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But even this risk was not too great to stop my mother from enlightening the prophet to our problems once she’d reached her limit. Mom had long ago learned that trying to fix problems herself wouldn’t change anything and she could no longer allow her children to be blamed for troubles in the home. Not long before the night we learned that my father would have a third wife, my mother had contacted the prophet, alerting him to the trouble in our house hold. This bold move was a huge violation for a woman, as it disrespected her husband and went against the church code of female behavior. Women are not supposed to complain; they are taught and expected to willingly and “sweetly” obey their husbands, who are their “priesthood heads.”

The fear of displeasing God and failing our religious responsibilities is so great that it pushes most members to do anything for the priesthood. For many women, this means they must sacrifice their own desires, needs, and feelings to conform to those of their husband and their religious beliefs. The FLDS believes that women cannot gain entrance to the highest of the three levels of heaven on their own; they must be married to a man who holds the priesthood and has at least three wives, or they will go to a lower level of heaven or to hell.

From birth, girls are prepared for this role. Their way of life is chosen for them by the priesthood. They are told whom to marry, what to believe, and how to live their lives. Women are taught that they have already chosen their destiny before their birth, at which point they chose to willingly place their lives in the hands of the prophet and priesthood, having everything dictated for them.

For my mother to alert the prophet without my father’s knowledge meant risking our chance of going to heaven together as a family, but things had gotten so bad in our home that my mother felt something needed to change.

When my father learned of my mother’s actions, he feared that he would never receive a third wife—or attain celestial marriage. But he held faith that the prophet would see him as the good man he was. He was well aware that men who prove unable to control their wives are looked upon as “weak sisters” and that he faced the possibility of losing his wives and his children to another man the prophet deemed more worthy.

So Dad was quite relieved several weeks later when he received a call from Rulon Jeffs, the prophet at the time. It seemed that Uncle Rulon had “another lady” for my father, and that my mother’s concerns had not jeopardized his standing after all. All my father’s worries were put to rest. Clearly, the prophet must have been confident that my father could handle his family issues.

My mother’s complaints may have been brushed aside, but there were reasons to be optimistic that another mother would bring stability into our home. The whole house seemed to light up at the mere prospect, and the two days after the announcement were consumed by a flurry of activity. All of the kids had fun rehearsing the musical presentation to welcome our new addition. Even my mother and Audrey seemed to put their differences aside as they began preparing for the wedding.

Dad had been assigned to marry Mom’s twenty-four-year-old niece, Laura Jessop. Laura’s father was married to two of my mother’s sisters and one of them was Laura’s mother. In the FLDS, it’s not uncommon for members of the same family—even sisters—to share a husband. Our family and the Jessops had been close for many years, but the choice of Laura was still a big surprise because we had been so closely tied to her growing up. It would be an adjustment to now call her “mother” instead of cousin.

The wedding was to take place at the prophet’s home in Salt Lake. Laura was driving up with her family from Hildale, Utah, home of an FLDS-only community. For years, Hildale and its sister town of Colorado City, Arizona, were called Short Creek, named after a stream that came out of the mountains and disappeared into the sand. Many of the locals just refer to the twin towns as “the crik,” and to the residents as “crikers.” Although these are not the proper spellings, residents of Short Creek long ago adopted these unusual pronunciations and spellings: “crik” and “criker.” Nestled close to the awe-inspiring red rock mountains of El Capitan and surrounded by hundreds of miles of parched, rough country, Short Creek was a refuge for members who wanted to practice their religion and plural marriage without the risk of persecution. Though barren and desertlike, the area’s rugged landscape and great expanses of open space offered scenic beauty and served as a buffer between the FLDS community and the outside world. The remote sites appealed to followers because they’d long been taught to be suspicious of all outsiders and to regard them as evil.

