, exclusive expert interviews, and more!
The Kingston Group - also known as the Davis County Cooperative Society - has grown from its humble beginnings during the Great Depression into a massive polygamist affiliation with over 3500 (known) members and over $150 million in assets. The group has also become notorious for abuse, money laundering, white collar crime, fraud, child marriage and incest. In this episode, we take a deep dive into this mysterious and prolific group and find ourselves much closer to the story than we thought.
This episode was produced with support from:
M. Dante and friends' erotic anthology Cin Sado Noir, a time capsule tribute to sadomasochistic, femme fatale, and neo noir romance.
Genre-busting, multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Neriah Stone Hart. Check out his music on YouTube, Apple Music, and Pandora, and follow him on Facebook at Neriah Stone Hart to keep up with his new tracks, upcoming albums, and live performances.
Critically acclaimed musical comedian and one-mom-band Jessica Delfino on Instagram and Twitter @JessicaDelfino and on TikTok @JustSomeMom.
Want to support CrimeJuicy? Join our Patreon community at www.Patreon.com/CrimeJuicyGang for access to ad-free episodes, unaired episodes, bonus content, exclusive expert interviews, and more!
Krista: [00:00:00] How's everybody doing?
Carrie: Thinking of treasure as usual.
Becca: Always. Why'd you get into anthropology, Carrie.
Carrie: That's why, treasure.
Becca: Treasure.
Krista: I'm in sure every group there's always a myth and everything about treasure hunting. Isn't it?
Becca: Buried treasure, hidden money, hidden away from the tax code, treasure hunting. Yeah.
Krista: And sometimes religion.Cause they're tax free. I’m treasure hunting into these weird banks that only certain people can bank at for certain reasons.
Becca: Like only the Kingston group, because they're big ass family’s run like a company store? The Kingston group came out of the LDS Church of the Latter Day Saints in 1926 Charles Kingston became at odds with the Church of Latter Day Saints when he started pushing for the doctrine of consecration, which basically means that everyone shares everything, communal living, that sort of doctrine which was promoted by the original prophet of this church, Joseph Smith. Plural marriage was also kind of thrown in, but it wasn't the central focus, consecration was the central focus. 1929 Kingston was ex-communicated from the Mormon Church for promoting the doctrine of consecration and they just like, we're not having it.
The Great Depression happened and all of a sudden pulling your resources and sharing things communally seemed like a pretty good idea to a lot of other people. It was a way for people to pull their resources and plural marriage and consecration were a way that struggling families could pull their resources and work together to get through this cause they were all broke.
In 1935 they've moved to Bountiful, Utah and started the United Order to live out these principles of consecration and plural marriage kind of followed. In A Year of Polygamy, which is a podcast that I've really enjoyed, I listened to their Kingston episode on it and I thought it was really interesting because it was from an LDS perspective and it put a lot of things in context that might seem like foreign from us outsiders. But basically she was saying that plural marriage kind of followed consecration because this whole sharing of everything, you've got like a sexual energy that needs to be addressed. And the way that it got addressed in this context was through plural marriage which is problematic because it's very one-sided. Especially in this case, it's extremely one-sided. But anyway in 1941, Elden Kingston became the leader and consolidated it into the Davis County Cooperative Society. In 1977, John Ortel Kingston became the leader. And then I believe it was he who introduced the concept of Bleeding the Beast which is the ideology of basically taking the taking government funding.
Carrie: It is social services, but it also, when you know about it, it applies to us all. If you are not within their group, if they can take something from you, it is bleeding the beast. It doesn't matter if it's the government, your neighbor, whoever, if they're not in your group and you can get a resource in, it's bleeding, the beast, you one free points.
Becca: It's kind of a move away from self-sufficiency even though like self-sufficiency was a big component of the original group. Now Paul Kingston is the leader. He has 27 wives and over 200 kids. Today there are officially around 3,500 members of the Kingston Group throughout Utah, but it's guesstimated that the real number could be as high as 10,000.
Krista: But you know, it's really messed up. Most of those are just children of a few men, if you break it down in reality, because no, most of them have at least three to four, sometimes five at the least.
Carrie: I believe Steven had 300 children.
Krista: Right? And they're marrying them off to their cousins because, oh, that's just, cousin from your uncle’s 16th wife's child. So it's fine.
Becca: There's this belief got introduced that the Kingstons were the direct descendants of Jesus Christ. Marrying a Kingston, having a child by a Kingston and makes you closer to God. A lot of the services and, belief systems, a lot of it's programming the community programming kids to be very secretive, preparing children for polygamy, but also teaching the history of the Kingston Group and teaching that Paul, the leader currently in particular is close to God and basically reinforcing that spiritual hierarchy.
Carrie: I saw an interview with one of Paul's kids. He saw Paul for the first time when he was working out and he thought he was amazing or something, I couldn't believe it. My mom told me that was my uncle. He didn't find out until two or three years later that Paul was his dad. The children are not told who their dad is for years until they're seven, eight years old. That eight year old mark, it has more of a meaning because that's when they kind of tell the children, if they can be trusted.
Becca: Right. Well, and the way that the kids are introduced into life in general, because it's become a trend to not get birth certificates for your kids until after they've turned a year old so that infant deaths aren’t reported and. The way that plural marriage kind of works in these situations where there's lots and lots of wives as each wife tracks their ovulation cycle. And basically dude shows up to impregnate her and leaves.
