Whenever I could, I would call my mother, but my father became so paranoid that she could speak to me only in the middle of the day when he was at work, or hide to talk on the phone. Speaking in code words—like stormy to indicate something was brewing, or thunder to say that my father was close by and she couldn’t talk, because his temper or paranoia was flaring out of control—she filled me in about what was happening at home.
On Halloween night 1996, Cole was kicked out of the house when he attempted to save the younger kids from a severe beating. The next day, my mother called Christine and me.
“Your father wouldn’t listen, and I knew if Cole tried to stay, even to protect us, he was in great danger. I had to… I had to drive him to the highway, and drop him off…” She burst into tears.
Cole was now completely alone in a wicked land. I couldn’t speak. My beloved brother had been forced out of all of our lives.
A few days later, Mom received a phone call from Hyrum Smith, a well-known Utahan who worked for FranklinCovey, a Utah-based training business. Hyrum reported that he had picked Cole up from the side of the road and kindly drove him to Colorado. He said that Cole was one of the finest young men he had ever met, and that she should be very proud. We were grateful to know that Cole had arrived safely in Colorado, but the lines of communication were cut from there on out. Cole was to be dead to us, and my brother, having no desire to “taint” us, would not contact any of us for five long years.
After Cole’s expulsion, Mom finally confirmed rumors I’d heard that Trevor, Joshua, and Jordan were not only smoking; they had also started using drugs and alcohol and were going to rave parties—a word I’d never heard before she and Christine explained it. They tried to quit but were not successful for very long. The boys and Amelia all struggled with rebellious thoughts and behaviors. I knew what they were feeling, but I encouraged, cajoled, and reprimanded them. They had to be better; they just had to! The alternative—being cast out of the church into eternal damnation and becoming a son of perdition like Cole—was unthinkable. If they were having trouble now, I couldn’t imagine what they were in for “out there.”
Most kids who left or got kicked out of the FLDS ran into very real, very debilitating issues. Boys and girls who had lived all their lives to please their families, church, and Prophet were cut from family ties with no education. Ninety percent or more of them wound up heavily involved in drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, and prostitution, or as the victims of some kind of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse.
I was grateful the twins were working hard to be clean and sober. Joshua and Jordan had found employment with a world-famous knife maker, where they were working exceptionally hard and learning fast. But one week, I learned that Joshua had made brass knuckles, as many boys his age might forge in a shop class. While he was showing them off to one of my other brothers, Dad walked into the room and came at him with no explanation, crushing Joshua’s fingers until they were bloodied and broken to punish him for having such a weapon. Our father felt totally justified in doing it, proving to Mother Maggie and Mother Irene that he, indeed, ruled his household.
In horror, Christine told Warren what was going on with our younger siblings, and he asked her to create a time line of our family and all of the abuse that had taken place through the years. She asked me to help her, as I had an uncanny memory, even for the incidents I wanted to forget. She then faxed it from Hildale to Warren’s office in Salt Lake City and received a scathing response from him.
“Never fax a document like this again,” he said caustically. “Don’t you realize if it had fallen into the wrong hands, it could have brought the whole FLDS faith under condemnation?”
Within twenty-four hours, however, my father was the one condemned and relieved of his Priesthood. Our mother and her children were packed up and sent to stay at Grandfather Steed’s ranch in Widtsoe. This was a devastating shock. We were supposed to be a “forever family.” I think Mom had hoped that the Prophet would step in and sternly lecture my dad, Maggie, and Irene to stop these abusive behaviors. She’d wanted to keep her children safe but had never expected this result.
With Rulon’s permission, Christine and I immediately drove up to meet our mother and siblings at the ranch. We did our best to calm their fears, but I could read the misery in each of their eyes. Many families were already living in the overcrowded buildings on the ranch, so the only place for all of us to stay was bunked together in one large and crowded room. We had only a wood-burning stove for heat, so it was either blistering hot or bone-shaking cold. We were all expected to pull our weight on the farm, even in below-freezing temperatures. We cooked, cleaned, mucked stalls, and watched over livestock, among other arduous chores. Several of my siblings became ill, with Elissa catching the very worst of it.
