Childress was particularly concerned with the emotional health of the children and how polygamy affected it. “Warren Jeffs freely ‘reassigned’ women and their children to men he deemed more worthy than their original husbands and fathers,” Childress explained. “One young mother had been reassigned to three different men in the course of a little over two years—and she had children by two of her three ‘spiritual husbands.’”
Also complicating matters, he said, was the appellate court’s out-of-hand rejection of DFPS’s argument that the YFZ Ranch should be treated as a single “household” under the law, so that the pattern of sexual abuse could be attributed to the entire group and justify the intervention. “But the records reflected,” Childress pointed out, “that there was, indeed, only one person, Warren Jeffs, making all important decisions at YFZ Ranch, and that person was ‘sealing’ girls as young as twelve to himself or his favorites, and ‘reassigning’ both the women and children as he deemed the circumstances to warrant.”
Childress also noted that some FLDS parents seemed genuinely bonded to their children and sad to reject the extreme practices that put their children at risk. Accordingly, Childress created a litigation strategy that would include the development of specific tasks and goals for those parents willing to change. This in turn would free him to concentrate his efforts on those, including Jeffs, who in the name of their religion orchestrated and carried out the sexual and emotional abuse that DFPS’s investigators had uncovered.
Childress told me he worked with caseworkers to help develop “service plans” with specific tasks and timelines for those families who were concerned for their children and cooperative with the department. The goal was to dismiss the suits involving those parents as soon as necessary therapy or educational services had been completed. He’d then focus on the biggest offenders—Warren Jeffs and his inner circle of followers who were shown to have actively engaged in the underage “marriages” and other extreme practices that placed their own children and other YFZ children at risk. He believed that the evidence, presented at a final trial, would justify termination of their parental rights.
But Childress never got a chance to pursue his plan. The reason? The DFPS had not filed the necessary legal pleadings to ask a court or jury to terminate the parental rights of any parents involved in the YFZ cases. Since that paperwork had not been filed, Childress had to amend the pleadings to ask for termination of parental rights in the few cases he thought should go to trial. Sadly, despite his best intentions, he could not proceed with his comprehensive plan. The permission Childress needed to file the necessary pleadings never came, and he has no idea why. The upshot? “Ultimately, I decided that I could not in good conscience continue to represent the department under the circumstances.” He resigned on October 23, 2008, just three months after he started.
“He quit when he was told he couldn’t do what he wanted to do,” Debra Brown told me. “It was a moral decision. He had too much evidence to say, ‘Okay, we’ll do it your way.’ He came by our office and told me how sorry he was that he couldn’t help the children. It makes me mad all over again when I think about it. CPS would not even terminate the parental rights of Warren Jeffs.
“I think a point came when CPS decided to cut and run, just get out,” Debra continued. “My feeling is that in its final report, CPS massively underestimated the level of abuse that took place at the ranch—even though CPS had access to the documents that were seized from the ranch as part of the criminal investigation. I honestly believe that CPS nonsuited children too rapidly and never adequately determined if they were genuinely safe from the threat of forced underage marriages.”
Childress remains convinced that the state’s intentions were good. But he also believes Texas overreached by taking all the FLDS children from the ranch. “If it were possible to rewind to the initial raid,” he explained, “the state should have realized that it was not prepared to handle the volume of work they took on by removing all the children at the same time. The situation would have been quite different if Ms. Voss [the state’s lead child-abuse investigator] had stuck with her initial inclination to remove the eighteen young women who appeared to be underage brides, and attempted to continue the investigation with some orders from the trial court requiring cooperation by the FLDS members as the family situations were being sorted out and the facts determined. The concern at that time was that some parents would flee and possibly take children with them in spite of any orders. For this group, the only law is the command of their prophet. I think that risk would have been worth taking.”
More than a year after the children were sent back to the YFZ Ranch, in a courtroom in Eldorado, Debra Brown bumped into one of the FLDS mothers she’d worked with during the raid whose family had no abuse issues. “She came up to me and asked, ‘The families that may have had problems, why did they nonsuit them just like they did me?’ I told her that was a really good question and I’d been asking myself that a lot but didn’t have an answer. Her question just blew my hair back.”
A Sea of Pastel Hostility
Once the Texas courts ruled in favor of the FLDS, the cult felt a fresh jolt of invincibility. One dramatic example was its emboldened stance toward the United Effort Plan trust. The UEP was created in 1942 by the fundamentalist Mormons who eventually became known as the FLDS but at that point called their sect “The Work.” The goal of the trust was to facilitate communal living in plural marriage by pooling members’ assets.
At the time Utah seized the UEP in 2005 and put it under court oversight, its net worth was estimated to be $110 million. Subsequent estimates have placed its value at $180 million. A large portion of that total is UEP-owned homes. FLDS members don’t own their own homes; all property is owned by the UEP.
