The next day, CPS hearings began in the Fifty-First District Court, with Judge Barbara Walther ruling in an overflowing courthouse. But I wasn’t there—instead I was making my way through a sea of people, including my sister-wives and their babies, at the coliseum where they were now staying. Behind my sunglasses and baseball cap, I went unrecognized by those I had loved for so long. Still, the hollow looks in their eyes haunted me.
Rebecca Baxter, my CPS contact that day, had worked with one young woman who she felt would be amenable to speaking honestly with me. She escorted the girl into the interview room where I sat without my disguise, and introduced me as her friend.
I looked directly at the young girl.
“Heather,” I said gently. “Do you remember me?” She shook her head. “I’m Mother Becky, and I was married to Uncle Rulon.”
Heather’s eyes grew large as recognition dawned on her. Suddenly she reached out and hugged me hard. We both began to cry.
“Look at you—you’re all grown up!” I exclaimed. “And you’re so beautiful!”
She beamed for a moment, before her sweet face turned somber. “It broke my heart when you left.”
“Oh, sweetheart… Don’t you think it broke mine to leave?” I told her why it was the most painful decision I had ever made—and the best. I also explained to her that the state had been forced to investigate allegations of abuse, but they’d had no intention of searching every home or removing anyone except Sarah and her immediate family, declaring that Merrill could have avoided all of this.
“Heather,” I asked tentatively, “what can you tell me about Sherrie and Ally?”
“Oh, let’s see… They’re both here.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“And I think they’re both married.” She thought for a moment. “Oh yes, they are, both Sherrie and Ally. And Sherrie has a baby.”
My little Sherrie, a mother? And my little Ally, married? She would have been just fifteen that year. It took all my power to hold it together. I almost missed what Heather said next.
“Wait! You said Uncle Merrill Jessop is married to Ally?” I cried.
“Yes.”
“Wow,” I said, dumbfounded. “Is she happy?”
Heather smiled, but it was hollow. “I think so…”
According to Heather, Ally had wed our uncle by marriage when he was in his seventies. No wonder he’d called on Valentine’s Day to have the missing person reports cleaned up! He didn’t want their union to have legal ramifications. I hoped beyond hope that Merrill would have respected my sister in a sexual way, yet I knew that he had given his own twelve-year-old daughter, Merrianne, to Warren, who had gone on to molest her in the temple in front of others.
Just before it was time to leave, Heather leaned over and whispered conspiratorially to me, “They snuck Ally out yesterday!” My heart stopped for a moment. What? How? And how many others had been taken? I quickly realized how much Heather had compromised by telling me, and I would not throw her under the FLDS bus, but my mind was racing.
I hugged Heather tightly to say good-bye. When she and Rebecca left the room, I lost all composure, crying for her, and for Sherrie and for Ally.
Several minutes later, Rebecca returned. “I went to find Sherrie for you, but she’s gone to the park,” she said. “Is there anyone else you would like to talk to?”
I was scared, but I knew it would be my last chance, so I asked to talk to Savannah.
Quickly I pulled myself together and put my sunglasses back on. Rebecca led Doran and me to another part of the coliseum. We passed LeRoy Jeffs’s daughter, who was standing with a couple of Warren’s daughters. I looked at them, the young girls I remembered teaching in musicals and PE and loved so dearly. Evidently, word had spread quickly, as they regarded me with silent but cold malice.
The moment Savannah stepped into the interview room, holding her little girl, Generous, who was Kyle’s age, I wanted to tell her how much I loved her. But her eyes were wide and wary, like she was walking into a den of snakes. Savannah was shaking and didn’t say a word. I closed the door and removed my sunglasses and hat. My older sister stared at me, hard.
“Why are you here?” she spat. “Haven’t you done enough? How could you be a part of all of this? They came to our doors and forced us out by gunpoint. They put guns to our sons’ heads! It was just like in ’44 and ’53! How could you?”
I was floored. Savannah honestly believed her own words about the rangers forcing people out at gunpoint! Had I not seen the footage, and known firsthand how the rangers treated those women and children, I might have believed her. I realized that this story had become so ingrained in her, it had become her truth. Not just Savannah but her peers sincerely believed that all of their rights had been taken, that the government had been pillaging their homes and touching their children inappropriately.
I wanted to share truth and light, but I tried to put myself in her shoes first.
“Please, just give me five minutes of your time.” Happily, five minutes turned into two hours as we caught up, and I finally got to tell her what had happened those final weeks with Warren, including Warren’s words that I would never forget.
Her lips tightened. “I don’t believe that.”
