Carolyn Jessop; Laura Palmer (42 page)

Dan and Leenie invited us to join them for a week in San Diego, where they had a beach house. My children had never seen the ocean and were excited at the thought. Betty refused to come with us because we were being so wicked and because we told her that she couldn’t wear her FLDS clothing on the beach. So she stayed behind, but it was okay because she was actually doing better at Karen’s house. It seemed to be a relief for her not to feel responsible for keeping all of her brothers and sisters in line with FLDS doctrine.

Dan arranged to have some of his family and friends who were coming on the trip take turns driving my family. That made it much easier on me. He even had someone to help me with Harrison. Dan’s continual kindness to me was miraculous. When we got to San Diego we had two rooms in a hotel that was down the beach from Dan’s home. The kitchenette was stocked with food, so I wouldn’t have to shop. One of the rooms had a sliding glass door that opened directly onto the beach.

The moment we awakened, we put on our swimsuits and my kids raced through the soft sand to splash and play at the water’s edge.

Merrilee and Bryson ran up and down the beach chasing sea gulls. They were still at that wondrous age when they believed that if they just ran a little faster they could wrap their arms around a big bird.

Bryson was almost two. He couldn’t talk a lot, but one of the words he said very well was
ducks
.

He toddled up and down the beach on his chubby legs, waving his arms and shouting, “Ducks, ducks, ducks.”

Merrilee was busy building princess sand castles. She was just about to turn six and princesses were her new discovery. The week we escaped she watched a
Cinderella
video for the first time. Merrilee watched it so many times that the tape finally broke. Everything in her life now revolved around being a princess.

Patrick and Andrew used their imaginations to build forts out of sand and play games on the beach. They were still scared of the water because in the FLDS you are not allowed to go near it. None of my children knew how to swim, so they’d only wade up to their knees.

I spent three relaxing days with my children on the beach and at the hotel. At night I’d go up to Dan and Leenie’s beach house to be with the adults. It was wonderful to be able to drink wine, laugh, eat, and talk. I hadn’t socialized like that before. Dan and Leenie brought a lot of their married children along on the trip, so their beach house was happy, noisy, and fun. Arthur, who was fifteen, and LuAnne, who was eleven, spent most of their time there with the older children. These were the most carefree days of childhood they’d ever had.

I had never known this kind of happiness was possible.

I Meet the Attorney General

S
hortly after we returned from San Diego, Merrilee turned six and we had a princess birthday party for her. It was the first party she had ever had in her life.

Even though birthday celebrations were practically taboo in the FLDS, over the years I’d given my children small presents on the sly. When my older children—Arthur, Betty, and LuAnne—were young, I was able to get away with making them a birthday cake. But none of my kids had ever had a genuine birthday party that celebrated their being who they are. As the cult became more extremist, anything that even hinted at making someone feel special on his or her birthday became strictly off-limits. Even compliments were banned. Warren Jeffs taught that it was unacceptable to acknowledge compliments. A person had to rebuff the praise or say something like, “It’s all because of my priesthood head.”

Dan’s wife, Leenie, had the same birthday as Merrilee, so the celebration was even more of a bash because it was for both of them. Their house was decorated with balloons and streamers. There were tables full of food and piles of presents. Jolene had found a princess gown among her children’s Halloween costumes. Merrilee was ecstatic. This was unimaginable joy for her, and for my other children, too.

We all sang “Happy Birthday” before the candles were lit. One side of the white cake with pink frosting had candles for Leenie, the other for Merrilee.

My daughter was radiant and opened her presents in amazement. My children had never been in toy stores. The younger ones had been so stripped of worldly things such as dolls and stuffed animals that these presents were unbelievable not only because of what they were but also because Merrilee knew they were for her.

This was an unforgettable moment for me. My daughter was happy. Every adult in that room cherished her. I had never been able to experience what would be an ordinary joy to most families: a six-year-old’s birthday party with family and friends. Laughter, singing, and silliness washed over me like a stream of love. I could simply enjoy watching my dear little girl get to be a fairy-tale princess. I was free to be happy. I could do things for and with my children that I’d never been allowed to do before in their lives.

Merril was furious when he learned about Merrilee’s birthday party from Betty. He was unhappy because he did not have the power to prevent me from taking the children to San Diego. It was remarkable, though, to feel how much space opened up inside me when I didn’t have to fear Merril’s punishment anymore. I was so accustomed to being afraid that I had no way of gauging how much of me that fear consumed.

For the first time in my life I could put my children to bed at night and know they were safe. No one could wake them up and make them go upstairs for prayers and then abuse them. I could feed them breakfast in the morning and not worry that later, when my back was turned, someone would punish them for eating.