Krista: Yeah, there's no, there's only one of them has ever really legally married. The rest of them are just really a picture of them eating a weird cake.
Becca: The favored wives get the nicer houses, the unfavored wives get…you know…often and up well until the mine closed Hiawatha was a place where a lot of the unfavored families and unfavored wives and stuff ended up, which we'll get into later. Throughout the time of the Davis County, Co-op the Kingston Group, they've accumulated what, over officially on the books, over $150 million in wealth. They run their family finances like a company store. So everyone in the group works for Kingston-owned businesses and only shops at Kingston-owned businesses. And every time they get a paycheck, it goes right to the family’s central banking establishment from which they need to ask permission to withdraw money. And they're almost always given less than they're asked for, or than they ask.
Carrie: And they use script yes.
Becca: Script. So it's kind of on like a mining old, old time mining fam-company store.
Krista: It’s laundering business. They launder their own money. Constant. And I think if you try to leave you, you go to the bank and they were, oh, that's how they alert people is if you try to take out large amounts of money from your bank account that you've had since you were eight, because you start working at ridiculously young ages and you should have a good chunk of money by the time you realize you want to leave.
Becca: Yeah kids start working, what, as early as eight years old. Yeah.
Krista: Yeah, cheap labor or it's a punishment.
Becca: One of the things that was interesting, so me and Carrie have both lived in Utah and researching the Kingston Group, we're like, oh, that name's familiar. Oh, those establishments, I've been there. They’re everywhere. And the kids actually often go to school with you know, in mainstream schools, but their, their last names are masked to, they're told instead of going to church, what church she goes to, oh, I go to a community church. Oh, what are you doing this weekend? I'm going to visit family out of town. Who's your dad. Or he's a trucker. He's gone a lot. So they're coached to really mask themselves and their lifestyles. They’re coached should never, ever, ever admit to being in a polygamist situation or living in a polygamist home.
Some holdings of the Davis County Co-op: A-1 Disposal, AAA Alarm, AAA Security, Advanced Vending, AM Security Alarm Co., American Digital Systems, Family Stores True Value, Fidelity Funding Corp, Garco Industrial Park, Hiawatha Coal Company Inc., which we'll talk about later, a Kalvin Property Company, Kingston Dairy, Men’s Shoe Repair and Men's Store, Specialized Inc, Sportsmen's Bail Bonds Specialist, Sportsmen's Fast Cash, Sportsmen's Pawn Shop, Standard Industries Inc, UPC Inc. Westmark Inc., Washakie Ranch, Washakie Renewable Energy, which we'll also talk about later. This is less than half of the companies that are listed just in this Wikipedia listing, but they own all kinds of stuff.You know, it's even told to the members where it's, if we don't have it, you don't need it, which kind of rings true cause they're all over the place. I mean they're even in, you know, medical fields like that, they don't necessarily believe in, they're providing medical services to others that they don't necessarily allow to their own members.
Carrie: The fuels division had PhDs all over it, folks all over it. PhDs.
Becca: Yeah. And it's interesting cause that some of the interviews some of the girls or women, they went to college, but they were only allowed to talk to each other and they were all set to spy on each other to like, make sure they only talk to each other. They only worked on projects together. When it's strategic for them, people get educated. But when it's not, they don't. And a lot of this is based on, there's definitely a sort of caste system within the family structure.
Carrie: It's a trust level that you have to threshold over to be able to do certain things within the group. You're not allowed to do that at level two, you have to be a level eight. We don't trust you with the money. We don't trust you to have the gold in the closet. [00:10:00]
Krista: I know that at the banks, a lot of the time they have 16, 17 year olds working as tele quote unquote tellers, because they don't know what's really going on. And then there's really no adults there either to tell them what's going on. So then when people ask questions, they're, well, I can't help you. We can't, you know, if it's yeah, like you said, if it's convenient for them to be uneducated, they're not. If it's convenient for them to be educated, they are, but in a highly, highly controlled situation.
Becca: A very high control group situation. They're everywhere. So polygamy, child, marriage, incestuous marriage, keeping the Kingston bloodline pure is a big thing. Abuse, financial abuse, high control group situations. It's a pretty intense situation. And then in 2017, the BBC actually reported that Hiawatha, which is a, it’s the labeled a near-ghost town. It's on the border of Emery and Carbon counties. We're going to be talking about it a bit later, but it's where the the lower ranking families and unfavored wives end up. And there was a coal mine there for a long time that we're going to talk about a bit later because there's a lot of abuse that a lot, a lot of bad shit that went down there. They basically reported that Hiawatha was facing a genetic disaster and that, you know, doctors in the area know the Kingston Group, because there's so many birth defects from incest.
Carrie: And it's really sad. It gets really bad because they, parents will give their, their kids to the state because they cannot take care of them. And then the kids are not visited again. Even if they remember their parents, you know, they're just not ever seen again. They're just gone. Okay. So there's those kids that are gotten rid of. Now, they'll take a girl. They'll keep a girl, but still that might be genetically maybe if she can wash dishes and change diapers. They'll keep those. They've got some of them I don't know if I should say this, but there's a problem with this thick tongue thing going around. It's not good. It's not cool. Gene pool is too shallow there. The gene pool is too low, and they're taken advantage of, you know, us, I feel like in a way, because we're going to keep, we're going to take care of the kids. The thing with the no birth certificate until one is so they can sh you know, hide the babies, they shoebox I'm sure.
