After a sleepless night, I got up the next day, April 4, and began calling everyone who might know something. I learned that the ranch had been surrounded because the Child Protective Services (CPS) for Texas wanted to talk to a young girl named Sarah Barlow, who’d made a call to an abuse hotline on March 29, 2008. The girl had begged for help, claiming she was forced to marry at sixteen, became pregnant, and was repeatedly raped and beaten by her fifty-year-old husband.
Initially Merril refused to allow the CPS workers on the YFZ Ranch because, he insisted, there was no one there by the name of Sarah Barlow. But after resisting for hours, Merril apparently realized that the Texas Rangers weren’t backing down. So he finally allowed them and their deputies to enter. They were followed by a team from CPS, who began searching the compound for “Sarah,” the young girl who’d made the call. When they could not find her, the CPS team wanted to talk to all the teenage girls on the premises who were younger than seventeen.
Of the twenty girls CPS interviewed, five were named Sarah. One had had a baby at sixteen but she said she was not Sarah Barlow. CPS found other girls under eighteen who were pregnant. Under Texas law, it is a crime to engage in sexual contact with someone younger than seventeen who is not a legal spouse. I was told that the girls generally refused to answer questions; the few who did talk were defiant in their insistence that no age was too young to get married.
The Texas Supreme Court decision that was reached six weeks later described the reception CPS got at the ranch: “When the Department arrived at the YFZ Ranch, it was treated cordially and allowed access to children, but those children repeatedly ‘pled the Fifth’ in response to questions about their identity, would not identify their birth dates or parentage, refused to answer questions about who lived in their homes and lied about their names—sometimes several times. Answers from parents were similarly inconsistent: One mother first claimed that four children were hers, and then later avowed that they were not. Furthermore, the Department arrived to discover that a shredder had been used to destroy documents just before its arrival.”
Law enforcement officers who accompanied CPS onto the ranch noticed pregnant young girls being herded from one house to another on the compound. A lawyer involved with the case later told me that the state always suspected that it never got all the children from the ranch because some had been whisked away.
By Saturday, April 5, CPS had taken 167 children into custody. I was on the phone when the news bulletin appeared on TV, announcing that district judge Barbara Walther had ordered the removal of young girls from the ranch. Moments later there was a shot of a bus filled with young girls leaving the compound. One of the heads I saw bobbing up and down through the bus window had bright red hair. My heart almost stopped. I was sure it was my fourteen-year-old stepdaughter; she would be terrified at being removed from the only world she had ever known.
What had begun as a simple investigation of a distress call by a young woman named Sarah had exploded into a human tragedy and a major national news story.
Once again Merril revealed his stupidity. If he’d only cooperated with authorities at the beginning and provided one of the Sarah Barlows for questioning, the raid on the ranch could probably have been avoided. The interview would have been fruitless, and there would have been no grounds for law enforcement to search all the homes on the ranch. The officers might have wanted to do more questioning, but CPS would never have discovered as much as it did.
As for CPS, along with not being equipped to handle all the children who were removed from the ranch, it never found the Sarah Barlow who’d made the call. Suspicion was building that the call was a hoax. All the same, evidence suggested that the YFZ Ranch was a hotbed of child abuse. As this evidence was presented to Judge Walther, she ordered more and more children removed.
By Monday, April 7, Judge Walther had ordered 401 children into temporary protective custody based on a determination of significant risk of harm. In addition, 133 women had now left the compound. The men, meanwhile, were told to remain on the ranch while the investigation continued.
Kathy told me that the small community of Eldorado was spinning from the shock of seeing hundreds of children being pulled from the YFZ Ranch. The residents had had no idea there were so many children sequestered on the ranch since, as Kathy said, the women and children were never seen in town, only the men. All anyone knew was that the ranch was a closed polygamous community that kept to itself.
The raid was now the largest child custody case anyone could remember in U.S. history. Unfortunately, CPS was not remotely prepared to provide for the hundreds of children suddenly in its care. Emergency workers were being called in from other areas of Texas to help. The Eldorado community began collecting emergency relief to provide food, toys, cribs, and other items the children needed.
“They should have kicked out the men and left the children undisturbed,” Kathy said angrily. “Those kids should not be traumatized like this.”
She was right, but I knew there was plenty of trauma going on inside the ranch, too. One of the major reasons I fled the FLDS was because fourteen-year-old girls were routinely forced to marry and my daughter Betty was thirteen at the time. And in the months before my escape, the FLDS was becoming even more fanatical. Warren Jeffs, who’d ascended to the official leadership of the FLDS in 2002 after his father, Rulon Jeffs, died, was splitting up families and talking about sending “worthy” FLDS members to “The Center Place.” At that point in time, none of us knew what he meant by “The Center Place” but I thought it sounded terrifying.
During the nearly two years, from 2005 to 2006, when Warren Jeffs was on the run (a status that eventually earned him a place on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list), my husband, Merril Jessop, became one of the most powerful leaders in the cult. If I’d stayed married to him, my eight children and I would almost surely have been forced to move to the compound in Texas, where we would have been completely cut off from the outside world. Even worse, my handicapped son, Harrison, would have been unable to get the medical care and therapy he needed to survive.