My family always stayed with the Jessops on the Utah side of Short Creek when we made the long drive south for church meetings and events. Likewise, the Jessops stayed with us in Salt Lake during visits to the prophet’s compound or as a pit stop on their way to visit their relatives in the FLDS-only community of Bountiful, British Columbia, just across the Canadian border. The community in Canada was much like the one in southern Utah in that its thousand or so members lived isolated from outsiders. Members of all three FLDS communities operated under the same umbrella of priesthood leadership and convened in Short Creek several times a year for important religious events and community activities.

Our mother, Laura Jessop, was fourteen years older than I was, and she and I had rarely spoken during our family visits. I was much friendlier with her three younger sisters, who were closer to my age. Still, I shared everyone’s optimism about Laura and hoped that her addition would mark a positive turning point for our family. Mom hoped for a friend in Laura. So did Mother Audrey. I just wanted the fighting in our house to stop and for us to all be a happy family.

Unfortunately, things would only get worse.

CHAPTER TWO

GROWING UP AND KEEPING SWEET

We follow the prophet.

—FLDS PARABLE

It hadn’t always been so tense in the Wall house hold. Growing up, I remember many good times with my family. There were camping trips, picnics in the mountains, and countless visits to the FLDS communities in Canada and southern Utah for festivals, celebrations, and group events. There were struggles, but I remember so much happiness, and how much I loved my dad.

Sixteen of Dad’s children were still living at home when I was born on July 7, 1986. I was the eleventh of my mother’s fourteen children, and number nineteen of Dad’s eventual twenty-four. My father was in the delivery room for my birth, and he always said that I came out smiling and continued to smile throughout my childhood. He nicknamed me Goldilocks because of my long silky blond hair and the way I skipped around the house reciting the Grimms’ fairy tale and performing it in skits for my family.

I was still quite young—only a few months old—when a dramatic fire changed the course of life for our family. At the time, we were living in our new nine-bedroom house on Claybourne Avenue. One crisp morning in November my mother was in the kitchen preparing breakfast for three of her young boys and cleaning up from a hectic morning of getting eleven children off to school. After putting some raw honey on the stove to melt, she went down the hall to the nursery to check on me. I had awakened and had decided I was hungry, so my mother lovingly took a few minutes to address my needs. While she was feeding me, my older sister Rachel called from Alta Academy, and my mother talked to her as she nursed me.

The blaze started when she was out of the room. The boys were happily eating oatmeal when a heating element on the old stove exploded and turned the pan of honey into a fireball. The flames quickly spread to the cabinets, which were made of a highly flammable material; upon seeing the flames, my brother Jacob ran into the nursery to alert my mother. My mother was still on the phone with Rachel, and it took her a few minutes to ask Rachel to call back and to calm Jacob enough to comprehend what he was saying. Her heart was pounding as she raced after Jacob to the kitchen only to be greeted by the grim sight of flames licking at the kitchen walls. Justin, Jacob’s twin brother, stood at the sink throwing small cups of water onto the flames to try to put them out.

Just then the phone rang, jolting my mother into action. She rushed to answer it, hoping that whoever it was could send help. It was Rachel calling back, and Mom screamed into the phone that the house was on fire, instructing her to get word to my father. Mom immediately herded the twins and my two-year-old brother, Brad, to safety, but the fire spread rapidly. Windows of the house exploded from the heat as she came back in to pull me from the nursery. In the end, I escaped uninjured, but my mother needed medical treatment for burns she received during the rescue.

After a frantic search for my father, who was volunteering as a teacher at Alta Academy, Rachel found him and shared the catastrophic news. As Dad raced home, he could see the thick black smoke rising from halfway across the valley. His heart dropped and a sick feeling entered his stomach as he realized the seriousness of the blaze and the danger we were all in. He arrived home to find the street packed with fire trucks, but to his relief we were all collected safely outside.

