Escape

by Carolyn Jessop

  Jason was not satisfied with just his one room. He soon commandeered the one next to it. I told him that was unacceptable because the motel was sold out for the upcoming weekend. He was furious with me and told James’ son Jimmy that he was going to dump acid in our well water. I told Jimmy to change every lock on every door that led to the shed where our well was.

  So Jason called the police, making wild accusations about Merril. When the police called Merril for his side of the story he finally stopped making excuses about Jason’s behavior and came to the motel a few days later to fire him. Merril would not stand for attacks on himself.

  The police came for the confrontation with Jason, which was stormy. He accused me of being abusive, hurtling accusations one after another. But no one was buying it. Dale, the police officer, finally insisted Jason leave the property.

  Then he turned to Merril and told him he needed to take me somewhere else. It wasn’t safe because Jason was directing all of his anger at me. James, who’d been in on the meeting, turned to Merril and said, “You have to get Carolyn out of here tonight. He might kill her if you leave her here.”

  Merril made light of James’ concerns. My world was so surreal that an ex-con who’d done twenty years for murder was more protective of me than my own husband.

  James went ballistic at Merril’s cavalier attitude. “Damn you, Merril. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. The man is dangerous. I’ll fucking kill him before I let him hurt your pregnant wife.”

  Dale turned to James and said that while his feelings were noble, he was looking at life in prison if he killed him.

  James was too angry to be intimidated. “Merril, you need to wake the hell up. Don’t put me in this position.”

  “I don’t see any concern in this situation,” Merril said in the strange and stilted way he had of speaking.

  James would not quit. “If you don’t take her home tonight, will you stay with her?”

  Merril said he would.

  “Do you have a gun?” James asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “If you don’t have a gun, you better take a hammer to bed with you. You don’t know what you’re dealing with here. Jason is the kind of person who’s likely to put gasoline in a bottle with a rag, light it, and throw it through the window.”

  Merril assured James there was nothing to worry about.

  James and the police left. A few moments later, Merril did, too. He took a key to a room he planned to stay in with Barbara that was out of Jason’s reach.

  I was almost too terrified to move, but I had to do something. I couldn’t stay in my room because Jason knew exactly where that was. My sister, little Rosie, was sleeping in the office, and I decided to stay with her. She was asleep when I got there. I knew she’d be frightened if I woke her up and told her what was going on, so I didn’t. I had sent my children back to Colorado City three weeks after Jason started working at the motel because I felt he was dangerous. I think that was another reason Merril wanted Jason at the motel: he knew that if I felt threatened, I’d leave my children at home and not bring them to Caliente.

  I locked all the doors but left the bathroom door open so I could see the lights on the shed. They were on sensors and turned on in response to movement. For the next two hours, I lay in bed, watching the lights flip on and off. Someone was out there.

  At 1 A.M. the motel phone rang. A voice I didn’t recognize asked to be transferred to Jason’s room. I said we didn’t put calls through that late. I was paralyzed by fear. I was sure the caller was checking to see if I was still awake.

  I was so exhausted that I finally dropped off to sleep. But at 2 A.M. I was jolted awake by a scraping sound on top of the roof. I could hear what sounded like footsteps and something being dragged across the motel roof. Then came more footsteps. It wasn’t just one person. I tried to wake Rosie, but then the footsteps stopped.

  I called James. In less than a minute he and his son Jimmy were in front of the motel with flashlights and guns. They called me to say they didn’t see anyone. James was firm on the phone. “But just because we didn’t find anything doesn’t mean that everything is all right. Stay awake. If he’s going to do something, it will probably be around now.”

  I thanked him and sat stiff in my bed. The phone rang again. It was James. “Carolyn, I have a bad feeling. We are coming down and staying. What you heard on the roof might have just been the first step of something. If we keep a presence there for a few hours, it will be too close to morning for Jason to do anything.”

  James and Jimmy spent the next few hours right next to the motel lobby. At regular intervals they circled around the house with their flashlights and guns drawn. They might have saved my life. I know they saved my sanity.

  The next morning I told Merril I was sure I’d heard people on the roof during the night and that James was on patrol to make sure nothing happened. Merril was furious and told me I’d blown everything out of proportion. He accused James of playing into my paranoid behavior. After he gave me a tongue-lashing he left for home with Barbara. I told them I needed to clean the laundry room before I returned to Colorado City. The last thing I wanted to do was travel with them.

  By the time I got back to Colorado City, Merril and Barbara were gone. I was a nervous wreck. On top of everything I still was sick and vomiting from being pregnant. The trauma hit me hard when I got home and I started crying so hard I couldn’t stop. The next day I felt desperately sick and broke out in hives. I was so weak it was hard to stand.

  I had never felt so sick in my life before. I had to crawl to the bathroom to throw up. The hives were all over my body.

  Merril called and wanted to talk to me. I told him that I was terribly ill and that I’d broken out in hives. “Well, that’s good,” he said.

  I thought he was joking. “Good?”

  His rage shot through the phone. “After the way you’ve been acting, I think so.”

  I said goodbye and hung up the phone.

