The mood at the workshop was a mixture of concern and tension. Those responsible for the more than four hundred children clearly took their work very seriously. Other cult experts attended, and we sat around a table and took turns talking and asking questions. There were also psychologists, doctors, and attorneys.
CPS officials made it clear that while they were seeking answers for the FLDS children, they could not shortchange the other twelve thousand children in their custody. I wasn’t sure that anyone at the workshop truly understood that this was not just an added burden—it was an epic moment. For one of the first times in history, children from this closed religious community had been given the protections—guaranteed by the Constitution—that are the birthright of every American.
I feared Texas might walk away from this problem if it became too complicated. Rarely does anyone tackle the FLDS and win. I am the only woman I know who made it out with all her children and won full custody. The FLDS is as rich as it is ruthless, and it is hard to stand up to their well-funded and withering assaults.
What made me optimistic during the workshop was the genuine interest that so many CASA workers had in preventing these children from further injury and trauma. It was obvious to me that they chose to do this work because in their heart of hearts they believed that even children born into a closed religious community had the right to be protected.
The state workers who were allowed to give media interviews were unable to provide the public with information about what they had witnessed while working with the FLDS. I spoke freely about the abuse that had occurred to my children before I left. The FLDS was pouring everything it had into its public relations campaign to convince the public that its members were being persecuted for their religious beliefs. (Its spokespeople never mentioned that polygamy is a felony; they framed it as a religious and lifestyle choice.) Their strategy seemed to be that FLDS members’ rights as Americans were being violated—they were the victims, not the children. If they could win that point in the court of public opinion, they felt confident they’d get the children back.
One of the television interviews I saw during this time was with my stepdaughter Monica. She became Warren Jeffs’s fifth wife in her twenties. I attended her wedding. Another of my stepdaughters, Monica’s sister Millie, was married to Warren Jeffs at seventeen.
In the interview Monica was asked if she thought it was all right for young girls to be involved in underage polygamous marriages. She became defiant. “We don’t do that in our religion,” Monica said. She showed no remorse about lying in public. She actually not only knew of her husband’s underage brides but went to the weddings and gave them her full support.
As I watched interview after interview, I was struck by how accelerated the level of FLDS mind control had become since 2003, when I fled. Many of the FLDS mothers who were paraded before the camera were my stepdaughters. I immediately noticed that they spoke in a monotone, deliberately mimicking the voice of the prophet, Warren Jeffs.
Members of the FLDS believe their prophet is the closest man on earth to God. If you want to become like God, you must first become like his prophet. The FLDS members had taken that belief to an entirely new level—they were now speaking with the tone of voice and using the same facial expressions as their leader. It was like watching a roomful of Warren Jeffses with female faces. Five years earlier my stepdaughters had all spoken like themselves. I wondered what, if anything, was left of their former selves.
My children had an equally difficult time watching their half-siblings on TV. “It felt like they had all vanished from my life” was how LuAnne described it. Although she expressed relief that they were still alive and seemed reasonably well, she bristled when they talked on camera about how “blessed” they were because of their religion. “I think I’m the one who is blessed because I had a mother who protected me from abuse they think is normal,” LuAnne said. “I remember feeling the very way they feel, but it was only because I never had a chance to feel any other way. It tears me apart to hear them when they don’t know what it’s like to be free.”
LuAnne had been working as a bagger for an Albertsons supermarket for more than a year before the raid; now, with all the media coverage, she started getting more questions about polygamy from co-workers. Stories of her father’s family were spread all over the country. LuAnne was determined to continue with her life and made every effort to keep her composure and maintain some form of normalcy. But she understood why there was so much curiosity about the FLDS. She worked really hard to take everything in stride and always be responsive to people’s questions.
One day one of LuAnne’s fellow baggers asked, “When you were living in the FLDS, did you ever see your moms get into catfights?”
“Yes, I watched them fight all the time,” she responded. “Sometimes it was more interesting than others. But since my mom moved us to Salt Lake and my dad moved his entire family to Texas, they’re in different states now. So if I want to see my moms have a catfight, I just turn on the TV and watch it on CNN.” (LuAnne was thinking of the back-and-forth that Cathleen and I had on Anderson Cooper.)
The media seemed particularly obsessed with the pioneer clothing that FLDS women wore. I was often asked why they dressed that way. With their long dresses, long underwear, and hair piled high on their heads, FLDS women look like they are racing headlong into the nineteenth century.
It looks bizarre to me now, but I wore clothing like that for thirty-five years. Thankfully, though, when I was growing up I did not have to wear long underwear, which a lot of us hated. It was hot and uncomfortable and made us look like big blobs. It did not become mandatory until I was in my thirties, courtesy of an edict that came from the prophet Rulon Jeffs, Warren’s father. Then when Warren took over in 2002, after his father died, things got even worse. Even children had to wear long underwear as soon as they were potty-trained. Warren Jeffs also banned red, bright purple, and any fluorescent color. (When he was captured by a Nevada state trooper in 2006, the Cadillac Escalade he was driving was red—yet another example of his complete and utter hypocrisy.)
