The Witness Wore Red: The 19th Wife Who Brought Polygamous Cult Leaders to Justice

by Musser, Rebecca

  Warren suddenly rushed through, accompanied by his brothers Nephi and Isaac, who had been taking orders from him since the stroke. “Do not grant them access,” he said. “Do not tell them anything.” I lowered my head and continued to write, shocked, as I watched them from under my lashes. They backed away from the door but perched nearby to listen. Isaac opened the door and greeted the men, though quite obviously barring them from entering.

  “We know the Prophet has been ill,” said Dan Barlow slowly, though authoritatively. He and his brothers were taken aback at being held at the door. “We simply wish to extend him our well wishes and prayers for his speedy recovery.”

  “Thank you,” said Isaac politely but firmly. “The Prophet is resting and no visitors are allowed.”

  A strange look crossed the men’s faces. The proud sons and grandsons of a Prophet stood there, stunned and angry, for several uncomfortable moments before turning away. It was a scandalous changing of the guard.

  In time, Rulon’s condition gradually improved, and thankfully some of the tension eased in our home. Fortunately, the rigid fasting let up, too. However, if Rulon had an especially rough night, Warren would blame the wife on duty for not having enough of the Spirit of God within her.

  “What influence are you bringing around Father?” he would ask. “Can you not see? He is so pure.” His insinuations frightened me. What if Father died on our watch? Would we be blamed for that, too?

  Rulon experienced debilitating fallout from the stroke. While his physical body and strength began to slowly improve, our husband could not recognize his wives, nor call each one of us by name. Slowly, he began to remember some of his oldest wives: LaRue, Julia, Ruth, and Marilyn. Except for Mary, who cared for him daily, the rest of us became “Sweetie.”

  For the next several months Rulon was as daffy as a post. “I want all of my wives to dye their hair just like theirs!” He pointed animatedly to Paula and Ellen, with their jet-black hair. We all gasped at first, and then sat in shocked silence. FLDS women were forbidden to dye their hair—a vanity of the outside world, frowned upon by our leaders. Isaac quickly retrieved Warren, who put the whole thing to rest. Otherwise, as obedient wives, we would have all departed promptly to St. George for hair dye! “Everything the Prophet says is right” we had heard hundreds, if not thousands, of times in morning and family classes. Never question. Always obey. Still, we couldn’t help but notice that our husband was not in his right mind.

  “I’m not Rulon!” he began insisting stubbornly. “I’m Rudy Bagucious!” He was adamant and proud of this name in a childlike way, so it made sense when Mother Ruth explained it was a nickname his father had given him as a toddler.

  One Sunday at church I was on duty with Rulon. It was part of my job that day to make sure he was not approached before his sons could whisk him away. He was not allowed to speak publicly at this point, nor allowed to speak privately with anyone. Whenever Rulon tried to speak, Warren and his brothers muted the lapel microphone he usually wore at church, and that way they completely controlled what was said.

  Warren and Uncle Fred sat next to Rulon, as my sister-wives and I sat in the first few rows of seats across from the pulpit. We could hear Rulon speaking when most of the congregation could not. I could not help but see how Warren carefully used every opportunity to place responsibility for the people squarely on his own shoulders, and to bring their attention away from Rulon and back to their iniquity and sin.

  “Father’s condition is like that of Moses on the mountainside,” said Warren, standing up to the pulpit. “We cannot understand it all, but he is in direct contact with God.” Then Warren looked sternly out over the crowd, which went completely silent.

  “And when you murmur you are like Moses’s people, senselessly imbibing in debauchery and revelry while he is seeking only the Lord’s will. It has been brought to the Prophet’s attention that people are putting paper up in their windows so they can watch television and no one will know…” Again his voice boomed scathingly out across the congregation. “God and the Prophet know your sins.”

  When we returned home from church, dinner wasn’t ready, but Uncle Rulon wanted to eat immediately and was acting cranky, like a toddler who had not had his nap. Sometimes his physical discomfort caused him to become very mean. Nephi patiently brought out Rulon’s television and put on a National Geographic video about bears in the Northwest.

