Kathy was indignant. “We can get this overturned,” she said. “There’s probably a judge who’ll issue a court order.” But it soon became apparent that overturning the CPS decision wouldn’t be easy. Kathy thought if I could stay for several days there might be a chance.
I wasn’t sure. From what I’d witnessed in that large building bursting with law enforcement (all of whom appeared to be as stressed as they were sleep deprived), I certainly didn’t want to interfere. They seemed confused about what they were dealing with. That was no surprise to me: the FLDS has been a secretive group for decades. True, other cults in the United States are multigenerational, but they’re not as dangerous and destructive as the FLDS. The newer cults are composed of people who led normal lives and then decided to join a cult. Most FLDS members, by contrast, have been born into the cult and have only superficial knowledge, if any, of the outside world. The FLDS doesn’t believe in recruiting members; it’s up to the women to produce children to carry on the work of God. It perpetuates its own, and this makes it a very different phenomenon for the authorities. Taking on the FLDS was like taking on a small nation-state.
I desperately wanted to see my stepchildren. But Texas was now engaged in a massive child abuse investigation involving more than four hundred children. In a gesture typical of his generous spirit, Chuck, our pilot, offered to stay if I wanted to keep the pressure on CPS. He said he didn’t want me to decide to go home simply because he needed to get back.
But I had a nagging feeling that I would only be wasting my time if I stayed and fought. Knowing Merril, I would have bet money that he’d ordered everyone to be noncompliant. If so, CPS may not have known who my stepchildren were because they didn’t have accurate information. Trying to find them could be impossible and would only create more stress for an already overwhelmed staff attempting to hold an explosive situation together.
It was hard for CPS to appreciate how rigidly controlled these children were. When I lived in the FLDS, if the prophet gave the word to fast and pray for a day, we did. No questions asked. We believed that God would answer the prophet’s prayers only if he had an obedient and faithful people. If even one person broke the fast, that could mean that the prophet’s prayers went unanswered.
The children had been drilled into a lifestyle of utter submission, too. If these kids were told that the prophet wanted them not to eat for three days, they would not touch a single morsel because that could jeopardize everyone else. God might require the group to pay an enormous price for the disobedience of one of its members, so they dared not disobey.
I later learned that the FLDS mothers weren’t allowing their children to give out any information to the people trying to help them. As a result, CPS had no way of knowing many of the children’s names. I don’t know if they were ever able to find birth certificates for some of the younger ones. Over the course of several weeks, former FLDS members who went to Texas attempting to see relatives in custody were all turned away. Some even went to Texas governor Rick Perry’s office begging to see relatives. One woman told me all she got from the governor was a hug.
Less than eight hours after we touched down, we were already on our way back home. LuAnne and Merrilee were crushed. They couldn’t understand why they were prevented from seeing their half-siblings. Stories started circulating that several of the young girls they knew were pregnant and many had babies. All of my children were concerned about their half-sisters, especially one who had disappeared right after we left. She was thirteen, and we all feared she had been forced to marry Warren Jeffs. We also lost contact with Betty during this time. None of us could get her to answer her phone or return a text message. It was weeks into the raid before she contacted any of her siblings. When she did, she made it clear she had no interest in talking to me. I was upset but not surprised.
Even though our Texas trip was a disappointment, my children were excited about the possibility of seeing their half-siblings sometime soon. They hoped Texas authorities would protect the kids from their father. Maybe now that the state was involved, Merril would be unable to force his sons to work construction jobs at an early age and sell his daughters in marriage to gain influence and power. My kids wanted their half-siblings to have the chance to go to public schools and play sports just like they now did.
Their current attitudes did not spring up overnight, of course. When we first escaped, my children were badly shaken and angry at me for taking them from the life they were used to. Growing up, they had almost no exposure to the outside world, and so they had no idea what we were doing or why. But after nearly five years of freedom, they now felt they had wonderful lives. Even in the worst times, they said their new lives were far better than their old. Like me, they fervently hoped that the state of Texas would give their half-siblings the same opportunities I’d fought to give them.
And at first that’s what seemed to be happening. Brooks Long got his search warrant for the temple from the judge. But this time it wasn’t just Texas authorities searching the temple; it was also the Feds. Reporters said truckloads of documents and other material were hauled out of the temple.
I knew how obsessed Warren Jeffs was with documenting his behavior, especially his underage marriages. Now that volumes of information were in the custody of authorities, perhaps the crimes of the FLDS would be publicly exposed. It was my most intense hope.
By the time I got back home on Monday morning, the FLDS public relations blitz had been launched in full force. Willie Jessop was recruited to become its spokesman. I’d been a classmate of his in school. In every interview he stayed on message: the FLDS was being persecuted for its religious beliefs. Photos taken by FLDS mothers with cell phones were widely distributed to the media, showing their purported mistreatment in shelters. Before long the strategy seemed to be working: newspapers ran front-page articles that often seemed to accept the FLDS side of the issue without challenge.
