Carolyn Jessop; Laura Palmer (46 page)

Going on a hunch that Feldenkrais might help Harrison, Lee offered to treat him for free. I was desperate to find more help for Harrison. He had improved greatly during our first two years in Salt Lake but now seemed to be on a plateau.

Harrison began seeing Lee three times a week, and within months he began crawling correctly. A few months after that, Lee had Harrison on his feet. He couldn’t walk alone, but he could take a few steps if he was well supported. This felt miraculous. Harrison had always screamed in the past when he was placed in a standing position. Now not only could he crawl, he could climb. His newfound mobility made him happier and easier to handle.

Brian remained a steadfast and joyful presence in my life. I experienced a kind of intimacy and tenderness I’d never known before. Brian taught me how to dance, took me to see the Utah Jazz play basketball, and introduced me to the life he said I would have been living if I hadn’t been born into polygamy.

Sometimes we’d just hang out and watch movies. I had never seen a lot of the classic films we enjoyed watching together. Brian is Jewish and he took me to his synagogue and taught me about some of his beliefs and traditions. It was interesting to me, but at the moment I’m not in the market for another God.

Brian has a deep respect for women and had a hard time listening to some of what I’d been through. I didn’t tell him a lot of things because I knew they would be too painful for him to hear. We went for long walks in the park together and he got me interested in running. Brian had done the Boston Marathon five times and the New York Marathon once.

When summer began, Brian gave our family season passes for Lagoon, an amusement park for children that’s like a mini Disneyland. It also has the best water park in the valley. Brian said I was always doing things for my children but that I rarely got to do things
with
them.

Betty was furious that we were going to be riding on the roller coaster, going through the haunted house, and banging around in bumper cars. She tried her best to sabotage us by telling the younger children not to go. The FLDS believed water was the devil’s domain, and Betty tried to convince her siblings that I was throwing them into the devil’s lair.

Individually, the children were doing well, but as a family we were still in the throes of the cult mentality. We went into counseling together. After a few sessions the therapist said that she wanted to work one-on-one with Betty. I was so grateful when Betty said she was willing to go.

I went back into therapy with Larry Bill. He told me that I was hurting Betty by allowing her to terrorize the family and that I was jeopardizing everyone else. It was hard for me to accept, but I knew what Larry was saying about Betty was true. We needed a time-out.

I talked to my brother, Arthur, and he agreed that Betty could come to live with his family for a few weeks. Betty was livid and accused me of throwing her out. I said two years of struggle was enough. She could come back when she was willing to behave.

So Betty moved in with Arthur. She actually seemed relieved to be able to lay down her arms. Her father could no longer use her as a weapon, which I think had been a terrible burden for her—something I didn’t appreciate at the time. She still maintained contact with Merril, but she wasn’t spying on us for him.

Merril went ballistic. He insisted that if Betty wasn’t living with me she should be with him. I made it clear that Betty’s move was only temporary and that she just needed some time and space of her own.

Patrick and Andrew did well in counseling and told me they wanted to take karate. I thought that was a fine idea and found a six-week program nearby. I asked for and received a reduction in tuition from $20 a child to just $10 for the whole six weeks, because I was still strapped for cash. My job with Paul had ended and I had not figured out something else.

Hill Dalde, the karate instructor, was a fourth-degree black belt. On their first day he told me that Patrick and Andrew were going to be his top students. I thought he meant for the six-week class. He meant long-term: he saw great potential in both my boys.

We found a way to continue karate—another godsend. Patrick and Andrew made great progress, moving up four belts in their first year. It was one area in their lives where they had total mastery of their bodies and their environment. Hill developed a mentoring relationship with my boys and would take them to the movies as they reached new goals.

Patrick and Andrew had never had such a positive role model in their lives. Brian had met my children, but we were taking it very, very slow with respect to introducing him into our lives.

