Fischer learned in 1999 that his 72-year-old father had been stripped of his three wives by sect leaders for supposed disloyalty. FLDS foes estimate that 250 plural families have been similarly torn apart, with wives redistributed like heads of cattle and children told to call a stranger Father.
"In the annihilation of my family, Warren Jeffs called the shots," Fischer said, his voice trembling with evident rage.
Like many who leave the FLDS, Fischer is shunned as a traitor. Even his mother refuses to talk to him. But like a long-lost uncle who offers a hand in times of need, other outcasts have discovered they can always call "Dr. Dan."
Through his charity, the Diversity Foundation, Fischer has provided shelter and counseling to hundreds of so-called lost boys, teens like Steed who are expelled from polygamist enclaves for alleged moral violations. Critics say the real reason for their expulsion is polygamy's brutal math: For a few men to have many wives, the rest have to be removed from competition.
"He's a remarkable man," Utah Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff said of Fischer. "He has done more for the lost boys than everyone else combined. I know he doesn't like to brag about it, but he has spent millions."
Fischer has also aided women who left the FLDS with their children -- most notably Carolyn Jessop, whose 2007 memoir, "Escape," became a bestseller.
"Without him, I would not have survived," Jessop said, recalling that Fischer harbored her and her eight children after she fled in 2003, even as she was hunted by the FLDS elder she had been forced to marry when she was 18 and he was 50.
But it is by paying private investigators and attorneys to expose his former religion's seamier side that Fischer has had the biggest effect.
After testimony from a child bride whom a Fischer sleuth tracked down and persuaded to go public, Jeffs was convicted in Utah last year of being an accomplice to rape for arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old to her 19-year-old cousin. He was sentenced to two consecutive terms of five years to life in prison.
Spurred by a lawsuit that Fischer funded, Utah persuaded a court in 2005 to take over an FLDS trust that owned nearly all the land on which sect members built houses along the Utah-Arizona border.
Fischer was raised in a secluded farming community outside Salt Lake City that outsiders derisively called Polyg-ville.
