Grand Marais trial over North Shore land sale gets into the inner workings of Warren Jeffs cult

GRAND MARAIS, MINN. – Elissa Wall hasn’t seen a cent of the more than $10 million dollars she’s owed from a lawsuit against self-described prophet and polygamous cult leader Warren Jeffs.

He doesn’t have a bank account, she testified Wednesday afternoon.

Wall is trying to collect money from a land sale conducted, on paper, by his brother Seth Jeffs and his Montana-based Emerald Industries LLC. She’s convinced that Seth Jeffs used Warren Jeffs’ money to buy 40 acres here in 2018, property that he sold in 2023 for $130,000.

“I’m here to recover the money given to Seth Jeffs,” she told the Cook County jury.

According to court documents, Seth Jeffs claims he used his own money to buy the land. He’s expected to testify on Thursday.

Warren Jeffs is also named in the lawsuit, but he’s currently in a Texas prison where he is serving a life sentence for child sexual assault. He’s still in the leadership role he inherited with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, according to Wall.

The fundamentalist sect broke away from Mormonism after the latter moved away from polygamy.

Wall testified that the church has shell organizations it funnels its money through. Warren Jeffs is skilled in bookkeeping and tax laws and he’s at the top of the hierarchy. Money is never in his name, she said.

Seth Jeffs, she claims, has benefited from the financial arrangement.

Wall’s attorney, Richard Furlong, shared with the jury financial logs discovered by Wall that showed payments to Seth Jeffs from October 2008 through August 2018. Some come from trust, some are listed as cash. Most are about $1,000; the largest is $62,000.

Warren Jeffs’ name isn’t on any of the payments, noted Seth Jeffs’ attorney, William Paul.

Still, Wall is convinced that the money is divvied up by Warren Jeffs, who told his brother to start Emerald Industries as a way to hide his money. She maintains ties to the church as an advocate for those who have left the church or are looking to sever connections.

Wall testified that her knowledge of the inner financial workings come from years of experience.

“Seth Jeffs doesn’t owe you money, does he?” Paul asked her.

Much of his cross examination relied on reading from court documents and pressing Wall on specifics: the dates of financial transactions between the Jeffs brothers, the names of Warren Jeffs’ agents who funnel his money.

About $60,000 from the Seth Jeffs’ property sale has been frozen by the bank, according to his attorney.

Asked how much money she was hoping to get from Seth Jeffs, Walls said she didn’t know.

“We have to determine how much,” she said. “We are here to collect that judgment.”

She said its hard to quantify how much money has passed from brother to brother. Maybe thousands, maybe millions.

Warren Jeffs has never faced Wall in a courtroom, not now and not when she won the sizable judgment against him in 2017. Wall, who was born into a polygamous family and married off to a first cousin when she was 14, sued Warren Jeffs and the church for damages in 2005.

The case meandered through the Utah court system for more than a decade. In the early parts, Jeffs was on the lam and listed on the FBI’s most wanted list.

He was captured during a routine traffic stop in Las Vegas in 2006.

Seth Jeffs, too, has had legal troubles. He pleaded guilty to food stamp fraud in 2016. Before that, he was convicted of hiding Warren Jeffs from authorities in 2006.

Seth Jeffs’ purchase of the land here in 2018 set off alarms in the community.

After leaving the church, Wall wrote the New York Times’ bestselling memoir “Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs.”