For four years the FLDS was completely unresponsive to its legal obligations regarding the trust, ignoring court papers, tax notices, and direct pleas from the judge. But after its win in Texas, the FLDS came out swinging and started to ramp up its legal push to regain control of the UEP. Because of the substantial amount of money involved, it’s a crucial battle. Bruce Wisan, the court-appointed fiduciary for the trust, said an FLDS representative told him, “We’re going to be fighting from now on.” An FLDS attorney, Peter Stirba, echoed that view when he said, “The days of the FLDS people not defending themselves in court are over.”
So on July 29, 2009, I was once again preparing to testify, this time at the Salt Lake City courthouse. The occasion was another battle in the ongoing war over the UEP trust. Judge Denise Lindberg was hearing motions about a multimillion-dollar land sale that the FLDS was trying to block. I was one of the witnesses called to testify about my knowledge of the FLDS, based on my marriage to one of its ruling elite and my membership on the UEP advisory board.
As I headed into court that morning, the contrast between the woman I’d been and the one I had become could not have been more stark. I was wearing a black pantsuit and a pale blue blouse. My hair was short and stylish, my makeup simple. I wore low heels and carried a black Dolce & Gabbana handbag that Brian had given me as a birthday present. (I’d never heard of the designers until Brian decided to replace the ratty and overstuffed bag I’d carried for years.) I felt proud of how I’d survived and grown, proud that my children were safe, and proud that a man as fine as Brian was by my side helping me navigate the crowds.
We took an elevator up from the parking garage, and when the doors opened, all I could see were the pastel dresses. Hundreds of FLDS women had dutifully turned out in their long, shapeless attire to take part in the massive protest that the FLDS was staging. Judge Lindberg had issued a court order prohibiting the FLDS from protesting within the courthouse. In a show of defiance the cult members had ignored that order.
I had not been in such a large crowd of FLDS women since my escape. It took my breath away to be face to face with my past. I knew many of the older women in the crowd, but most of the younger girls had only heard the stories about me.
They looked confused. Clearly I didn’t fit their image of an apostate doing the devil’s work. FLDS members were taught that anyone who left the work of God could never find happiness. We were conditioned to believe that any woman who left the FLDS would lose not only her health but her beauty.
Most of these girls had had very little exposure to the outside world. I’m sure they expected me to be ugly. Seeing me look strong, confident, and feminine with a handsome man I loved at my side undercut everything they’d been indoctrinated to believe. Hostility spat from the eyes of most of the older women, but not all. One reached out to hug me and asked if her mother would be in court. The two of them had been estranged since her mother was kicked out of the FLDS a few years earlier for refusing to obey her abusive husband. Several of the woman’s older children, including this girl, had remained in the FLDS. Her warm embrace made me instantly think of Betty and gave me hope that one day she and I might reconcile.
But even more surprising was hearing my cousin Lucy call out “Carolyn!” Looking exhausted and pale, Lucy jostled her way through the crowd and smiled when she hugged me. I was incredulous that she dared to hug me in front of an FLDS mob. Lucy and I had had some serious disagreements about the FLDS when she and I were part of a group that secretly went to Curves to exercise. We remained close during some of my worst times in the FLDS, and she was one of the few people who would give me the time of day after I left. But I hadn’t seen her for a while and was startled that she dared call out to me so publicly. My heart ached to see how worn and lost this once-spirited woman looked. We were close in age, but she looked much older now. If she dared to hug me, it meant she almost certainly was on the margins of the FLDS and felt she had nothing to lose.
Brian and I had to get to the fourth floor of the courthouse, but there was no way we could make our way through the crowd to the next bank of elevators. Our only option was the stairs. But the mob had jammed into the stairwells as well.
By flooding the courthouse with people and clogging the security, the FLDS seemed confident it could disrupt the proceedings. Hundreds of kids had come with their parents. Most of the boys carried pocketknives, which brought everything to a standstill as they went through the metal detectors. The FLDS had alerted the media to its protest, and TV crews were there. Willie Jessop bragged that four thousand FLDS were there, but I think the true number was closer to a thousand.
The FLDS leadership was probably hoping that Judge Lindberg would bar them from the building, giving them a way to turn public opinion against her. But the judge was savvy enough not to take the bait. She knew that finding the FLDS in contempt for ignoring her order would have played right into its hands.
The immediate issue for Judge Lindberg was whether to allow the UEP trust to sell a large parcel of land—Berry Knoll Farm—and use the proceeds from the estimated $3 million sale to pay trust debts and generate income to keep functioning. Ultimately, of course, the FLDS was fighting to regain control of the trust altogether because of the tens of millions of dollars at stake.
The trust controlled virtually all of the land and homes in the FLDS community along the Arizona-Utah border. But non-FLDS lived in this area, too, and for them, conditions were becoming less and less safe. The FLDS was determined to assert its power, whether it had legal control of the trust and its assets or not. And the FLDS-controlled police force collaborated in the harassment of nonmembers. Criminal trespassing warrants were issued to people who had every right to be in the area. A young non-FLDS mother was arrested several times for working in her yard and for putting a lock on her power box. Another man was arrested for working on his farm. These people had signed agreements acknowledging that they had the right to live where they did.
