She left a fundamentalist Mormon cult. Then her children went missing. ‘Somebody came by the shop and hauled off with them’
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In the Western part of the country, a disturbing pattern is unfolding: children of mothers who fled a fundamentalist polygamous Mormon sect are vanishing — and their families fear it’s part of a radical religious agenda.
In the latest case, Elizabeth Roundy of Jefferson County, Idaho, says her two youngest children, 13-year-old Allen Larand Fischer and 15-year-old Rachelle Leray Fischer, disappeared last month while she was at Bible class.
“My children asked if they could go down to the shop to get on the internet…so they could watch videos while I went to the class,” Roundy recently told EastIdahoNews.com. “I allowed them to do it, and that wasn’t very smart of me. I let them go down there, and when I came back to get them, they were gone. Somebody came by the shop and hauled off with them.”
According to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, a report was filed on June 22 after the teens went missing from their home in Monteview, Idaho. An Amber Alert was issued the next day. They haven’t been seen since.
Authorities suspect the teens may have returned to the FLDS community in Trenton, Utah, where they previously lived. They believe the disappearance was not random.
“Their mother was previously an FLDS member,” said Jennifer Fullmer, a public information officer with the sheriff’s office. “She was exiled and had to leave the children there. And then when she finally got custody of them, she brought them back to her hometown of Monteview.”
In 2021, Roundy was granted full custody of all three children, who she shares with her ex-husband and their father, Nephi Fischer.
“We believe that [her children] wanted to go back to the FLDS lifestyle,” Fullmer added.
Still, investigators don’t believe the children simply ran away. “There’s no buses. There’s no trains. It’s out in the middle of the desert,” Fullmer told PEOPLE. “Mom’s belief is that somebody from the FLDS picked up the children.”
“I believe they were watching and waiting for the right moment,” Roundy said. “I’ve seen their vehicles driving by, even past the shop where the kids disappeared Friday night.”
Roundy also believes that the disappearance of her children was an orchestrated attempt by FLDS members to reclaim them for the church, spurred by a chilling 2022 prophecy from imprisoned cult leader Warren Jeffs.
“It’s terrifying,” Roundy said. “The things they told us to do when I was still part of it were erratic and manipulative. You never know what they’re capable of.”
Jeffs is currently serving a life sentence for child sexual assault in Texas after arranging marriages between underage girls and older men. His 2022 “revelation” directed followers to “consecrate and return their children to the church by any means necessary” and prepare them to become “pure” by dying and being resurrected.
Content retrieved from: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/missing-flds-children-mormon-cult-b2786564.html.