Once the flames subsided and the trucks had dispersed, the damage was assessed, and it was crushing: the top floor of our house had been completely destroyed, and the basement had suffered damage as well. Our neighbors on the block immediately came to our aid. Even the local Mormon bishop arrived with donations of clothing and offered a place where we could stay temporarily. Our family was shocked by the outpouring of kindness from people outside our church. Their actions contradicted what we had long been taught about the “evil” character of outsiders. Here were so many non-FLDS people offering help in our time of need, despite knowing about the secret and misunderstood life our family led.

While the loss of our home was traumatic, it was nothing compared with the loss we suffered later on that day. That night, November 25, 1986, as we were recovering from seeing our home and possessions go up in flames, we received word that our prophet, Leroy S. Johnson, had passed away at age ninety-eight. The entire FLDS community was devastated, and suddenly the fire in our home took a back burner.

To say that the prophet is the most important figure in the FLDS is an understatement. He is viewed as an extension of God. His words and proclamations are equal to the word of God on earth. A prophet’s death was a profoundly tragic occasion, one that forced us to set aside our own situation and focus on the church.

In particular, Uncle Roy’s death took a huge toll on the FLDS community. Part of what had endeared him to us was the important role he played in reuniting the people after the notorious raid of 1953 when members of Arizona law enforcement stormed Short Creek, arrested 36 men, and sent 86 women and 236 children on buses to Phoenix in an attempt to put a stop to their polygamous lifestyle. The governor of Arizona at the time, J. Howard Pyle, said the raid was in response to reports of child abuse and men taking young girls as brides, but the governor’s goal of abolishing polygamy failed after graphic photographs of children being ripped from their mothers’ arms surfaced in the media. In the days after the raid, Uncle Roy vowed to reunite every single family in the community, and in the years to come he followed through on his promise, showing his love and loyalty to his people.

For a few years before his death, we’d been told that Uncle Roy suffered from shingles and deteriorating health. According to what people were saying, Rulon Jeffs and several other church elders had been overseeing the meetings and taking care of church business. There were a number of church elders with more seniority than Rulon Jeffs, but a disagreement between members of the priesthood council over the interpretation of key church ordinances ended with Rulon, the religion’s oldest living apostle, as our prophet’s likely successor.

With nowhere to live, we moved in with another church member, Woodruff Steed, and his family. Woodruff owned an enormous home in Draper, in the southern end of the Salt Lake Valley. His house accommodated not only his seven living wives and dozens of children but now our large family as well. His ten-acre property was big enough for both a small dairy operation and several of his sons’ homes.

Woodruff was my mother’s uncle, but that was not why he offered to let us stay with his family. My father had helped design Woodruff’s house, and the two had cultivated a lasting friendship. In return for lodging our family, Dad agreed to share the two thousand dollars he was receiving each month from the insurance company to cover our family’s living expenses while our home was being rebuilt. In addition to the dairy, Woodruff owned an excavation company, and business had been slow. The insurance money would help to feed his large family.

Woodruff was not the only one experiencing financial difficulty at the time. For almost a year, my father had been in the process of selling the company he’d founded with a partner in the late 1970s. The company, Hydropac, sold components, parts, and seals used in hydraulic and pneumatic equipment and pumps. In its prime, it had about twenty employees and contracts with numerous branches of the U. S. military as well as NASA.

The sale of the company was taking place at the behest of Uncle Roy, who wanted my father to discontinue his frequent business trips and be at home with his family. This was not the first time that my father had sacrificed a high-paying position at the prophet’s direction. Back in the spring of 1967, Uncle Roy had instructed Dad to leave his job at Thiokol Corporation, where he worked on secret, high-tech rocket-development programs. The prophet told Dad that his business travel was interfering with his time with his family and exposing him to outside influences he deemed “worldly.” Uncle Roy wanted his followers close to him, and with little explanation, he told my father to resign from his post and move his family from their Brigham City residence to the Salt Lake Valley. A strong believer in FLDS teachings, Dad trusted in the prophet and, without questioning, did as he was told; he quit Thiokol and moved his family to Salt Lake. The move exacted a huge financial toll on the family, from which they would not recover for years.