A few weeks in, Mom received a phone call and asked me to stay with the kids while she and Christine were escorted to a mysterious meeting. We didn’t hear from them for weeks. Tensions were running high among all the family members. While Grandfather Steed was alive, he had certainly been strict and severe, but music and laughter had pervaded the ranch. Now, many of our cousins saw fit to preach the word of God to my four younger and “wicked” brothers, Joshua, Jordan, Zach, and Levi. One night I walked out to the barn to discover that the twins were secretly plotting to run away. I stopped them, but I could hardly stand to hear the boys confide in me their open, bloody psychological wounds. They felt betrayed and abandoned by our father because of his behavior, especially since his new marriage, and knew that our mother had no power to protect them. I had felt a lot of judgment over my younger siblings’ rebellion and use of drugs. The more I learned about the traumas they’d experienced, the more I understood.
As December turned to January, the situation remained strained, exacerbated by the fact that though pneumonia wracked Elissa’s ten-year-old body, she was still expected to do heavy chores in the freezing cold and was getting worse. Without warning, our parents suddenly showed up together at the end of the month, ready to take everyone home again—and to start over. I was overjoyed; not only had they reconciled, but Mother Irene had been forced to leave our parents’ home. It was something we had secretly hoped for as children but never thought would happen. Part of me felt sorry for her, until my memories of all the beatings flooded back.
Before they left, my father took me aside privately. He was furious with me for helping Christine with the time line that had prompted the Prophet to dismiss him from his family.
“That’s no one’s business, Sis,” he said angrily. “You girls lied on that time line and you see how it’s ripped our family apart. The things you wrote—”
“—should never have happened, Father, but they did,” I retorted angrily. It had already sent me over the edge to have to write down all the things in black and white about what my father had allowed and later perpetrated. It had been harder still to have to hear more horrifying stories from my younger siblings. But for him to deny everything? To act as if we were the ones perpetrating lies? I had never stood up to my father, but I did now, fire in my eyes.
“Don’t you even try to act all innocent!” I retorted. “I now know things about your younger children that were never even written on that sheet! What kind of a father are you? You’d better make sure nothing like this ever happens again!”
Suddenly he drew his hand back as if to strike me. My heart faltered.
“Go ahead,” I said, trembling, my fear mixed with fury. “I’m sure my husband would like to know all about this.” My father’s face filled with more cold malice, but he lowered his hand, then turned and stalked out to his car. I watched out the window as he put on a false smile for my mother and the younger kids. As they drove away, tears for each one of my siblings and my mother welled up within me as I prayed. God be with you till we meet again. Dear God, please.
As I settled into Hildale as my permanent residence, I reveled in my freedom from Warren. Nineteen ninety-seven was a pleasant, relativ
ely peaceful time for me in the Prophet’s Hildale home, interrupted only by Warren’s visits from Salt Lake.
One morning I was in the kitchen, the smell of yeast strong in the air. Three or four of my sister-wives and I were on kitchen duty, baking enormous quantities of delicious bread to feed the veritable army lodged in our home. Normally I loved baking bread, but on that particular day I was distracted by a young visitor, one of Warren’s newest wives, to whom I was sending waves of silent, yet tender compassion as she baked alongside us. Warren had been stalking her since their arrival. Because Stacey wanted nothing to do with him, he pursued her relentlessly, despite many, many wives at home hungry for a crumb of his affection.
When Warren popped into the kitchen, eager to see his new wife, he greeted the other women and turned to me.