  I knew I needed help. I couldn’t go back there without protection. My sister Annette was married to Merril’s half brother Bob. They had managed the motel for over four years in the past. I was betting they knew Jason.

  A week later I went to see them. The hives were gone and I was feeling a little better. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I got in my van and drove to St. George, which was about forty-five minutes away. I hadn’t seen Annette and Bob for years, but I knew they were still at the same address.

  They were glad to see me, and after catching up a bit I asked Bob if he knew Jason. He told me he knew a lot about him, and wanted to know why I was asking.

  When I told him Jason had been living at the motel he leaped to his feet and said, “Get him out!” Bob was shaking his finger at me. “That man has been involved in murder. He’s involved with a drug operation in Las Vegas. He’s done time in jail, but the police haven’t been able to convict him for the serious stuff he’s been involved with.”

  Annette looked shocked. “I can’t believe he’s still there,” she said. “When we left the police had a rap sheet on him and were going to take him down.”

  I told Bob that Jason was moving out; Merril was getting a no-trespassing order to keep him off the property and a restraining order to keep him away from me.

  Annette shook her head. Bob spoke first. “Carolyn, a restraining order isn’t going to protect you. This man has a sick mind. He belongs in an institution. The worst part is he’s hooked up with people who are very evil. He’s kind of a coward. I don’t know if he’d come after you himself, but he knows a lot of people who’d be happy to take you out for a few drugs.”

  I told them I wasn’t going back for two weeks—and that I didn’t think there was any way out of it. Annette couldn’t believe Merril was making me return to Caliente if it was so unsafe. “He insists that I’m paranoid and that my fears are out of control,” I told them.

  Bob was getting angrier by the moment. “I’ll tel
l that son-of-a-bitch husband of yours what you are involved with in Jason. I know the area and I know the people.”

  “It’s not going to change him just because you talk to him,” I said. “I know Merril.”

  “You’re going back there with a gun,” Annette said. “You can take mine. Bob and I will take you out to the gun range and teach you how to shoot it.”

  I didn’t argue with my sister. She came with me when I returned to Caliente the following week and made sure I knew how to use the gun. I kept it under my pillow. But Jason wasn’t the only trauma I was dealing with.

  I was having trouble with preterm labor. Each contraction frightened me because I was afraid the placenta might abrupt again. I was on medicine to stop the contractions. But it did nothing to diminish the stress, which was certainly not good either for me or my baby.

  I told Merril that I needed to be closer to a hospital because of the complications from my pregnancy. He growled at me, accusing me of using my pregnancy as an excuse for my laziness.

  Jeremy could see how sick I was and insisted I stop cleaning rooms. I stayed in the office and did computer work. For several days, Jeremy talked about having an eerie feeling as he cleaned. Finally he spotted Jason’s red car. A few days after that, Jason walked into the lobby and wanted to talk to me. Jeremy told him to leave and called the police, who did not get there for forty-five minutes. Jason was gone by then, but the police tracked him down and gave him a warning.

  A few weekends later my cousin Lee Ann was with me and the power went out at 9 P.M. That meant the phones were cut off, too, and I couldn’t call James for help. I locked the doors and grabbed my can of Mace. Lee Ann and I went to find James. I had that same eerie feeling Jeremy had talked about; it felt like Jason was watching and waiting, but I didn’t know where. James and Jimmy walked us back to the house.

  He checked the breaker boxes and found nothing wrong with any systems in the motel. He quickly restored power to the main house. But he said he was alarmed because usually when a breaker trips from a power overload it only flips partway. This breaker had been flipped all the way off, which said to James that it had been flipped deliberately. Jimmy put a key lock on the breaker box before leaving us. James promised us that they’d patrol around the house again that night with their flashlights and guns.

  Several days later James caught Jason on the property. He put a loaded gun to his head and told him he was going to blow his brains out. Jason dropped to his knees and pleaded and whimpered for mercy. James told him to get the hell off the property and that if he ever caught him again he’d enjoy the pleasure of killing him.

  I found this out two weeks later when I was visiting James in his trailer. James said he felt confident that he’d scared Jason away. “He knows from the police that I have killed a lot of men and I have nothing against killing him if I need to.” James had a beer in one hand and a cigarette in another. He offered me a beer, but I told him I didn’t drink when I was pregnant. “With a husband like that, you should,” he said. I couldn’t stop staring at the rattlesnakes in cages over his bed.

  Then James went on. “You know, sweetheart, that Jason is a small problem for you in comparison to that bastard you’re married to. You are nothing to that man but a piece of meat. You need to do whatever it takes to get yourself away from him.” He stopped, turned off the TV, and sat back in his chair.

  I knew what he said was true. But it was still a lot to take in.

  “James, you know I can’t leave Merril. I have nowhere to go and no one to help me get away from him. Not with six children and another on the way.”

  James was undeterred. “You are a very smart girl. You’ve been to college, but there was one class you should have taken.”

  I looked perplexed.

  “You should have taken a class on domestic violence. You are in over your head in a domestic violence situation.”

  Now he wasn’t making sense. I told him Merril had never hit me.

  “Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to be physical abuse. Emotional abuse is just as bad. I’ve never seen a man more emotionally abusive than your husband. He’s dangerous.”