Krista: Oh yeah. We must wait for the perfect one, that will be our savior.
Becca: It’s Kwisatz Haderach stuff. Or it's we'll get the perfect Kingston and he’ll go on the Golden Path and become a sand worm. And. I just listened to, I just listened to Deep Dives Dune. So thank you. Last Podcast on the Left Network.
Carrie: I was thinking that myself.
Krista: We actually just watched Dune the other night too. I walked in the room and I totally forgot how it started and it's that weird creature in that weird ship thing with the vagina mouth out. And I was, what are we watching? And I was oh yeah.
Becca: There's a lot of crossover between Utah and the Duniverse.
Carrie: There really is.
Krista: Oh, I could imagine. I mean, it's, you know, kind of landscape is similar.
Becca: Yeah. I mean you know, the Kingston's kind of treat their kids, they breed them.
Krista: They don't even know their dads. They are the, the literal…the definition of baby daddy. Like maybe we should submit that to urban dictionary under a Kingston Group father.
Becca: We don't know where the fuck he is. He comes by once a month and beats the shit out of us and knocks up our mom and leaves.
Krista: Don't the men live in big, beautiful houses, in their solitude or with their favorite wife at the moment?
Becca: It is interesting because listening to the interviews with people who have left, it is a whole breadth of situations. The Kingston dudes kind of have it lit cause like they're allegedly descendants of Jesus or whatever. So everyone wants to fuck a Kingston or not necessarily wants to, they get more wives and they've gotten more sway over all of that. Whereas the further you get away from the, maybe it's, oh, I'll have like one or two wives. And then some people in the group don't even practice polygamy. And I thought that was interesting as well, how it kind of runs the gambit and everyone's experiences are different in a lot of ways, but the same in that, the isolation and the high level of control is experienced by everyone.
Carrie: I talked to a guy, a honey seller from Hiawatha and he wasn't allowed to have wives.
Krista: Or don't they select who gets to have wives, or don't you have to earn it.
Becca: Or what is it? Guidance or what is it like direction from…
Carrie: Yeah, what it is basically is that, you know, the guy that's ahead of you gets a new wife every year, that's younger and prettier and there's nothing left. Have we have a bunch of boys leaving the group. They call them lost boys. A lot of them get into meth. They get lost or, or they survive on the fringe of the group like this guy did and was up on the mountain by Hiawatha, not working for the mine though and doing the honey for them.
Becca: So, or they start grooming girls when they're really, really, really young.
Krista: They keep them when they're useful. They keep boys when they're useful, when they need hard labor, when they need a labor that somebody doesn't want to do. And then may keep certain women for labor in the homes that some of the favorite wives don't want to do well.
Becca: And there's this whole doctrine of life should be a struggle. Also don't even bother meeting other people that aren't in the group, cause they're going to hell anyways. So, you know, you won't know him for long.
Krista: Aren’t they called the gentile or whatever.
Becca: That's what us Jews called non-Jews.
Carrie: They stole that from the Jews. That’s not original. Huh.
Becca: Yeah. It's a lot of abuse within the group. You know, even aside from just deep, deep, deep brainwash and isolation. A lot of accounts of child abuse, of beating of people you know, rape’s pretty commonplace because, you know, consent’s a kind of shaky issue.
Krista: Yeah. Underage marriage and all of those things are, ick.
Becca: I heard a bunch. Yeah, it was yeah, it was, it was interesting. Kind of researching all the isolation tactics, you know, because it's gone through a couple of generational cycles, so they've really got their education dialed in and their like isolation, tactics dialed in and, you know, identifying what kind of people can be trusted to go further out into society and which needs to kind of be reined in.
Krista: Even when it comes to being sick. So many people die that we probably don't even know of and they're probably still collecting like social security or welfare on those people because they were horribly sick and they were, well, we're just not going to take you to the hospital. We'll pray on it. We'll be good. We'll be great. We'll be golden.
Becca: Yeah. I listened to in the Survivors Podcast an interview with one of the women who got out with her family and she had a brain tumor when she was a kid and her family was pressured to talk to the leader, Paul, about what they should do about it. And he said, stop standing in front of the microwave and in front of the television. And they didn't have a working television in their house. Then it was also suggested that this child go on a 30 day fast and you know, putting people that are sick on fasts, putting the elderly on long fasts, too, people have died from this kind of I guess kinda pseudo spiritual treatment.
Krista: No, they know what they're doing. They're, eh, if you survive after 30 days of no food…
Becca: Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Krista: Yeah. They know what they're doing. Some of those people are not stupid.
Becca: No. And that's just, it, they're very, there's some very, very savvy people involved and you've got, you know, doctors, you've got lawyers you've got very charismatic leaders, people that are very well connected and it's interesting because they are, it has it's, it's definitely permeated. And yes. It's, it's interesting.
Krista: When you talk about people paying off the cops, they are, the cops, they are the firefighters. They are the building inspectors. They are, you know, the principals, they are the teachers, they they're everywhere and it's creepy how much they're everywhere. And you guys lived with them.
Becca: Apparently!
Krista: Everywhere.
Becca: No, Hiawatha was I'm on my way to work when I lived out there. And like my first day on the job, I was driving out to the job site with my boss and he's like, don't turn right. Don't ever turn right. You go left right here, you go left.
