Escape

by Carolyn Jessop

  I had been to San Francisco with my father several times. But I’d never seen how beautiful some of the outlying areas were. We stayed with Brian’s sister, who lived in a house on a cliff that looked over the ocean.

  I remember standing with Brian on the edge of the cliff and feeling the deepest peace I’d ever known in my life. I thought that when I escaped, I’d gone over the edge—the edge of everything I had ever known.

  Freedom was something I had always been able to imagine. It was the opposite of oppression, slavery, and degradation. But love?

  I had never known what it felt like to be loved by a man—to have the love that says, You matter, the love that says, I adore you, I believe in you, and I want you by my side.

  Love was brand-new. The thrill was, I wanted Brian, too.

  Better and Better

  My children stabilized more each month. Betty was still the wild card in the family and ran away a lot. Calling the local police department was becoming a regular part of life.

  I thought I was doing well, too, until I was knocked down again by PTSD. I had a fever and chills and felt completely debilitated. That’s when I learned what caring meant. Brian was on the phone to me several times a day. I had never been protected before, never known what it felt like to really matter to someone. I had never been more than property to Merril. Now I was not only a person but a cherished one at that. I could feel emotions that had been cut off and cauterized coming back to life. Even when I was sick, I was more alive in spirit than I had been during my seventeen years of marriage.

  The fever and chills spiraled into pneumonia that winter. One Saturday I found I couldn’t breathe very well and I thought I’d stay in and try to get better. I went to find LuAnne to help with Harrison and found that Betty and LuAnne were both missing. It had been several months since Betty had last taken off, because I think she and Merril both knew it wasn’t working to their advantage. This was the first time Merril had tried to take more than one of my children, however.

  The first thing I did was call Brian. I told him I was too sick to call the police. I was sure the girls were in Colorado City. Brian pushed me to call the authorities, walking me through it step by step.

  I promised him I would. Then I remembered that Arizona law enforcement had put an investigator in the community in 2004 as an outsider to help people like me. Gary Engels worked out of a trailer he shared with social service workers from Child Protective Services. The idea was to give women a place to turn to for help—but very few used it. This was the first time there had ever been any real law enforcement in the community—all the other police were FLDS members who looked the other way. The local police followed him with guns whenever he moved about the community.

  “There is nothing like this in America,” Engels told the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes in America. “It’s like a fiefdom. Everyone lives and survives by the will of Warren Jeffs. He can take away your family, your business, and your home. What king ever had that power?”

  The Southern Poverty Law Center characterized the FLDS as a hate group in 2005, putting it on a list with the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation, among others. In doing so it cited statements such as this from Jeffs on race: “The black race is the people through which the devil has always been able to bring evil unto the earth.” Jeffs’ hateful speech is not limited to just race. Homosexuals were a frequent target: “The people grew so evil, the men started to marry the men and the women, the women. This is the worst evil act you can do, next to murder. It is like murder.” On violence, there is this statement from Jeffs: “I want to remind you what the prophets have taught us, that whenever a man of God is commanded to kill another man, he is never bloodthirsty.”

  When I called Gary and reported that my daughters were missing, he said he’d investigate immediately. The police in West Jordan, Utah, faxed orders to the Mohave County, Arizona, office to go pick up Betty and LuAnne. None of the local officers wanted to go into Colorado City late on Saturday night, but Gary insisted. The orders were there; they were required by law to act. Extra police officers were called in from Arizona to accompany them.

  The doors were locked at Merril’s. A young girl answered Gary’s knock and slammed the door in his face. Betty and LuAnne had only been in the house fifteen minutes.

  The officers circled the house. Through the windows they could see a large group of people standing in a circle and talking. The police were worried about a stand-off. The house had not been surrounded very long when the FLDS police officers told Gary that was not Merril’s house. This was a lie. They told Gary he should stop harassing innocent people and leave.

  Gary said he had orders stating that Betty and LuAnne were at this residence. If they weren’t, he said, why did the people inside refuse to talk to him? A search warrant was in the works, and Gary said that the moment he had it he was going inside.

