The mysterious vanishing of two teenagers from Idaho has brought widespread focus back to a polygamous religious sect, whose imprisoned leader has ominously predicted a doomsday scenario, potentially linked to the disappearance.

Rachelle Fischer, 15, and her 13-year-old brother Allen vanished from their Monteview home on June 22. They remain missing more than a week later.

While numerous state agencies are diligently searching for the missing siblings, their heartbroken mother is unsure if they were abducted or voluntarily left home.

Regardless of the situation, she is convinced that they were lured by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). The sect’s leader, Warren Jeffs, a convicted pedophile currently serving a life sentence in a Texas prison, has proclaimed that children need to be sacrificed in anticipation of a catastrophic event he forecasts will occur in the coming years.

‘I’m worried their lives are threatened,’ says Elizabeth Roundy, the teens’ mother who was banished by the sect in 2014, and since has disavowed it.

‘My hope is for their safety and freedom, away from the manipulation and brainwashing.’

Roundy, 51, detailed her experiences with the FLDS in an interview with the Daily Mail.

Her story shows how the sect started tearing apart her family when Rachelle was a toddler and Allen a newborn, shedding light on why they went – and are likely to remain – missing.

MODERN-DAY POLYGAMY

The Church of Latter Day Saints used to consider polygamy – specifically a man having more than one wife – necessary for a family to achieve the highest level in the ‘celestial kingdom,’ the sect’s idea of heaven. 

Although the church banned the practice in 1890, and all 50 states outlaw it, several offshoot sects have continued engaging in plural marriage.

Among those was the community where Roundy, 51, grew up in Monteview, 50 miles northwest of Idaho Falls.

Her own father had 26 children by two wives before taking on seven more wives later in his life, she says.

At age 24, she was sent to the FLDS stronghold along the Utah-Arizona border to marry a man she had never met – Nephi Fischer, who by that point already had a wife and children.

Together, Roundy and Fischer, 51, had five children: Jonathan, now 23, Benjamin, 20, Elintra, 18, Rachelle, and Allen.

Life in a plural marriage wasn’t easy. But Roundy says the arrangement became much harder when Rulon Jeffs, FLDS’s longtime leader died in 2002 and was replaced by his erratic son, Warren.

As the church’s prophet, Warren Jeffs, now 69, is said to be a direct mouthpiece of God and has authority over adherents’ lives, including marriages, living situations and eternal fate.

As he solidified his spiritual and financial power over the community – and grew his family to include about 85 wives – law enforcement investigated the church-owned construction company and other business dealings, as well as male community leaders for sexually abusing and impregnating underage girls.

Much of the flock fled the church’s base in the strip of Northern Arizona and Southern Utah north of the Grand Canyon, creating smaller FLDS colonies in Texas, Colorado, North and South Dakota. 

Some of those strongholds are surrounded by large fences to block police and prosecutors’ watchful eyes.

Jeffs was arrested in 2006 for sex crimes related to his marriages to girls aged 12 and 14 in Texas. He was convicted in 2009 and sentenced to life in prison.

A CHURCH IN FLUX, A FAMILY RIPPED APART

Other men in the sect tried to take over leadership of the church once Jeffs landed behind prison walls. But he has managed to maintain his role as FLDS’s prophet from prison in Texas.

Soon after his conviction, he started using his family members to deliver a series of prophecies and strict orders to his newly-dispersed flock. 

Among them was prohibiting couples from having children, let alone sex, and restricting foods followers were allowed to eat.

‘If he couldn’t have something, he felt nobody else should have it, either,’ says Tonia Tewell, who leads Holding Out Help, a Utah-group aiding people who flee polygamous groups.

Concerned that some members weren’t falling in line, Jeffs allegedly annulled marriages and kicked members out of the church whom he and his minions considered unworthy.

Those included Roundy’s ‘sister wife’ – the term for a woman also married to one’s husband – that woman’s two eldest sons, and Roundy’s own eldest, Jonathan, who was only 9 at the time. 

The church’s new rules forbade non-members from living with the FLDS members, forcing the four who had been excommunicated to occupy the second floor of the family home without interaction with Roundy and the others.