Carrie: Turn right and you're going to get a gun in your face.
Becca: Yeah. Pretty much.
Carrie: You see this, this is the gunline. You don't cross the gunline in Hiawatha. You will be shot.
Becca: But yeah, let's talk about Hiawatha.
Krista: You guys were there. Take this on. I want to hear about this.
Becca: Alright Carrie, take it away.
Carrie: So did we want to talk about that murder?
Becca: Let's give some overview, but what Hiawatha is first. So like it was a mine. Yeah and an unincorporated community that sits on the Carbon County Emery County line.
Carrie: There's a mine and there's another one called the Co-op mine. There's actually two mines up there. There was one, the Hiawatha Mine and then there was one across the mountain that's the Co-op mine. That's the one that the Kingston's have everybody working. Mostly now for the last, I dunno, 20 years.
Becca: The Hiawatha Mine closed?
Carrie: The Hiawatha Mine's been closed for a long time, but the Co-op mine is still open, but they still use the town buildings. There were some really cool town buildings there. And then there's a little town building area on the other side by the coal mine.
Becca: Yeah. And in the interviews, the the people that grew up living in the Hiawatha area they said that they lived in the mine, they grew up living in the mine. They actually attended church in the washing house of the mine and when non Kingston employees came by, they'd have to have. The kids would have to hide. The working conditions: everyone that works they're from the Kingston family, it was kind of the, the men of the lower rung families. And obviously they had to give their whole paycheck over to the Kingston family banking establishment. But they were not [00:20:00] making very much. It was quote unquote union, but the union leader was only making $10 an hour working in a fucking coal mine. They also employed undocumented workers for as low as $5 an hour, working in a mine.
Krista: And children have lost limbs.
Carrie: And if you complained about it, he ended up dead in a car off. They found undocumented workers in too many cars over the cliff for my liking, for it to be -noncoincidental.
Becca: Was that part of the whole bleeding the beast kind of ideology where it's like, they're not us, let's use them.
Carrie: I believe so because a lot of the Mexican workers will come up and they won't ask for their checks for the first six weeks because that's pretty typical.Okay. But then you're , wait, I need my first check. Right. I need to send money home. And then they get their check and it's $5 an hour. And they're, whoa, whoa. , this is supposed to be way more.
Krista: Well yeah, they, and be like excuse me. And they were probably told one thing. Because of the thought of them, they contract them out and then they were, oh yeah, we pay our employees this much an hour on paper.
Carrie: On paper. And then they also get the sheep herder guys to get into those mines that come in from Peru and Mexico, because they think they're going to make more money and I'm going to make more money in the mines. They get a steady supply.
Becca: It's, it's super exploitive. It's exploitative of the group members, you know, and there was this whole, I would say on, there was this kind of question of who's exploited more, the group members making slightly more than $5 an hour or the undocumented workers that are making $5 an hour that they get to keep. And it's a really, I mean, these people have, the group itself has amassed so much wealth from this, kind of tidy slavery structure.
Carrie: Knight brothers stole 5 million from this girl's closet in gold. And what did it started out was is with another couple of brothers had stole silver from this one girl and she called her friend and she's, you better check your gold. And she had 5 million of the group’s gold and it was gone. So the Knight brothers were off of was like Deshaun or something like that. And so she just got to pick a name when she married Paul, I believe. And she picked the last name Knight. Well, there's Knight’s mattress. There's Knight’s all kinds of stuff, huh, Becca all the way up and down Provo. The Knight brothers were 15 brothers, crazy. And they, they stole that gold and they never got in trouble for it. They, what had happened was is they, the cops started investigating for the silver that the cops were like, wait a minute, you have this much money in silver gun? How much money have you guys missing in gold, 5 million? Wait a min. Why do you guys have this much money? And then all of a sudden the Kingston's lawyered up and a private detective and all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Cause they were oh, we didn't think about that part. We'd have to tell the cops where we got the gold from. That was just in one girl's closet, one old lady’s closet. And the Knight brothers never got in trouble. The lady wrote a letter to the judge and they got two year’s probation.
Krista: Wow.
Carrie: They had big trucks, they had all kinds of stuff. But they were Paul's kids. Because their last name wasn’t Kingston, they knew that they were Paul's kids. The Knight brothers were his. They were, they were raised on a ranch. With his mother.
Becca: Up at the Idaho border where they sent people, when they were acting up to get kind of broken.
Carrie: Yeah. How much…
Becca: Was that the Washakie Ranch? Was that what it was called?
Carrie: I think so.
Becca: Yeah. Yeah. The boys that lived, it was interesting listening to the accounts of the kids that grew up there. Cause they're, oh, it was so much fun. We would play. People were, oh my God, it was protected by feral boys.
Carrie: They said the boys were feral, running around with fricking shotguns.
Becca: But yeah, there was a lot of abuse that, you know, people's daughters were acting up, they'd take him up to Washakie Ranch and tie him up or have people do hard labor and yeah.
Carrie: You don’t want to get married to that old uncle?
Becca: Well, we're sending you up to the ranch.
Carrie: And so one summer on the ranch and you'll come back and be, Hey, do you guys want to marry that uncle or do you want to go back to the ranch? And they’ll be, old nose hair uncle.
Becca: Yeah. Or we’re going to call up those girls on that reality show Escaping Polygamy! Get the fuck out of here!
