EAGLE MOUNTAIN, Utah — The neighborhood looks like any other in the upper-middle-class suburbs: sprawling homes with porch swings and manicured lawns strewn with kids' bicycles.
But beneath the all-American veneer, much is different in this upscale subdivision 40 miles south of Salt Lake City.
"Pretty much everyone who lives here is polygamous," said Mary, who gave a recent tour of the area and who is the second wife of a Utah man. She, like other polygamists interviewed for this story, asked to be identified only by her first name for fear of prosecution. "There may be one or two houses that aren't, but virtually everyone else here is one of ours."
In the weeks since the arrest of Warren Jeffs, the polygamous sect leader who made the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list for allegations that he facilitated the rape and marriage of underage girls, there have been constant questions about the pervasiveness and peril of polygamy in Utah.
Mainstream Mormons in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with 12 million members worldwide, have asserted that all polygamous groups -- including Jeffs' Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- are aberrations in a state where the influential Mormon church banned polygamy more than a century ago.
But Utah's attorney general, pro-polygamy activists and other experts estimate there are 40,000 people living in polygamous families or communities like this one across the western U.S., with a large portion in suburban Utah.
Although it is rare that allegations of abuse are as systemic or egregious as those reported in the community led by Jeffs, virtually every other polygamous sect practicing in Utah today has been linked to alleged financial, sexual or other improprieties. Federal grand juries in Arizona and state investigators in Nevada reportedly are probing polygamist practices.
In the wake of Jeffs' arrest, Utah polygamists have come forward to defend their faith, values and lifestyle.
They say plural marriage fulfills the mission of all Mormons to be fruitful and multiply and to ascend to the highest reaches of heaven. They say it breaks their hearts that the mainstream church in 1890 abandoned polygamy -- what one expert called "the process of polishing the soul" -- to appease the federal government and ensure Utah would earn statehood. They point to communities like Eagle Mountain and Rocky Ridge, where polygamous families appear to be happy and prosperous, often with multiple wives of one husband living in palatial homes with adjoining yards.