“Mother Becky,” he said, nodding in deference. My stomach twisted when he winked at us, then slid his arms around Stacey’s waist. For him, this was all fun and games. His face and body were animated as they often were when showing off in front of his father’s wives. The more Stacey refused to play along with him, the more ardent he became, forcefully turning her around to face him and trying to French-kiss her in front of us. The young girl turned her face away, and a familiar and sickening metallic taste filled my mouth. I was biting my lip, knowing too well that feeling of not wanting to be kissed, touched, or fondled in front of other women. I yearned for him to stop as we all looked away. He finally did stop, like an insolent toddler whose toy had been taken from him. He picked up a freshly baked loaf of bread that had not yet been cut or bagged.
“She’ll get it,” Warren said to the rest of us nonchalantly, tossing the bread up into the air two or three times. Then he stopped and laughed. “She just needs to be bred!”
At that moment, he thrust the loaf at his wife’s chest and smirked at her before walking away. Poor Stacey was horrified, still holding on to the bread in her humiliation. I seethed inwardly. To an FLDS man, if a woman was in any way rebellious, the solution was to get her married and keep her pregnant. Then all of that rebellion would be “bred” right out of her.
I watched Stacey over the next several months having to submit to her husband, her light growing dimmer as the hope and fire in her eyes waned. I wondered how many times in the last few years I had looked into my own eyes and seen that same surrender of life force.
In statements eerily reminiscent of Home Economics classes at Alta Academy, Warren would constantly admonish us as the Prophet’s wives to seek to be “close to Father.” That was the term for being sexually intimate.
“To follow the Prophet means eternal life,” he would somberly intone, once again wielding the salvation stick. “Not following the Prophet means death.” Church leaders often spoke of “spiritual death”—an eternal life devoid of hope. It was what we all feared most.
While living in Hildale, I became closer with my sister-wife Cecilia, who had so offended Ora by giving away her dress. Sunny and sweet, and stunningly beautiful, she had been highly sought after in her day, before her father gave her to the Prophet. Like me, she had begged for her freedom, but her father wouldn’t listen. She had become Rulon’s fourth “young wife.” It was the only thing I’d ever heard her quietly complain about, and only rarely.
Cecilia’s sweet disposition—and likely her curvaceous figure—ended up getting her into a lot of trouble. We were admonished to keep our distance from all men, but it was not unusual for several of Rulon’s young wives to have a “favorite son” to help out, or to take them into St. George for shopping, of course in a small and respectable group. While this commingling would not have been tolerated otherwise, it was allowed here because the Prophet’s family was considered beyond reproach. Before I was married to Rulon, Cecilia had gotten involved with Warren’s younger brother Darren. He had used the secret panels of the Salt Lake property meant to protect us from a government raid as the way to access her secretly. Their tryst discovered, they had confessed and repented.
Apparently, Darren was soon married off, but Warren’s youngest brother, Morgan, then sought Cecilia out, and they got into trouble both in Salt Lake City and Hildale. When Cecilia and Morgan’s flirtation was discovered, Warren came down to Hildale to investigate and pulled me into his office to interrogate me. I had been oblivious to all of this. I adored Cecilia, who was like sunshine to me in a very dark world. I had never seen this in her, nor had I looked for it.
The two were never excommunicated or publicly humiliated, I believe in part because of Cecilia’s marriage to the Prophet and her father’s standing in the church. I was also unsure of Cecilia’s degree of guilt. I had seen Warren blow similar things out of proportion. Whatever the case, Warren’s insinuations made their actions seem as immoral as death. I was embarrassed at my naïveté, but Warren insinuated that on some level I had to have known.
“What is it within you that needs cleansing?” he asked me as I sat in a chair opposite him. I hung my head. Certainly I was secretly angry with my husband for forcing sex on me, but I had never, ever harbored the desire to have an affair! Still, after I left Warren’s office, I began to brutally beat myself up inside. I was already painfully aware of my character flaws. But when I got quiet, the only thing I could think of that needed cleansing was my sexual abuse as a child. What Sterling had done to me when I was small had made me feel unworthy of marriage to the Prophet. I spent a considerable amount of time feeling stained, defiled, and dirty, and I had a strong desire to be cleansed.
