The Secret Lives of Saints, page 18
That experience gave her some idea of what to expect in the outside world, but her children had no idea: “I wanted it so bad, but for the children, they had their world ripped apart. I was an apostate and I was insane. That’s what they were told. And things were very terrifying for them.”
Two weeks after leaving Colorado City, Carolyn enrolled her children in a public school. All of them are bright, and counsellors said the best thing would be to put them into age-appropriate classes, regardless of how they did on the skills testing. At first, her oldest son, fifteen-year-old Arthur, hated it. He’d been working full-time alongside men for three years. Suddenly he was back at school with children in a strange city. He didn’t know how to act around gentiles and he often didn’t have a clue about what he was being taught. When Arthur refused to go to school, Carolyn called the police. Utah law requires children to go to school until they are eighteen. So, for the first weeks, Arthur went to high school with a police escort. But soon he was on the honour roll. He learned how to fly before graduating from high school. His goal is to be a commercial pilot.
Three years after leaving, Carolyn’s oldest daughter, Betty—Harold Blackmore’s great-granddaughter—still wanted to go back to Colorado City and to the religion she was raised in. Her mother promised her that if she still wanted to go back when she turned eighteen, Carolyn would let her. Even if Betty does return, Carolyn finds solace in the fact that she’s saved Betty from becoming a child bride, provided her a high-school education and given her the security of knowing that she has a mother on the outside to rescue her if necessary.
Betty made it as difficult as possible to fit in at her suburban Salt Lake City high school. She insisted on wearing the “polyg dresses,” which invited the taunts of classmates. “Polyg” is the derogatory name Utahns and others call the fundamentalist Saints. Although the fundamentalists keep to themselves as much as possible, there are 37,000 polygamists in Utah and the surrounding states, so it’s hard not to see them. Attorney General Mark Shurtleff recalls going to school with polygamists. Women in “polyg dresses” are a common sight in discount stores from Salt Lake City in the north to St. George in the south. Brenda Williams Jensen sees them frequently in Wal-Mart in Mesquite, Nevada, where she lives just a half-hour’s drive from St. George. They are tolerated, but barely. Some mainstream Mormons, who make up the majority in Utah, despise them for ruining the good name of their church, for the abuse of boys and the child brides. Still, many LDS members find it difficult to fully condemn them, because they too have polygamous ancestors.
Carolyn says her first priority is doing the best she can for her children. It’s a struggle. “But,” she says, “as bad as it’s got, there’s never been a moment or a second that I have considered going back. The worst thing out here can never be as bad as what I experienced there.” Carolyn also tries to be a role model for other women considering leaving polygamy, because she can’t forget the people she left behind. “I taught Grade 2 there for seven years and since I’ve walked away many of those precious little girls are married, many were married at 14 and I’m just sick about that.”
She has written a book, done hundreds of interviews and spoken at conferences, always pushing her belief that education is the key to ending polygamy, a destructive and abusive way of life that demands strict obedience, not just from women, but also from men.
She has chided the Utah and Arizona governments for failing to provide adequate services—particularly housing—for people coming out of the cult. She is an adviser to Bruce Wisan, a court-appointed fiduciary who is trying to ensure that the appropriate people benefit from the US$110 million United Effort Plan that all FLDS members contributed to for years.
Her activism has led her back to her family. Carolyn was invited to speak at a human rights conference in Creston in 2006. Her aunts—Brenda and Lorna—had read the harrowing story of her escape and they’d seen her interviewed many times on television. When they found out she was going to the conference, the aunts went to meet Carolyn at the Spokane airport. During the three-hour drive to Creston, Lorna and Brenda did for Carolyn what their father had never done for them. They apologized for not having been able to help her escape. And they told her how sorry they were that their parents had got them into the unholy mess in the first place.