Roundy says Jonathan was abused physically and emotionally in that arrangement. 

She recalls the torture of hearing him calling for her from upstairs and not being able to console him. 

And she describes the pain of having to send him to live with a niece who then handed him off to somebody else not of Roundy’s choosing.

‘All he needed was a mother’s love,’ she told the Daily Mail while preparing loaves of sprouted wheat bread.

Around 2012, Jeffs cited new revelations for banishing some men from the community on grounds that they were sinners. 

Among them was Roundy’s husband, Nephi Fischer, who was directed to repent by moving away from his wives and children ten days after Allen – his youngest with Roundy – was born.

Although acknowledging it was a loss for her kids, she says his departure came as a relief.

‘He was kind of like a dictator, very controlling,’ she says. Fischer could not be reached for comment.

In his absence, Roundy and her four youngest children had to move out of the family home, then were allowed to move back in with her sister-wife and her kids, a living arrangement she describes as ‘really ugly’.

‘I’d take my children into my bedroom and lock the door to keep her and her kids from screaming at us all day,’ she recalls.

She then moved in with her brother, who accepted her children, including Jonathan, into his home, but decided Benjamin, her second oldest, was impure and couldn’t stay.

That set off a series of different living situations that involved Roundy being separated from at least one of her boys and at times both of her girls.

‘Of course I hated being away from them. But I was trying to be a good person and trying to obey because that’s what I was taught to do my entire life,’ she says.

BANISHMENT

A year and a half after her husband’s banishment, the church sent Roundy to work as a cook for its construction company in Wyoming, allowing her to take only Benjamin and baby Allen with her.

She had to leave her other children with her cousins, who then separated them, shifting their care to random community members, she says.

In 2014, Warren Jeffs had another jailhouse revelation: That some church members had killed unborn babies. She says Jeff’s brother called her back to Utah for an interview, asking if she had any miscarriages.

Roundy informed him that she had suffered two, the first from a fibroid, and the second from unknown causes. She told him she had wondered whether the fetus was harmed by Fischer’s insistence on having sex.

Jeffs accused her of sinning by having sex while pregnant, and sent her away with her son Benjamin to ‘repent.’

She expected only a brief exile, but ended up spending the next five years in Nebraska, her heart ‘was always aching’ for her other children, whom she had been instructed not to contact until the church gave her the green light.

She made do with jobs doing laundry, delivering newspapers and caring for infirm and elderly clients – gigs that allowed Benjamin to go with her. As hard as that time was for them both, she says it was also freeing.

‘I got to know people in the broader world and for the first time felt respected for the good I do and loved for who I was. It helped me realize how badly I was treated. Being away from the manipulation did me good,’ she says.

In 2017, she says Fischer reached out to her after hearing that the four children still in the FLDS community weren’t in loving homes.

She says she wanted to rescue them, but he convinced her not to risk the family’s status with the church and her own hopes of reuniting with the children she was forced to abandon.

Roundy came to disavow the sect after five years in Nebraska, then moved back to her hometown in Idaho with Benjamin in 2019, intent on getting her four other kids back.

BATTLING OVER CUSTODY — AND FAITH

Fischer, by that point, was back in the church’s good graces, and opposed to Roundy reconnecting with their children.

Nobody in the FLDS community would help her locate them, and police warned her against showing up in Utah and snatching them – a move that has caused the church to send other children from other families into hiding.

Roundy started working with Roger Hoole, a Utah lawyer who donates his services representing people leaving polygamous communities. Through the court system, she was able to bring Allen, Rachelle and Elintra to Idaho in 2020.

Jonathan, her eldest, was legally an adult by then, old enough to refuse to join them for fear, she says, that he would risk his chance for eternal salvation.

He could not be reached for this story.

But within days, Roundy’s legal victory would be challenged. Fischer showed up and tried to take the three children back to Utah, once by force and later by court order.

Roundy says her kids tried running away with their father the first time, but her brothers stopped them. 

Fisher returned with a court order to gather the children a few days later and they left with him, refusing to see her for 13 months until she won full custody in court in 2022.

