The Secret Lives of Saints, page 10
“A man who obeys the ordinances of God and is without blemish or deformity, who has sound health and mature age, and enjoys liberty and access to the elements of life, is designed to be the head of a woman, a father and a guide of the weaker sex and of those of tender age, to mansions of eternal life and salvation,” says one quote from Elder Parley Pratt, one of Smith’s contemporaries.
“A woman, under similar circumstances is designed to be the glory of some man in the Lord; to be led and governed by him, as her head in all things, even as Christ is the head of the man; to honour, obey, love, serve, comfort and help him in all things, to be a happy wife, and if blessed with offspring, a faithful and affectionate mother, devoting her life to the joys, cares and duties of her domestic sphere,” he continued.
A quote from another early Mormon elder, Heber Kimball, suggests even women know how incapable they are of being anything but a chattel. “Ladies, there is not one of you that has common sense but would leave the man that would suffer you to lead him; you would rightly consider that he was not following his calling, if he would bow to your mandates.” Pity the poor woman who learns this after finally convincing her husband to take out the garbage, fold the laundry or change a diaper.
But girls aren’t only taught to aspire to marriage. They are taught to aspire to plural marriage. In a sermon to the folks in Lister in 1965, Rulon Jeffs (who was the fundamentalists’ prophet from 1986 to 2002) preached about celestial marriage, “the highest and most sacred law.” “Without it we cannot become Gods. Without it we cannot redeem Zion and build up the Kingdom of God…we are not going to build up the Kingdom of God or establish His Priesthood in the earth and God will have to go on and get another people.”
By his own admission, Winston Blackmore was “a busybody,” keen to listen in on semi-whispered schoolgirl conversations. He either knew intuitively or had learned by watching his father that knowledge is power. Nothing is more powerful than knowing secrets in any community, but this is especially true of a closed community like Lister, where little more than four, very large families were becoming ever more intertwined.
“I needed to know who the girls had a crush on and what their favourite singers were singing and who were their favourite movie stars. Well, I knew those statistics about these girls [Debbie and Jane Oler] as well as the other girls in my school class,” Winston wrote years later. “None of the boys would do. They were all no good. We were Blackmores, Palmers and the odd Oler boy and the girls just knew that no one was right for them…but Deb focused on my father. I thought she must have been crazy, and so did he, for there were no secrets kept long in our society. She had scarcely reached 14 before she was overly anxious to get married.”
It wasn’t just the exhortations and expectations of the priesthood leaders that made Debbie Oler anxious to marry. She also believed in the power of revelation, and that by fasting and praying she would come to know God’s plan for her. And what she came to believe was that God not only had chosen her to be Ray Blackmore’s wife, but that he would tell her how to cure Ray of his leukemia if she loved him enough, was obedient enough and prayed hard enough. That fall, after her fourteenth birthday, Debbie told her father about her revelation and how she felt about Ray. Dalmon Oler approached the prophet LeRoy Johnson on his next visit to Lister. The prophet listened but said nothing. Debbie was heartbroken and, in her distress, poured out her heart to her friends, and Ray’s busybody son heard almost every word.
“Oh what an uproar at school,” Winston wrote in his questionable account of the strange romance:
The girls sobbed their hearts out…In her mind, she [Debbie] was mature, desperate and time was running out for my father had been diagnosed with cancer and he was in the fight for this life. She seemed to be driven by the belief that if she could just marry him then she could somehow prolong his life, and she seemed driven to get out of her own father’s home. Her tears and fuss at school brought on a whole new scene of wonder among the students…
Deb was a pretty girl and it did not go unnoticed. Among the other men who were non-students, her focus on father sparked some debate as many I suppose could not understand why any girl would want to commit to a man soon to be dead. The kind of cancer that father had was final in 95 per cent of all those who contacted [sic] it. I am sure that it seemed such a waste of a pretty girl’s life to be locked on a man who was terminally ill, while there were others who in their minds were handsome, ready, willing and able. Father could not understand it either and the thought had no appeal to him. Time went by for him and as it happened, she eventually got her wish, as father was called to come and have her become his wife.