That opportunity came a short while later. In January 1998, Parley Harker, the First Counselor in the FLDS Presidency and next in authority to the Prophet, died, and Warren was called to fill his position. This was a colossal event in the church and in the hierarchy of power. For his first few months in his new role, Warren was jubilant and seemed like another person. I began to see him actually treat the people with kindness. At one point, I almost thought I could actually like him as a leader, if not as my “son.”
His words, however, had still struck a chord deep inside of me. It was our custom to fast and pray at least once a month for one day about any areas in our individual lives that needed additional strength, but I went without food for several days, trying to wrap my head around Warren’s admonition: What within you needs cleansing? The question had haunted me for months.
Although I was not fully aware of most of their histories, I discovered that Cecilia and a few of my sister-wives had asked to be rebaptized. Baptism by immersion meant to fully submerge the body in water so that it could be cleansed from all sin. This generally took place in a large basin or pool of water blessed for that express purpose.
Most members of the church were baptized at eight years of age, as it was considered the age when one can tell right from wrong. As a child, I had been baptized by immersion in the font at Alta Academy, where we also attended church. I had made a holy covenant with God and Jesus Christ to always remember him, and to keep his commandments so that I could always have his Spirit to be with me. Something within me broke open years later as an adult. Perhaps a rebaptism was the way I could be fully released and absolved of what Sterling had done to me and of my angry thoughts toward my husband. Perhaps being cleansed from this early trauma might assist me so that this persistent presence of evil that Warren saw in me would go away. Perhaps then the Spirit could always remain with me, and enable me to perceive evil and keep it from me at all times.
I asked to have a private consultation with Rulon. For the first time in my life I shared the story of what Sterling had done to me, shaking uncontrollably the whole time. I was afraid the Prophet would be angry and force me out of his house, but instead he was kind. When I suggested rebaptism, he said that it was not necessary, but if it made me feel better, he would permit it. I stood up, my heart filled with joy. I would be clean and absolved of all sin, finally free of what Sterling had done to me!
A few days later, Warren arranged for my rebaptism in the font that had been installed in the ba
sement of the Prophet’s Salt Lake home, the same one I had been baptized in as a child. Cecilia had talked to me about her rebaptism, and she waited with me until the Priesthood leaders were ready for me to descend into the water. Uncle Wendell, LeRoy Jeffs, and Warren were all present, though none of them asked me any questions. Dressed all in white, I simply stepped into the water and was immersed fully under it. Under the authority of the Priesthood, I was baptized. Warren and another Priesthood member confirmed upon me the Gift of the Holy Ghost. I was free! I had not told anyone else about my rebaptism, but for the next few months, my feet felt like they had wings. My life took on new meaning, and I taught with greater power and love.
In the midst of what felt like a new beginning for me, deeply disturbing news from my childhood home arrived. Mother Maggie was still causing major havoc, and to make matters worse, Mother Irene had been allowed to return. Dad, in his attempts to please Maggie, was doling out corporal punishment again. Trevor and Amelia had rebelled and been forced up to Canada for reform. Both had been drinking beer and going to rave parties, and Amelia had kissed more than one young man. My heart hurt for both of them. On my visits to Canada I had seen the way the people treated those who had been sent to the youth camps, and witnessed the backbreaking work they were forced to do. Amelia was not to go to Uncle Jason’s, but had to work her guts out in the wood mill and was also expected to cook for and clean up after other work crews after her shift ended.
Unable to do anything constructive for them, I threw myself into helping Christine with the Pride of Avonlea operetta. We choreographed the production together, and I played my violin in the orchestra as well as worked directly with the youth. This year, one participant was a painfully shy young man with thick glasses and drooped shoulders who had trouble making friends. We had been working with him week after week, and it was wonderful to see him start to hold his head erect and perform with confidence, grace, and skill. I said a prayer of gratitude every day for this opportunity—and I prayed daily that someone, somewhere, would show up for my brothers and sisters in a similar way.
The Witness Wore Red: The 19th Wife Who Brought Polygamous Cult Leaders to Justice Page 12