One morning LuAnne came into my bedroom and picked up The Salt Lake Tribune. After scanning the article I’d been reading, she threw the paper on my bed and shouted, “That bitch!” Plastered across the paper’s front page was a large photograph of my grown stepdaughter Monica, 34, LuAnne’s half-sister. The story said Monica had gone shopping and left her small children at home with her sister. When she returned, her children had been removed from the Eldorado compound. Monica insisted she was a good mother who’d never harmed her children and that the state had no right to remove them without evidence of abuse. A reader who knew nothing about the FLDS would be inclined to agree.
LuAnne was furious. “She can be so self-righteous about not hurting her own children, but she didn’t have anything against hurting me,” she said. I had no idea what she was talking about and was unprepared for what followed. “When you were at work, she spanked me real hard every single day. One day she said, ‘Why aren’t you crying? I spanked you real hard.’ I said, ‘I’m used to it; you do it all the time.’”
I was livid. I’d had no idea that Monica had been spanking LuAnne. She and I took a moment to talk about what happened. LuAnne said she never dared tell me about the abuse while we were still in the FLDS because she feared what Monica would do if she found out she’d told. I never saw marks on LuAnne, but we were required to wear long sleeves, and children bathed in private with the doors closed. So it would have been entirely possible for me not to have a clue—especially if LuAnne didn’t want me to know.
Once my children felt safe, about three years after we escaped, they started telling me many stories of abuse. They opened up about spankings and having their heads smashed against other children’s heads. I heard about episodes of intense hair pulling and about their being forbidden to eat meals. As incredibly hard as it was for me to hear these stories, I also felt relieved that they were able to talk about them. I was eager to help them begin to recover.
Now, as the events in Texas dragged on, every day triggered new emotions in every member of my family. Although we were hundreds of m
iles away, we felt like we were in the epicenter of the story because we knew so many of the players. Even as I struggled to hold my family together through the storm of events, I was besieged with questions and interview requests from the media.
I felt obligated to do as many interviews as I could. I had a unique perspective and could put things in context for people who were otherwise clueless about the FLDS. I was determined to share my hard-earned expertise to help educate the public about the cult’s crimes against women and children. What made it more difficult was the state’s refusal to release information to the public about criminal evidence they’d uncovered at the ranch. Yes, a legal case was being built and couldn’t be compromised, but it left me feeling like a voice crying out in the wilderness. The pressure on me was relentless. I was physically and emotionally exhausted but determined to keep going because I had been married for seventeen years to the man who was at the center of this ongoing national news story. If I didn’t speak out, who would?
A Voice from the Past
Perhaps the most dramatic day for me since the raid on the YFZ Ranch was Monday, April 14, 2008. That’s when Judge Walther separated the mothers from their children, who’d been moved from Fort Concho and were now staying at the San Angelo Coliseum. The only mothers who could remain with their kids were those whose children were eighteen months or younger. Once separated, the children were eventually placed in sixteen group shelters and foster homes throughout Texas.
With this development, the FLDS public relations machine went into overdrive: As they boarded buses, the mothers held up signs reading “HELP US” or “OUR CHILDREN HAVE BEEN STOLEN.” The news media showed wrenching images of sobbing mothers who said they’d been separated from their children.
I did newspaper, radio, and television interviews nonstop. By late in the day, I was ready to collapse from exhaustion when I got a call from a producer for Anderson Cooper’s CNN show inviting me to be a guest that night. The producer was desperate because Cooper was going to interview women from the ranch and needed another viewpoint to balance the broadcast.
I agreed to do the show and headed back to the studio in Salt Lake City where I had done live shots. I’d just done another interview and was only a few minutes away. But when I got there, the studio was locked and everyone gone. My publicist called and said they’d interview me by phone, so I did it from the car.
I knew most of the mothers on the ranch but wondered if I could tell who was speaking if I couldn’t see her face. I could hear Anderson asking one of the mothers a question. I was nervous about reacting to someone I couldn’t see.
But I instantly recognized Cathleen, one of my former “sister wives.” I could never forget her voice. Angry feelings bubbled to the surface. Emotions coursed through every cell of my body when I heard her talk about being separated from her children. Here’s an excerpt from a CNN transcript:
CATHLEEN: So, we need the public to know that an injustice has been done against us. In the land of the free, in the home of the brave, we are being treated like the Jews were when they were escorted to the German Nazi camps.
COOPER: You’re saying you are being treated like people sent to concentration camps?
CATHLEEN: Yes, we have been treated that way in a country that professes to be free, in the land of the free and the home of the brave. And we have been persecuted for our religion.
COOPER: Just for accuracy’s sake, do you actually know what happened to the Jews during World War II? Because it does not seem to be the same, just factually speaking.
CATHLEEN: I do. I do. I am forty-two years old. I’m very studied in history. I have a college degree.
Anderson asked her a few more questions about the raid, and then it was my turn. He was surprised to learn that I was wife number four and Cathleen was number five. I explained on-air what she did the night I fled.