A similar scenario played out when my father later went to work at Kenway Engineering, where he had secured a high-paying position as a program manager. There he oversaw projects valued at forty to sixty million dollars and supervised a large staff, but sure enough, after a little while, Uncle Roy told him he had to leave that job for the good of his family.

Because of these two incidents and the financial burden they had placed on our family, my father was understandably reluctant to sell Hydropac, fearing he would lose a small fortune in the process. With two wives and nineteen children, many of whom were still living at home, he had to be careful with his finances. He postponed selling the company for about a year, hoping that Uncle Roy would relent and allow him to keep it.

That hope died with Leroy Johnson. In the wake of Uncle Roy’s passing, Rulon Jeffs became prophet, exerting renewed and vigorous pressure on my father to sell the company. The sale would be for a fraction of Hydropac’s true value, to three FLDS members, among them Brian and Wallace Jeffs, Rulon’s sons, who had been working at the company for about two years. It didn’t matter that none of the men buying Hydropac had experience running a high-tech company, it was what the prophet wanted, and so it had to be done. In the end, my father proved no match for the newly consolidated power of Jeffs, finally acquiescing to priesthood demands and putting his family in financial straits in the process.

After the sale was finalized, Dad had more free time to spend with us at Woodruff’s house, and during this period our family grew further enmeshed with the Salt Lake Valley FLDS community. Woodruff was an influential person in the church, with strong ties to its followers. Since my dad was a convert and didn’t have a real family connection to the religion, we’d always been a little bit segregated from the church. Our time with the Steeds brought us closer not only to their family but to the FLDS way of life.

The eight months at the Steed compound offered Dad, Mom, and Mother Audrey a reprieve from their typical routine and helped them to get along better. These were happy months, and in the years that followed, my older siblings would often share with me their fond memories of that time. It provided a chance for the kids in our family to play with the other children, roaming free on the Steeds’ expansive property and forming close links with the Steed family.

We returned to the house on Claybourne Avenue in time to celebrate my first birthday on July 7, 1987. While most of the money from the sale of Hydropac went to the church, my father had held some back to make improvements to expand and redesign the house, which had been built with a much smaller family in mind. This time my father designed much of the interior to accommodate our large family, and everybody was pleased with the way it turned out. We all hoped the new home would give us a fresh start. After eight months living in four bedrooms at the Steeds’ property, we were finally able to stretch out and make the most of our new surroundings.

I shared the nursery on the main floor with my twin brothers and Brad. Our room was just across the hall from my mother’s, which was kitty-corner to Dad’s suite. Mother Audrey’s room was at the far end of the same hall. All three of the adults’ rooms had queen-sized beds. The living room now had carefully crafted floor-to-ceiling windows, and in the mornings the sun would fill the entire first floor, which Dad had finished in a lovely pale blond wood. Most of the bedrooms for the older kids were in the basement, and unlike the rest of the house, those rooms always felt dark and grim to me, even though there were some windows at grade level. The basement was also where Dad kept his hunting rifles and bows safely secured behind a panel inside an enormous walk-in pantry. The floor-to-ceiling shelves of this pantry were filled with home-canned food, enough to last us for six months. Many members of the FLDS had similar storage spaces, since we were taught that the end of the world was coming and storing food was one way to prepare. It could take several months once we’d settled back on earth after the destructions before we’d again be able to start planting and harvesting our own crops.

At first, living in the nursery room with my brothers was fun. I was born smack dab in the middle of the younger boys in my family and found myself stuck playing with them much of the time. There were two bunk beds, and we liked to jump back and forth from one to the other. We spent hours doing this or tying sheets across the two beds to make a hammock. As my brothers and I jumped around the room, my ankles would sometimes get caught in the hem of my long dress. Like me, my brothers had restrictions on what they could wear. In order to cover their church undergarments, they wore long-sleeved shirts and long pants, even in summertime. Our wild games made the boys hot and sweaty; they were constantly tugging at their collars in discomfort.