But Harold’s legacy doesn’t end there. Despite all of Carolyn’s attempts to keep her oldest daughter, Betty, in mainstream society, she went back to Colorado City in July 2007, right after her eighteenth birthday. So committed is Betty to proving her faith to the FLDS that her name was on the defense’s list of witnesses in the 2007 case against Warren Jeffs on two counts of rape as an accomplice. Carolyn Jessop was on the witness list for the prosecution. Neither was called to testify, but just by being on opposite sides, they bore silent witness to the horrific toll their forebear’s fascination with polygamy has had on their family.
TEN
GOD’S BROTHEL
Ever since Joseph Smith had his revelation about celestial marriage, the Saints’ prophets have always known, directly from God, exactly what a woman’s role should be. They have spent an inordinate amount of time telling girls and women just how important it is that they submit to and obey their priesthood heads, whether their fathers or their husbands.
“How is it with you sisters?” Rulon Jeffs asked in one of his sermons in 1970. “Are you upholding and honouring and sustaining the Priesthood of your husband and head? We hear a lot in the nation today about the liberation movement of women. I want to tell the world and anybody who is interested, the only true freedom of woman is in the abiding and holy Celestial Law of Marriage, submitting herself to her husband and head, and living his law as he lives and abides the law of God.”
In one of his sermons in 1977, Prophet LeRoy Johnson warned women of the consequence of not obeying their husbands. “Some girls who have been set by good men will not take their place. The Lord says there is nothing left for them but to be destroyed. And to be destroyed is something that cannot be explained by men…Give them a chance to repent and if they will not repent, you are to chase them out of your midst.”
When Debbie Oler was fifteen, she believed that she was special because her marriage to Ray Blackmore had been ordained by God. But Ray quickly shattered her girlish dreams of romance and intimacy. After she had a miscarriage, and even after the birth of their daughter, there was no tenderness. She never felt close enough to her husband to call him by his first name, let alone a pet name. And, instead of feeling like a goddess, as she’d believed she would as a mother in Zion, Debbie felt like a prostitute in God’s brothel.
“He never talked to me. I thought sex was love. And I had to be so close to someone and have a penis in me or I didn’t think anyone loved me,” she wrote years later to her father, Dalmon, only after he was dead. “I was so special to be married to Uncle Ray…He loved to have sex with me! He was even willing to bypass the Law of Chastity [that forbids sex for pleasure] so that he could have sex with me. But he blamed me and I felt wicked.”
Widowed at eighteen, Debbie’s second placement marriage to Charles Quinton was no improvement. Quinton was a man that Dalmon Oler wouldn’t have given a dog to. That’s what he told his daughter later. But it didn’t matter. When the prophet commanded, Oler handed over his oldest daughter in accordance with the prophet’s will. Quinton had orders of his own from Prophet LeRoy Johnson. Get Debbie pregnant as quickly as possible. It’s how women are dealt with. Get them pregnant, keep them pregnant and, if they’re still not obedient, exile them to the edges of the community, drug them or have them committed to the psych ward.
Cruelly, after their son was born, Quinton took the baby. Frantic weeks passed. Debbie had no idea where Quinton had taken the baby. When he returned the child, Quinton told Debbie she’d passed the test—a test seemingly aimed at weakening the bond between mother and child. He told her she was ready to get pregnant again.
The seven-year marriage was punctuated by his abuse and her suicide attempts. She took all kinds of pills to ward off the pain of depression; she often sat in the house with the lights out. In the spring of 1982, after Debbie set fire to Quinton’s store—and forced her sister-wife Lorna Blackmore and her children to find a new home—Prophet LeRoy Johnson released Debbie from the marriage. She was committed to the psychiatric ward in Creston for treatment.
While she was recovering in the hospital, thirty-seven-year-old Marvin Palmer started visiting her. Ignoring the prophet’s prohibition on courting, Marvin spent long hours at Debbie’s bedside. He told her she was beautiful and he listened to her. After telling him about her dream of soaring like a bird over the Creston Valley, Marvin took her flying when she was released from hospital. After years of yearning for it, Debbie was in love with the first man who had ever treated her kindly. Unfortunately, her Prince Charming was a polygamist who already had two wives—sisters Marlene and Miriam, daughters of Ray and Anna Mae Blackmore. That is, Winston’s sisters.