Merrilee’s birthday party opened my eyes to something I’d been trained not to do: have fun with my children. Every time I did something enjoyable with my children in Merril’s family, I was criticized for it or told it had created a problem. This went on for seventeen years, whether I took my children to the park, baked cookies, or played games with them outside. I was conditioned to believe that if I did anything fun with them, I’d be made to pay and pay and pay. As the years went by, I ceased doing the things that would cause trouble.

But I was free now. I made myself do things with my children so I would learn how to break out of the cycle of fear that had been cemented around my soul.

Someone gave us some McDonald’s dollars, and that, as simple as it sounds, was a challenge for me. I knew I could do it—no one was going to punish me for this—but I was still afraid. I had to keep telling myself, “Carolyn, it’s okay, it’s okay, you can do this.”

We did it. We went to McDonald’s. But when I got home I was a nervous wreck. My reaction shook me up. I put my kids to bed and stood in a hot shower to calm down. My body, my reflexes, and my instincts were all programmed for fear. I could not undo overnight the damage that had been done to my psyche over many years. The only way over was through—I knew that—but it was still debilitating and stressful. All I could do was face the fear and keep going.

But fear was still all around me. My family had to pay a price for my freedom. My sister Linda almost paid with her life. Someone in the community must have known I went to her house the night before I escaped and assumed she was in some way complicit.

Some weeks after my escape, she took her family hiking in a remote location in her truck. On her way there she lost her steering. This was surprising because she was driving slowly and the road was clear. Fortunately, she was able to maneuver her truck off the road without any of her five children being hurt. When the mechanic came he told her someone had tampered with the steering wheel.

I had to face off against Merril again in court in June. But his attorney was prepared this time and managed to deftly turn the tide against me with the help of the lawyer I thought was going to protect me.

The issue was custody. Merril’s attorney presented him as the good and steady all-American guy on
Father Knows Best.
Yes, he had a lot of children, but he cared about them all.

The two attorneys asked the judge if they could meet to try to work out a deal. I didn’t quite know why that was happening. The judge put a time limit on their meeting and the rest of us sat and waited.

When my attorney, Doug White, came back, he told me they’d reached a deal. I would get temporary custody, but Merril was going to get full visitation rights. The protective order would remain in place. Merril agreed to pay for counseling for his daughters—which he’d opposed—but only if the therapist was neutral about polygamy. In other words, the therapist was to be an advocate for the children and keep whatever feelings he or she had about polygamy out of the counseling sessions.

I felt blindsided. My attorney had rolled over and handed Merril nearly everything he’d demanded. I told Doug I didn’t need as much protection as my children did. He said that I didn’t have any grounds on which to prove Merril should not be allowed to see his children unsupervised.

“I have fought these cases before,” my attorney said, “and men will work hard to get the right for visitation, then once they get it they drop the whole thing and never see the kids. It is not something that is worth fighting for because it really isn’t an issue.”

It was an issue to me—I felt we had been sold down the river. At the time I was unaware that I had the right to reject the deal my attorney made. I had lived so long without rights that I didn’t understand the ones I now had.

The attorneys outlined their deal to the judge. She asked me if I was in agreement with this. I was in such a state of shock that I stood before her feeling numb and dazed. I had no idea I could converse with the judge, so I just said that yes, I agreed with the deal.

What I learned later was that the judge discounted my allegations of abuse against Merril because I agreed in court to let him have unsupervised visitations. This made me look like either a bad mother or a liar. My credibility was shattered. Legally, I could now lose my children.

A guardian ad litem was assigned to this case, but that had the potential to work against me because at this point all my children were saying they wanted to return to Merril. They believed there would be terrible repercussions against them if they sided with me. They knew that in FLDS society their father held all the power, and in their eyes that made me powerless. I hadn’t been allowed to parent them in a traditionally loving and nurturing way when I was living with Merril. They knew I was their mother, of course, but they had others.

When the first meeting with the guardian ad litem was a few days away, Merril pulled out all the stops. Two of his older daughters, Esther and Merrilyn, found a way to get onto Dan Fisher’s property and find my Betty and LuAnne. They took them for a walk down the road and showed them how to give themselves hickies on their arms. Two days later when they met with the guardian ad litem they said the hickies were from my hitting them. The guardian knew it was a lie. I found out about this when Patrick and Andrew showed me how Betty had taught them to put hickies on themselves. She said that Esther had taught her how to do it on Merril’s orders. He wanted all of the children to give themselves hickies and then tell the guardian ad litem that I was hurting them.

