ELDORADO, Texas - When it came time to pick a Texas Ranger to wiggle through a little hole into the Temple Annex vault of the YFZ Ranch in April 2008, Sgt. Jesus "Jesse" Valdez was the one.
The powers that be figured Valdez, a Ranger on the short and small side, was little enough to get through the hole by the vault door during a historic raid at the Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado, Valdez testified Tuesday in the child sexual assault trial of a polygamist sect member.
"I removed everything but my outer clothing to make myself as skinny as I could," Valdez said.
Jurors and defendant Raymond Merril Jessop, a 38-year-old member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, looked on as a photograph was projected on a screen showing the hole authorities had somehow carved out beside the door.
Law-enforcement officers had already tried getting in through a window several times with no luck, Valdez told the seven-man, five woman jury in Jessop's trial.
Jessop is accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old in November 2004. Prosecutors say he had taken her as a spiritual wife.
In early April last year, authorities were executing a search warrant at the YFZ Ranch and looking for an underage girl abused at the hands of a husband. The call that led to the search warrant turned out to be a hoax, and the girl was never found.
But Valdez and the other officers were on a serious mission to find her during the raid.
He was one of a succession of Texas Rangers who testified before a jury Tuesday -- when prosecution and defense attorneys weren't wrangling over evidence out of earshot of jurors.
Much of that evidence was collected during the raid and, in particular, from the vault.
Valdez testified that the door to the vault wasn't just a regular door.
"It was like a bank door," he said, describing it as 18 inches to 2 feet thick and made of steel.
When he crawled through the hole, he said he found boxes and boxes, as well as safes, full of family records, marriage records, sermon notes, bishop's documents, priesthood records, cassette tapes and other items, he testified.
In all, authorities removed three trailer loads of items from the ranch on April 9.
Prosecutors want jurors to learn that an underage girl was struggling to give birth at the Yearning for Zion Ranch in August 2005 for about three days, but taking her a hospital wasn't an option, according to a dictation or "priesthood record" prosecutors contend is from Warren Jeffs, the imprisoned leader of the polygamist sect.
"I knew that the girl being 16 years old," Jessop could be jailed, said the document. "The associated governmental pressures against the Prophet" -- Jeffs - also ruled out going to the hospital.
A nurse and midwife were also in attendance during the labor, according to the document the prosecutor read aloud in court Monday morning.
Lead defense attorney Mark Stevens was indignant at the document being offered as evidence, saying it spoke to endangerment of a mother and child -- not his client's guilt or innocence on a charge of sexual assault of a child.
But lead prosecutor Eric Nichols said it provided needed evidence.
"This is the pregnancy that resulted from the sexual assault of (the victim) when she was a child," Nichols said.
Prosecutors contend Jessop had taken the girl as one of eight "purported" wives in addition to a Utah woman to whom he's legally married, according to court papers prosecutors filed on "extraneous offenses."
If convicted, Jessop could serve two to 20 years in prison. He also faces a bigamy charge in connection with a 2006 incident. But that charge is to be tried in a separate case.
E-mail reporter Trish Choate at choatet(at)shns.com.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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