After the first year of karate, Hill agreed to teach Betty, LuAnne, and the little princess herself, Merrilee. Betty did very well because she’s very disciplined. LuAnne is athletic, and although she’s not as motivated as the boys, she’s done fine. Merrilee is determined and persistent, which serves her well in karate. She’s also a natural athlete and has been steadily moving up with her belts.

Despite all the help I’d been given, I still had trouble asking for it when I needed it. I was so used to doing what I was told and never asking for help. Dan Fisher thought his foundation was paying my rent when I left the battered women’s shelter and was upset when he found out that hadn’t happened. He could not believe how much I’d struggled without asking for more help.

As my children felt safer and more secure, I began to hear more stories about Merril and Barbara’s abuse. One of my daughters told me about being molested by her half brother. Patrick told me about the night Barbara beat him so hard, he thought he was going to die. He was even afraid after he told me what happened because he didn’t want his half brothers to hate him for telling. It was one abuse story after another.

The kids continued to unload stories for about a year. It was painful for me to listen, but I knew that their mental health depended on my ability to hear and validate what they’d endured.

After two and a half years of waiting, the Section 8 housing voucher came through in November 2005. I went on an orientation to learn the details, and when it was over I sat in my car and cried. I was only going to have to pay $70 a month for rent. For the first time in my life, I had breathing room. No longer would all my money have to go to housing expenses. Knowing I’d have $500 left over after I paid my utilities and other expenses felt like an unbelievable windfall.

By Christmas, I learned that Merril had moved his entire family into Warren Jeffs’ compound in Texas. At that point he had fourteen wives and about forty children who were still young enough to be living at home. The one person who was left behind was his wife Faunita, who was put in a mental institution in Flagstaff, Arizona. She was told she was unworthy to participate in the kingdom of God.

In the spring of 2005, the state of Utah seized the assets of the FLDS, which were worth $110 million. The assets—all in real estate—were part of a trust called the United Effort Plan, or UEP. It has been set up by the FLDS as a charitable trust. The UEP owned all the homes in the community.

Warren Jeffs used the trust to his advantage by putting assets in the names of his cronies, who would then sell them and give Jeffs the money. Since there was never really any oversight until the state went after it, the UEP was like a personal ATM for Warren Jeffs.

Jeffs, who had been in hiding for more than a year, did not try to defend himself when Utah went to court to gain control of the UEP trust. He knew if he showed up, he would be arrested on the state and federal charges that had been leveled against him.

Once the court gave control of the trust to the state of Utah, legally Warren Jeffs was cut off at the knees. Utah, Arizona, and the FBI were all pursuing him, and his assets were unavailable to him.

But thousands of brainwashed believers still clung to him as their prophet and leader. This was further proof of what many had grown up believing: that evil outsiders were always poised to attack and persecute those who were doing God’s work.

So Jeffs still exerted power. He ordered his followers to withhold the state tax they would normally pay on their houses that were owned by the U.E.P. This is a substantial amount of money, about a million dollars a year. None of Jeffs’ followers paid taxes. The administrator of the trust responded by going after Warren’s brother Lyle with an eviction notice. After he was forced to pay his taxes, others in the FLDS did, too.

Rumors circulated in the community that Jeffs now had the ability to be transported directly by God from place to place. He would show up in the twinkling of an eye and disappear just as magically. Jeffs’ fanatical believers were convinced that this was why the authorities had so far been unsuccessful in capturing him. Jeffs fed into their perverse worldview by sending back stranger and stranger communications. He took full credit for the tsunami off Thailand that had killed hundreds of thousands in December 2004 and said that more disasters would befall those who were trying to stop the work of God.

Warren’s response to what seemed like the beginning of the end for him was to marry and marry and marry again. The rumor was that he was up to 180 wives. He was marrying younger and younger girls—one of whom was my former second-grade student Jennet Jessop, who was fourteen at the time.

What was also disturbing was the number of people who disappeared. Entire families would be moved out of the community during the night. To this day, no one knows where they are. Winston Blackmore and his first wife, Jane, lost their daughter, who disappeared with her husband.