Carrie: That was where Knight brothers come from. And I guess they were pretty balls to the wall kind of dudes.
Krista: Yeah, that wasn't a bad show. I mean, obviously it did take some cheese to it because TLC got involved, but they were doing that well before the show came in and I think that's pretty awesome that they were trying to help people. And are actively and doing it. And I don't, I think they had to stop the show because it started, it probably did start getting unsafe for them. Those people were probably threatening them all over the place. Like they're not, it's no joke that if you leave that they are going to threaten you and stalk you and you know, make your life a living hell until you come back. And then you go back and they make your life even more of a living hell because you left.
Becca: Yeah. And people have had to deal with terrible things really. And there is, it is really cool that like, with the people that have left, they have created a support network for people that also want to leave, but it takes a big leap to get out, you know, because you don't have your own money.
Krista: You literally have to leave in the middle of the night with a backpack.
Becca: And like, you have to completely relearn everything.
Krista: Yeah. And if you ha, if you're moving, if you're bringing your whole family, like if it's a wife and she's taking her kids, you somehow have to, because they patrol their neighborhoods and they specifically have people watching everybody. If you're trying to leave, it's you have to start packing silently inside your house and make no sudden movements. And then the day that you're moving, it's just everybody has to go balls to the walls and you have an hour to pack like a 15 bedroom house and get, you know, 15 kids out. If you're, you know, one of the wives that has a lot of kids, without somebody coming to your house to talk you out of it.
Carrie: You know what’s really odd about their home. So if you've noticed a lot of those homes, they don't have a lot of stuff in them on purpose, I believe. They've got the sofa, you know, but our sofa would have five pillows. They have no pillows.
Becca: Well, because they're not given a lot of money to work with, you know, where it's like, you go there you're, I need to buy a car. I need, I'm like $2,000. And they're like, oh, well, you're going to have to do it with a thousand or, you know, anything you, you ask for , oh, I need this much money to buy furniture. Oh, you're going to do with that half as much. Or you're just told no.
Krista: Yes. Unless you're a favorite. Yeah. Even then you still don't get as much.
Becca: Let's talk about the rampage.
Carrie: So a few years ago, there was a call at a ranch home that is right below Hiawatha but had connections to the Kingston clan into the Washakie group in particular. Their daughters and cousins had been working up in Salt Lake that we attract to this biofuels company. This woman had children. I think she had 14 kids, something like that, that I'd went to high school with. Carbon County was called because this man had went crazy. They called the mother from Emery County, Utah clear over to Hiawatha, which is right across the border into Carbon County. They were called and this guy is having a come-apart. They would go and check on him, do a wellness check. They say, he's fine. They call the mother to come check on him. When the mother shows up, she brings another son with her 23 year old to check on this 26 year old son who had obviously been on drugs, whatever had happened. But he shot the mother in the face and then he shot his brother and it was horrible.
Becca: Yeah. The mother's name was Susan Peterson. She was 45. The brother that got shot was James Peterson. He was 23. And Seth Gordon Peterson was the shooter. He was 25 at the time. And he shot them near a farmhouse outside of Hiawatha on the Carbon County side. They're all three from Ferron in Emery County. So Seth Peterson was arrested after a short car chase and.
Carrie: Yep, Seth Peterson. I knew Susan as Susan Hansen and thought she had gotten out of polygamy because when we were in school with her, junior high, you know, we all knew that she came from polygamy, her and other people. We researched it and it all adds up.
Becca: Well, it's interesting. Cause when I was researching this, it was, interesting how, well women within the Kingston Group had to marry within the Kingston group. And men within the Kingston group, often married women from other polygamist groups. TheKingston polygamist group, isn't the only polygamist kind of collective group in Utah. There's a lot. What was it like 20,000 to 30,000 polygamists? And then only like 3500 in the Kingston group were recorded even though their numbers are estimated to be upwards of that.
Carrie: There's a reason for that. It's because there's not enough wives within the core groups. So if you can pick off one from another group here and there, and that's basically what they do, they act like sneaker males and they'll get another girl that's already have program polygamist. Cause a lot of them will just start going to church. Some don't. It just depends on where they're at though. Some of them will go back to the polygamous church, but they're not married to other people. What I didn't like about Susan, I mean, I hated to see this in the thing, but it's so typical. It said, you know, the father said she never had asked for anything for herself. She always did it for everybody. And I know she did if they had that many kids, I think it was like 16 kids or something, you know? So, you know, she didn't have anything and she was such a nice person. She always had a really nice smile, really sunny attitude. But like that, like Krista said, my dad's a trucker. I think she might even told me [00:30:00] that. It's sad.
Becca: But yeah, the Hiawatha area, it's interesting because it's recorded as a near ghost town, but there are still people living there.
Krista: Creepy. The outcasts. But yeah, you're still part of our group. We'll call you if we need you.
Becca: We need you. We mostly need you in the mines though.
Krista: Like, I'm sorry. Yeah, the best we can do.
Becca: Yeah. Some of the attention that's been brought to the group was this rampage that ended in Hiawatha. But also Escaping Polygamy what we were talking about, the reality show with the three girls that left and have been helping other, other women leave. Survivors of the Kingston group who've got out and started writing books about their experiences in the group and leaving the group. Lawsuits have been filed for child abuse welfare fraud.