It seems that even years later, after Winston himself had taken several fifteen-year-old wives, he was unwilling to believe that his father had seduced Debbie.
Some former Lister residents have speculated that Winston’s intense interest wasn’t just in knowing secrets. They suggest Winston and some of his older brothers had their eyes on Debbie and were upset that their father might take her, but knew that they were no competition for their powerful father or for any older men who paid special tithes or used their connections to the prophet to get the smartest and most beautiful girls.
It wasn’t until 1971, when Debbie was fifteen, that the prophet had his own “revelation” confirming Debbie’s—and perhaps Ray’s—fervent wish. The only hint that Debbie got from her father of her impending marriage was a new suitcase and the thirty dollars that he gave her a few weeks before the June priesthood meeting in Cardston, which was still fertile ground for attacting converts to polygamy. She wasn’t certain if the money was for her wedding dress and trousseau, but she used it to buy material for two dresses, including a soft cornflower-blue print that would be suitable for a wedding.
Debbie wore her blue dress to the June meeting. She sat through hours of sermons preached in one of the rented meeting rooms before Uncle Roy took her hand and told her to wait for him in the hallway. Together they went into another room set aside for the secret sealing ceremonies. Ray and Anna Mae were already there along with Joseph Musser’s son Guy, one of the prophet’s senior councillors. Musser took one of Anna Mae Blackmore’s hands and placed Debbie’s hand in hers. With their hands intertwined, their middle fingers resting on the pulsing veins of one another’s wrists, Anna Mae followed the example of Sarah. In the Old Testament story of Sarah and Abraham, the childless Sarah placed the hand of her servant-girl Hagar in her husband’s as a sign of her consent that he take another wife to give him children. And that’s what Anna Mae did. She placed Debbie’s hand in Ray’s. Ray was nearly forty-one years older than his bride. He was just a few months shy of his fifty-sixth birthday.
After Anna Mae had joined the hands of Debbie and Ray, one smooth and girlish, the other wrinkled and worn, she stepped aside. Musser asked “Brother Ray” to “receive her unto yourself to be your lawful and wedded wife and you to be her lawful and wedded husband for time and all eternity, with a covenant and promise, on your part, that you will fulfill all the laws, rites and ordinances pertaining to this holy bond of matrimony in the new and everlasting covenant, doing this in the presence of God, angels and these witnesses of you.” Then Debbie vowed to be Ray’s “lawful and wedded wife for time and all eternity.” Musser invoked the authority of the “Holy Priesthood” and sealed them together with the blessings of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and “with all other blessings pertaining to the new and everlasting covenants.”
When the ceremony concluded, the men went back to their priesthood meetings and the new bride, Ray’s sixth wife, found herself alone outside in the shade, uncertain what to do next. It gave her time to contemplate the complex family genealogy that had just become even more complicated. She was Winston’s stepmother and stepmother to her own two stepmothers which, most confusingly of all, made Debbie her own stepgrandmother.
When it was time to return to the motel, Anna Mae ceded her spot next to Ray in the front seat of the truck. But Debbie was about to learn that Anna Mae lived what is called the “Law of Sarah” she was like Sarah in many ways. In the Old Testament story, a few years after Hagar’s marriage to Abraham and the birth of their son Ishmael, Sarah became pregnant at age eighty-eight with the son she named Isaac. After Isaac was born, Sarah demanded that Abraham cast out both Hagar and Ishmael, telling him, “The son of this bond-woman shall not be heir with…Isaac.” Like Sarah, Anna Mae never gave up believing that she was the one true wife and that her favourite son, Winston, was Ray’s only true heir.
Ray didn’t consummate the marriage that night. Despite Anna Mae’s symbolic approval of the marriage, her weeping in the room next to the newlyweds’ was so loud and went on for so long that Ray left his child bride and spent the night comforting forty-seven-year-old Anna Mae. It was a prophetic start to Debbie’s lonely, difficult and even dangerous life as a sister-wife.