We were typical, rambunctious kids with lots of energy and not much to do at home all day long. Mom let me read the American Girl doll catalog from time to time, and I dreamed of the day that I might be able to get a Molly doll for myself. Dad provided us with toys to fit his budget, but with so many birthdays in a year, he could not afford a doll so extravagant. Still, our family made a big deal of birthdays. Dad always marked them with a special dinner out or a gift he’d carefully selected, and Mom prepared beautiful hand-decorated cakes. On the months when there was more than one birthday, we’d have one big party with a cake and presents for each child celebrating.

Dad didn’t allow us to leave the property without an adult, and our school friends lived too far away for frequent visits. With nowhere to go and little to play with, we found sanctuary in the backyard. My brothers and I were always out there, making up games and bickering. Being trapped at home all day forced us to be creative. We’d spend hours playing cowboys and Indians or hide-and-go-seek. On sunny summer days, we would climb high into the branches of the trees around our house and leap out with bedsheets tied to our wrists and ankles, aiming our landings for the big trampoline we positioned to hopefully break our fall. Given the dangerous nature of our play, there were occasional mishaps that would send Mom into a panic, but luckily for us, we got by with a few broken bones and minor scrapes and bruises.

My sisters were much older than I was, and they rarely included me in their activities. Teressa, who was closest to me in age, was still seven years my senior. I adored her and all my other sisters, and I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to move downstairs with the big kids. Sometimes I’d sneak down to my sister Michelle’s room and slip into bed next to her after everyone went to sleep.

When I got sick Michelle was always there to take care of me. I’d climb into her bed because Mom’s was often full with some of her other children. Like a lot of FLDS families, we didn’t have private health insurance. My dad didn’t believe in living off the government, so instead of getting Medicaid or food stamps like many members did, we went without coverage. My mother was an herbalist who believed you should use God’s natural remedies before turning to the medical community. Her skeptical view of conventional medicine was shared by most FLDS members, who were quite suspicious of the professional medical community because they were afraid the government was using medicine to spy on people. For this reason, we were also not fully immunized because a suspicion circulated around the community that the government was putting tracking devices in the vaccines, or that they were making the vaccines bad to hurt the people. I rarely went to a doctor or an emergency room as a child, and when I had an ear infection I usually did not have access to antibiotics or other pharmaceuticals. I remember nights when I would cry myself to sleep because my ears hurt so badly.

By the time I turned five, the financial crunch from the sale of Hydropac was beginning to ease. Dad had found good work as a mining consultant, but the job unfortunately took him away from home to remote mining sites throughout the West.

My father was somewhat strict and expected a lot from us, but he loved us and we knew it. He would tell us that we could do anything with hard work. Seeing him in the evening was the highlight of our day. We didn’t get to leave the house much, except to attend church on Sundays, so when we heard Dad’s car pull into the driveway, we all raced to greet him in the carport, hoping he would have a stick of gum for us. Dad kept his stash of Big Red cinnamon gum in his Buick Le Sabre and we were crazy about that gum. If we were lucky, sometimes he’d invite us along to the supermarket, where he did all the grocery shopping from a list that his wives would compile.

Since Dad was often away on business during the week, it was important to him that we spend time as a family on weekends. We would sometimes share quiet evenings in front of the TV, watching Little House on the Prairie or a National Geographic special that Dad deemed appropriate. All the kids would crowd around the TV in the living room to enjoy Saturday-morning cartoons. In college Dad had played football, and he passed his love for the game on to us. On some Saturday mornings, he would take the older children to see his alma mater, Brigham Young University, play football, and when they returned he would recount the game’s best plays to me. I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to go with them. Sadly, religious pressures and new priesthood teachings began to restrict these trips to outside sporting events, labeling them as “worldly” entertainment. By the time I was old enough to attend, our family no longer went. The priesthood expected the members to dedicate their Saturdays to donating labor for the church work projects instead of partaking in family fun. I never got to have my own experience with my dad watching his favorite team play.

