Four. Years.

Texas authorities knew about this abusive polygamist cult for that long and didn't act until now.

Doran said it was not until after the raid began that he learned that the sect was, in fact, marrying off underage girls at the compound and had a bed in its soaring limestone temple where the girls were required to immediately consummate their marriages. Also, investigators say a number of teenage girls there are pregnant.

Authorities in Texas suspected there would be trouble ever since members of the renegade Mormon splinter group - the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints - bought an exotic game ranch in Eldorado in 2004 and began building the ranch.

Warren Jeffs, the sect's prophet and spiritual leader at its longtime headquarters in the dusty, side-by-side towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., was charged in 2005 and 2006 with forcing underage girls into marriages there. He was convicted in September in Utah of being an accomplice to rape and is serving up to life in prison.

Doran had been making occasional visits to the Eldorado compound - he even called to tell members of Jeffs' capture in 2006 - but he said he saw nothing to warrant a criminal investigation. Most of those milling around the compound would scatter when he and a Texas Ranger visited, he said.

"You can only press someone so far without having a criminal investigation going on," the sheriff said. "This group doesn't openly talk and they do not openly answer questions."

SOUNDS LIKE YOU'VE HAD PROBABLE CAUSE FOR AT LEAST TWO YEARS, YOU JERK. MAGISTRATES WILL FLING SIGNED SEARCH WARRANTS LIKE GIs THREW HERSHEY BARS.

Hope you can live with all those shattered girls' lives on your conscience, you horse's ass. Push your legislator, notify the feds. DO SOMETHING.

Yeah, yeah--stale evidence, etc. The point is, nobody even tried to address it until one of the girls made a rape accusation. A collective looking the other way by a whole lot of people tasked with the job for looking out for the girls' welfare. Sickening.