This kind of harassment rarely held up in court, but it created immediate and enormous problems for its targets. My father, Arthur Blackmore, was one of the witnesses called to testify about the crimes he’d seen the group commit. I was proud of him for standing up for himself. He had been deeply opposed to my escape and had been a staunch defender of the FLDS until he was kicked out and his family was stripped from him.
An attorney from the Arizona attorney general’s office finally helped Brian and me maneuver our way through the crowd. I wasn’t afraid, but I had never been in an atmosphere of such rampant hostility. People who had once been my friends glared at me with cruel disgust. A cousin I’d worked with as a teacher shot me a look of such loathing that it almost burned. There was no shouting, just venomous stares. At one point Brian whispered in my ear, “It doesn’t matter how many of them there are. The law is the law.”
The sadness I felt moving through that sea of pastel dresses outweighed the hostility directed at me. The women were doing what they had to do to survive in their world. They had been told to show up, and they did.
When we finally made it to the fourth floor, I turned in my cell phone and gave Brian a quick kiss good-bye before walking into the courtroom. The young girls in that crowd had probably never seen an affectionate couple. I’m Brian’s lover, not his slave, and I hoped the young girls in the pastel dresses would begin to consider the difference between the two.
In many of their eyes, I had run from power into a shallow, gentile life. As Merril Jessop’s wife, I had been at the pinnacle of FLDS society. But I didn’t run to experience love; I knew virtually nothing about true intimacy. I ran to free myself—and my children—from a world where abuse, degradation, and exploitation masquerade as faith and love.
I stood for everything a woman in the FLDS believed would take her to hell. It was painful to see hostility in the eyes of women who’d once been my friends. But what really hurt was seeing how many were still trapped in a hopeless cycle of abuse.
For the millionth time, I thanked God that I had found the strength to get out and stay out.
Triumph?
Thinking again about the reality of the raid and its implications has been painful, exhausting, and often disappointing. Where is the triumph in a tale that reeks of betrayal? How do those children who were promised security and protection feel now about their lives, their worlds, and their futures?
When some FLDS children were staying in a San Antonio shelter, they asked if they could see a dog. Patsy Swendson, who runs the Penny’s from Heaven Foundation, a therapy dog program, brought in two of her dogs—Zoe, a big Irish wolfhound, and Gracie, a little blind French hound dog. “It was the most heartbreaking thing I have ever done,” said Swendson, who has worked with therapy dogs for twenty years. “Children and dogs go together, they belong together. These children had never seen a dog, touched a dog, read a book about a dog, or ever looked into a dog’s eyes and felt a dog’s unconditional love.”
Swendson had been warned that the children might be abusive toward the dogs. No one knew how they would respond. But the kids were mesmerized, gentle, and curious. “Within ten minutes they went from fear of the dogs biting them to lying on the floor beside them, petting and loving them and begging us to bring them back again ‘real soon,’” she recalled. “They turned from little robots into children laughing and playing with a dog.
“The boys were all over the dogs and the girls, more standoffish,” Swendson said. “But one little girl had a tiny pink slipper, like a shoe from a Barbie. She picked up Gracie’s little foot and put it on one of her toenails.” Swendson remembers a handsome young boy who was about twelve. “He just melted on the floor. It was like Christmas Day for him to see a dog. Seeing him react was reward enough for me. But the sad part was when we were getting ready to leave. He came to the door, and the feeling I had in my gut was that he wanted to run away with us. It was eerie. I will never forget the sadness in his face. It broke my heart knowing what these children were going back to, but it did help somewhat knowing that at least for a moment, they were able to experience nonthreatening, nonjudgmental devotion that we find at our feet every day.”
The absence of dogs in the children’s lives stems from a day in the late 1990s that I re
member well. On orders from Warren Jeffs, all the dogs in the community where rounded up and killed or taken to the pound. This was in response to the death of a small boy who had been attacked by his stepfather’s pit bull. People in the community had dogs as pets, although it was generally frowned upon, and sometimes people would kill each other’s dogs in retaliation for something. I think Jeffs’s motivation in ordering the elimination of dogs was an attempt to see how far he could get the community to go. It was chilling to me that no one—no one—challenged him.
So it wasn’t a surprise to me that none of the FLDS children had seen a dog. It’s a small but telling detail about how different their world is from ours. Similarly, some of the kids held in state custody after the raid had never seen crayons before and tried to unwrap and eat them.
Dogs and crayons: small signs of big problems. But ultimately it’s facts—not signs, impressions, assumptions, or opinions—that speak the loudest. Here are some facts that appeared in the report (available online) on the official investigation of the raid on the YFZ Ranch published by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. The DFPS report is dated December 22, 2008, seven months after the children were returned to the YFZ Ranch on orders from the Texas Supreme Court.
Investigation Results
12 girls were victims of sexual abuse and neglect at the YFZ Ranch with the knowledge of their parents. The 12 girls were “spiritually” married at ages ranging from 12 to 15, and seven of those girls had one or more children. The 12 confirmed victims of sexual abuse were among 43 girls removed from the ranch from the ages of 12 to 17, which means that more than one out of every four pubescent girls on the ranch was in an underage marriage.
Triumph: Life After the Cult--A Survivor's Lessons Page 12