  This bothered me, as everyone had just heard Warren literally attack the people for watching television. Why, then, was it okay for the Prophet and his family to watch?

  Rulon sat, spellbound, providing commentary and clapping his hands. At one point in the show, he watched a bear catch a salmon and eat it. He suddenly leaned forward with as much force as his age-ridden body would allow and nearly toppled over.

  “Oh my God!” he shouted as the bear ripped into the salmon with his great teeth. “Bears are barbaric!” Hearing Rulon’s shouts, some of the other sister-wives came running, expecting the worst. Rulon asked them to stay and watch the show with him, as he continued his commentary. Nephi quickly exchanged that video for a program on nuclear war and the impending doom of the world, in an effort to placate his father until Warren came in to give Rulon a “snack.” When we gathered for dinner a short while later, Rulon was slumped over in his chair. I wondered if Warren had drugged him. I paid attention and began to notice a pattern. If Rulon was really outspoken or talking crazy, his sons would intervene and fifteen to twenty minutes later he’d be asleep.

  From time to time, Rulon would have periods of lucidity. Alone with Rulon at lunch one afternoon, my sister-wives and I were perplexed when our husband began beating his fists on the table in great anger and frustration.

  “I want my job back, damn it!” he cried, looking around at us. We knew what he was talking about. “Are you listening to me?” the Prophet screamed at us again. “I-want-my-job-back!” Each word was accentuated with another fist upon the table. Warren and Isaac rushed in to soothe him, and a few minutes later he was asleep in his chair, his mouth open in a drooling snore.

  Warren could be heard to say “I am only doing my father’s will” even more frequently. However, it was becoming obvious to us in the Jeffs family that Warren was now directing the will of his father.

  The last year of the millennium turned into a living hell for the FLDS, as Rulon continued to decline and Warren began dictating disturbing doctrine about the end of the world. The term “Latter-day Saints” was coined by the early Mormons over a century prior, because they had felt they were experiencing the “last days.” Our FLDS Prophets had instilled the concept of doomsday only deeper into our consciousnesses, and we all braced ourselves for the arrival of the year 2000.

  When school ended in May, everyone in the Jeffs family moved to Hildale. Warren warned the people in Salt Lake City that the Prophet wanted them to sell their businesses, pack up their personal items, and move down to Short Creek as soon as possible. They obeyed and began coming down in droves. Warren had already moved down with his wives and children. In Hildale, where I’d gone deliberately to get away from him, I found myself under his constant thumb once again.

  That July, my own family prepared to join us. Tempers had been running high in the Wall household for months. Our father felt that my mom’s children did not honor his Priesthood authority. Mother Maggie had been feeding into that belief again, and the kids felt powerless against her manipulations.

  One afternoon, Mom told me and Christine, she had been at a car wash several blocks from home when she saw Zach staggering toward her on foot. Her first thought was that his older twin brothers, or perhaps one of his other mothers, had gotten ahold of him. When she learned that it was actually our father who had beaten and bloodied Zach in his rage, all because of a misunderstanding, she decided her children should not have to suffer any longer. She called Warren and within a day left home with her children, never to return again.

  As she described the severity of Zach’
s injuries, I was relieved that she’d taken matters into her own hands, but my heart ached for her and her loss. My father had rescinded his right to be a father under those circumstances. The Prophet seemed to think the same way. Dad’s Priesthood was revoked once more, and my mother and my siblings as well as Maggie and her children were taken from him. Dad and Irene moved down near us, but into a trailer house on the southern outskirts of town. He was stricken from the Prophet’s good graces, though he was still a member of the church, having to repent from afar in order to be able to hold the Priesthood again.