Despite this, it was a tender time for us. I was able to express my love and tell her how our siblings were doing. But I saw in her something I’d seen in the others: Savannah seemed hollow, and her responses seemed canned, in her high-pitched, sickly-sweet voice. “We’re so blessed… We’re just so blessed.”
But I rejoiced the few times I saw the real Savannah underneath.
She laughed when I told her I was still mad at Seth for leaving her in the garden to have her baby while he bounded off to play in St. George with some of Rulon’s wives.
“I was so mad at him then, but when I went through my first labor with Kyle, I could have killed him for both of us!” Her eyes filled with mirth as she asked about Kyle and Natalia. I delightedly showed her pictures on my phone and described their vibrant personalities. Seeing the compassion and concern that Savannah had for Natalia’s health was healing for me. We hugged before she left, and I waited a bit before I left the room, incognito once again.
On my way back I encountered Rebecca, who told me they had brought a group of women and children back from the park, but they still couldn’t find Sherrie. From the beginning we’d been unable to find my mother. Now both Sherrie and Ally were nowhere to be found.
Once again, it seemed, my sisters had slipped through my fingers.
Finally, I had to resign myself to allowing Mom, Sherrie, and Ally their path. It was probably one of the hardest decisions I’d ever had to make. All the suffering, all the unanswered prayers… I didn’t have the stamina for much more, and I knew then I had to honor their choices, once and for all.
The next day, I headed to another building adjacent to the coliseum, where many of the adolescent girls were residing. Not bothering with a disguise, I dressed in a professional skirt, soft blue blouse, black heels, and curled hair. They all knew I was there, and part of me wanted the women and girls to know that I was fighting for them. As I entered the building, I saw Uncle Roy’s granddaughter staring at me. I sat down, leaned over to the CPS worker next to me, and murmured, “Watch the news spread.” It was like a tidal wave crashing from girl to girl.
The first girl took out her notebook and flipped to a clean page before she waltzed up to me, the rest of the girls behind her.
“Who are you?”
“You know who I am,” I said easily.
“Oh, do I?”
“Yes, you do.” I stopped for a moment. “Look at you young girls! You have all grown up to be such beautiful young women. I was Mother Becky, married to Uncle Rulon. Do you remember me?”
She ignored my question. “Why are you here?”
“You’re not helping.”
“You know what might really help,” I said, “is if you would stop switching around your names and wristbands.”
The girls looked like they’d been caught with their hands in the cookie jar. But all I felt was love and compassion, especially for the girls on the bottom of the totem pole. I wished they could know they were valuable and exquisite, just for being who they were.
That afternoon, the sheriff took me to a place close to his heart, Our Lady of Grace Carmelite Monastery, just outside of Christoval. As we drove up through the desert to the beautiful Spanish Mission–style stone buildings, I did my best to reserve judgment, but my childhood indoctrination that Catholicism was the “great and abominable church” still lingered.
When I entered and saw the pictures of Pope Benedict XVI on the wall, I was reminded of how Warren’s photo was in every room of his followers’ homes on the YFZ. I was sickened by what had happened in the FLDS temple. Surely this was the same.
Then I met Sister Mary Grace. The moment she walked out to greet us, something within my soul shifted.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, her voice breaking in compassion. “We have been praying for you. We have been praying for the highest outcome for everyone involved on the ranch.” I stared into her gentle eyes in disbelief. She and her sisters had not only prayed for law enforcement; they were praying for my people—not against them.
After our talk, I wandered outside alone, looking up at the tall stone walls and feeling the warmth of the sun on my skin. Taking a breath, I entered the chapel alone. Awe-inspiring and yet intimate, it was intensely still. Too still.
I hadn’t experienced any quiet since I had come to Texas. Finally no longer able to control my thoughts or emotions, I burst into tears of frustration and shame, anger and pain. My heart cried out to the God that I had begun to love but still did not fully understand. How could I have come from a people able to commit atrocities against children in his name? How could he allow it? I cried until all my emotions were spent.
Then something surprising developed out of my new stillness—a peace so profound that it covered my soul like a soft blanket. I could almost feel loving arms around me. And then I had the urge to embrace the love I felt right back.
I stepped reverently from that chapel with a startling realization. Man was fallible. No one, not the Dalai Lama nor any Prophet, pope, or minister, was beyond reproach. To follow blindly was to shut down our sacred voice of reason and deny the God that lived in each of us. I had to realize that everyone, even I, had the capacity to be a tyrant. And every one of us had the capacity to embody charity, love, and mercy. Nobody was all bad, and nobody was all good. We were human.