Inside the complicated history of the Hildale infant graveyard


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HILDALE — If you drove by it, you probably wouldn’t notice it. Even from the sky, it just looks like a field.

But if you look closely, dozens of small grave markers come into focus.

The polygamous communities on the Utah/Arizona border call it “Babyland.”

“That’s going to be one of their biggest, deepest, darkest secrets,” said Sam Brower, a private investigator. “All around, it’s just a very sad place.”

It’s a place few have entered. Inside are rows of little headstones.

“People love their children and we’re no different here,” said Paulette Black, a Short Creek resident.

Black, who worked as a midwife, remembers the tiny resting spots being reserved for babies under a year old.

“If the mother had some kind of a genetic problem and the baby would die right soon after birth,” Black said.

She pushes back at rumors that haunt the Hildale graveyard explaining that it’s a sacred place for mothers to mourn.

“The town is a small town. And you get babies dying everywhere. If it was in a big city, a few babies like this is nothing,” Black said.

There’s no sign indicating that the property is the infant graveyard. There’s only a simple white fence that borders the road. Records from the property trust indicate that 182 babies are buried there.

“To me, this is a very sacred place,” said Terrill Musser, a Hildale resident.

Musser has a sister buried there.

“She was probably a week old. She was born and had a really hard time. Wasn’t fully developed. Just a lot of complications with the pregnancy,” Musser said.

For Brower, the weight of the heartache is matched only by the heavy concern he has about the history of this graveyard.

“There should have been more oversight. More watching what was going on out there,” Brower said.

Through his investigative work for the FBI, the Department of Labor and various attorneys general, Brower said the secretive FLDS stay one step ahead of the law and that the burial yard is no different.

“It’s also a place of real grieving where legitimate deaths have taken place,” Brower said.

Any death of a child or infant triggers a review by the Utah Department of Health — which can be a simple review of the death certificate or a full-scale investigation.

“Usually they’re looking at non-accidental trauma, homicide, abuse, medical neglect,” said Jenny Johnson with the Utah Department of Health.

Since the mid-1990s, Utah’s Child Fatality Review Committee automatically investigates any death under age 19. But when asked to pull the records for deaths in Hildale, nothing out of the ordinary came up.

“There’s nothing in our data that is a red flag for that area,” Johnson said.

The process hinges on accurate birth and death certificates making their way into the state’s system — paperwork Brower says the FLDS have manipulated or bypassed completely to avoid scrutiny.

“For instance, a mother, an underage mother, there is no record of her so there’s no record of the child; there’s just no records,” Brower said.

“There’s always a possibility anywhere in the state that somebody could have a child at home and actually not get a birth certificate to begin with, so our system wouldn’t even know that this child has been born,” Johnson said.

These days, the locals say funerals are rare in the cemetery.

“After a certain point there were no more babies born,” Black said.

In fact, a nearby home is packed from the basement to the rafters with baby cribs — some neatly packed away, others stacked in disarray.

A nearby home is packed from the basement to the rafters with baby cribs — some neatly packed away, others stacked in disarray. (Photo: KSL TV)
A nearby home is packed from the basement to the rafters with baby cribs — some neatly packed away, others stacked in disarray. (Photo: KSL TV)

Imprisoned prophet Warren Jeffs allegedly banned procreation between husband and wife — an edict Paulette Black heard firsthand during a church meeting.

“They just took away the whole relationship from a husband and wife,” Black said.

“A lot of people don’t know what the baby graveyard is. There haven’t been a lot of babies born out here. It’s kind of a forgotten little area,” Musser said.

As for Brower’s position on the cemetery, he thinks the humane option is to leave the past buried.

“I think it’s probably too late to do much about it,” Brower said. “Because what are you going to do? Are you out there and try to get a judge to give you a search warrant to start digging up baby graves?”

Moving forward, he calls for better government oversight.

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