Stolen Innocence: My story of growing up in a polygamous sect, becoming a teenage bride, and breaking free

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.

On that first day of school I was incredibly excited, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that the drive to school was fraught with the same tension that permeated my home life. Since Mother Audrey worked as a teacher at Alta Academy, it was her responsibility to get us into Dad’s big blue Chevy Suburban, which we all called “Big Blue,” and shepherd us to class on time. Of course, rounding up nearly a dozen kids was no easy task. My sister Teressa was always ready first. Eager to get a move on, she’d go outside to the car and wait for the rest of us to file out. After about ten minutes she was back in the house, screaming at everyone to hurry up. Then she was back at the car, where she’d honk the horn wildly to let us know that she meant business.

Inside the house chaos reigned as we shoveled oatmeal into our mouths and scrambled to get dressed. The drive to Alta Academy took about twenty minutes in good weather, but there was often fog and snow. On some days, the ride felt like an eternity to me, sitting squished between my brothers in the third row of Big Blue. There was usually a lot of commotion in the truck, with everybody trying to talk over everybody else. At times, fights would break out and Mother Audrey would step in to take charge. She didn’t like us horsing around when she was trying to concentrate on the road, and she wasn’t afraid to tell us.

Mother Audrey differed from Mom in the way she handled discipline. She had a clear idea of how things should be run, and her preoccupation with order pervaded every aspect of her life, including her appearance. While Audrey’s eyes glasses would shift within the bounds of popular fashion, everything else about her style remained constant. The long skirts and blouses she wore during my childhood had become a kind of uniform, and she never changed her hairstyle: one wave on each side of her head, with the rest swept up in the back. During the rides to school, Mother Audrey tried to impart her beliefs about how we should conduct ourselves both at home and in school. Often her lectures upset my sisters. Sometimes they’d argue back. Other times they’d fester in silence, telling Mom about the confrontation when they got home.

Part of what made the car rides so tumultuous was that this was one of the only times during the day that we were alone with Mother Audrey. Because our mother was concerned over the way that Mother Audrey reprimanded us, she tried to keep us separated from her. If we wandered into Audrey’s room, we would be shooed out. By that time, to ease the pressure, Audrey rarely interacted with our side of the family, spending much of her time in her bedroom with her own children. After school, Mom and Dad would hear about the day’s drive and inevitably the friction would grow, frequently culminating in an angry blowup in which Mom defended her children against being deemed as the only source of the trouble.

Every school day began with a class called Devotional, taught by Warren Jeffs. The meeting room on the ground floor, which was used as a religious hall for Sunday and priesthood meetings, was enormous, half a football field long, but it still could not accommodate all of the Alta Academy students for Devotional, so the fourth-through twelfth- graders met in there, while students in the lower grades listened over the PA system from their classrooms. Every student, no matter his or her age, was expected to take notes, which were always reviewed and graded. The content of the Devotional was mostly religious teachings, with readings and homework assignments from the Book of Mormon.

Most of the students had to enter through the door at the very back of the room, and the age and grade level determined the section you sat in. This explained Teressa’s morning panic; at thirteen she’d have to walk all the way to the front with the older kids, directly in Warren Jeffs’s line of view. If she walked in late, she would meet one of his signature stern glares—no one wanted to receive one of those. We were all expected to treat Uncle Warren with the highest respect; he was not only our school principal but also the son of the prophet.

Uncle Warren would start every morning by saying, “I am only here to do the prophet’s will,” a statement that always made it seem as though the lesson that followed had been dictated by his father and thus was the word of God. As students, we all strove to gain Warren’s approval. Having his good opinion and acknowledgment meant much more than the small prizes he would sometimes hand out for good deeds and high marks. Life at school could be miserable if you were not in Uncle Warren’s good graces.

One night in the spring of first grade, our family was eating a thick, mushy spaghetti dinner—Mother Audrey was frugal with the sauce—when my father revealed some exciting news: our family was blessed to have a daughter marry the prophet. My sister Rachel was twenty-two years old, and Dad had received word that she was to be married to Uncle Rulon, who was eighty-one at the time. It seemed that all the prettiest girls were chosen to hold the honor of marriage to the prophet, but no one would dare say that out loud. My oldest sister was no exception. Rachel was lucky to inherit our mother’s rich dark hair, slender figure, and wide, bright smile.

In addition to Rachel’s marriage being a tremendous honor for our family, it was also incredibly exciting to me that we would be invited to attend the wedding ceremony at Rulon Jeffs’s sprawling thirteen- plus-bedroom residence in Salt Lake. For us, Uncle Rulon’s tan brick house was considered a mansion. It was constructed of top-of-the-line materials and equipped with expensive appliances, and it had an enormous garage to accommodate his fancy Cadillac. We would be able to witness the ceremony in the prophet’s living quarters on the main floor, which was treated as his private sanctuary.

The wedding took place on April 30, 1993. Because it was the prophet getting married, the marriage was “sealed” by my father, who had been temporarily ordained to fill the role usually played by the prophet. Not only was Rachel’s marriage important for religious reasons, it also afforded my sister many opportunities that other women in the community didn’t have. As a wife of the prophet, she was elevated in status, viewed as a worthy angel on earth. She was well provided for and had access to credit cards and cash. Even though it appeared to us that Uncle Rulon’s wives were lucky and blessed to be members of his family, like all FLDS women, they were still considered property of their husband and the priesthood. They were expected to keep sweet and be submissively obedient.