Inside Ray Blackmore’s home, there was no one more powerful than Anna Mae and no one more protective of him as he grew weaker, both from the cancer and from the intensive treatments that he had opted for rather than depending on faith alone. Anna Mae was the alpha wife and Mother Superior. Even though all the wives did not live in the same house, Anna Mae doled out their chores and responsibilities. She disciplined the sister-wives, and reminded them of their duty to obey their husband and her. The other wives had to make appointments through her to see their husband. Anna Mae had insisted that Ray’s bedroom be in the house where she lived, and she kept the schedule of whose turn it was to sleep with him.
She charted the wives’ menstrual cycles to ensure that they were only having sex with Ray when they were most fertile, since sex for pleasure without the goal of procreation is a sin. Anna Mae didn’t only regulate the wives’ access to Ray, she was his sleeping dragon. She spent nights on the floor outside her husband’s room while one of the other wives slept with Ray.
Ray’s thirty-one children were also scattered in several different houses and Anna Mae acted as gatekeeper to them as well, regulating their access to their father. That, of course, meant that the door was always open for Winston to spend as much time as possible with his father. Still, arranging time alone wasn’t simple. Everybody wanted a few minutes with Ray—his children, his wives and priesthood men, who were becoming increasingly dependent on Ray, not only for their salvation but also for their homes and their jobs. Plus, Ray had a ranch to run in order to pay for food and clothing for six wives and thirty-one children.
Debbie was as spirited, insecure and demanding as any teenaged girl. She was also beautiful, and Ray was not unaware of that. His attentiveness to his child bride upset Anna Mae’s rigorous schedules, and Debbie’s inability to blend sweetly into the family angered the matriarch—and inflamed her son Winston. Debbie had a miscarriage six months after the wedding. Ray—and, no doubt, Anna Mae—blamed Debbie for it. Ray and Debbie had broken the celestial covenant and had sex while she was pregnant. Ray told Debbie that she had tempted him into sinning and Debbie believed him when he told her she was wicked. Debbie fell into a depression and had only begun to recover when she was pregnant again. Debbie’s daughter was born in November 1973. Surprisingly, Debbie agreed to name the girl Memory, even though that was the name of her stepmother, who had been so hard on her.
By then, Debbie says, Winston had begun a campaign against her. She says he spied on her, and she found menacing handwritten notes, including a particularly chilling one that read:
You are a murderer and innocent blood will be on your hand forever because of it. We were all told by the prophet that the Good Father would be healed and restored to full health if his wives and children would keep sweet and be obedient. You are guilty of the sin of gossip and stirring up wicked and vile spirits to destroy the peace and healing power in the Good Father’s family.
You will pay before the judgment bar of God for the sins you have committed. You will know the pain of the damned in this life for destroying the prophecy of our prophet, LeRoy Sunderland Johnson—the prophecy that our Good Father would be healed and live forever without ever tasting death. Watch yourself, because I am watching you. From this day forward, someone will always be watching and recording every act you commit, so beware! You will know me. Never forget this day.
It was signed “the Protector of the Faith and the Good Father.”
Debbie had reason to be frightened. Mormons are taught that there are sins for which the atonement of Jesus does not apply and for which the spilling of blood is justified. This controversial concept is called blood atonement. Brigham Young, the second president of the LDS church, outlined it in 1856: “There are sins that men commit for which they cannot receive forgiveness in this world or in that which is to come, and if they had their eyes open to see their true condition, they would be perfectly willing to have their blood spilt upon the ground that the smoke thereof might ascend to heaven as an offering for their sins; and the smoking incense would atone for their sins, whereas, if such is not the case, they will stick to them and remain upon them in the spirit world.”