  That August, Christine informed me that Warren had arranged for our mother to move down to Uncle Fred Jessop’s home in Hildale. Uncle Fred, the bishop of the Hildale area, often took in widows and displaced families. That didn’t sit well with me, knowing that Rulon enjoyed giving women with children to Uncle Fred for marriage. Unable to have children of his own as a side effect from a childhood bout with measles, Fred had been given well more than a dozen wives with children already. I prayed that somehow my mother could simply be placed in a quiet setting where she could have time to heal and have peace without having to marry again.

  Christine and I spent quite a bit of time trying to comfort our brothers and sisters. Joshua and Jordan, now seventeen, refused to come to Hildale, but Mom still had Zach, Elissa, Levi, Sherrie, and Ally with her—all of whom just wanted to go home. My fears came true when our mother was given to marry “beloved” Uncle Fred, and they were given along with her. I was most worried because I had seen several families suffer at Fred’s hands, not because he was abusive, but because he was so very intolerant. Before my mother came to live with him, I saw that like many FLDS leaders, he had a double standard for his behavior and that of his people. It particularly irked me one Sunday when he spoke piously at the pulpit about the importance of being gentle with children, then that afternoon he went home, and while we were preparing a family meal, he publicly shamed and ridiculed one of my brothers in front of his very large family.

  Unfortunately, Mom didn’t have any recourse. FLDS women rarely, if ever, owned any property. She certainly had no means to support herself and her brood of children. And since Mom had been Dad’s second wife and therefore a “Celestial bride” with a less-than-legal marriage license, she therefore had no legal way to get a divorce. Her marriage to my father was dissolved the moment the Prophet presented her and her children to Fred.

  It was done.

  I tried to be cheery and optimistic on my mother’s wedding day. Warren performed the ceremony in Rulon’s home, and everyone went to Fred’s afterward for music and celebration. As I looked around the room at the other women and children, I saw that some faces were very kind, others cold or jealous, and still others just… dead. The things these women and children had already been through were tough to think about. Most had been taken from their husbands and fathers and given to Uncle Fred, generally for reasons of severe abuse.

  I went through the line to wish Mother and Uncle Fred my congratulations. I gave my mom a huge hug and bent over to hug Uncle Fred in his chair, and he pulled me toward him, turned his face directly to mine, and kissed me right on the lips! I backed up in shock and he just laughed. Who was this man? If anyone else had dared to kiss the Prophet’s wife like that, he would be kicked out of the FLDS in a heartbeat. Although I would come back frequently to visit my family, I steered clear of Fred whenever possible. It seemed he had that same depraved sense of entitlement I noted among most other FLDS leaders.

  The night of Mom’s wedding I could not sleep for worry over my siblings. Elissa, Levi, Sherrie, and Ally were still quite young. I feared especially for Zach and Levi. Hundreds upon hundreds of boys had already been kicked out of the FLDS. With very little education and nowhere to turn, their futures were very dim. We called them “sons of perdition,” but we heard that the outside world had begun to call them “the lost boys.” That made me mad. People on the outside didn’t understand. It wasn’t like Peter Pan, who didn’t want to grow up. These lonely boys came from a culture where God and family meant everything, literally everything, and once kicked out they had neither. They weren’t lost; they were abandoned.

  Over the next few months, it broke my heart to see every one of my younger brothers end up in that category. Trevor was already gone, and Joshua and Jordan, who couldn’t stand living in such an abusive environment with Dad, left to live with friends. Then Uncle Fred set up my sweet brother Zach on some trumped-up charge in order to send him to work camps in Canada. He escaped on the way there, and I didn’t blame him. Still it was anguishing to imagine my little brother hiding out in Salt Lake City somewhere, perhaps sleeping on a park bench or under a bridge.

  Not long after that some boys came and picked up my baby brother Levi in the middle of the night. He was only eleven. We were all distraught at his disappearance, but somehow I knew that Zach was involved and that he really cared for Levi. I prayed that they’d be safer out there than in Uncle Fred’s home. Now only my little sisters remained. With the dramatic shifts within the Jeffs household and the FLDS at large, I had never felt more concerned and unsure about their future.

