Samuel Bateman, a self-declared prophet, was recently sentenced to 50 years in federal prison after acknowledging in a plea agreement that he had spiritually married 20 wives, including 10 underage girls. His intent in marrying the children, he admitted, “was to engage in sexual activity with minor girls.”
Just before the sentencing, The Salt Lake Tribune published a special two-part story on how a Utah couple helped bring Bateman to justice. That story is now the subject of an episode of RadioWest from KUER, “A Predator in Prophet’s Clothing.”
As KUER explains: The Tribune’s “Trent Nelson has been following the story for years, and he was there with his camera when FBI agents arrested Bateman.”
Bateman had been leading a small offshoot of the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Listen to Nelson and Jessica Schreifels, joined by the Sunstone Education Foundation’s Lindsay Hansen Park, talk about Bateman rise and fall here or below.
Read the stories here:
Part 1: A Utah couple infiltrated a new polygamous sect and helped put its abusive leader behind bars.
And the follow-up story: Samuel Bateman gets 50 years in prison after admitting he sexually abused his child ‘wives’ in FLDS offshoot