We were told that wearing long underwear was preparation for the sacred underwear we might one day wear as temple garments. The FLDS considers these garments to be the ultimate in holy attire. For any ceremony or endowment that takes place in the temple, special garments are worn. In fact, whenever a change of any kind was presented to us, the explanation was always religious. We were always told that we were being rewarded for being righteous and faithful and had proven ourselves worthy of living a higher form of God’s law.
The FLDS clothing sets women apart while also desexualizing them, by flattening their chests and hiding their natural shape. Whenever the dress code became more restrictive, Warren Jeffs always said that it was a sign that “God loves you so much he wants you to be more like him.” So FLDS women, who had so few rights to begin with, had even more of their individuality stripped away. The clothing we wore was like a fence drawn around us to make us off limits.
With so much media interest in the clothing, the FLDS decided to cash in. Its “Captive FLDS Children” website soon had a display of prairie-style clothing for sale.
From Bad to Worse
I was sickened, but not surprised, when the news broke on April 30, 2008, that forty-one of the boys removed from the YFZ Ranch showed signs of having had broken bones. Some of them were “very young,” according to child protection officials. Debra Brown said CASA requested body scans to determine exactly how many of the children had ever had broken bones, but none were ever done.
Physical abuse was not uncommon in Merril’s family during the years I was married to him. I’d seen boys hit with large boards and kicked hard enough to cause fractures. One boy was kicked so violently, he flew across the room. But it wasn’t just abuse; there was medical neglect as well. One night when my son Patrick was six, he fell off a bunk bed. Merril refused to let me take him to the doctor. I was sure his arm was broken; Mer
ril, who had never gone beyond the eighth grade, insisted it was not. Pat was in agony. I sat up with him all night and gave him pain medication. As a mother in the FLDS, I did not have the freedom to take my child to the doctor without my husband’s permission! I waited for three days until Merril went out of town to take Pat to the clinic. By then Pat was unable to use his arm. As it turned out, it was broken and needed to be set.
Rod Parker, the attorney who has been representing the FLDS since 1990, tried to dismiss the reports about broken bones by saying that if they were true, then the boys would have been taken to hospitals for treatment. Sadly, it rarely happened that way.
Boys are also abused by being forced to quit school and work construction jobs from an early age. They have no choice. Merril’s son Johnson, who was living at the compound at the time of the raid, had told my children a few months earlier that he’d been in a severe accident while working construction and almost had to have his leg amputated. (It got trapped under scaffolding.) Men in the FLDS use their sons as slave labor to make money off them in their construction businesses. The boys work from sunrise to sunset. My oldest son, Arthur, was forced to quit school at twelve. He would go to work at 5:00 a.m. and come back at dark. Twelve- to sixteen-hour days were not unusual. By the time we escaped six years ago, Arthur had been out of school for three years and resisted returning. On two early occasions he had to be taken to school in handcuffs. Now he’s about to start his junior year in college.
Along with the report about the broken bones, Texas officials released a photo of a young girl of about twelve being kissed on the mouth by Warren Jeffs. The face was blurred to protect her identity, but I knew who she was. It was my stepdaughter, the girl with the bright red hair whom I thought I’d seen on a bus leaving the compound.
I first saw the photo during an interview with Nancy Grace, who had a show on CNN at the time. When Nancy asked for my comments, I was not only shocked but felt sick to my stomach. Some questioned whether the picture was real; maybe she had just been posing with the prophet. But anyone in the FLDS knows that a man never kisses any female unless she belongs to him in marriage. Such behavior is completely taboo.
My children reacted violently to the photo. Whatever loyalty to their father that any of them had left ended once and for all. My daughter LuAnne was hit especially hard. She loved her half-sister, and it was devastating for her to think that she had been so badly injured by being married to Warren Jeffs when she was twelve. I could see from LuAnne’s face how stricken she was. She now knew at a cellular level that what I had been telling her for almost six years was true. After realizing the condition her half-siblings were in, her entire attitude toward school changed, and she decided to become an attorney. I think she started feeling responsible for the loved ones from whom she had been separated. Her search for a way to keep others from being injured like her half-sister had begun.
It was depressing to realize how much worse things had gotten since we escaped. I was distraught that I had no legal way to protect my stepchildren. Even the knowledge that I’d been able to protect my own did nothing to ease my despair that a little girl I cared about had been injured.
At times I felt overwhelmed by everything that was happening in Texas. But Brian, as always, came through for me in every way. This was the first time in my life when I could rely on a man for emotional strength, support, and protection.
I had major concerns about the FLDS children in state care. Clearly they had been injured by abuse and not just by mind control. Sexual abuse does long-term damage to a child’s brain. More than four hundred children were also at risk of ending up in the foster care system indefinitely. Texas usually had only one year to reunite each of the children with their parents. If the reunification was unsuccessful, the state would have custody of the children until they turned eighteen.
