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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Arizona officials have asked Utah authorities to help serve grand jury subpoenas for documents involving a former school official in the polygamist communities on the border of the two states.
The Arizona attorney general's office filed papers in 3rd District Court in Salt Lake City on Tuesday asking Utah authorities to help serve the subpoenas for any financial documents, invoices, tax forms, contracts or correspondence involving Jeffrey P. Jessop between 2000 and 2005.
Jessop resigned as financial director of the Colorado City Unified School District at the end of December. He had held the post since 2000.
The state of Arizona took over the district after teachers went months without pay and allegations of financial mismanagement.
"It's nothing I can comment on," said Andrea Esquer, spokeswoman for Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard. "Anything that deals with the state grand jury in Arizona is confidential."
The Salt Lake County district attorney has agreed to serve the subpoenas for the Arizona attorney general.
All of those subpoenaed were asked to appear before the grand jury in the Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix on May 24.
Jessop apparently provided accounting services for several businesses in the communities of Hildale and Colorado City, Ariz., which are dominated by the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Subpoenas were to be served on Valley Transportation, Valley Truss and Steeds Inc., which are all believed to be defunct, and the Corporation of the Presiding Bishop of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints.
Steeds Inc., a contracting business, went bankrupt in 2002. Its address in Midvale does not exist.
Valley Truss and Valley Transportation had as their addresses the Utah Department of Commerce's Division of Corporations because they did not provide registered agent information.
Former FLDS church member Richard Holm owned Valley Truss and Valley Transportation about a decade ago. He told the Deseret Morning News that Jeffrey Jessop would work as an independent contractor, handling vehicle licensing for his company's trucks.
"He's my cousin," Holm said Tuesday. "I know he did licensing for a whole bunch of people in the community. When you needed help that way he was the one that most everybody called on and you'd pay a certain fee."
"I'm not sure I know who Jeffrey Jessop is. That I can recall, I don't think I've met him," said Rod Parker, a former lawyer for the FLDS church who was to be served one of the subpoenas.
Parker said he did not know what the grand jury was investigating.
Parker was listed as the registered agent for the presiding bishop of the church, but he has not represented the church since about 2004. He said he does not have any church records.
In 2000, church leader Warren Jeffs told followers to remove their children from the public schools. Nearly two-thirds of the district's students left. About 425 students remain in the Colorado City district.
Jeffs is a fugitive being sought on Utah and Arizona charges that he arranged plural marriages of underage girls.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