Krista: Yeah. Their banks did get raided or their union or whatever the hell they choose to call that place did get raided and all of their weird ass files that only they knew how to read were, were taken.
Becca: It's going to be some Zodiac shit 20 years later, it's, who could decode this?
Carrie: They should just ship it over to the Mormon church decoders. I'm sure they've got a section that can handle it was CIA on FX you know.
Becca: They’re like deep into vault.
Krista: Then they'll be like, why, why are you writingany of this? Like teach us your ways, teach us your ways in this money. We have a lot of money, we want more money you guys got.
Becca: We'll teach you, but it's going to cost you some daughters. But in a 1999 David Ortel Kingston, one of the main Kingston's was convicted of incest with his 16 year old niece who testified against him claiming that she was forced to become his 15th wife.
In 2004, John Daniel Kingston was charged with child abuse and neglect. This was an interesting one. I believe this is where it came out that wives had straws of their husbands’ semen. If they were ovulating and he couldn't get to them, he'd be, oh, there's a straw in the fridge. They'd like use the straw, but this is how he was able to in pregnant people while he was in prison for child abuse.
I'm pretty sure that was, yeah. So then in 2019…could you imagine that like, where it's , Hey, what to doing? And he's, I'm busy, there's a straw on the fridge. And if a straw goes bad then it’s your fault or something.
Krista: Exactly. You said that the church would take care of us while you were gone. It's a weird mafia thing and , oh yeah, they'll take care of you while I'm gone to worry about it.
Becca: Well there’s spoiled cum in the fridge now. Fuck.
Krista: Yeah. There's there's…
Carrie: The group is really ran mafia style. When you look at it top down.
Krista: Oh, yeah.
Becca: And a 2019, Jacob Kingston pled guilty to 41 charges, including money laundering, fraud, conspiracy, and witness tampering and obstruction of justice.His brother, Isaiah Kingston, pled guilty to 17 counts, their mother, Rachel Ann pled guilty to five counts. And Jacob's wife, Sally pled guilty to two counts regarding the Kingston group-owned Washakie Renewable Energy Company. They misled federal agencies in order to receive tax credits for biofuel production. And this is kind of, this may have a spiraling effect for the group because you know, illegal funds used to procure real property could lead to property seizures, which means a lot of sister wives are going to be shit out of luck if that happens.
Carrie: Because the properties bought and purchased are by illegal means.
Krista: I suppose. They rent them from their rental companies to the wives.
Carrie: Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure that's a step.
Becca: Yeah, it's interesting. It's, it's so interesting how they've been so programmed to be so secretive, but things are really starting to slip out. And I mean, a lot of it, you know, it's, oh, you, you, you bragged about ripping off the government and now it's shed bad light on everyone. Or, you know, there's, there's cracks in the dome and now whatever beneath it shining through.
Carrie: Either way they've only got one more generation, they better figure it out. Dude, I - they're close there. There, there's not a lot of them. And they're there. Already that close.
Krista: Maybe, 35,000 is not. That's a, that's a town.
Carrie: 3500 for them. 3500 for the state. In theory, I say it's more, I say it's more 50,000, 60,000, but I just, it, but the numbers are 3,500 Kingston, about 35,000-40,000 regular polygamists. And that's just the other normal polygamist groups or whatever, or whatever polygamists you want to call it. It there's mean there's like.
Krista: So one town? Why can't they all live together and play nice?
Carrie: They don't like each other. Every one of those men are running their own little tiny kingdoms.
Becca: They're all king of Greenland.
Krista: I suppose that. Yeah, it's still, I just don't know…
Becca: Well and there’s that whole pressure to have as many kids as possible, a child a year, ideally. You know, listening to some of the interview, some women were told by their dads, oh, you know what we do to cows that stop making baby cows, just really growing the population like that.
Krista: Gross.
Becca: But yeah, I guess one of the big things about, you know, just cycling back around to the origins of the doctrine of consecration and plural marriage as a means of pooling resources and working together, and just how over time. I mean, I don't know if it was necessarily humble beginnings and, oh, we can all live together and we're just the hippies of the LDS and whatever. But…
Carrie: Oh yes. Groups were communal. Yeah. If you see some of those older groups down by Cedar City, what they had to live through to get through the winters and they were all living in very communal situation. So I think the right - the ground was ripe for this group to begin, especially during the Depression. And, and to bring back, like you said, they had to bring back polygamy for it to sound right? Right.
Becca: Well, I mean the church oppose them on consecration. Like he was the original Charles Kingston was kicked out for that. They're, fuck, no, we're not sharing everything. And but yeah, I mean, if plural marriage was more equal and balanced and like women weren’t just treated like breeders maybe things would have been different. I mean, what's the old saying goes, if Mom's not happy, no one's happy.
Krista: Amen. Happy life.
Becca: Happy wife.
Carrie: Amen.
Becca: So what's next for the Kingston group? We kind of touched on this a little bit, but…
Krista: You know, I think that, I think they'll, they'll always be a small amount of them and then there might be a huge fluctuation and then there may not be, but I think for, I mean, it's hard to keep people so isolated nowadays, especially if you are letting them go to public school and be in some aspect of the public with all of the things that are out there, there's no way that some of these new children aren’t like, what the hell is going on? I'm not about this.
