Inside private world of polygamist ranch

There is a country road that snakes out, through the scrub oak and rocky soil, from a tiny place called Eldorado, Texas. Population: 1,900 or so. Good people. Old town. Lots of churches.

But drive down that road, and off in the distance it looms on the horizon like some alien structure. It’s the Temple of Yearning for Zion.

That's what they call their little town: Yearning for Zion. Their utopia.

But here is where the state claims there was an immediate danger to children and a pervasive pattern of sexual abuse and neglect.

"This is a classroom that hasn't been cleaned up after the state people did their search."

We have been given unprecedented access inside.

“These are the lower grade classrooms.”

People, schools, homes. To tell their side of the story.

Five years ago this land – 1,700 acres in all -- was utterly empty, and exotic animals wandered. It was a hunting preserve.

And now? For 700 people, it's home.

They've wrenched untold tons of rock from the soil they've enriched for farming.

Richard: We try to focus on the natural foods, whole foods, organic foods.

There's a fleet of trucks over the horizon that way, shops for fabricating wood and metal.

A school. A meeting hall. A temple -- and annex. Every single limestone block from which these buildings were made was cut from the ground right here.

Rich: Yeah, I like it up here.

But as we look at it all from the summit of the limestone mountain they've made, Richard Jessop’s heart is not really in the tour.

Richard: They've wronged a whole community here. And we're a peaceful people.

He's alone as we speak, his family – including his seven kids -- taken.

He wanders the empty house and shows us the poster his kids used to divvy up bathroom cleaning chores.

"This is where those four older boys live."

The school's empty classrooms. It all confirms, he says, what he's known, himself, for years.

Richard: We've got enemies. There are people that have been associated with our religion for years and years. And they get disaffected, disinterested, bad feelings. And it’s just a bunch of lies. But the bad part about it is we've got officials that have believed it.

The whole place has the feel of life interrupted.

Keith Morrison: Still got their jackets hanging on…

Rich: Well, yes. Of course it’s not like it happened easy. It was an uprooting.

Rich says evidence was seized from every home, every building, every classroom.

Every family lost precious photos, paperwork, computers.

Rich: Any locked doors, they just blasted through them.

And then we understand his bottom line when he tells us the community lost its temple.

Rich: We pleaded with these people that there's nothing in there. Leave that building alone. It’s a sacred place.

It’s a place that has always been off limits to visitors, including media. The authorities used hydraulic tools to force the door open and seized documents.

Rich: We believe that the presence of God is in that building. And when its desecrated like it has been, it’s useless.

Keith Morrison: What are you going to do?

Rich: As far as I’m concerned, set fire to that building.

Inside, authorities took note of that bed, the one some imply is used for some sex ceremony as they deflower young brides. Police notes describe "bed linens disturbed," a strand of woman's hair on the pillow.

Rich: To me that's so disgusting that some immoral mind can apply their mentality to it. In temple work doing sacred ordinances, there's fasting and praying. And it’s just not that uncommon for someone to be fatigued and have to lay down.

But the big question in all this trouble has been about the sexual abuse of young girls and women, and illegal forced marriages. There are allegations that it has happened here -- things Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott says are simply unacceptable.

Attorney General Abbott: If it is a religious belief to sexually assault a girl once she reaches puberty, should we accept that? No.

The thing is, says Rich, nobody here would accept that either.

Rich: Well, I would just invite him to go right into his very own community and scoop up 400 people, pull them out of their homes, ransack their closets, take every record we can find, and scrutinize it to the letter, and you tell me what you're going to find.

Keith Morrison: They found a few problems here?

Rich: That's their allegation. There's no abuse, period. There's healthy, happy children. And they've all been snuffed away.

Instead, he says, the outside world seems to focus only on their practice of plural marriage, and all anyone wants to know is how many wives they have. It’s a question he himself did not wish to answer.

Rich: Well, that's kind of a stupid question. I think the media, the public knows the way we live.

There's a strange, almost science fiction feel to a town of vanished children. Its empty. Grieving happens in private.

We encounter a couple, clinging together, coaxing a garden to life. Rulon and Lorene. They say they are by no means alone here with their more typical American marriage. It’s just the two of them and their six kids -- until this morning.

Lorene, it turns out, is one of the tearful women just returned from that sports stadium, where she watched her children bused off to foster care. She worries most about Natalie, her only daughter.

Lorene: She's always been very attached, she doesn't do well without me.

Authorities said they'd attempt not to separate siblings, but couldn't guarantee it as they spread the children around the vast state of Texas.

Keith Morrison: You don't know where they've gone?

Rulon and Lorene: No.

Keith Morrison: Have they gone to one place or more than one place?

Rulon: We've heard more than one.

Lorene: We've heard rumors that they're split up.

During the long weeks in the coliseum, Lorene says, she and the other women were unable to communicate with their husbands.

Lorene: They didn't want us talking to them. They feel like they're predators.

Rulon: They feel like the husbands are just criminals. They haven't even talked to us. I have not been served any papers. I don't know what my charges are.

Lorene: I haven't been served papers.

The house is large, and, like Richard’s, empty, eerie.

We ask to see photos of the children. Anything recent, we discover, was seized in the raid. But unlike most of the families here, they managed to save one album. It's all they have of their children now.

Lorene sits on the bed and relives the horror of captivity in the coliseum.

Lorene: We were on the floor, the concrete floor, and there's rows and rows and rows and rows of cots. We've been taken from our nice, clean homes, and brought together into a place where the children are so close one child coughs and the whole room gets sick. Every night there would be children throwing up. I don't feel like they had the child's best interest in mind at all.

Keith Morrison: You coping? You two?

Rulon: We're alive, but we're only part way here.

And this very morning, Lorene tells us, was her 3-year-old's birthday.

Lorene: He turned 3 today. His third birthday and they took his mother away.

But surely a government agency dedicated to child protection would not intentionally create this kind of pain without good cause.

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