  This was all new to me and not easy to process.

  “You girls from Colorado City think you’re only going to heaven if your husband lets you in. But that ain’t true. You don’t need your husband’s permission to go to heaven. No man’s going to keep you out of heaven.”

  I’d known Merril was dangerous from the moment I met him. But I’d never had the right words for it until I heard James describe it.

  I felt like the gravity had been stripped from my world. What James was saying undermined a main premise of my faith: that only my husband could determine whether or not I was worthy enough to enter into heaven. James did not comprehend what I knew in my bones to be true.

  James wasn’t finished. “I know the kind of man your husband is. I have seen his like before. You’re going to end up dead if you don’t wake up and get away from him.”

  I didn’t know how to respond.

  “Men like him start out with abuse but they will eventually kill their victims.”

  I thought of how Merril used to beat and brutalize Faunita. I knew Merril was scared of my father, but that certainly didn’t preclude him setting me up to be hurt by someone else. James had gotten rid of Jason, but how much longer would it be until Merril found some other criminal to work in the motel?

  I walked up the hill back to the motel. James’ words had burned into me.

  Life with Merril had always been painful and I hated it. That I knew. But now there was another element: danger. I’d never thought of myself as the target of domestic violence before. Was I?

  I lived in such an isolated world—one that since Warren Jeffs had taken over the FLDS, which he’d done within the past year, was now without television, newspapers, and magazines.

  James, who lived with rattlesnakes and stayed up all night and slept all day, cared more about me than anyone else in my world. No one else saw my situation with his clarity. No one else would dare suggest that I leave Merril. My parents knew I was unhappy, but both still believed my marriage was based on a revelation from God.

  Merril called a few days after my conversation with James and asked me to come home for a wedding. He was about to marry his seventh wife, Lorraine Steed. There was no way I could refuse. But I didn’t understand his urgency. His last two weddings had been top-secret.

  When I got home Tammy told me that Merril’s daughters—the ones he had married off to Uncle Rulon—had arranged the marriage because they wanted their father to marry someone nice.

  I felt revolted. Merril’s daughters weren’t supposed to be arranging marriages. I realized that my daughters were not going to be safe. How could I ever tell one of my girls that her marriage was the will of the prophet when, in fact, it was the will of her older sisters?

  My mother and grandmother had raised me to believe in the beauty of polygamy. I was taught that not only was it a more natural lifestyle, but a privileged one because it meant living a higher law of God, which always brought more happiness. A woman’s sister wives were her best friends who would always be there for her in sickness and in health. The love shared for the same man extended to the love wives shared for one another’s children. I grew up believing in the myth; my life proved it a lie.

  I knew I didn’t want to condemn my daughters to polygamy. But if I didn’t want them involved in polygamy, why was I staying?

  Merril’s wedding was full of pomp and grandeur. He was now in his mid-sixties; Lorraine was twenty years old. She went through the motions as robotically as I had, stiff, scared, and resigned.

  After the wedding I gathered up my four children and we drove back to the motel. Jason was out of the picture and I felt confident he wouldn’t be back. I wasn’t going to be separated from my children anymore. My cousin Jayne and her children came, too.

  When Jeremy got back to the motel after his vacation he told me Barba
ra had been badgering him about me. She was questioning him about all sorts of bizarre behavior she thought I was involved in. Why weren’t the daily reports longer? How much did I spend on cleaning supplies? Did I charge everyone who used the bathhouses? Did I give rooms free to my family? Was I underreporting room rentals and keeping the money for myself?

  Jeremy was disgusted. “All of this time I thought I was working for Merril and keeping him from losing his motel. But Barbara is the one running this family. I’m not scrubbing toilets and making beds for her.” Jeremy said he’d told his wife he was going to look for another job. Four weeks later, he was gone.

  I had one weekend at home before he quit. I was riding home in a truck after church with Tammy and Merril’s other wives. Tammy made a point to tell a story about a teacher she knew who’d celebrated his anniversary with his wife in Caliente. He was there when I was managing the motel alone, pregnant, and overwhelmed with work.

  When he saw Tammy at school he said, “How can Merril send one of his wives off miles away from home to be in a rank area like that?” (Rank was a word we used all the time to refer to something bad.)

  She said Merril replied, “You tell him that I sent Carolyn to Caliente because I’m trying to get rid of her.” Everyone roared with laughter.

  Merril was bragging about putting me in danger. I could not believe what I was hearing.

  Tammy couldn’t get enough of this story. When we had guests over for dinner after church she told it again for their benefit. Merril and his wives thought it was just as funny the second time.

  I felt stricken. The guests weren’t sure how to react.

  That was the turning point. James had pointed me to the door. Now I was ready to walk through it.

  I took my plate into the kitchen and went to my bedroom to get away from Merril and his sickening wives. I started packing my things to return to Caliente.

  Thoughts were coming fast. If Merril wanted to get rid of me now, why would he take me with him into the kingdom of God in the next life? I realized I could spend the rest of my life enduring his abuse so I would not have to go to hell and then find myself sent there anyway by him after I died.