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-p
age 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.”
His involvement was a turning point for my custody case. Mark began collaborating with Arizona’s attorney general. I met with investigators from that office, too.
I met with Lisa Jones a few weeks later. She’s a small woman with a big presence. With her short red hair, she can come across as a firecracker. But the truth is that she’s much more of a heat-seeking missile that aims right at her target and rarely misses. While she’s tough, she was easy to work with and became my rock. Lisa told me at our first meeting that she didn’t believe in coincidences. She had planned on doing some writing and asked her firm to reduce her workload. She’d just managed to free up her schedule when Mark Shurtleff called and told her about me. Lisa said that after she spoke with him she understood that the way had been cleared for her not to write but to take my case.
Merril’s attorney, Rod Parker, knew he’d be playing hardball now that Lisa Jones was involved. She was no pushover. When Lisa called Parker and reported another case of Merril’s abuse, Parker told Merril to cut it out—he could not pull these stunts any longer. Parker knew that with competent legal representation I would win in court. Merril and his minions began to back off.
It began to feel as if the tide had turned in my favor.
Shelter
Now that Merril had visitation rights with my children, it was easier than ever for him to fill them with more lies. He began telling them that Dan Fisher was an immoral man who wanted to have sex with me until he was sick of it and then would throw me into the streets. This was terrifying to them because they believed if that happened, I’d return to their father.
By this point, my children liked being with me but were still afraid of living in the outside world. They didn’t think I had the ability to take care of them. I reached out to Lisa, and we agreed that my kids had to feel like our new life was for real and that it could be maintained. The key to this would be finding a place of our own to live.
The quickest way to accomplish this was to go through the shelter system. The battered women’s shelter in West Jordan was my jumping-off point. The social workers there knew all the options for assistance and would help me find permanent, subsidized housing. I put my name on the waiting list and was told it would take about a month before we could move in. Dan supported me fully.
I enrolled my younger children and Betty in summer school to help them start catching up. They were seriously behind academically.
What sabotaged my hoped-for achievement of normalcy were Merril’s visits. He was permitted to take the children every other weekend. He’d collect them for the five-hour drive to Colorado City on Friday night. It seemed to take my children two weeks to unwind from the visits to Colorado City. They’d be tense and argumentative when they came home. On Sunday when they returned they sat down to the huge meal I’d made—roast beef, potatoes, gravy, hot rolls, vegetables, and dessert. But no one touched a thing. I knew Merril didn’t feed them well and couldn’t imagine what was wrong. I put the food in the refrigerator.
Merrilee finally told me what was going on: Merril had ordered them to fast and pray all day on Sunday that they’d be returned to their father. I called my attorney and made a complaint. Under the visitation rules, the children were not to be dragged into the custody fight. Merril wasn’t even supposed to talk to them about our case.
The next day, Betty and LuAnne launched a verbal attack on me. They accused me of having bad feelings toward my sister wives and said I needed to learn how to forgive. I was told that I was trying to drag them to hell and see them destroyed only to satisfy my own selfish emotions. Both of them accused me of being the abuser and claimed it was I who had always been abusive to them, not their father. They said I’d told the court that Merril had starved them for several months. This was news to me, because it was untrue. There was plenty of abuse to report in court; I didn’t need to make any up.
“You’re an apostate, owned by the devil!” Betty said. “He wants your soul and he wants ours.”
“You can’t be our mother because you put yourself under the power of the devil,” LuAnne wailed. “None of us wants to be with you!”
It was awful to feel them lash out this way. I called Lisa again to make another complaint. She told me to write down everything they were saying. She also called Rod Parker, Merril’s attorney, and complained to him about the fast. Parker was put on notice that if Merril’s abuse
toward the children did not end, he’d be called back into court.
Parker said that Merril was eager to have Bryson for visitations, too. Bryson was nearly two. If I didn’t allow him access to Bryson, Parker said I could expect to be back in court. I was still nursing Bryson and planned to do so until his second birthday. I usually nursed my babies for eighteen months, but Bryson had been so premature that I wanted to give him an additional boost. Since I was still nursing him, I couldn’t send him off for those weekends with Merril. Being deprived of him infuriated Merril.
We were at the shelter for five weeks. The breakthrough came when a woman who knew what we were up against, Rhoda Thomson, raised some money to help me get a roof over our heads: two trailers that combined to give us five bedrooms and four bathrooms. We had a beautiful front yard and space out back where the children could roam and play.
When Merril heard about our new living arrangements, he was furious. I think he hoped that I’d be forced from the shelter into the streets and then back to him. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Our First Christmas
Making ends meet was tough. My monthly income from Social Security and SSI was $1,500, which after I paid my rent left $150 for gas. The homeless coordinator who was helping me gave me $60 a month in gas vouchers. I had $700 a month in food stamps to feed the nine of us. I had $80 in state financial aid each month to use for everything else. I could stretch a dollar from a dime and I made the best of it, but we often fell short. Despite the frustration and hardships, though, I finally was living in my own place.