Becca: Yeah, it's interesting. One of the women who I heard her interview in the Survivors Podcast was saying that she got out because her whole family left together, and both of her parents had started questioning it and really stopped believing in it. But they dare not tell each other. And then one night they did talk about it and they're, oh shit, we're both just pretending to continue to believe in this and hating our lives. Let's get out. And…
Krista: Well yeah, it's the whole family.
Becca: Yeah. Yeah. Again, I think it really does speak to, all right. Who's, you know, are you just playing along because you think you're just not getting it? You're in this situation where it's, I'm feeling these things because I'm wrong. I'm out of alignment. Not because, I'm in a crazy situation and I'm actually seeing things for what they are.
Carrie: Because they probably saw shoebox babies.
Becca: Or just things that just didn't add up or make sense, or seeing hypocrisy within the leadership, because I mean…
Krista: Or having conversations with people just because they were curious and they took that risk, you know, which happens. Or they read a book that they weren't supposed to read or, you know, it could be the littlest things that make people question it too. I mean the first one…
Carrie: It’s a dangerous one.
Krista: Oh yeah. It's not…
Carrie: Dangerous people. Like you said, Krista, they're not.
Krista: They mind - literally mind, fuck you into coming back. And then when you come back, they'll put you in isolation or send you to the bad people camp. Not only will then emotionally break you, they will physically break you. So then you can't run away again.
Becca: Well, and the desire to be home and the desire to be with your family and fear of leaving the people that you love in that situation. That's, there's, there's a lot of, a lot of compounding factors that coerce acting a certain way.
Krista: And if you leave, they erase you. Like they literally take pictures off the wall and we'll cut your face out of them. So nobody will remember you. Literally erase you so you are no more.
Becca: Unless they watch Escaping Polygamy and see you and they’re, Oh, my God, that girl looks like me. Maybe it's my sister and also cousin-mom.
Krista: Yeah. Or unless, you know, the mom finally does leave or if you hear another sibling whispering about it or how they miss them or something, it'd be, who are you talking about? Who's this person? Yeah. Oh, that's your first sister. She was born 20 years ago because you're, you're two now. So…
Carrie: She's back now.
Becca: And you know, it gets tricky. It must be so confusing just to be able to keep track of who you're, I guess it would be normal, just not knowing who you're related to or not related to. And yeah. Yeah. Again, one of the interviews I listened to one of the women, when she found out that Paul was her dad, she was ah, shit. Like I'm never going to have a relationship with my dad cause she'd been holding out hope that he'd come home someday and she’d get to know him. And when she found out it was him, she was, I'm never going to know this dude.
Krista: So you’re even his kid, he was just the sperm donor. All of those, all of those men that have a bunch of wives and two-300 children are just nothing but sperm, donors for whatever messed up misogynistic reason in their brain that they turned into a religion.
Carrie: What kind of god you got to have that makes you think that you get to have 300 children.
Krista: Well, think about it. God created Earth and God created us and we’re God's children. And how many of us are there? Jesus Christ.
Becca: Jesus Christ.
Krista: Not only him, but like how many people are on this planet. And if, if that's true that that's a God complex right there. Like I need millions and billions of them.
Becca: What if all my sperm became babies and they can take over the world. Send those sperms do work in the mines, send them to work in the fricking alarm store, the bail bonds, the whatever.
Carrie: They had spas. You guys. Like good spas too.
Krista: They have legit businesses. Like they're not, some of them are complete and total bullshit and..
Carrie: I’ve been to their massage therapy places. It was nice. They had tea bitches.
Krista: We all like tea.
Carrie: They followed us with tea.
Becca: That sounds great.
Carrie: It was lovely.
Becca: They can just like follow you right out the door with tea and into your car with tea and away from their terrible lives with tea.
Krista: You ever never, but they were never alone where they, there was always, at least two of them.
Carrie: We were like, do you want tea? No, we can't have no tea.
Krista: Yeah, no, there's always at least two of them. So they, you know, one could spy on the other one, never alone.
Becca: Yeah. And under those circumstances, you know, where you're so heavily watched, it must be really difficult to develop an identity apart from the group or apart from other people. Identity formation is so integral in making your own decision and having the confidence to leave, you know? And I’m really, really, just in awe people that have been able to get out of that situation and take that leap of faith in themselves and in the outside world, and like met the challenges of the outside world and made mistakes and grown from them and, you know, turned around to be support systems for other people that are leaving. Cause it's super powerful. And I think it's like a huge testament to how, you know, how much strength you can tap into, even if you don't know you're tapping into it, just putting one foot in front of another and taking it one day at a time.
Krista: Have you dated a Kingston, Carrie Anne?
Carrie: Maybe close to it. Once they tried to get it high school.
Becca: How many kids do you want to have?
Carrie: That was probably what it was. And I was oh, I got to go by. And their last names too, you don't know that you're talking to one a lot because you don't get their last name. You get the Knights, you get a different name. So you don't know if they're one of them, you don't, they hide it.
Becca: Yeah, the Knights…
Krista: Yeah they sound like they would have been fun and they stole a bunch of gold. So like, you could have gone places, Hey, you, you were…
Carrie: I heard they party.
Krista: Why wouldn't you?
Becca: Just like gold party out in the desert.
Krista: And they capitalized on it. And they were able to, which is funny.
Carrie: Yeah they knew right where the gold was, because everybody knows, you know, maybe it's a little sniffing around. That's all it took. Those boys knew where that stuff was. I bet they're more careful with their stuff now.