CAROLYN: She’s also the one who told on me when I was trying to escape. So, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, why is it that she felt so urgent to go to Merril in the middle of the night and tell him that I had my children up, and I was leaving? I nearly didn’t make it out because she made that phone call. And, so, she believes in freedom. Where’s my rights as a mother to take my children and flee if I believe we are at risk?
COOPER: What do you think should happen now?
CAROLYN: I think that every case needs to be heard. I think that it all needs to go to a court. And if there’s crimes that have been committed against children, then a judge is going to have to rule in the best interest of protecting a child. And this, by the way, is not about religious persecution. It never has been from the beginning. Nor is it about polygamy.
The officers did not go in there because they had a call that there was polygamy going on in that compound. They had a cry for help from a child. And they went in to investigate that cry for help. And when they got in, whether they found that child or not, that’s why they went in. And they did find other children that were being abused, and that, either way, having sex with a sixteen-year-old in the state of Texas is a felony. They found—they found felony cases of child abuse.
Brian taped the CNN interview. When I got home, we watched it with some of the children. Since I’d done the interview on my cell phone, it was the first time I’d seen Cathleen since the raid. She had aged far beyond her years; she also looked more miserable than I could ever have imagined.
The children watching TV with us didn’t know I was going to be on Anderson Cooper 360° that night. They were focused on several of their half-siblings who were being interviewed at the ranch. (In a big about-face, in response to Judge Walther’s ruling that moms be separated from their children, the FLDS let reporters and camera crews onto the compound.) When Cathleen started talking, my children were shocked because she had changed so much. Seeing their half-siblings separated from their mothers reminded them that if I hadn’t gotten us out, they could have ended up in the custody of Texas. I could have been one of the moms crying on TV, like Cathleen. Hearing Cathleen and me on CNN taking opposing sides was a revelatory moment for them. They realized that the comfort of their own beds and their public school were gifts I had given them. For five years they’d been living normal lives, protected from the fate that their half-siblings were now enduring.
I had been in such shock since the raid hit that I hadn’t really stopped to think about the fact that I could easily have been in Cathleen’s position at this very moment. As I contemplated that awful fate, I nearly wept with pure gratitude.
When I woke Bryson and Merrilee the next morning, the fact that we were together and safe as one family seemed nothing short of a miracle. I drove them to school, kissed them goodbye, and then waited for the moment I loved—when they turned and waved to me before entering their school. I could never take such a moment for granted. I had always felt that a higher power was involved with my success in escaping the FLDS, as well as with getting custody of my children. Too many events had lined up and happened in just the right way. One misstep, and I surely would have failed. Now more than ever before, I realized that if I hadn’t taken those necessary steps, a higher power couldn’t have protected us. I easily could have ended up as one of the zombielike women on the YFZ Ranch.
My heart hurt for them all, but especially the children. A mother has the right to teach her children about religion. But she doesn’t have a right to injure them or allow others to do so, even if she believes that the man hurting her children is a prophet of God.
A Public Relations Blitz
It turned out that some of the women seen sobbing on the news were never in the coliseum and that the state didn’t have their children in custody. At least that was the view of Debra Brown, the executive director of the Children’s Advocacy Center of Tom Green County. In that position, Brown is also responsible for CASA, or Court Appointed Special Advocates, which was in charge of monitoring the welfare of the children for Judge Walther. “I think those ladies were brought in to perform
for the cameras,” Brown told me. “The women shown on TV were not the mothers we were working with at the coliseum. We had some very upset mothers because their children had been taken, but they were not the moms being shown on TV. It was weird when that happened. We were like, ‘Who the hell are those people?’”
This made perfect sense to me: the FLDS must have brought women in from Colorado City, Arizona, who were capable of doing a better job of crying on camera than the actual mothers, who were too distraught. After all, if the latter had been allowed to tell the truth about what they were feeling, they might have said things that would have caused problems for the FLDS.
CASA works on behalf of the court as its eyes and ears to determine the validity of claims made by Child Protective Services about whether children should be returned to their parents or remain in state custody. CASA was alerted to what was happening on the ranch on the evening of April 3 because of the possibility of abuse. Based in San Angelo, about forty-five miles from the ranch, this particular branch of CASA had a full-time staff of only four and soon was dealing with hundreds of women and children. Initially Judge Walther had asked if it could handle a dozen.
“We were totally in uncharted territory,” said Shirley Davis, CASA’s program director. “None of us really knew anything about polygamy. We’d heard some stories about Warren Jeffs when he was on the FBI list. But none of us had any idea about the number of people on the ranch.” Within hours, CASA began assembling dozens of volunteers who worked practically around the clock for the next seven days, backed up by an outpouring of support from churches and other charities.
The FLDS children were different from any whom CASA had worked with before. They had no concept of fun. “When we’d ask them what they did for fun, they’d say work,” recalled Paulette Schell, a CASA case manager. “Or they’d pick up rocks and dig ditches.” Some of the children at Fort Concho asked for gardening tools “so they could go outside and pick weeds.”