Leaving Short Creek, No Short Trip
By Matthew Heller, Special to The Times
August 1, 2004
You have to go out of your way to find the place Flora Jessop
once called home. Colorado City, Ariz., and the adjoining, indistinguishable
town of Hildale, Utah, are perched in a remote valley divided by the dry wash of
Short Creek. The towering vermilion edifice of Canaan Mountain is just to the
north, the gaping abyss of the Grand Canyon to the south. The only way into this
valley is a lonely two-lane blacktop.
Getting out, some say, is even harder to do. Almost all of
Short Creek Valley's residents are members of a fundamentalist Mormon church
that controls how they live and where they believe they'll go after they die. As
a key tenet of its faith, and a means of control, the Fundamentalist Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints enforces the practice of polygamy, marrying
off girls as young as 15 to adult males for whom multiple, or plural, wives are
considered a passport to salvation.
Polygamy is illegal in every state and has been condemned for more than 100
years by the mainstream Mormon Church. But the fundamentalist church here has
gone largely undisturbed by law enforcement for 50 years, growing into the
largest concentration of polygamists in the nation, a theocracy of more than
5,800 people now ruled from a secure Hildale compound by Prophet Warren Jeffs,
who teaches: "A man can go with his wives to be a god in his own right. No
man can become a god unless he has more wives than one."
Jessop grew up in Hildale, one of 28 children whom her
polygamous father had with the first two of his three wives. At 16, she became
one of the few teenage girls to escape the church, running away after marrying a
cousin.
Now 35, this wiry, waif-like woman lives 350 miles from
Colorado City with her second husband, a former Marine, and two teenage
daughters in a scruffy Phoenix home. But she has not left the church far behind.
In fact, she devotes almost every waking moment to exposing the church as a
hotbed of child abuse and helping the community's girls and women escape from
the polygamous life she fled. "This is not a religion," she said of
the church on a recent TV news show. "This is terrorism."
Frustrated by a failed attempt to prevent her teenage sister
Ruby from having to marry an older man, Jessop founded Help the Child Brides,
which provides aid to "victims of polygamy." She also is executive
director of the Los Angeles-based Child Protection Project. She labored in
relative obscurity until last January, when with a Phoenix television news crew
along for the ride, she drove from Phoenix to a "safe house" near
Colorado City and picked up two teenagers, Fawn Holm and Fawn Broadbent, who had
run away together from their church families.
The rescue was a solo endeavor; Jessop believes social workers
and government officials have failed to protect the church's children. "The
authorities don't want to do anything about this because how do they fix a
problem they allowed to happen?" she fumes. In the resulting broadcast
story, Jessop came across as a latter-day, Wild West version of Harriet Tubman.
Other media, from ABC News to the Salt Lake Tribune, quickly reported the flight
of the Fawns, and the telegenic Jessop made the rounds of the national talk
shows. "She's become a rock star," says Linda Binder, an Arizona state
senator whose district includes Colorado City. Some observers of the church
predicted that other girls would follow Holm and Broadbent to freedom.
That case, however, sparked an anti-Jessop backlash. The girls
ran away from their foster home after a judge, at the request of Holm's parents,
ordered Jessop to sever contact with the two girls. Arizona's attorney general
accused her of scaring them off, and the weekly Phoenix New Times described her
as a publicity-hungry "fanatic" whose "demands to have control
over someone else's children are becoming eerily similar to the dictatorial
attitude of her sworn nemesis, Warren Jeffs."
Rodney Parker, an attorney and de facto church spokesman,
describes Jessop as a "vigilante" who has a "very personal hatred
for the fundamentalist community that's unjustified. I think she is exploiting
these young children for her personal gain. The things she says about the
community simply aren't true."
Still, Jessop persists because there are children, she says,
who are "still trapped inside" the valley where she once lived. And
she persists because "every time we can save a child, it's saving a little
piece of me too, repairing a little bit of the damage."
Jessop likes to say of herself so often it could be her mantra
"I'm just a polyg from Colorado City." In one sense, she's referring
to the fifth-grade education she received in the church-controlled school
system. She remains the opposite of slick and sophisticated; she's rough around
the edges, speaks in a country twang and chain-smokes Camels. There's a
street-urchin quality to her, accentuated by her wafer-thin physique, high
cheekbones and dark hair.
But Jessop also is suggesting that you can never escape
polygamy. Once a "polyg," always a "polyg" and that makes
you a little different, maybe even a little crazy, especially if you're from a
place where polygamy is the foundation of a severe and insular faith-based
culture.