Merril had ten children under the age of twelve when we got married, and he fathered twenty more over the next seventeen years. It had been nearly five years since I’d seen any of the stepchildren I’d helped raise, and I knew their world had only grown less safe. With Warren Jeffs’s 2006 arrest and conviction (he’s now serving two five-years-to-life sentences for being an accomplice to rape), his followers became more convinced than ever that he was being persecuted like Jesus Christ, just as he’d predicted.
As I watched the crisis at the YFZ Ranch on TV, fear and hope were my dueling emotions. I was frightened about what might happen to the children and heartsick that they might have to endure yet more pain. At the same time I hoped that maybe, just maybe, the long legacy of abuse and crimes against FLDS women and children might finally be drawing to a close.
More than almost anything else, I wanted to see those children saved.
The Drama Unfolds
My days soon became a blur. My book, Escape, had raised my profile, making me the media’s go-to person for commentary on FLDS matters. I did a late-night interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper from a Salt Lake City studio. Afterward I got a call from Shannon Price, the woman who worked for Dan Fischer, the former FLDS member and dentist who founded the nonprofit Diversity Foundation to help the hundreds of “lost boys” who’d been kicked out of the FLDS as teenagers (mainly so the old men wouldn’t have to compete with them for young girls). Shannon, who lived in Salt Lake City, asked if I’d be willing to go to Texas with her. “The authorities need help understanding the FLDS,” she said. “They’re in over their heads. The local sheriff would like a few of us to come down and assist.”
As the ex-wife of the man in charge, I knew I’d have valuable insights. But Shannon was leaving in two hours, and I needed more time.
Information continued to pour in with every phone call. More children were being removed from th
e ranch, and a search warrant had been issued for the temple, the most sacred site on the compound. On Merril’s orders, FLDS men barred its entrance. The Texas Rangers broke the massive front doors to enter; once inside, they had to break down other doors.
The most symbolic was the door that Warren Jeffs had decreed only God could walk through. That did not really impress the Texas Rangers, who blew it wide open. There they discovered a room surrounded by a thick wall of limestone and an enormous vault door. They went to court to get a search warrant to enter.
I was back home looking into what it would take to fly to Texas when Crystal Maggelet called. She and I had met the year before, and she was very moved by my story. She’d been following the news on television and wanted to know how I was doing. Crystal is a part owner of one of the largest private companies in the state, Flying J, and she also runs several hotels, the Crystal Inns. I told her I was trying to figure how to get to Texas to see my stepchildren, and Crystal immediately said her husband, Chuck, would fly us on his private plane. We’d leave the next day, Sunday, and land on a rural landing strip a mile outside of Eldorado. I brought my daughters LuAnne and Merrilee with me. LuAnne was especially eager to see her half-siblings and wanted to reassure them about life outside the FLDS.
My older children, Arthur, 20, LuAnne, 17, Patrick, 15, and Andrew, 13, were pleased that their half-siblings might get some protection but also concerned about how they’d react to being suddenly removed from the only life they’d ever known. By contrast, my two youngest—Bryson, 6, and Merrilee, 10—were mostly oblivious to what was happening because they had so little memory of their past. Merrilee was far more interested in her current friends than in anyone from the FLDS. When Bryson, my baby, once saw pictures of several FLDS girls on TV, he said they looked like “a whole bunch of Bettys.” (Betty continued to wear FLDS clothing after we escaped, except when she ran track in high school.)
My boyfriend, Brian, was completely supportive. He spent as much time as he could at my house in case I had to travel or do interviews. The raid was as much of a shock for him as it was for me. We had been together for almost four years, and Brian knew, from seeing how damaged my children had been, what the reality of FLDS life was. He was furious about the emotional and physical neglect that so many kids endured and especially hated the fact that these children had been pulled out of public school and were being brainwashed in FLDS via homeschooling.
Brian’s dad had been career military, and Brian couldn’t fathom why the same basic human rights that his father had fought for overseas were being denied to children here at home. Brian could never understand why the government was not upholding its moral obligation to protect children from abuse. He got so outraged about some of the things I told him that happened to women and children in the FLDS that I would have to give him the information in small doses. But Brian also understood that sometimes our justice system fails. He tried to prepare me for the worst in case that happened this time.
The flight was a thrill for the three of us. Merrilee and LuAnne had fun teasing Chuck while he was piloting the plane. Kathy Mankin was waiting for us when we landed. We piled into her car, which was loaded in the back with dishes from feeding the media who had descended on the town and were hanging out at her newspaper’s office. Satellite trucks were lined up for blocks. Most of the media were camped out as close to the children as they could get, but many were leaving at about the time I got to town because the state had just moved the children from Eldorado to Fort Concho, a restored historic fort.
Almost immediately I touched base with Shannon, who was on the scene in Eldorado, talking to authorities and trying to help any way she could. “Things are pretty intense,” she said. “I need to talk to Sheriff Doran before you come over. Stay where you are until I call back.” When she called back, she said there was no way I could bring LuAnne and Merrilee into the investigation area. She said I would be allowed through the gates only if she met me. Kathy drove me over.
