“The pregnant teenagers were really tough,” added Debra Brown. “Some acted like you were ridiculous, rolling their eyes, flipping their hair as they looked you up and down.”
At one point Shirley Davis got a call from a CASA worker who was supervising some FLDS girls who’d been temporarily settled in nearby Midland, Texas. “They had a group of difficult girls who wanted makeup,” Davis said. “The worker told me, ‘Shirley, I don’t know what to do.’ I said, ‘I’m going to tell you. You go to Wal-Mart and fill up a basket full of makeup, and you send me the bill.’ She said, ‘You’re going to give them makeup!’ And I said, ‘You bet I’m going to give them makeup!’”
Davis treasured the sweetness of some of the older teenagers she got to know. “They were hilarious,” she said. “They had awesome senses of humor sometimes and could be giggly little girls until their brothers or other FLDS males walked into the room. Then it all disappeared.”
Debra Brown told me at one point that she’d have much preferred to work with mothers addicted to crack cocaine than with the FLDS moms. Most addicted moms understand at some level that what they are doing is wrong and that society will not tolerate their injuring their children. They realize that they have to cooperate with the state and that if they don’t, they could lose their children. In contrast, FLDS mothers truly believe not only that what they are doing is right, but that God is on their side. In their eyes, state workers are agents of the devil whom God will punish. They also believe that the state has no right to interfere with their religious beliefs, even if those beliefs violate the law.
Brown also explained that the courts ordered the children to be separated from their mothers because the mothers were actively and aggressively interfering with the investigation. The day before that decision, Judge Walther ordered all cell phones confiscated from FLDS women and children because some of them were talking to reporters and sending pictures from their cell phones, making an already chaotic situation more unmanageable.
Another problem for CPS was that mothers would remove the identification bands from their child and trade with a band from another child, so that state workers would be unable to identify the children whose DNA they had taken. The mothers also coached the children on what to say. One CPS worker I spoke to said that the mothers didn’t even try to swap name bands with children of roughly the same age. Nor did they bother to hide what they were doing. They were deliberately disruptive because they thought the state had no right to do what it was doing.
All the mothers were told that if they wanted to be reunited with their children, they should go to a shelter and cooperate with the state in its investigation. If they did that, they would be given the necessary help to get their children back. Only six women went to the shelter to fight for their children. Once again I shuddered to think that I could easily have been one of those desperate women if I’d not escaped.
Stories circulated among former FLDS members that Merril had sent a message through his attorneys to those six mothers, warning that any woman who cooperated with Texas would have her children taken from her by the priesthood. This was an ongoing reality in the FLDS and a far more terrifying threat to most of the women than the state of Texas.
The public sympathy that was building for the FLDS was deeply distressing to those of us who were former members. We all knew that Warren Jeffs took children from their biological mothers and reassigned them to other mothers. This practice went unchallenged because of the entrenched belief that everything Jeffs did was based on revelations from God. But Merril exploited the separation of the FLDS women from their children to maximum advantage since it touched a primal fear in any parent.
The airwaves were saturated with FLDS mothers claiming the state had stolen their children, which prompted public outrage. The problem was that the public was projecting its own parenting values onto the FLDS—values that had no relevance to the way the FLDS conducted family life. The FLDS works to break the bonds between a mother and child. When I was married to Merril, any of his wives could discipline another’s children. My kids did not call me “Mom” until we escaped. We were “Mother Carolyn, Mother Barbara, Mother Tammy, Mother Cathleen, Mother Ruth, and Mother Foneta.” We did minimal hugging and kissing of our children. Showing physical affection was seen as bestowing individual worth on a child, something only a father could do.
When the media was allowed into the YFZ Ranch shortly after the raid, I was struck by the absence of toys. How could there be over four hundred children and no toys? A portrait of Warren Jeffs hung over each bed, as well as over all the desks at school, but there was nothing to suggest that children lived there. That was another big change from when I was in the FLDS. We had toys and play equipment, and the only picture of Warren Jeffs was in the living room.
The absence of a well-organized media campaign to counter the FLDS’s PR blitz meant that the public didn’t get a balanced view of the world inside the YFZ Ranch. Most of the information recovered during the raid was part of the criminal investigation, but it was shared with CPS. So CPS couldn’t claim it didn’t know what the investigators found. My fear was that the state of Texas didn’t completely understand the FLDS or the games it played. I knew the FLDS would do whatever it took to turn public opinion against the state.
A FLDS website was quickly set up to solicit donations from the public based on the FLDS claim that it was being persecuted for its religious beliefs. When I clicked on it, I became seriously worried that the FLDS was going to win its media war. The public has so little awareness of how destructive polygamy can be to women and children. Merril painted himself as a martyr, when in fact he was a criminal. I knew some of the mothers who appeared on TV and was convinced they were lying. I understood that they wanted their children back, but I thought they should cooperate with the state.