You can sense the imprint of that culture on others who have
fled the community. It's there on Laurene Cooke Jessop, a distant cousin of
Flora who once was a plural wife and bore her husband five children. After
leaving the church and spending time in a mental hospital, she is now, with
Jessop's help, seeking permanent custody of her three daughters and two
sons.
"I'm still dealing with the guilt of leaving the
church," Laurene says. "I'm afraid the Lord will
strike me dead." Polygamy also rankles Pam Black, a mother of 13 children
whose husband church elders deemed unworthy of multiple wives because, she says,
he couldn't "control" the one he already had. Shunned as an
"apostate," she now lives in a canyon above Hildale, and bluntly
describes her marriage as "35 years of hell."
For Laurene Jessop and Black, relatively recent refugees, the
wounds are still raw, the emotions still raging. They don't have Flora Jessop's
years of distance and hard outer shell. But all three women are trying to find
themselves in an "outside" world that is very different from the one
they left behind. It's as if they're poised on the rim of Canaan Mountain,
seeing the wider world beyond but with Colorado City still large and vivid in
the foreground.
A visit to colorado city-Hildale is an unsettling experience.
If it weren't for the moms driving minivans and SUVs, you might think you had
traveled back to a 19th century Mormon settlement. Women and girls wear
ankle-length, pioneer-style dresses. Their hair, which they are forbidden to
cut, is woven into braids and put in a bun; the boys look like extras from
"The Waltons" in their checked shirts and long pants. In a community
where TV is taboo, there are no satellite dishes or video stores.
The only recreational facilities appear to be a small zoo and a park.
What is most unusual about the community are the homes. To
accommodate their large and ever-expanding families, church men commonly build
houses in excess of 3,500 square feet. According to the latest census, a third
of the homes have more than nine rooms. But many houses have unfinished stucco,
or empty spaces where windows should be, or bare yards. That's because the
United Effort Plan, a church-operated trust, owns virtually every square foot of
the community and doesn't allow its "tenants-at-will" to take out
property loans. So they finance home construction out of their own pockets, and
if they run out of funds, they can't finish the job.
The 48-year-old Jeffs succeeded his father, Rulon, as prophet
in 2002. Rarely seen in public, he lives with at least a dozen wives in a
compound shielded by an 8-foot wall and covering an entire block on Hildale's
principal artery. From here, Jeffs enforces the rigid orthodoxy of his one
"true" church. Dissenters face excommunication, which means that they
can lose their homes and even their wives and children, who must submit to the
prophet's will or themselves be expelled.
Prominent followers of Jeffs in the church's all-male
priesthood occupy key civic positions. One is the mayor of Hildale. Another is
the Colorado City police chief. There are few nongovernment jobs in town. But
families make the most of public assistanceto the tune of more than $10 million
a year from Arizona alone. The church calls it "bleeding the beast."
The prophet is the only matchmaker. "Both the man and the woman must have
their marriage [arranged] through the prophet," he teaches. A polygamous
marriage is a "spiritual" marriage, sanctioned by God, if not the
state.
Fundamentalist Mormons first settled the Short Creek Valley in
the 1920s. They were part of a breakaway movement that
dates to 1890, when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints officially
commanded members to abandon polygamy. But belief in plural marriage is central
to Mormon fundamentalism and the Short Creek settlers found a good place to
practice it, 200 miles from the nearest Arizona authorities.
In 1936, the community formed a trust to coordinate its
development in a communal fashion. A few years later, the trust became the
United Effort Plan. By the 1940s, Short Creek had a population of about 400, and
the polygamists were skilled at using the Arizona-Utah border to avoid police
officers trying to enforce anti-polygamy laws.
The border-hopping didn't save the church from the infamous
Short Creek raid of 1953. Arizona authorities, acting on the orders of Gov.
Howard Pyle, arrested 122 polygamists and declared 263 children to be wards of
the state. But the raid backfired after the public shuddered at newspaper
photographs of wailing toddlers being separated from their mothers. The arrested
church members were soon back home, Pyle was voted out of office
and law enforcement has been reluctant to intervene ever
since.
By the time Flora Jessop was born in June 1969, the church had
rooted itself in the dry soil as tenaciously as the Mormon tea bushes that dot
the landscape. On the Utah side of Short Creek, Hildale had recently been
incorporated, and the Arizona side had been renamed Colorado City. The
then-prophet, Leroy "Uncle Roy" Johnson, reigned over an empire that
now includes interests in construction, real estate, hotels and restaurants, and
banking.