One of the CPS workers met me outside the Schleicher County Civic Center, where the investigation was taking place. I asked her about seeing my eight stepchildren, whom I believed had been taken into custody. She said the investigation made that impossible at the moment. But she also said that CPS needed my help in understanding the FLDS. I followed her into a large metal building overflowing with law enforcement and CPS workers. I was asked to sit at the end of a long table. She disappeared.
The place felt like a command center in a war zone. The FLDS had always been a law unto itself, and when Texas seized the children from the ranch, it was tantamount to a declaration of war. The FLDS is one of the largest closed polygamous groups in the United States, with tentacles throughout the western United States and into Canada and Mexico. Its members don’t see themselves as being subject to the laws of their country. They had no qualms about taking on the nation’s second-largest state. I knew all this but doubted that the people working the crime scene did.
I was starting to feel numb, but even so I could not entirely block out the intense emotions that penetrated the atmosphere. An officer approached me and asked me to follow him to a room in the rear of the civic center. He introduced me to Brooks Long, the Texas Ranger in charge of the raid.
Long was a tall and rugged-looking man who apologized for his appearance, saying he’d been working around the clock since the raid began almost four days earlier. He’d been told I had relatives in custody and wanted to know if I’d be willing to answer a few questions. Without elaborating, he told me that because of what they’d found when they initially broke into the temple, they now needed to go back to the judge for another warrant to search a room they’d been unable to get into with the first warrant.
Long asked me about my relationship to those living at the YFZ Ranch. I explained that I had been married to Merril Jessop for seventeen years and had eight children with him. Long was stunned. “I am talking about Fredrick Merril Jessop, the man in charge of the ranch,” he said. “Is he the man you are claiming you were married to?”
“Yes, he was my husband. I was married to him, along with six other wives.”
“When did you leave him?”
“I didn’t. I escaped with all of my children nearly five years ago.”
“How did you get away?”
“It’s a long story. Mark Shurtleff, the attorney general of the state of Utah, got involved and helped me eventually get custody of my children.”
Long was calm but intensely focused. “If you were married to Merril, there are some things I need to know from you. Were you ever involved in a setting where you had an intimate relationship with other people watching?”
It was my turn to be shocked. I told him I’d never heard of anything like that ever happening when I was in the FLDS.
The questioning continued, and I could tell they’d found something in the temple that had set off alarms. Long asked me several questions about the reason I was married to Merril. Then he said, “You know, when you get a search warrant to look for pot, and find crack cocaine, methamphetamines, and other illegal things you didn’t have the warrant to search for, it’s still all evidence of a crime, even if that wasn’t what you went in looking for.”
Long stopped for a few seconds and then shook his head. “How can I help these poor people? How can I get them to tell me the truth so I can protect them?”
“This is why I came down here,” I said. “I’ve been begging CPS to let me see my stepchildren in custody. I brought my two daughters along so they could see their half-siblings. They haven’t seen one another for years. When I first left the FLDS, it was very difficult for my children. But now they’ve adapted to a better life and emerged from the trauma of their past. If my stepchildren could see how happy my daughters are now, maybe this wouldn’t be so difficult and scary for them.”
“You’ve asked to see your stepchildren and were told no?” Long was incredulous.
“They are telling me there is no way I will be allo
wed to see them. Eight are in custody, and I can give CPS the names, ages, and descriptions.”
Long was adamant. “You can see your stepchildren. I’ll make that happen.”
He left and came back with another man. We sat down, and I gave him the names of my eight stepchildren and their mothers. He wrote down the information and then left to talk to some people. He came back and asked me more questions. Then he left again to talk with CPS workers. It was starting to feel like an endless cycle.
Finally it looked like the reunion might happen. I was told that as soon as my stepchildren were located, I’d be able to see them. I said I wanted to make sure my daughters were with me when the children were found, so I called Kathy, who said she’d drive the girls over.
I waited. And waited some more. The man I’d been talking to never returned. I don’t think he had the heart to break the news to me himself.
“I understand you want to see your stepchildren, and you have every right to do so,” said the woman who finally showed up to crush my hopes. “We’re about reuniting families and keeping them together. But this case is under investigation, and sometimes the criminal side can overrule CPS when they feel that it’s in the best interest of the criminal case. So we are not allowing anyone to see family right now. This may change, and if it does, you can come back.”
“I flew here with my two daughters from Utah. My daughters haven’t seen their half-siblings for several years.”
“I’m sorry, but you can’t see them until we’re through with the investigation. That is a CPS standard.”
I couldn’t believe it. The last thing I wanted to do was contaminate their investigation, but none of this made any sense. I walked like a zombie to where Kathy was waiting with LuAnne and Merrilee.
“Brooks Long, who’s in charge of the investigation, has the power to overrule CPS, and he did. I don’t know what happened,” I told Kathy and the girls. “CPS still turned everything around, and they’re refusing to allow me to see the kids.”