Every summer we enjoyed a one-week vacation in the Uinta Mountains. The endless expanses and quiet solitude gave us a reprieve from our hectic and often chaotic existence. Somehow when we were in the mountains, our problems seemed to dissolve. With room to breathe, we all put our anger aside and remembered what it means to be with family. We had a special campsite there, a big meadow with lots of privacy. Being in the wilderness was the best part of our summers. Since he was a geologist, Dad would teach us about rocks, fossils, plants, and how to be smart in the wild.

Dad was amazing with a Dutch oven and liked to prepare large breakfasts of pancakes, bacon and eggs, and hot chocolate with mini- marshmallows. After a day enjoying the great outdoors we would have the treat of Dad’s special roast and potatoes for dinner. At night, under a blanket of stars, we’d have big campfires and sing hymns or family songs. My mother has a beautiful voice and my sisters all played violin. Together, they would end the day with the sweet harmony of “Danny Boy,” my Dad’s favorite song. Oftentimes, my dad’s father and stepmother, who were not members of the FLDS, would come on our camping trips. Even though they did not share our lifestyle, Grandma and Grandpa Wall loved us just the same. Mom slept with us in a little pop-up camper, and Dad shared a tent with Mother Audrey. I never thought to question why Dad had two wives and Grandpa Wall didn’t. It was all I knew. Mother Audrey was the “other” mother and that was that. It was never explained. That was just how it was.

When I was six years old in the fall of 1992, I started the first grade at Alta Academy. My turn had finally come to leave the house for a few hours each day, and I was looking forward to being among my older siblings.

Alta Academy was a combination school, place of worship, and birthing center for the FLDS people who lived in the Salt Lake Valley. In 1972, with many of his children grown and no longer living at home, Rulon Jeffs had converted his twenty-plus-bedroom white brick residence into a school for FLDS children, moving himself and his wives into a smaller, more elegant Colonial-style house that the people built for him just next door. The school would be called Alta Academy, and it became the center of church life in the Salt Lake Valley. Rulon’s son Warren had just graduated with honors from the local public high school, and Uncle Rulon directed him to serve as Alta Academy’s first principal. To many church members, Warren seemed intelligent and knowledgeable about the church’s religious teachings—the ideal candidate to help mold the young minds of Salt Lake’s FLDS community.

Uncle Rulon used church donations to fund the conversion of the drafty old house into a school, but much of the building remained as it was when he lived there. It was littered with secret cubbyholes built into the walls and hidden doors that blended in with the décor—hiding places that may have been used for plural wives and children in case of an unexpected raid by the police or other authorities. They could be locked from the inside to protect those in hiding from being discovered. There were also locks on the outside, and rumors circulated, but were never substantiated, that the hidden crawlspaces were used to correct a disobedient child or wife.

In two of the converted bedrooms on the second floor, Uncle Rulon opened a birthing center that was staffed by his wife Sharon, who became the midwife for the Salt Lake Valley’s FLDS community. The delivery room was makeshift and had barely changed since it had been a bedroom in the original house. With blue shag carpeting on the floor and the lower half of the walls, it was wholly unlike anything you’d expect to see in a regular hospital. There was no sink or other running water in the room, and the midwife had to use an elongated sink in a nearby bathroom to wash the newborns. An adjacent bedroom was used as a recovery room for the mothers and their babies.

Though the birthing center provided only basic medical equipment and services, it offered members one distinct advantage over hospitals: husbands could be present when their plural wives gave birth. Before the birthing center, men could not accompany their plural wives to give birth because it risked attracting attention from outsiders. Such was the case when my mother gave birth to her first daughter, Rachel. Mother Audrey had accompanied Mom to the hospital, with Dad relegated to the waiting room.

Before Alta Academy opened its doors, children in the Salt Lake area had attended the public schools. My older brothers and sisters who grew up then had gone to the elementary school just up the road. Mothers enrolled their children under fictitious names to hide their status as plural wives.