Authors: Elissa Wall
Stolen Innocence (48 page)
“I’m in town right now,” she told me. “William Timpson said that if you want to, we can set up a meeting and I can see you for a few minutes.” Tears filled my eyes at the sound of her warm voice. Back in December I’d told her I was pregnant, and now I informed her that her new grandson had been born. She was thrilled to meet him, and we scheduled a rendezvous for the following morning. I called Kassandra as soon as I hung up. She was already planning to come down for Uncle Fred’s funeral, and when I told her about the meeting with Mom she put a rush on her trip.
It was pouring rain the next day when Kassandra and I drove in her blue Ford Focus to the meeting spot. Mom was already there waiting for us, and with no shelter, we all jumped into the backseat of Kassandra’s car. The first few minutes were pleasant as Mom expressed her love for us and gushed over the baby, but our joy was instantly cut short when the conversation turned to the missing-persons report that Kassandra had filed. Mom was hurt that her children had gone against the priesthood like that and asked that we not do it again. I was alarmed to see how agitated Mom appeared, and even more disturbed by the big white truck that was parked along the street when we arrived. We all knew that inside were members of the FLDS who’d been sent to keep watch over Mom.
The conversation turned awkward as Kassandra pressed Mom, and I silently wished she would stop. It was all still fresh enough for me to remember what it felt like to be a true believer. All Mom was asking was to be able to live her beliefs without us fighting them, and I didn’t yet have the perspective to understand what my sister was trying to do. We wanted to know why Mom hadn’t brought Ally and Sherrie along that day.
“We didn’t want a problem,” Mom explained, and it was clear from her tone that “we” referred to the priesthood elders, who feared that Kassandra and I might try to take the girls with us. She declined to tell us where she and the girls were now living and implored us not to stir up any more trouble. I was certain that leaving the girls behind was a calculated tool on the elders’ part to ensure that Mom returned for them. Otherwise, the risk would have been too great that Kassandra and I would persuade her to leave and take our sisters with her.
“What are you going to do when Sherrie faces the same thing that Elissa did?” Kassandra asked Mom. Sherrie was now thirteen and quickly approaching the age at which I was placed with Allen.
Mom was indignant. “I’ll do something,” she replied.
My sister stared over me at Mom. “I don’t feel like you have the power to stop something from happening to those girls. I don’t feel like you have the power to protect them.”
“Yes, I do,” Mom insisted. It was sad to hear her trying to convince herself of that. I knew how much she loved those girls, and that she would never want any harm to come to them. But the ominous sight of the white truck with the tinted windows was an ugly reminder of what lengths these people would go to to keep a hold on their followers.
“No you don’t,” Kassandra shot back. “You didn’t have it when it happened to Lesie, and you won’t have it when it happens to those girls.”
“Well, that’s just something I’ll just have to put on a shelf,” Mom said, referring to her inability to halt my marriage to Allen. It seemed that no difficult conversation with Mom had ever been complete without this line.
“I’d rather see you die than fight the priesthood,” Mom said. Her words were a hard slap on the face. Everything Mom had ever done had been influenced by her loyalty to the church above all else, but to hear her phrase it in such indisputable terms was upsetting.
“I’m not trying to fight you,” Kassandra assured her. “I’m not trying to fight anybody. I’ll tell you what. If we can go to the funeral tomorrow and I hear something that puts our minds at ease, then we will leave this alone.” Mom agreed, and before departing she told us to pray for an answer from the Lord. Later that day, she orchestrated a phone call between William Timpson and me, in which he welcomed Kassandra and me to Fred’s funeral. “I give you my personal permission,” he told me.
The next morning, Kassandra and I set off for Hildale. We’d spent an hour or so styling our hair in the FLDS updo and selecting dresses to fit in with the crowd. More than three thousand mourners turned out for the funeral service that was held in the large meetinghouse at the center of town. Several men guarded the door, and we were greeted by a few. Before granting us entrance, we were asked if we were carrying cell phones. Kassandra offered to turn hers over but was told to just take it to the car. That’s when we were confronted by church elder Willy Jessop. He had a reputation for being gruff and unkind, and though he probably knew the answer, he asked who we were. The church elders who had been involved in our conversation all stepped back as Willy confronted Kassandra and me. When we identified ourselves, he told us that we were not welcome.