Since Brent Jeffs filed his civil suit in 2004, over a hundred young boys and girls were interviewed by the Utah attorney general’s office about their allegations of sexual and physical abuse by Warren Jeffs.

The media became more aware of Warren Jeffs as the hunt for him continued. Stories were written about the men who’d been excommunicated and the hundreds of “lost boys” whom Warren Jeffs had arbitrarily banished from the FLDS.

Johnny Jessop, one of the “lost boys” Dan Fisher has been supporting, can’t find his mother, Sue, and has filed a lawsuit against Jeffs to reveal her whereabouts. There have also been rumors that children were being taken from their mothers and sent to the FLDS compound in Texas—which is called the YFZ Ranch, which stands for “Yearning for Zion.” These were children who belonged to men Warren had kicked out of the cult. We heard that they were being sent away to be raised the way Warren wanted them to be raised.

I began to see that we’d made it out just in time. But I was sickened by what I heard about people who had been part of my life.

When Faunita was eventually released from the mental institution in Flagstaff, she hitched a ride from someone and returned to Colorado City and stood alone on the doorstep of our old home. She tried to open the door, but it was locked. When Merril moved to Texas, he gave the house to Nathan, Faunita’s son. But since Faunita had been excommunicated, Nathan’s family wouldn’t let her in. Faunita stood in the rain while her grandchildren stared out the windows at her. Ruth and Merril’s son Wallace finally came and picked her up. Wallace told her she couldn’t stay in the community, drove her to a motel in Hurricane, and left her there.

In the end, one of Faunita’s grandsons, Merril III, who had been kicked out of the FLDS and was a “lost boy,” came and rescued her. He rented her a little place and bought her groceries. But he was a teenager trying to survive on construction jobs and not making very much. With little education, he could barely survive himself.

Faunita was also a diabetic, so her health was perilous. One day she was found wandering, delirious, in Wal-Mart. After forty years of living with Merril’s abuse, Faunita was badly damaged and very sick. A few women who had been on the other side of the religious split that divided the FLDS started helping her buy groceries. Her situation was particularly heartbreaking to me.

But a year later, quite unexpectedly, Faunita, her daughter, Audrey, and son-in-law, Merlin, dropped in to see me. I was as delighted as I was stunned. I never expected that anyone from Merril’s family would want to see me again.

Faunita looked happier than I had ever seen her. She hugged me and laughed joyfully. She said she wanted to apologize for not helping me more when Harrison was so sick. Faunita was close to tears when she told me how sad she felt for me then. But she said she was too sick herself to reach out to me.

I never expected Faunita to make such a turnaround. Even though she is alone much of the time now, she is removed from the constant cruelty and abuse she endured for decades as one of Merril’s wives.

Brian moved back to Utah in the spring of 2005. He wanted to be closer to his two teenage boys, and to me. One of the things I love about Brian is that he is a devoted father. His sons anchor his life.

Some of Brian’s friends chided him about dating a little Mormon schoolteacher with eight kids. He told them I was the most amazing woman he had ever met, and he introduced me with pride when we went to parties. It felt surreal—happily so—to be dating a man who was a corporate executive. But most of all, I welcomed being included, for the first time in my life, in a world where ideas, culture, and education were respected.

Once the UEP trust was in the hands of the state of Utah, an advisory board was created to suggest how its assets could be best utilized to benefit those still in the community and requesting help. Thirty people applied for the board and six were chosen. I was one of them. This was more than an honor for me, it was a vindication. After years of trying to protect myself from the evils of the FLDS, I was now aligned with those who were going to fight to undo the damage it had done to children and families. Even though Warren Jeffs was in hiding, his power was gradually being shut down.

Arthur turned eighteen on December 20, 2005. Merril ordered him to leave everything he had and return to the FLDS. Arthur refused and told his father the religion had turned into something weird. Merril denied that it had, but Arthur held his ground. His life was going in another direction now. Merril was outraged. No son of his had ever stood up to him before.