  As the months progressed and December drew to a close, the paranoia and anxiety among the people was at an all-time high. On New Year’s Eve, we had a sobering family class. I looked upon the troubled faces of my sister-wives as we listened to Warren’s fateful pronouncements. Everything would blow up. California was about to drop into the ocean. Unless I was considered pure enough to be lifted up with the righteous while the rest of the world perished, I would die with them at the ripe old age of twenty-three.

  Our class ended around 11:15 p.m., and there were no rumblings yet, although everyone seemed poised to spring at a moment’s notice. Finally, my sister-wives and I all hugged one another tightly before going to bed. We believed we would not see one another in the morning, unless we were pure enough to be lifted up together in the eternities. I walked soberly down the long stretch to my room, locked in a distressful life review, convinced I would never be worthy of life in the eternities with the Prophet. Finally I took a long shower, to emerge into the deathly quiet of the house, the silence closing in somberly around me.

  As I slipped into bed, all I could hear was the tick, tick, tick of the clock. I was so scared. I hadn’t bothered to set my alarm. According to Warren, we wouldn’t be waking up, and we all believed him. This was it. The end of life as anyone had ever known it. I pulled the blankets up to my chin and gripped the edges tightly in my fear. It was nearly midnight.

  11:57… 11:58… 11:59…

  I held my breath and waited… Then something occurred to me. What time zone was God in? Wasn’t it already past midnight in New York? Wouldn’t midnight in that wicked place have been a really great time to blow the earth away in a dramatic gesture of retribution?

  I finally let out the breath I had been holding and, about half an hour later, fell into a restless sleep.

  CHAPTER 10

  God’s Law Is above Man’s Law

  The next morning, New Year’s Day, I greeted my sister-wives in the kitchen. We all glanced at one another, a little shell-shocked. We felt relieved until Warren told us later that day that the Prophet said that God had given us “just a little more time.” The end of the world was still imminent—but we were too wicked to be saved. Once again, we needed to repent.

  I watched my entire community try to come back to the grips of reality. Wholeheartedly believing we were on the brink of destruction, a wild recklessness had taken over the previous months. Why not buy large pieces of equipment, or rack up credit-card debt, if no one would be left to be accountable to after the destructions? Unfortunately, now there were actual, worldly consequences for our spiritual beliefs. With a breaking heart, I witnessed several of my closest relatives and friends struggle under the burden of confusion and horrendous debt.

  The exception was the Prophet’s household. We continued living as we had before, on the tithes and offerings of
the people, which now unsettled me. A scripture often quoted from the pulpit was Malachi 3:8—“Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings.” Anyone who did not pay at least a tenth of every dollar that he or she earned was cheating God. That was unacceptable. Our struggling people would take food from their own mouths and those of their children, but they would not rob their God.

  Many did, however, take money from the government via welfare, Medicaid, and food stamps, especially Celestial wives and their children. Not considered legal wives, they used their maiden names to apply for benefits. Subsidies accounted for millions of dollars—much of the community’s income. After how my father had raised us, it was uncomfortable for me to sit at the front of the church while the leaders taught us it was noble and holy to take government subsidies to “bleed the Beast,” or run the evil government into the ground.

  We were told that God’s law was always above man’s law, so nothing the Priesthood did was considered illegal. And whereas in Salt Lake we avoided police and government at all costs, here in our small area where nearly everyone was FLDS or had immediate affiliation to the FLDS, we were our own law enforcement and government.

  Every town official, municipal director, and police officer was FLDS, subject to the Prophet’s rule, not to state or federal laws. Nearly five decades previous, during the ’53 raid—which was the largest mass arrest in modern American history, in which the entire community was taken from their homes—outsiders saw photos of children being ripped from their mothers’ arms. It was a public relations fiasco for Arizona governor Pyle, and it caused his campaign to backfire. That was when our people had basically been left alone to govern ourselves—left in our own little niche that Arizona and Utah basically pretended didn’t exist. The church and our people had taken full advantage of it. No one bothered us. We literally became a law unto ourselves.