  Shortly thereafter, Merril called Gary and lit into him. He insisted that this was not his residence and he had no right to be there. Merril said he had no idea where Betty and LuAnne were. “Carolyn is only trying to cause trouble for innocent people because she is unable to control her daughters.” This was a lie and Gary knew it.

  Gary did not back down. Merril called him again with more threats. Gary said when he had the search warrant, he was coming in. The girls would be taken into custody and Merril would face charges.

  Merril called back with an offer. He admitted that Betty and LuAnne were inside, and he said that if they could stay the night, he would see that they got back to my house the following day.

  Gary called me and said it was up to me. He’d move if I told him to. I wanted my daughters back as peacefully as possible, so we agreed to accept the deal. I could not risk someone getting hurt during the stand-off or when they went in with a search warrant.

  Betty and LuAnne came home the next day, and Betty never took off again. I think Merril realized what the consequences would be if he tried kidnapping any of his children again.

  Merril continued to liquidate his assets. He sold his Big Water Motel, which had sixty rooms, and another smaller one. He sold his rodeo arena, which was the largest in northern Arizona, and most of the equipment from his construction and trucking companies. His cement company was closed, and so was the motel I used to run in Caliente. Merril was liquidating hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets, and not a dime went to child support.

  We never reached an agreement because I was collecting a small amount from his Social Security, and he did not want to pay child support. He only wanted to pay the Social Security money. My attorney refused that offer because we knew Merril was lying about his income. Legally he owes me child support based on his assets and income. But I have to prove he still has hidden assets and is profiting from them. This would cost a tremendous amount of money in investigative fees, and even if I proved that Merril had unreported assets, there’s no guarantee that Merril would ever pay what he rightfully should.

  My dad owned a third of the motel in Caliente. Merril wanted my father to give that money to Warren. My father refused, saying it was going to my mother to help her buy a house after their divorce. Merril was furious and told Dad that he had no obligation to my mother. After thirty-eight years of marriage, my father felt differently. Merril said God would take care of him legally if he was doing God’s will. Dad wasn’t buying it. My father was excommunicated from the FLDS by Warren Jeffs and ordered to return to Jeffs his two wives and the more than ten children still living at home.

  Gary Engels estimates that more than three hundred men have been kicked out of their families by Warren Jeffs and excommunicated. The men are told to repent from afar by sending Jeffs long letters detailing their sins. If their list of sins is identical to the list of their sins Warren Jeffs has received from God, they will be allowed to return to the FLDS. That, of course, never happens, but Jeffs has used this tactic to accumulate a massive amount of detail about what men considered their worst deeds and
most shameful secrets from men desperate to reunite with their families.

  Jeffs sent some of his goons to my father’s house to tell him that he had been kicked out of the work of God. He was no longer to manage the local grocery store, which he’d done for more than eighteen years. His home was to be turned over to the FLDS.

  Jeffs’ emissaries told my father to delineate all his sins in a letter to the prophet, leave the community, and repent. He was instructed to pray constantly for God’s forgiveness and with sweetness in his heart thank God and the prophet for their grace in allowing him to repent.

  My father asked the men if they would give Warren a message for him. When they agreed, my father said, “Could you sweetly tell Warren Jeffs to go to hell?”

  The goons looked scared. How dare my father speak like that to the prophet of God! Didn’t he understand the risk of eternal damnation? His complete disregard for Warren Jeffs was like a body blow to them.

  Merril was soon on the phone to my father to say he was taking over the store. My father had no objections to that but told Merril he was planning to take his retirement money with him. During his years running the store my father had accumulated a substantial retirement account. Merril told my father the money should go to Warren Jeffs. My father refused and said Jeffs would have to fight him in court.

  Warren had ordered my fathers’ two remaining wives, Rosie and Muriel, to turn themselves in for reassignment to other men. My father told them they were free to do whatever they wanted. He said he’d never owned them; he had become their husband through a covenant with God that he was still prepared to honor. The choice was theirs.

  My father had raised thirty-six children in his life, eight of whom were stepchildren. Unlike Merril, his children mattered to him. So did their mothers.

  Rosie decided she would stand by my father and had no interest in becoming a pawn in Warren’s sick games.