Even though Marvin had disobeyed the edict forbidding courting, Uncle Roy agreed to let him take a third wife, who would open the gates to the celestial kingdom to him. The prophet sealed their marriage in August 1982. For a while, it was everything that Debbie had hoped and dreamed of. “Marvin was so good to me,” Debbie said later. “He treated me as if I was worth something besides sex. He valued my opinion and he stuck up for me, sometimes.” She took his name and adopted it for her three children. Debbie felt safe and appreciated. “It was the first time that I made love with somebody. Before that it was somebody was doing sex to me. It was making love when I was with him. It was such a different experience than it had been before.”
Over the next few years, Marvin came under increasing pressure from Bishop Winston Blackmore and the prophet to dedicate his property to the United Effort Plan. He eventually signed over a backhoe and some logging equipment worth $150,000. But it didn’t go to the UEP; Blackmore had him sign it over to one of his companies. Marvin was promised shares in the company and a place in the Kingdom of God. But, it was the same kind of deal that the church leaders had done to cheat Harold Blackmore out of his farmland in Bountiful. When Marvin tried to collect his shares, he was told that he’d been voted out of the company. He got nothing.
After that, Marvin became a dangerous, perverted parody of the man Debbie thought she knew. He was abusive and had begun fondling and inappropriately touching some of the children, including Debbie’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Memory. Memory burst sobbing into the kitchen one night while Debbie was making dinner. “I’m going to hell,” she told her mother. “I’m going to hell.” The young girl was terrified that because her stepfather had fondled her, she would be forced to marry him. That was the priesthood’s solution to child molesting. The victims became the molesters’ brides.
Marvin blamed his abuse of Memory on the terrible nightmares he’d begun having and on the severe beatings he’d taken as a child. Still in love, and in the thrall of the FLDS, Debbie didn’t go to a social worker or to the police. Once again, she mistakenly believed she could cure the man she thought she loved. Debbie believed that if she could relieve some of his work pressure, Marvin would return to what he had been. She took an air brakes course and went out on the long hauls with him in the eighteen-wheeler.
If Marvin had ever been the loving and tender man whom Debbie had fallen in love with, he wasn’t any longer. In the fall of 1987, he raped and sodomized her in a motel room. Six weeks later, after twenty hours of driving, they finally stopped for the night. Inside the motel room, Marvin grabbed Debbie and rolled her onto her stomach. He held her down with one arm, and jammed his fist into her with the other. He changed hands, did it again and then turned her onto her back and raped her.
It was the last time Debbie went on the road with him. But she didn’t leave him or go to the police. Instead, she went to her father, the patriarch, and to Winston Blackmore, the bishop of Bountiful. She begged them to get help for Marvin. They refused. They told her it would be dealt with internally; there was no need to involve gentiles. That was the last thing that Winston wanted.
Winston had been appointed bishop three years earlier by Prophet LeRoy Johnson. But Johnson died at age ninety-eight in November 1986, and was replaced by Rulon Jeffs, who had his own set of allies and his own ambitious son. Jeffs’s favourite dictum was one that is spelled out in white stones outside the Bountiful Elementary-Secondary School, written on posters thoughout the school and framed on the walls of many homes: KEEP SWEET. It was the code for blind obedience. Followers must simply smile and do what they are told. They needed to subjugate their will, their needs and their desires to those of the prophet. Winston Blackmore was eager and willing to prove that he could enforce that dictum.
Blackmore’s increasing economic clout allowed him to nurture friendships outside Bountiful. He played oldtimers’ hockey with some of them at the community arena and guided some on hunting trips through the rugged mountains. He befriended the local member of the legislature, Howard Dirks; a succession of mayors; John Kettle, the representative on the regional district’s board; and Chris Luke, who for twenty-seven years was the elected chief of the Lower Kootenay Indian band and for much of that time was the band’s manager as well.