“We have a personal invitation from William Timpson,” I told him, growing upset. It was exceptionally cold outside and had started to lightly snow, a rare event in sunny Hildale. I had Tyler bundled in my arms, and he was just six weeks old, but Willy didn’t care about that.
Kassandra and I were not allowed inside for the entire three-hour service, and we sat through most of it in Kassandra’s car. We waited for the procession to come out and positioned ourselves so that we would be at the front of the line, that way, when we reached Fred’s grave we would be close to where Mom would be standing as one of Fred’s wives.
I was desperate to see her again, and I knew this might be our last chance. I rocked the baby in my arms and tried to keep every inch of his tiny body sheltered from the icy air. When the service was finally over, scores of congregants came pouring out the large double doors. Standing by Fred’s grave site clutching my infant to my chest, I was aware that I was the latest scandal in town, and I was joined by my apostate sister. Everywhere around us there was a wall of silence, as people we’d known for years dismissed us with a glance. To them, I was no longer important, worthy, or loved. I was just one more lost soul who had no right to be standing on their sacred land.
Mom joined us at the end of the burial.
“See? Wasn’t that beautiful?” she said, smiling contentedly.
“They wouldn’t let us in,” I told her. I knew what was going to happen now, and I silently wished that we’d just been granted entrance to stop the inevitable confrontation.
“Oh, Kassandra, it must have been a mistake,” Mom nervously replied.
“No, it wasn’t a mistake,” my sister told her. “This was God’s answer.”
Again, I found myself in the middle of my mom and my sister. Our conversation was cut short when Mom was hurried away with the rest of Fred’s wives.
I was relieved to receive a call from her that night. She’d gone to William Timpson about how we’d been restricted from the service. Willy Jessop had told the bishop that we’d been confrontational. The misunderstanding led to William’s decision to grant us permission to visit with Mom again the following day at Cottonwood Park. When we arrived Mom was already there waiting for us, and so was the same big white truck with the FLDS men inside, observing our entire visit from behind the tinted windows.
We spent three hours together, and snapped plenty of photographs, many of which are in frames displayed around my house today. I brought Lamont along so that he could meet my mother. She was kind and accepting to him and our son. Mom pushed Kassandra’s son on the swing and cradled Tyler in her arms. As I watched Mom playing with her grandchildren, I was overcome by a sense of grief that they would have to grow up without her. With tears in the corners of my eyes, I asked, “Mom, are we ever going to see you again?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, shaking her head softly. There was a long pause. “I wish I could be a grandmother to my grandchildren,” she said in a wistful tone.
“Mom, you still could,” I urged. “We would love to have you in our lives.” A quick flash of images came into my mind—possibilities that would never come to pass—of Ally, Sherrie, and Mom getting out and starting over with us. Mom continued to press me not to involve the authorities again, bringing it up several times. Her words were unexpected and there was something about them that seemed forced, as though perhaps this meeting had been about more than just seeing her grandchildren.
Eventually we had to say good-bye. With a distant look in her eyes, Mom walked toward the two men who’d been watching over us and disappeared into their truck.
Kassandra and I looked at each other, devastated. As much as we didn’t want to believe it, inside we both knew this would be the last time we’d ever see our mother.
Evil flourishes when good men do nothing.
—
SHARON WALL, QUOTING EDMUND BURKE
A
fter that last meeting with Mom, we lost contact with her for a second time, and I began receiving pressure from Kassandra and Craig to help them do something about it. In her efforts to locate Mom and the girls, Kassandra began speaking with law enforcement, and during those conversations, she briefly told authorities what had happened to me. Though I’d specifically asked her not to say too much, she came away from those exploratory calls with the impression that, if I didn’t come forward to authorities by what would have been my fourth anniversary to Allen that April, the criminal statute of limitations would run out on possible charges being pressed.