After the marriage, Dad sometimes allowed me to stay over with Rachel at Uncle Rulon’s Salt Lake compound, where she had a room on the second floor. In my young mind, I always felt that I was staying at Buckingham Palace. It was a great honor to any member to be graced with the opportunity to be on the prophet’s property. During my sleepovers, I sometimes got to watch a kid-friendly video on the small TV that Rachel kept hidden in her closet.

While we had been able to watch TV when I was much younger, life had grown more constricted under Rulon Jeffs’s direction. In an attempt to cleanse the people of all outside influences, he’d banned television, films, and video games. Through Uncle Warren, we’d been told that the prophet had ordered that all the books in the school library that were not priesthood-approved be burned, claiming that those who read the unworthy books would take on the “evil” spirit of their authors. The library was then restocked with books that conformed to priesthood teachings.

Warren also had a house on his father’s compound, where I was sometimes invited to play with his daughter Shirley, a classmate at Alta Academy. While his house was nowhere near as big as his dad’s, it had plenty of space for his five wives and their many children to spread out.

Though he was harsh and intimidating at school, I liked Uncle Warren and he seemed like a caring father to my friend. But my feelings about him began to change when I entered the second grade. I was in the middle of schoolwork in Mrs. Nicolson’s class when I heard my teacher’s name called over the loudspeaker. I watched her pick up the telephone and look in my direction. I was to report to the principal’s office at once. I had no idea why I’d been summoned, but I’d been at Alta Academy long enough to know that it wasn’t a good thing to be singled out to see Uncle Warren.

My legs felt heavy as I climbed the carpeted stairs to the third floor, where he had his office. The walls of his office were covered in cheap wood paneling, and he was seated behind a large desk that faced the door. Our eyes met as soon as I stepped into the doorway. He was smiling when he told me to sit down in one of the chairs facing his desk. I was about to receive my first lesson on boy/girl relations.

Warren had been told that I was holding the hand of my seven-year-old male cousin while playing outside earlier in the day. This was true, but I had no idea why he was bringing it up. As he explained, what I had done was absolutely not to be tolerated. I was never to touch boys; I was to treat them as poisonous reptiles, as “snakes.” Even thinking about a boy was “unclean.”

It was a strange lecture, but I took it to heart, vowing to obey him and not touch a boy again. Unfortunately for me, that was not the only thing that landed me in Warren’s office that year. A few months later, I was back there for unknowingly breaking the dress code. As a souvenir from one of his trips, my father had given me a gold heart-shaped ring and necklace set that was accented with pink sparkles. It wasn’t super- expensive, but it meant a lot to me because it was from my dad. I didn’t want to take it off and had worn it to school so that all my friends could see. Again, I climbed the stairs in dread. When I arrived in Warren’s office, he greeted me kindly.

“That’s a beautiful necklace and ring,” he said. “Can you please put the pieces on my desk?”

I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but given his gentle tone it didn’t seem like I was in any trouble. Uncle Warren spoke in a mild tone and was formal. He always addressed me as “Miss Wall.”

“Miss Wall,” he began, as he turned the sparkly pink and gold necklace over in his fingers and admired it. “Are you aware of the restrictions on what the priesthood people can wear?”

I had no idea, and didn’t immediately answer. Now I was intimidated and worried, not knowing how to respond.

“This jewelry is quite nice,” he continued.

I began to exhale a sigh of relief.

He told me that it was wrong to adorn our bodies with worldly possessions. “Now, I want you to walk over to the garbage can and throw them away.”

I was devastated and embarrassed, but there was nothing I could do. Lowering my eyes, I obediently dropped the jewelry into the can, losing them forever.

I cried as I related my terrible experience with Uncle Warren to my mother that afternoon. She was sympathetic but firm. She told me that from that day forth I should not wear unacceptable items to school. I had to obey what Warren said. I was too afraid to tell my father, feeling ashamed to have lost something that he had given me, so I kept the incident to myself, oftentimes sulking in private when I thought about how my precious gift had become Uncle Warren’s trash.

The summer following second grade, I was officially baptized into the priesthood in the sacred “baptismal vault” in the basement of Alta Academy. I knew about the room, but I’d never actually been inside it until I had come of age. Descending the stairs to the basement in my pretty white full-length dress, I felt a rush of apprehension. I was excited to be participating in the sacred rite of passage, but also a bit scared. It was the way I felt about all of our rituals: it was good to know that my time had come, but there was always mystery surrounding the observance. Still, the thought that my father would be waiting for me in the waist-deep water calmed me down.

My mom and some of my siblings were standing just outside the door as I took off my white lace socks and white shoes and prepared to enter the room. I walked through the door of the sacred space slowly and descended the white tile steps that led into the enormous tub that took up much of the room, my clothing growing heavier with each step.

Three church elders had to be present for the ceremony; one was my dad, who was already in the water waiting for me to join him. The water was deep, just about up to my shoulders when I reached the section were Dad stood. For the ritual to be performed properly, every part of the body had to be completely submersed. My father had to submerge me three times because my foot kept popping out of the water.

Climbing back out of the tub, I was met by the other two elders standing just inside the doorway. They were there to perform a laying on of hands and anoint me with the special olive oil that had been blessed by three church elders for the occasion. I should have been freezing because the water in the font was so cold, but I was too overwhelmed to care.

I was officially a member of the church now and responsible for all my actions. It was an important moment in my life as an FLDS believer. The baptism signified that I was now accountable for my choices. All my childhood sins were instantly wiped away and I was given a “clean slate” to begin my life as an official member of the priesthood. From here on out, making the wrong choices could result in a permanent “black mark” on my slate that would remain until I was judged in heaven.