Jessop belonged to one of the community's largest and most
prominent clans. Like other girls, she was taught from an early age to
"keep sweet no matter what," which Warren Jeffs defines as keeping
"the spirit of God through prayer and obedience." To Jessop, it meant
subordinating yourself without protest to the patriarchy.
In her early teens, she was already struggling for
independence. Once after a church service, a local cop who had five wives
approached her. "He said, 'I can't wait till you're mine and I can tame
you,' " she recalls. "The only thing I could think of saying was,
'Before I'd let you touch me, I'd kill you and myself.' "
At 16, Jessop made her getaway. Over the years, she has told
conflicting stories about how this happened. What is clear is that she brought
charges of sexual abuse against her father. A judge, apparently doubting her
credibility, dismissed the case and the state placed her in the home of Fred
Jessop, an uncle and a senior advisor to "Uncle Roy." In May 1986, she
entered into an arranged marriage with a 19-year-old cousin, Philip Jessop.
But within weeks she took off on her own for Kansas City, Mo.
Jessop was not prepared for life on the outside "naive to the point of
being socially retarded," as she puts it. She also was tormented that she
might have damned herself to hell by fleeing the church. Her untidy life during
that period speaks to the difficulty of adjusting to the outside world.
"I almost killed myself on cocaine," she remembers.
Jessop had boyfriends and, after giving birth to a daughter from one
relationship, moved to Phoenix, where she paid the bills by working as a topless
dancer. She divorced Philip in 1996they never reunited after she fled and
married a former U.S. Marine mechanic who brought his own daughter into their
home.
Despite her apostasy, Jessop stayed in touch with some members
of her huge family. In May 2001, she learned that her 14-year-old sister Ruby
had run away to an older brother's home after Prophet Rulon Jeffs ordered her to
marry a stepbrother. Before Jessop could arrange for Ruby to move to Phoenix,
however, Ruby allegedly was abducted and taken to church elder Fred Jessop's
home. When social workers interviewed Ruby a month later, she denied being
married and was returned to Hildale.
Jessop hasn't been able to speak to Ruby since. She says the
authorities did not adequately investigate whether Ruby
had been abused. Mostly, she blames herself for being
unable to save "the first person I gave my word to that
I would save."
The experience persuaded Jessop to start Help the Child Brides
in 2001, though she spends most of her time now working for the Child Protection
Project, which provides financial support and other services to polygamy
refugees. Funding for that group is tight about $7,000 in donations so far this
year. Jessop's bungalow in a blue-collar neighborhood of north Phoenix is
crammed with documents, transcripts and pamphlets. "This is about every
Ruby that's in there that wants to be free," she says.
It's also about sabotaging the well-oiled polygamy machine.
The prophet, she argues, controls the community's men through his distribution
of wives. The more girls she can get out, the fewer he has to satisfy the
demand. Under Arizona and Utah law, girls under the age of 16 can be married
with their parents' consent validated by a court order.
Jessop also knows that public scrutiny will help her cause.
She got her first national publicity in March 2002, when Marie Claire magazine
profiled her and two other refugees. The other women wore straight hair and
modest sweaters for their photo shoots, but Jessop, with her permed hair and
black leather jacket, could have passed for a biker chick. The article got the
attention of Linda Walker, founder of the Child Protection Project, who was
looking for a former church insider to serve as a spokesperson. Flora
"didn't want this," Walker says. "I pushed her into it."
The national media have treated the church and its polygamous
lifestyle as an eccentricity, in part because the idea of men having multiple
wives lends itself to flippancy. In her new role, Jessop began emphasizing the
seriousness of the problem, providing quotes for everyone from the National
Enquirer (polygamy "gives you the right to rape children," she told
the tabloid) to Jon Krakauer, author of "Under the Banner of Heaven,"
a study of polygamous sects published last year. But it was with the two Fawns
that she pulled off her first real media coup.
On Jan. 10, the girls fled from Colorado City to a safe house
in nearby St. George, Utah. Both feared they would be
married off against their will. "I don't like the religion, not having
control over my life," Broadbent says. Jessop was on the road within hours,
the crew from Phoenix's KTVK station in tow. She feared being arrested for
kidnapping, but that didn't stop her. "I don't use
the bridge, I just jump across the canal," she says. "When it's the
lives of these children that's on the line, I don't have time to walk across the
bridge."