As the weeks wore on, I became distraught about what was happening in the custody case. I knew Merril would spend unlimited sums of money to destroy my credibility in court and convince a judge that I was an unfit mother—the only way he could win sole custody in Utah.

Dan Fisher was upset that my case was going so badly. He knew that unless I got a first-rate attorney, I would lose custody of my children. We looked at one of the major family law firms in town. The attorney we spoke with was blunt: the firm did not want to take on a cult. The FLDS had been in court before and won their cases by financially wearing out their opponents. “This cult will dump a million dollars into this case before they’ll walk away from it,” the attorney said. “Carolyn is a hole in the dike for them, and there is no way they will ever let her get these kids.”

Dan said he’d pay my legal bills. But then we got a big break. Utah’s attorney general, Mark Shurtleff, agreed to meet with me. I had been meeting regularly with the investigator from Shurtleff’s office about the extremism and abuse that had taken hold in the FLDS. But Dan and I both felt the attorney general needed to become more actively involved. Now we had our chance.

Dan and his brother Shem came with me. I brought a two-page list summarizing the abuse that was occurring in the FLDS because of Warren Jeffs. I organized my thoughts and composed myself. I did not want Mark Shurtleff to think I was some insane woman who’d grabbed her children and fled in the middle of the night.

When I shook his hand I looked him directly in the eye and asked him how much time I had. “Thirty minutes,” he said. We sat around a table in a conference room. Dan said we were here because of the human rights violations that were taking place within the FLDS community. He said he felt the attorney general’s office had to intervene.

I began by giving each person at the table a copy of my two-page list of abuses. It delineated the numerous marriages I had witnessed among under-age girls and the emotional devastation this had caused. I described how women were taken from their husbands and arbitrarily given to other men.

I told how young boys were trained as spies to go into FLDS homes and report back to Warren. I explained how Warren had terrorized young children by having animals tortured to death in front of them. I told them about the day all the dogs were destroyed and how Warren taught that a society that treated animals humanely was corrupt and had turned away from God.

It was chilling to recount what had become routine in my life. I talked about the teenage boys who were kicked out of the cult, dumped on highways, and told never to return. In a polygamous culture, boys are disposable, I told the attorney general. Sometimes they’d be kicked out on trumped-up charges—exposure to CDs or movies or kissing a girl. More often than not, they’d simply be told one afternoon that they had to be gone the next morning. (Dan Fisher’s foundation for these boys knows the names of four hundred who have been summarily expelled.)

The attorney general was riveted. He asked me question after question, seeking more detail and specifics. We were there for well over thirty minutes; every so often he would ask his assistant to cancel his next appointment.

I explained that for seventeen years, I was married to one of the most powerful men in the FLDS community. I knew Warren Jeffs and how he behaved. He was consistent, predictable, and to my mind very dangerous.

Two and a half hours later, when our meeting was finished, Mark’s aloof, professional demeanor had shifted to one of sheer outrage. He stood up and addressed everyone at the table.

“This situation is really serious, and it has the potential of becoming a mass suicide. We have got to pull more help in on this situation immediately. We need to collaborate with the state of Arizona and pull in the feds.”

The meeting was ending and we hadn’t even talked about my custody case. Dan jumped in and insisted we focus on it. I was the first woman who had ever taken the FLDS to court for custody of her children. Most of the time, if a woman left, she did so knowing she might not be able to get all her children out. The reality of abandoning some of her children was the price a woman had to be willing to pay for her freedom.

Dan told Shurtleff that Merril had hired one of the highest-paid attorneys in the state to fight me. Dan and I knew that if Merril could win his case against me, no woman would ever again try. A representative who was at the meeting from Child Protective Services agreed completely.

Shurtleff shook his head in disbelief. Then he said that my case was going to be a high-profile one and he would find an attorney smart enough to protect my children. He was true to his word and moved fast. A few days later he put me in touch with a former judge, Lisa Jones, who had done custody cases for years and knew family law inside and out. She was now working for a major law firm and agreed to take my case pro bono.

Mark Shurtleff is a Mormon but has no ties to fundamentalism. He later told me that for years people had come into his office complaining about polygamy. But state officials had always warned him that if he went after polygamists, it would cost him his career. Even though polygamy is a felony, he would be perceived as persecuting religion.

Mark also told me that he didn’t sleep much the night after our meeting because he knew there was no turning back. He knew he had to deal with polygamy. Now when we give speeches together he says, “After I talked with Carolyn, I realized that I had been elected to do a job and I couldn’t ignore my responsibilities, even if it resulted in costing me my career.”