I did interviews almost every day during the crisis. Brian helped me process the developments of each day. Despite the demands of his own corporate job, he listened and gave me input on what I might be able to do next. Not only had he fallen in love with a woman with eight children, he also had to grapple with the impact of the FLDS in our lives. The events unfolding in Texas were making Brian even more outraged—as an American, as a father, and as a deeply moral man.
Among the Missing
What was also terribly upsetting for me during these frantic weeks was that I had lost contact with Betty once again. I had no way of knowing where she was, since apparently she was no longer living and working as a housekeeper for her half-brothers. I felt ill at the thought that she might have been taken to the YFZ Ranch.
Betty was more valuable than ever to the FLDS now. Not only was she Merril’s most prized daughter, but she was also my child and could be used against me. I was doing a lot of media interviews, and Escape was also educating the public about the cult’s mind control. I was a problem for the FLDS, and now my daughter was being pulled into the middle of it.
Along with the moment-by-moment blows during the crisis, I was dealing with constant phone calls. I had been to Texas several times, and I was working with the state on issues concerning the children. CPS workers committed to helping the children called often. But as the crisis wore on, I also heard from people seeking missing family members. Sometimes the questions were about specific children they hoped might be in state custody. Often they were about a sister with children who had disappeared. Did I have any way of knowing if she had been on the Texas compound during the raid? The state was, of course, looking for relatives to place the children with if the parents were ultimately deemed unfit. Within a month, non-FLDS relatives were mobilizing to get FLDS children back to Utah and Arizona from Texas.
Who were these people? Some were part of an extended network of people who were former FLDS but had relatives in custody. Many of these extended family members wanted to offer their hearts and their homes. Many were willing to offer a place not only for children but also for their mothers. There were substantial obstacles to making such offers a reality, but the goodwill of those who wanted to help protect the children was as genuine as it was deep. Many people who had left the group understood how severe conditions were after Warren Jeffs assumed power. I heard about many, many offers from people who wanted to bring the children into their homes and help with counseling and any other support that was needed.
My conversations with CPS in Texas confirmed that the situation for the FLDS children was looking up. The state was extremely interested in placing them in long-term care with a relative, even if the relatives were out of state, as was the case for most of the Texas children. One of the greatest advantages that a former FLDS relative could provide for a child was an understanding of the belief system into which he or she had been indoctrinated. Most former FLDS had also experienced the abusive nature of the FLDS lifestyle, so they understood on a personal level the devastation it can do to an individual. Some of the offers were coming from individuals who wanted to take in younger siblings or half-siblings to raise.
The most heartbreaking calls were from former FLDS members who were desperately searching for a missing family member. These were people who had vanished during Warren Jeffs’s reign of terror. Missing. Gone. Disappeared. It began happening in Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, shortly after Jeffs took over. We suspected the missing were being sent to FLDS compounds in the West or in Canada. But no one knew for sure. It was terrible enough when a family went missing, but the anguish was compounded when no one knew where they went.
Often a family was moved during the night. Their neighbors would wake up the next morning and see a new family moving in next door. No one was told where the other family had gone—only that the family had been reassigned to live somewhere else because they’d been blessed by the prophet with a mission. Families were usually not allowed to take anything with them. The instructions were to leave their possessions behind for the family that would take their place. People knew not to ask questions in the FLDS.
<
br /> Sometimes entire families disappeared, but often it would be just one family member. Parents would not know where a child had gone, only that he or she had been called by the prophet and sent on a mission. The older kids were often used as labor, which we’d find out about only after they returned.
The upsurge in these disappearances happened after I fled the FLDS. I learned about it from friends who stayed behind but also because I was serving on the United Effort Plan (UEP) trust, which had been taken over by the state of Utah in 2005. No one in the FLDS owned their own homes. All were held jointly by the trust. When the court ordered them seized, the state then controlled these homes. An advisory board was established to oversee the trust and to suggest how its assets would be utilized. (I was one of six people chosen out of thirty who applied.) So we were aware when houses were suddenly evacuated. The FLDS would try to move a family in immediately, but that wasn’t always possible. At one point twelve homes were empty, and no one knew what had happened to those families.
Warren Jeffs would sometimes evict a man from the community and give his family to another man. Other stories circulated that Jeffs would kick out a woman, take her children, even nursing babies, and give them to “a more worthy mother.” It’s indicative of his absolute power that there wasn’t a revolt. Children were sometimes severed from both parents. This was happening before I left the FLDS, but at first it was mostly the men who were kicked out. Warren Jeffs commanded my former sister wife Cathleen’s father, Nephi, to leave his family. Nephi’s third wife was then married to Merril; that meant Cathleen and Grace, her stepmother, were sharing the same man. Grace got into trouble with Merril, so he took her children from her and moved them to Texas. She was told to remain in Colorado City and repent.
Many of the wrenching phone calls I received confirmed the stories that had been leaking out of the community over the previous several years. People were indeed missing, and their distraught family members had been unable to communicate with them. The sixty-four-million-dollar question for a family member was, which compound has my missing loved one been taken to? The hope for such families was that if their children had been taken to the YFZ Ranch, they’d now be in state care.
Triumph: Life After the Cult--A Survivor's Lessons Page 5