Jessop doesn't have much use for government social workers,
attorneys or other bureaucrats involved in child
protection. She even tapes her phone conversations with them in case their
recollection of the dialogue differs from hers. "Every kid that comes out
of there screaming for help, you guys do nothing but turn them back over,"
she berated one Utah official, according to a transcript of a June 2001 call.
But after they arrived in Phoenix, Jessop brought Broadbent and Holm to the
Arizona Department of Child Protective Services. "We thought the state was
going to do right by those girls," Walker says.
Officials agreed that the girls could stay at a foster home
arranged by Jessop while their futures were decided. But one meeting with a
social worker didn't go well, and the girls' trust in the state suffered when
they learned that their parents had their new address, which they thought was
confidential. The final straw seems to have been a Phoenix judge's decision to
bar Jessop from having any contact with the girls.
On Feb. 12, the girls, convinced that they were about to be
returned to Colorado City, fled again. Two days later, Broadbent wrote in a
letter to Jessop and their foster mother: "I do not want to go back because
I will be locked up and even married."
Things have worked out for Broadbent. In May, her parents
agreed to put her in the care of Carl Holm, an older brother of the other Fawn
who fled Colorado City himself 20 years ago and now lives with his wife, Joni,
in Salt Lake City. But Fawn Holm, whose parents still want her back, remains in
hiding at an undisclosed location, largely deprived of the freedoms she was
hoping to enjoy. "She's in a horrible limbo," Joni Holm says.
Jessop, meanwhile, has had her motives and methods questioned
by government officials, journalists and other activists. "It's gotten
nastier and nastier," complains Walker. Arizona Atty. Gen. Terry Goddard
has said that the girls were in no danger of being reunited with their parents,
suggesting that Jessop fanned their fears without reason. "She's really
undermined the state," he told New Times, which accused Jessop of using the
two runaways as "props in a media campaign," and described her as
"misguided and devious."
Pennie Petersen, an anti-polygamy activist who grew up with
Jessop, believes Jessop has been swept up in "the TV interviews, the fame
and the glory," and that the Fawns became her "poster girls."
"She loves the attention. She's craved it her whole life." According
to Petersen, Jessop has alienated officials who could help her cause.
"Nobody wants anything to do with Flora."
Walker sees jealousy among other activists. "[Jessop] has
been in the media a lot," she says. "They want to be Flora."
Perhaps Jessop, with her lack of appreciation for the formal procedures and the
bureaucratic nuances, was impatient, and perhaps she did give Broadbent and Holm
some misleading advice.
She "wants to go in there guns blazing, get everybody
out," says Binder, the most vocal critic of the
church in the Arizona Legislature. "It's just not feasible." But
Binder won't fault her tactics. "If I was in her shoes, I'd probably be
doing the same thing."
The exposure has paid off, making government officials and the
media take her cause more seriously. "She's doing it the best way she knows
how under the circumstances," says Rowenna Erickson, co-founder of Tapestry
Against Polygamy, a group of former polygamous wives who lobby against the
practice. "There's no other way except to quit, and she can't do
that."
One recent morning, Jessop returned home with Laurene Jessop
after visiting government agencies to get family assistance and housing for
Laurene and her children. No glamour or TV cameras here, just a lot of hard
legwork.
Laurene is Jessop's latest project. Four years ago, Laurene
waived custody of her children while she was in a Flagstaff, Ariz., mental
hospital, too drugged up, she says, to have any idea what she was signing. In
January, her former husband was excommunicated from the church, leaving his
first wife, Marie Jessop, in charge of the children. While the girls were
visiting Laurene in Flagstaff in April, she decided to take them to Phoenix and
file for custody. A judge awarded Laurene emergency custody of all five children
(the boys remain in Colorado City) after her attorney alleged that the children
were being abused.
The oldest daughter, 15-year-old Luanne, greeted Laurene in
Jessop's living room. Luanne is about the same age Jessop
was when she fled. Her blond hair still hung in braids to the small of her back.
But she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and washable tattoos decorated the pale
skin of her bare arms. "They're not going to want you back now,"
Jessop told her. "The worst thing you can do is mark your body up."
Then she added: "Next to associating with me."
Later that day, Jessop was asked what difference she can make
when there are so many girls like Luanne still living in Colorado City. "If
I can save one single child, I've succeeded," she replies. "If I save
Luanne, I've succeeded." And as the sun set on another day of desert heat,
Jessop may be a little closer to saving herself.
It's a dentist Dan Fischer who left a decade ago and who has a
boatload of money from products he invented that all dentists use. He is majorly
helping with the financing of it all.