Throughout Mormon history, there have been murders in the name of cleansing sin. But in the 1970s, a fundamentalist Mormon leader named Ervil LeBaron had gone on a killing spree, murdering or ordering the deaths of as many as thirty people. LeBaron had had a revelation that he was the rightful successor to Joseph Smith, and anyone who refused to pledge their full allegiance to him was in danger from his roving hit squads. Among the most spectacular and brazen of these murders was the shooting of chiropractor Rulon Allred. Allred was Harold Blackmore’s old friend who had taken over from Joseph Musser after the 1952 split between fundamentalists in Salt Lake City and those in Short Creek who later became the FLDS. At the time of Allred’s murder, he had an estimated five thousand followers—the second largest polygamous group in North America after the United Effort in Short Creek.
Eighteen-year-old Rena Chynoweth—LeBaron’s thirteenth wife and the leader of a commando group that the LeBarons called the United Women of Zion—walked into Allred’s waiting room, which was filled with patients, on the afternoon of May 7, 1977. When Allred came out of his office, Chynoweth emptied the six-shot magazine of a .25 calibre automatic pistol into Allred. She and her accomplice, Ramona Marston, left. But Chynoweath returned a few minutes later, placed the muzzle of a .38 calibre revolver against Allred’s head, and fired a final shot.
Chynoweth was nearly nine months pregnant when a Utah jury acquitted her of the murder. Despite her acquittal, Ervil LeBaron was convicted in 1981 of ordering his wives to kill Allred. And Chynoweth later wrote a book admitting to it. Marston also admitted to the murder, but jumped bail and disappeared before she had her day in court.
Seven years later, after Allred’s murder in 1978, Ron and Dan Lafferty slit the throats of their twenty-four-year-old sister-in-law, Brenda Lafferty, and her eighteen-month-old daughter, Erica. Brenda had refused to agree to her husband, Allen, taking a second wife. His brothers were acolytes of another polygamist prophet called Brother Onias, whose real name was Robert Crossfield. Crossfield had grown up in Cardston and spent several years living in Lister before he began having revelations that he was the true prophet.
There have been other blood atonements since and, as recently as 1997, Rulon Jeffs preached to the eight thousand or so members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that sometimes blood atonement was not only permissible, but necessary:
I can refer you to plenty of instances where men have been righteously slain in order to atone for their sins. I have seen scores and hundreds of people for whom there would have been a chance…if their lives had been taken and their blood spilled on the ground as a smoking incense to the Almighty, but who are now angels to the Devil…The wickedness and ignorance of the nations forbid this principle being in full force, but the time will come when the law of God will be in full force.
This is loving our neighbour as ourselves; if he needs help, help him; and if he wants salvation and it is necessary to spill his blood on the earth in order that he might be saved, spill it.
Debbie was never faced with a gun or a knife, but the threat was always there. And, before long, with the family becoming more and more discontented, Debbie and her newborn daughter were banished from Blackmore’s big house and sent to live in an unheated room over the meeting hall. She stayed there for a few months until Ray asked the prophet to order Debbie and her daughter to return to Dalmon Oler’s home.
On June 17, 1974, fifty-eight-year-old Ray Blackmore died. Just a few days after her third wedding anniversary, eighteen-year-old Debbie was a widow.
SIX
THE NIGHT OF LONG KNIVES
Not long before Ray Blackmore died he gave his sons some advice: “If you boys will just stay together, this valley will fall into your hands one piece at a time and there will be nothing anyone can do about it.” But his favourite son, Winston, who has always claimed to revere his father, ignored that advice. He was too intent on claiming power and doing whatever it took to get it. After all, that’s what his father had done.
Only a few days before Winston was to write the first of his Grade 12 provincial exams, his father had finally told him that it was unlikely he would live up to his promise. He was not going to live forever and was not likely going to be able to beat cancer. On June 17, 1974, Winston should have had his head down, writing his exam. Instead he stayed home as his father weakened. Winston never took that test, and never sat through another school exam. Ray Blackmore died that afternoon. He was fifty-eight.