Kassandra and Craig were pushing hard for me to present my story to authorities, hoping that it could help gain Sherrie and Ally’s freedom. While I wanted nothing more than to help my younger sisters, I was not interested in speaking to police. I had not lost my fear of law enforcement, and I worried about what the priesthood would do to me if I talked to the police about my life. I also didn’t want to hurt Mom.
Nevertheless, as April approached, the pressure on me intensified. In addition to Kassandra and Craig, Lamont’s uncle Jethro Barlow, the man who’d been publicly expelled from the FLDS, contacted Lamont with some information about a law-enforcement investigation that had been launched into my relationship to Allen. He raised the possibility of a subpoena, and I was terrified. During his short reign as prophet, Warren had expelled a lot of people, and some of them had come together on the outside. They were working hard to remove Warren from power, and I was viewed as someone who could help them.
There were already a number of lawsuits in the works that were designed to challenge Warren’s abuse. Shem Fisher, an expelled FLDS member, had been one of the first to find the courage to file lawsuits against Warren Jeffs and the FLDS. His actions blazed the way for others, and he eventually became a valuable tool for law enforcement in their efforts to address the abuse of minors in the FLDS. The group of FLDS exiles known as “the Lost Boys” later also filed a civil suit against Warren and the FLDS Church seeking compensation for “unlawfully banishing them from their homes and their families.”
Warren’s nephew Brent Jeffs had also accused him and others of repeated acts of sexual abuse when he was just a boy of about five or six attending Alta Academy. The Utah Attorney General’s Office declined to press criminal charges on Brent’s behalf, but that didn’t stop him from filing a civil suit. Brent Jeffs told the press that he’d decided to come forward after his brother Clayne committed suicide. Medical records revealed that Clayne had also been sexually abused.
A lawyer for Warren Jeffs denied the charges, calling the action “part of a continuing effort by enemies of the church to defame it and its institutions.”
Lamont and I were appalled by this information about Warren’s behavior. Warren had always held himself up to be the most righteous and had demanded perfection from us all. Even masturbation was considered a sin, and Warren punished and often exiled boys who admitted to such an “evil” activity. Lamont told me that Warren instructed boys to confess in painstaking detail, describing what they’d done and how it made them feel. Thinking back to how often Allen had done this in front of me, I found myself even more furious at what I’d been forced to endure.
With this gathering storm against Warren, Lamont and I began to understand Warren’s mysterious absences since at least the summer of 2004. That was when the first of these lawsuits was filed against him. Outside of Short Creek, there was a lot of public speculation that he was giving up on the southern Utah community to evade the lawsuits piling up against him and the church. The media began to explore a new FLDS settlement in Texas, one that Warren had been building for a couple of years. YFZ (Yearn for Zion) Ranch was the walled-in community being constructed in a remote location outside of El Dorado, Texas, on 1,697 acres for use as a “hunting retreat.”
By late January 2005, a massive footprint of a building began to take shape, and in late March a temple rose up from the landscape. The enormous structure soared ninety feet above the ground, and as April neared, news reports claimed that workmen were busy applying a coat of primer to its exterior. There were reports that Warren wanted the construction to be complete by April 6, the date of the annual priesthood conference. Not only would the FLDS temple be a place to get closer to heaven, but it could also be a place where rituals such as blood atonement could be performed. I’d always been taught that this ritual could only be performed in a temple. Members of law enforcement quietly prepared themselves in case Warren was planning something more ominous for the temple’s completion date.
As the April 23 deadline to file charges loomed, Kassandra and Craig increasingly encouraged me to come forward. While I fretted over the possibility that one day I might regret not speaking out, I was not prepared to make such a leap. All I wanted was to close the door on that chapter of my life, to put the past behind me and settle into my role as a new mother. It was fun to focus my attention on the little things like what outfit I would dress my baby in and how I would comb his thick shock of dark brown hair. It would be weeks before his fair blond locks would come in and months before he would utter his first sounds, but I was eager to soak in all that motherhood had to offer me. Lamont and I had started to make some friends in Hurricane. We’d moved to a nicer house that had a swimming pool in the backyard, and I was excited at the prospect of enjoying summer barbecues with friends like “normal” people do.