Texas was also flooded with attorneys ad litem, lawyers who volunteered and then were appointed by the court to represent the interests of the children in the legal proceedings. Many of the ad litems had seen the crying mothers on TV and were extremely sympathetic toward the FLDS because they felt that Texas had overstepped its bounds. Most had no background in family law.
Not only did the state have the media to deal with, but it also had only fourteen days from the time the children were initially seized to defend its actions in court and present sufficient evidence to keep the children in custody.
The first day of the hearing in Judge Walther’s courtroom in San Angelo, April 17, came with a mob of attorneys ad litem and parents representing over four hundred children. All of them were required to be in the courtroom. Every motion had to be reviewed by every attorney. It was a tedious day with endless objections. No one involved with the case had any idea of how Judge Walther might rule. Even members of CASA felt that the judge might return the children, though no one could think of a case with this level of abuse in which the judge had returned the children.
In the end, even with the endless objections and the complexities of such a mammoth case, Judge Walther ruled that there was sufficient evidence to keep the children in state custody.
This courtroom drama was followed a few weeks later by another one, this time centered on my stepson Daniel Jessop, 24, one of Merril and Barbara’s sons. Danny was one of the few FLDS fathers who showed up for a custody hearing. He made a perfect poster boy for the FLDS because he was not in a plural marriage. His wife, Louisa Bradshaw Jessop, was “a disputed minor” whose newborn baby, along with her two older children, was in state custody while Texas determined whether she had been of legal age when she married Danny. It was finally established that Louisa, while a minor at the time of her marriage (she was seventeen), was older than the legal marrying age in Texas.
The FLDS argued that Texas overreached in removing all the children from the ranch during the raid simply because it found a few young girls who appeared to have been sexually assaulted. But those girls had nothing to do with Daniel’s young children. If Texas was concerned w
ith underage marriages, the FLDS attorneys argued, why take babies and toddlers away from their mothers? Needless to say, this argument resonated with a lot of people.
I was outraged. I happened to know that Daniel Jessop’s children were very much at risk because he’d sexually molested my daughter when she was four years old. I did not find this out until 2006, and I immediately reported him to the state of Arizona and got her into therapy. The state conducted a complete investigation of the evidence and awarded crime victim’s assistance to pay for psychological counseling. Although investigators concluded that the molestation occurred, certain issues complicated prosecuting the crime. For one thing, Daniel Jessop was no longer in Arizona, and we didn’t know where he was living. The authorities also told me it could be hard to get a conviction because my daughter was so young when the crime occurred. I didn’t want to put her through a trial if there was any chance he’d be acquitted, because she’d feel victimized again. She was shocked when he turned up on television. “Mom, I saw Danny on TV,” she told me. “I couldn’t believe the stuff he said.” She’d been taught about sexual abuse at school and knew not only that it was wrong but that the state had the right to remove a child from his or her parents if the child was being hurt in any way.
I will always regret that I had no advance knowledge that my stepson, Daniel, was going to take the stand. If I’d known, I would have insisted that the Texas attorneys question him about the investigation that Arizona had done about his molestation of my daughter. I made phone calls to Texas officials and told them about the case. But I was never able to connect with anyone who had an interest in pursuing it.
It was insane to me that the FLDS would use Danny Jessop as a poster boy after what he’d done to my daughter. But on reflection, I decided that having a child molester represent the FLDS was all too appropriate.
In Custody
With Judge Walther’s ruling, the state of Texas, which already had some twelve thousand children in its foster care system, now had 439 more. Over the next six weeks foster care and other placement-related costs would soar to more than $3 million. The ultimate cost far exceeded that amount.
FLDS children brought a unique set of challenges. They needed services that the traditional system was not prepared to handle because they had grown up under the mind control of a religious cult. A lot of them exhibited out-of-control behavior. I know this because after Judge Walther’s ruling, I received many calls from their guardians seeking my input and guidance, which I was happy to provide.
I knew what a treacherous and uphill battle these caretakers faced. Once people heard about my willingness to share what I knew about the FLDS and its child-rearing practices, my cell phone rang nonstop. It quickly became clear that there were things no one was talking about publicly. Caretakers were discreet in phrasing their questions because they did not want to give out confidential information. But after thirty-five years in the FLDS and seventeen as the wife of Merril Jessop, I knew the culture inside and out. It meant a lot to me to be able to transform my pain into a way to help children who’d had only the most minimal exposure to the outside world.
One of the biggest issues was that many of these kids had no respect for women. This was common in the FLDS culture but hard for outsiders to grasp. That lack of respect, combined with racial prejudice (another part of FLDS dogma), meant that many CPS workers had no authority whatsoever. The only way a woman could get some children to cooperate was by having a white male stand beside her demanding that the children be respectful. The worst scenario was when an African American woman was placed in charge. This was a surefire disaster. FLDS children are indoctrinated to believe that all people of color were put on the earth to preserve evil and will burn in hell when they die.