If Blackmore’s guests and friends disapproved of his “lifestyle” or envied his growing harem of young wives, they seemed willing to tolerate it. Even though the wives and mothers were getting younger every year, as long as they and their children smiled sweetly when they came to town, nobody was going to interfere.
Luke is a hockey player, a goaltender who still often literally faces down Blackmore, a forward, rushing in to shoot. Luke claims he mostly shuts out the polygamist leader, but not often enough. They still often wager on whether Blackmore will score. Luke says they’ve become “real good friends” as well as business partners. Luke brokered the deal that gave Blackmore a long-term lease on nearly 2,600 acres of rich farmland in the Creston Valley that the band secured only after a long and costly fight for a treaty settlement.
Raised in a Catholic residential school, Luke has little regard for organized religion and distrusts the way government treats minorities. Yet he’s not bothered by Blackmore’s particular brand of faith. He accepts that it’s just something Blackmore was born into.
As for his friend’s practice of taking under age brides, Luke says Blackmore has admitted it and has taken responsibility for it. Besides, “It’s a matter of nature and maturity. If the girls are ready to have a relationship and they’re capable of having children, then it’s all right.”
This live-and-let live attitude is the hallmark of a community that has seen more than its share of the unusual, including several bizarre and often violent cults, in comparison to which the polygamous fundamentalist Mormons look positively mainstream.
Luke’s extreme tolerance gives a hint of how content Valley residents were to accept Winston’s word that everything was fine in the community, Blackmore preferred not to have to answer any questions at all. Rather than getting outside help for Marvin or alerting the police, the bishop convened a religious court. Marvin and all of his wives and children were put through a series of “repentance and obedience tests.” But the strictest instruction was that they were to keep Marvin’s sexual assaults a secret within their community. Blackmore ignored the laws that require him as a spiritual leader and as superintendent of a school to report what had happened to the provincial social services ministry and to the RCMP.
In her book, Debbie says Blackmore told her that he knew everything about her, everywhere she went and every person she talked to. He tried on several occasions to take away Debbie’s daughter Memory. (Memory’s father is also Winston’s father, making Debbie’s daughter Winston’s half-sister.) Winston told Memory that God and the prophet had directed her to move into his home and come under his authority so that he could direct her on the path to salvation. He didn’t make the same offer to Debbie’s other children.
“I was numb and exhausted,” Debbie told a documentary filmmaker about that period of her life. She tried to drown herself in nearby Goat River. “I felt it was better for the children. If there was no place left for us to go, I felt I had to do this.” After the suicide attempt, Debbie was again treated in the psychiatry ward of Creston Hospital. She called the only people she could think of who might be able to help her—ranchers Faye and Steve Street.
Faye Street—a strapping, strong woman—had worked on the same forest-fire-fighting team as Marvin had in the mid-1980s. She liked Marvin and, on one of their days off, she had invited him to stay at their ranch outside Cranbrook. While they were still up at the firefighters’ camp, Marvin had started talking about his wives. Faye, a plain-spoken woman with a sharp tongue, thought he was joking. But he soon convinced her that it was true and told her more about his wives and Bountiful.
Although the whole idea of polygamy made Faye more than a bit uncomfortable, Marvin brought Debbie to meet her and her husband after the fire season ended: “I could tell she [Debbie] was head over heels, passionately in love with the guy. But I started talking to Debbie about the polygamy crap. She told me all that stuff about how wonderful it is and all that. But I could tell the whole time she was lying and trying to convince herself.”
The Streets visited Marvin and Debbie in Bountiful a few months later and were appalled at the living conditions. “The boys were sleeping in a granary with the beds stacked up against the wall. It was cold and dirty.” Inside the house, the atmosphere was also frosty. “I could feel the daggers between the women,” says Faye. “I told Debbie that this is crap.”
The friendship with Marvin and Debbie ended abruptly. During a visit at the ranch, Marvin asked the Streets’ fifteen-year-old foster daughter if she would be willing to be his fifth wife. “I told him to stay away from her or I’d neuter him,” says Faye.