Krista: Yeah. I think everybody's a little work careful with their stuff now for the most part, the crazy world out there. So I like their, Utah and Colorado, why are those the two states that have that?
Becca: Whenever Utah, Colorado, Russia, Wisconsin.
Carrie: When you look at Mapquest, my friend showed me the other day. When you look at the Colorado Plateau, it almost looks like it's a big eye in the United States. Like everything else is, you know, kind of flattened out. You get a little bit of mountain over here on the east, but not much, but there's this great big right in the middle where Utah, Colorado, and a little bit of a New Mexico and Arizona, you should look at it from the top. It's, it's different. If there's something here.
Becca: It's a really powerful spot. That's really powerful. No, when I first moved out there, I didn't mean, I meant might've been the elevation, but I felt really unbalanced and it was like, whoa, there's just so much coming through here.
Carrie: There's a lot of magical implements. I could go. I could do a whole show about the magical implements around me that I know of.
Krista: When they move out of like their favorite wife's houses, can we buy one? Cause they are nice. The nice ones are nice.
Becca: I wonder if they're going to get foreclosed on when they get seized or whatever.
Carrie: They've already been seizing homes. I've already heard about that. That's been going on.
Krista: Yeah, that's been, that's been going on for a little while now.
Carrie: There’s going to be more, cause they're going to find more schemes because they had people employed just to do schemes and find this kind of stuff with grant writing. That's how it started.
Krista: I want one of their houses though. The nice ones, the ones that have like the nice granite countertops and the big old kitchens and big living room.
Becca: The favorite wife house.
Krista: Yeah. I want the favorite wave house and I don't necessarily want all the rooms, but like kinda.
Carrie: I don't even know what they need them for. They're not partying. They're not having a big party guests over.
Becca: All the kids.
Krista: All those damn little kids running around, just everywhere. They don’t have that much stuff. That's easier to keep it clean that way.
Carrie: That’s a good point. That's probably why they don't have so much stuff.
Becca: Like the kids break it all. We can't have anything.
Krista: No, they do. That's that's a fact that is a true fact. Kids break everything. Now, the Kingstons, they'll find a way they'll either fizzle out completely or find a way to survive, you know, or one of them boys will go absolutely insane and like start an offshoot.
Becca: Right. I mean, they might be ripe for a new offshoot.
Carrie: They're going to have to address the genetic problem.
Krista: Yeah. Start turning blue. Like the people in the Appalachian mountains.
Becca: Oh, the Fugates. Yeah. I heard they died out around the seventies, but they were blue.
Carrie: They were blue.
Krista: Literally, literally blue because of genetics because of incest and just the way the genetics came out and it didn't happen to all of them, but some of them.
Becca: Fascinating.
Krista: And now enough, so maybe, maybe this thick tongue thing will be the new blue. You got to think…
Carrie: There's more than just that there's, there's severe retardation. There's missing limbs you know, a lot of mental, severe men…
Krista: Yeah. Physical and mental deformities from.
Carrie: It's not fair to those units.
Becca: No. And it's, it is interesting. Cause it does function as you know, all for the good of the family, all for the good of the group. You know, suffer in this world for about, for like, you know, privileged places in the next world. It's intense a couple generations and just to see the, the organism that the group’s become and just how it grinds its individual members just within its cogs.
Carrie: Very quickly. It jumped out too. Huh? Within a couple of generations, like you said.
Becca: Dogma’s a bitch. You’ve got to talk to people with varying viewpoints.
Krista: Yes. If somehow one of you Kingston's hear this, you're weird. I'm weird, but you're weirder. What do you feel? How do you feel they're going to end if they end?
Carrie: I suspect pretty soon in a couple of generations anyway, but Utah in particular has, is a hotbed, but geneticists are talking about it. It's worse than, they say it is the worst in the world right now, is Utah.
Krista: So wonder why other countries think we're weird?
Becca: So if y'all are listening get out there and fuck other people, get out of Utah.
Krista: The pool, open your gene pool up. If you want to continue on.
Becca: Yeah. Get out there and consensually fuck other people. I promise. It's fun.
Krista: Yes.
Becca: That’s my thoughts on it. I wanna just say a word about our Patreon. We're revamping our Patreon this week for as little as $2 a month, you can support us and get ad-free episodes. You can also get access to unaired episodes and bonus content and free gifts from the gang, every - annually. We thank y'all so much for listening. We couldn't do this without ya. Season Two so far has been just kind of next level for all of us. And we're getting a better sense of what we're doing and what we've got to offer. We've been going through a bit of a restructure and we're just really stoked for what the future holds. So join us on Patriot and get some more juice. Expert interviews.
Krista: Silliness.
Becca: JuicyBitz.
Krista: JuicyBitz!
Becca: Let us know what…and join us on Facebook and on Instagram and let us know what kind of topics you want us to cover because we are open to suggestions.
Krista: All the time. I'm sure there's things in your states or areas that we don't get to hear about, or, some in our stumbling upon things that happen, we may not so share them with us. We would really, really enjoy it.
Becca: Yeah. And we do have a strange synchronicity going on in this group. If you mentioned something, it has a high likelihood of tying in in ways that are unexpected and kind of magical. So go for it. We'd love to hear from you.
Carrie: Get juicy!
Becca: Get juicy, but not with your cousins.
Krista: No, don't do that. That's bad for everybody.
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