Kingston Clan

The Kingston Clan, officially known as the Latter Day Church of Christ, is a Mormon fundamentalist sect whose family and religious authority comes into sharp focus through the account of a teenage member forced into marriage and later able to reach the police. The episode made the group a subject of highly publicized criminal trials and returned Mormon fundamentalists to national attention.

Identity and Leadership

Based in Salt Lake County, the Kingston Clan is described as having about fifteen hundred members. It was led by patriarch Paul Kingston, a lawyer who was married to at least twenty-five women and had fathered about two hundred children. The book identifies John Kingston, a businessman, and his brother David as members of the group and central figures in the case that exposed its internal family relationships.

The 1998 Case

In May 1998, a teenage girl contacted police from a truck stop in northern Utah. She reported that her father, John, had taken her out of high school after her sixteenth birthday and compelled her to become David’s fifteenth wife. David was her uncle and was thirty-two years old. The account describes her efforts to leave: twice she ran away, but each time she was caught. After the second attempt, she sought help from her mother, who returned her to her father.

Escape and Public Consequences

John then took his daughter to a remote ranch near the Utah–Idaho border that the Kingstons used as a reeducation camp for wives and children considered disobedient. After he left, she escaped, walked five miles along a dirt road, and reached a gas station, where she called the police. John and David were arrested and convicted in highly publicized trials: John was found guilty of child abuse and jailed for twenty-eight weeks, while David received a ten-year prison sentence for incest and unlawful sexual conduct. The convictions pushed Mormon fundamentalist communities back into public view.

Family Authority and State Law

The case shows how authority within the Kingston Clan operated through overlapping family and religious relationships: kinship did not shield a young member from decisions imposed by older relatives, and seeking refuge within her family did not secure her safety. The ranch’s use as a place for correcting wives and children deemed disobedient extended that authority beyond the household. The criminal convictions, in turn, marked a point at which state law intervened against conduct defended or maintained within the group’s own family order.

Public Visibility and Its Limits

The Kingston convictions brought Mormon fundamentalists back into public attention, but the response was uneven: the trials made front-page news in Utah without immediately attracting the same attention elsewhere. The book places this renewed scrutiny against the long afterlife of the 1953 Short Creek raid, whose backlash had helped shield fundamentalist communities from sustained state interference for decades. Later prosecutions would draw wider media coverage, making the Kingston case an early sign of how criminal proceedings could expose private community practices to public and legal examination without, by themselves, resolving the conflict over religious authority and state law.

From Local Case to National Attention

The Kingston convictions did not immediately make the same impression beyond Utah that they had made within the state. The book sets them beside the prosecution of Tom Green, charged with bigamy and first-degree felony rape of a child in April 2000: unlike the Kingston trials, which drew front-page coverage in Utah, Green’s prosecution became a wider media spectacle, and reports on his plural marriages appeared in outlets from Seattle to Miami. The contrast places the Kingston case at an early point in a growing public scrutiny of fundamentalist polygamy, rather than presenting it as the moment that scrutiny reached its widest audience.