The arrest of a Colorado woman for allegedly impersonating an abused girl has cast doubt on the tip-off that led to a massive police raid on a polygamist compound in Texas.

A total of 416 children were taken from the remote 1,700-acre Yearning For Zion (YFZ) ranch after an April 3 raid on the breakaway Mormon sect of the jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs.

The controversial operation against the 10,000-strong Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was provoked by a call to an abuse hotline from a 16-year-old girl who identified herself as Sarah.

The caller said that she had an eight-month-old baby and was pregnant with another child after her 50-year-old “husband” forced her to have sex. Authorities have been unable to locate Sarah despite interviewing the children, and doubts persist as to whether she really exists.

The whole operation has been thrown into question by the arrest on Wednesday of a Colorado Springs woman named Rozita Swinton.

Ms Swinton, 33, is accused of making calls in which she claimed to be an abused child being held in a basement. She has also allegedly masqueraded as a desperate mother who threatened to abandon a newborn baby and commit suicide.

Flora Jessop, a former church member who runs a centre for teenage girls trying to escape the polygamist sect, told the Denver Post yesterday that she received a call from Ms Swinton claiming to be an abuse victim named Sarah on March 30.

Texas authorities say that a girl with the same name also called a Texas hotline on March 29 claiming that she was suffering abuse in the polygamist compound. The hotline call was not made public until after the raid on the YFZ ranch. “It does kind of indicate [Ms Swinton] made those calls,” Ms Jessop told the Denver Post. “There was no press on it at the time.”

Ms Jessop said that she recorded between 30 to 40 hours of daily phone conversations with Ms Swinton, who alternately claimed to be Sarah, Sarah’s twin sister Laura and Laura’s friend. She would call after 8.30pm at night and speak softly, explaining that others in the compound were sleeping. “She was very convincing,” Ms Jessop said. “She very much thought this out.”

Ms Jessop said that she confronted Ms Swinton when she called her two hours after her release on Thursday claiming to be Laura’s friend. Ms Swinton admitted that her name was Rose, she said.

The raid has left a judge struggling to cope with the largest child custody case in American history. Judge Barbara Walther complained of a “free for all” as hundreds of state-appointed lawyers packed her courtroom and an overflow room three blocks away to represent each child. She must decide whether to return the children to their parents or to place them in foster care because of the risk of underage sex.

Angie Voss, a child welfare investigator, testified that the officials who raided the polygamist compound were told that there was no girl known as Sarah. But interviews have now identified five Sarahs, including three who could have been the girl who called to report abuse.

“We learnt that a few of the girls know of the Sarah we were looking for and that she’d been seen last week and she had a baby,” Ms Voss said.

Ms Voss acknowledged that most of the children showed no signs of physical or sexual abuse. But she said that at least five girls under18 were pregnant or have children – with one becoming a mother at the age of 13.

She told the judge that they should remain in state care because they were “at risk”.

“They will continue to grow up in an environment where young women have sex with older men and young boys grow into adult men and have sex with young children,” she said.

The sect is complaining that the raid – larger even than the infamous Short Creek raid in 1953, when 236 children were taken from the polygamist sect – violates its religious freedom.

Case notes

— 350 Lawyers involved in case

— 139 Women accompanied the children

— Age of husband of the girl whose call led to case is 50

— Number of wives he had before “marrying” the teenager = 6

— 27 Teenage boys, in addition to the 416 children, have been sent to a delinquent facility

Source: Agencies

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