I’ve seen tapes of Warren Jeffs’s racist preaching on YouTube. In one of his rants he says, “You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, or rude and filthy, uncomely, disagreeable or low in their habits, wild and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind.” (Inflammatory statements like this about blacks and homosexuals led the Southern Poverty Law Center to declare the FLDS a hate group—the first time it ever gave a religious sect that designation.)
Warren Jeffs’s views on race were even more extreme than those of the traditional FLDS, and he actively encouraged people to hate African Americans and other nonwhite races. I had been raised with more traditional FLDS teachings and was distraught that my children were being exposed to such incendiary racism.
Although I wasn’t raised with Jeffs’s radically extreme teachings, I was taught from an early age that people of color were a disgrace to God and had to come to earth with darkened skin because their spirits in the preexistence weren’t deemed worthy enough to be incarnated into a white body. It was common for children in the FLDS, when I was growing up, to be taught that Abraham Lincoln was evil because he freed the slaves and called slavery and polygamy twin evils. And this was when FLDS children still attended public schools!
Warren Jeffs is still viewed by the FLDS as its prophet. In a conversation with his brother that was recorded on a jail surveillance tape on January 25, 2007, Jeffs said, “I am not the prophet. I never was the prophet, and I have been deceived by the powers of evil.” The day before in a recorded telephone conversation from prison, Jeffs said that he had not held the priesthood since he was twenty and had “committed immoral acts” with a sister and daughter. Of course, many of his true believers are convinced that he was tortured in prison to make such statements. Jeffs used to preach that he would be persecuted like Jesus Christ, so many of his followers thought his arrest was a fulfillment of his prophecy.
In my conversations with the caretakers of the YFZ children, I tried to explain how racist the FLDS is so they could better understand the children’s exasperating behavior. The boys in custody would be obedient if a white male was in charge, but if it was a woman, they sometimes called her names such as slut, bitch, or whore; both boys and girls were often physically violent with those caring for them. When I was married to Merril, he encouraged his children to be disrespectful of and abusive to his wives. He saw it as a way to control his family. If the children in custody believed in the name of God that it was all right to beat their mothers, then I knew how readily they would believe it was godly to beat others. So just imagine how some of these children would treat a total stranger who they were convinced was evil. Of course, these kids could also turn on the manners when they had to.
The social structure in Merril’s family had always been defined by female relational aggression, or the “queen bee syndrome.” I had no reason to think that anything had changed when Merril moved his family to the YFZ Ranch. Barbara, Merril’s favorite wife, was the queen bee, with total and complete authority. We all had to answer to her. Sometimes the queen bee changes when the husband marries a new wife. But in Merril’s family Barbara always remained the queen bee despite the six other wives he had when I was married to him.
Even though men have all the power in the patriarchal world of the FLDS, they sometimes defer to the queen bee to keep peace. And sometimes queen bees compete with their men, but it’s a delicate balancing act. A queen bee must be very subtle in her manipulation of her husband. Merril could have replaced Barbara as his favorite wife or subverted her queen bee status, but he had no reason to because she controlled him so deftly. She convinced him that she was helping him maintain control and would make him feel threatened by his other wives’ actions. I never knew if Merril was unaware of the crimes she was committing against his family or simply didn’t care. He did enjoy the conflict that her abuse generated. Merril fed off the tension that anger created.
I knew that there was no way the children in state custody would obey a CPS or CASA worker over the commands of one of the queen bees. This was a problem that Debra Brown immediately recognized. “We really wanted the children separate from the mothers and from the older chil
dren,” Brown said. “There’s a real pecking order there.”
“When you tried to talk to one, you were immediately surrounded, and there was a spokesman,” added Brown’s colleague, Shirley Davis.
Another issue faced by those dealing with the children was that queen bees could not be removed, and a similar hierarchy operated among daughters in a large FLDS family. If, for example, one of the queen bee daughters moved or was married off, a middle bee would emerge and take control. In FLDS families, the middle bees are the eyes and ears on the ground for the queen bee. The middle bees can also be other wives who act as supplicants to keep the queen bee in power in exchange for additional status.
The other daughters and mothers who are not in the queen or middle bee position are powerless and must submit to the demands of their superiors. In Merril’s family, Tammy was Barbara’s faithful middle bee. Cathleen and I were her victims because we both refused to be Barbara’s lackeys.
This entire system was deeply entrenched, and I knew it would give the state workers hell when they ran into it. These workers obviously had experience with families in crisis, but rarely were they part of a highly structured social system in which females aggressively controlled one another. I could tell by the number of phone calls I was getting that the CPS workers were feeling the stress. Shortly after the judge ruled that the children would not be going back to the ranch immediately, CPS organized a two-day workshop for the heads of the various departments who were working directly with the children. I was invited to participate in the workshop and flew back to Texas to provide information about the FLDS lifestyle, belief system, and social structure, and to alert the workers to areas in which the children were at risk of trauma.