  Muriel decided she could not risk her salvation and surrendered to “the will of God.” She placed herself and her four children at the mercy of Warren Jeffs. I do not know if she’s been reassigned in marriage. I do know that women who were ensnared in Jeffs’ web did not fare well. Several women whom I knew had been reassigned as wives more than once, some to as many as five different men. One woman said she felt like she had become a “priesthood prostitute.”

  My father’s heart was shattered. He wept for days. His family was torn apart. Warren Jeffs had made a mockery of the faith and community my father loved.

  There were leaders in the community who had tried to block Warren Jeffs and protect the values we had had. Key among those was Uncle Fred Jessop, who had been the leading FLDS bishop throughout my lifetime. Uncle Fred was widely admired and loved. He had been investigating Warren for fraud. Now in his nineties, Uncle Fred worried about leaving a crook and criminal in charge after his death. Secret meetings were held with other men, one of whom was his stepson, William Timpson Jessop. William turned traitor and went to Warren and told him everything Uncle Fred was planning.

  Warren had Uncle Fred sent to another compound and told the community the Lord had removed him as a bishop and appointed William in his place. The other men who had been part of the secret meetings were kicked out of the cult. This is how opposition to Jeffs was eliminated—swiftly and surely. Uncle Fred was too beloved for Warren to have excommunicated him. His ploy was to make it look as though Uncle Fred was too old and deserved to retire.

  Uncle Fred disappeared from the community in late December 2003. A few weeks later, in January 2004, Warren Jeffs made what would be his last public appearance when at a town meeting he kicked out of the FLDS twenty-one men whom he called “master deceivers” and reassigned their wives and children to other men. The men were told to keep sending money to Jeffs and work on their repentance from afar.

  Jeffs had always been private, secretive, and somewhat paranoid. After his father’s death, he never went out into the community without security guards. At the time of that town meeting, no one knew that he was going into hiding. But as months went on, that meeting became the last time anyone could remember seeing him in public. He still sent tapes into the community and did sermons that were piped in over the phone.

  In July 2004, a civil lawsuit was filed in Utah against Warren Jeffs and two of his brothers by his nephew, Brent Jeffs, who accused Jeffs of sodomizing him when he was a student at the Alta Academy, a private school in Salt Lake that Warren ran.

  Brent’s lawsuit was motivated by his brother Clayne’s suicide in 2002. Clayne shot himself in the head after disclosing that he had been abused by Warren Jeffs. Brent had never told anyone about his own abuse until after his brother shot himself.

  In his lawsuit, Brent Jeffs said Warren told him that he was doing “God’s work” when he assaulted him and that if he ever disclosed the abuse, “it would be upon pain of eternal damnation.” Brent Jeffs said he was routinely sodomized from the time he was five or six years old.

  Jeffs refused to appear in court to answer those charges. Federal charges were filed against him for fleeing to evade prosecution. With armed zealots guarding him, plenty of money, and a network of FLDS safe houses in the United States and Canada, Warren Jeffs managed to conceal his whereabouts. Federal and state authorities were also wary of triggering another Waco and did not want to move on Jeffs in a situation where many others might die.

  Even though he was in hiding and on the run from the law, Jeffs still wielded power through tapes, phone calls, and messages he relayed back to the community. From time to time he would appear to perform a marriage. But these were rare and secretive moments that people learned about only after they had occurred.

  By the time he dropped off the radar, Jeffs had effectively wiped out any opposition to his reign. Those men who were left behind—men like Merril—were total disciples. Merril’s devotion to Warren Jeffs had never wavered over the years, even as the community sank to deeper levels of extremism.

  During the winter of 2005, I was driving home with Betty and Merrilee on a snowy day. A car in the opposite lane swerved into mine. I turned my van to the side of the road to avoid a collision, but the car still crashed into the back of my van.

  The children weren’t hurt, but I had terrible back and shoulder pain as a result. I went to see a chiropractor, who said that area was too tight to work with and adjust. He sent me to a massage therapist, Lee Bird, who turned out to be a godsend.

  Lee was learning Feldenkrais massage, which is based on a belief that new connections can be formed between brain and body that can help retrain the nervous system. During the course of my treatments, I told Lee about Harrison and how hard it was for me to still lift him.

  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.