By PAUL A. ANTHONY, Scripps Howard News Service

Nancy Barlow is an American housewife.
She smiles as she talks, cutting bananas into slices as she stands over the kitchen counter in her modest four-bedroom home.
She has pinned up flashcards for preschool lessons the next morning. Dinner will come soon, but first the piles of blackening bananas must be peeled and cut so they can be turned into dried fruit snacks.

It was called the place of refuge -- hundreds of acres in Schleicher County, Texas as isolated from the world as the people who would live there.
For Warren Jeffs, the self-declared prophet of the polygamous sect that owns the land, it was a new hope, a retreat for his closest allies to continue with God's work while they awaited the destruction of everyone around them.

A high percentage of families at a Texas polygamous compound abused or neglected their children -- and more than a quarter of girls age 12 and older were forced into underage marriage, according to a final report from child welfare officials released today.

ELDORADO, Texas -- "We need you now."With those four words, Angie Voss and her team rolled into action.They left the Schleicher County Sheriff's Office, drove five minutes on County Road 300, and pulled up to the gate of the YFZ Ranch, home to hundreds of devotees of a polygamist sect.

Life hasn't been particularly kind to Dan Barlow.The soft-spoken retiree, now 76, saw three children taken during the infamous Short Creek raid of 1953. He got them back, fathered many more and rose to prominence in life becoming mayor of Colorado City, Ariz. and his involvement through the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.That changed in 2004.

Of nearly 170 mothers whose children have been removed from the Texas compound of a fundamentalist Mormon sect, Pamela Jeffs Jessop now stands alone.

Texas authorities are holding in protective custody a days-old baby boy born to a woman from a polygamy sect as they investigate to determine whether she is a minor.