It was a bittersweet victory. She held out hope that the three kids would thrive in the secular world and learn to think for themselves. But she knew they saw her as an apostate who threatened their shot at an afterlife.

‘Nephi taught them to hate me,’ she says.

Tewell, the Holding Out Help director who describes FLDS as ‘simply a human trafficking ring,’ has seen that dynamic play out with other mothers who have left FLDS and tried reconnecting with their children.

‘The message those kids get is loud and clear: You’ve got to get away from your mom in order to get into heaven,’ she says.

‘The trauma never, ever goes away and they have severe attachment disorders. It’s horrific.’

Elintra, Roundy’s eldest daughter was 16 when she disappeared from her mom’s place within a month of returning there under the custody order. 

Roundy doesn’t use the words ‘ran away’ to describe the situation, but doesn’t dispute them, either.

She saw and heard nothing from Elintra until she recently turned 18, old enough to live on her own. Roundy says she would see her driving by or watching the kids from afar.

She also claims her eldest daughter broke into her home a few months ago to steal birth certificates and baby pictures.

‘Why would she do that unless she was out to kidnap the kids?’ she asks. Elintra could not be reached for comment.

END TIMES NEARING

Meanwhile, Rachelle and Allen had been seeing a reunification counselor to help them acclimate to living with her and away from the church. 

Both balked at attending public school and insisted on wearing the kind of traditional, FLDS-style garb they grew up in. And both admonished her she said or did things forbidden among obedient FLDS members.

Roundy says that Elintra and Fisher had supplied the kids with burner phones to stay in touch and arranged secret places where they met up. 

She says she kept a close eye on them for fear that they would run away or be snatched back into the church’s grips.

They disappeared while she was at a bible study class and gave them permission to go to the family store to surf the internet.

‘I’m kicking myself, just kicking myself for letting them go,’ she says.

The Amber alert states that Rachelle is 5’5′, weighs 135 pounds, and has green eyes and brown hair and was last seen wearing a dark green prairie dress and her hair braided.

Allen is 5’9′, 135 pounds, has blue eyes and blonde hair, and was wearing a light blue shirt with blue jeans and black slip-on shoes.

Police believe they may be headed to an FLDS group in Mendon, Utah, but it’s not clear how they are traveling.

‘We don’t have any evidence on who they left with or where they went,’ says Jennifer Fullmer, spokesperson for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.

Police told Roundy they reached Fischer after the siblings went missing.

She says they said he told them he doesn’t know where his two youngest children are but seemed unconcerned about their disappearance.

‘I know he’s behind it,’ she says. ‘It’s a cult. Worse than a cult.’

In case Rachelle and Allen can read this, Roundy wants them both to know: ‘I love you and am sorry for all that you’ve been through. Please come home. All I want is your safety and wellbeing.’

But she acknowledges, it’s unlikely her message will get through.

She believes the church has put both kids in hiding, locked in rooms or behind FLDS colony walls until they turn 18 or until an end times mass rapture scenario that Jeffs predicts, whichever comes first.

She is particularly concerned about a revelation he had from prison, which he communicated through his family members in August 2022. 

In it, he called for members of the FLDS to die by February 2028 in order to ‘be translated,’ or reach heaven.

‘Translated people must die,’ he wrote twice in his prophecy, reviewed by the Daily Mail.

Experts on the sect and families of FLDS-involved children who have gone missing like Rachelle and Allen read the document as a possible sign of violence. 

They’re particularly concerned about a potential mass-suicide like the one in 1978 in Guyana when more than 900 Americans, followers of the People’s Temple cult leader Jim Jones, fatally drank a Kool-Aid type drink laced with potassium cyanide.

Former FLDS members say self-sacrifice is a theme commonly discussed by church elders. 

Besides, some note, Warren Jeffs attempted suicide in prison and has a history of self-harm. One of his sons, LeRoy ‘Roy’ Jeffs, who publicly spoke out about his father’s sexual abuse, ended his life 2019.

As Roundy tells it, it took her decades to deprogram from FLDS’s teachings and free herself from the pressures that come with the church’s insistence that there’s only one, strict path for spirituality.

‘My fear, my greatest fear is that my children don’t have that kind of time,’ she says.