Those families were so enormous. Your husband had 50 children. How did anybody pay the bills? Life is not the same as normal society. There's not enough money to go around. So somebody is going to have to go without the basic necessities they need. The other thing is, we worked really hard. There might be one woman who would try to maintain life in the home, and then everybody else had to work. I worked as a teacher and I gave Merril all my money.
It was just a mandatory requirement. You'd turn everything in. He pays the bills and then he gives you back what he feels you deserve or need. If he chooses to give you nothing back, then you just have to deal with that.
He also had the power to decide whether he wanted to eat out at fancy restaurants and eat steaks, and we went without groceries. As a man, that was his choice. If I had seen you on the street, would I have immediately known that you were religious?
Oh, yes. My entire life, I never dressed normally. We'd go to the movies and everybody would stare at us on the line. We'd go to the grocery store and everybody would stare at you. I dressed like the fundamentalists do in the community right now, with the exception that their dress code is a lot more rigid than when I was there.
You had to wear a dress or skirt that was mid-calf, six inches below the knee at least. And you had to wear long sleeves and something with a high neck. You just had to have everything covered. And then we weren't allowed to cut our hair and there were particular hairstyles we had to wear. It was a big part of the culture. Dominance and control. It was all to maintain the work of God.
She loved her father, and out of 54 of his children, she was his princess," Carolyn says. After they left the polygamist community, Carolyn enrolled her children in public school. Though she encouraged her children to leave the past behind, she says Betty, a middle school student at the time, refused to give up her hairstyle and traditional dress. I was terribly concerned that she would be mistreated," she says. Since the day Carolyn escaped the polygamist community, she says her relationship with Betty has been strained.
Now, their conversations are few and far between. At public school, the "unbridled vulgarity and immorality" were a shock, Betty writes, and the pressure almost unbearable.
It was hard "to see how students acted, their language and how teachers didn't do anything about it," Betty said. She focused on succeeding academically in part to disprove her mother's criticism of FLDS schools. Despite the mocking and questions she got at school, Betty wore the sect's conservative, body-covering dresses, even in gym class.
There were other awkward moments. In one class, she was asked to share plans following graduation. A church mission? Her answer? The teacher pressed, but Betty kept silent. She made some friends, but visiting their homes reinforced her desire to return to her polygamous community. While her mother describes Merril Jessop as a cruel husband and father, Betty speaks of him as loving, kind and with an "unconquerable spirit.
Betty said she and her mother have not spoken since September, when she called to wish a younger brother happy birthday.
She was not living on the YFZ Ranch but was cooking and cleaning for her half- brothers, who were working on construction jobs outside Texas. She never talked about why she wasn't on the ranch with her father, whom she idolized, but I suspect Merril wanted to make sure she was truly committed after living for four years "on the outside.
But above all I felt relief that Betty wasn't at the ranch. It was an endless night. When the calls stopped, my mind didn't. Something huge was unfolding in Texas. What terrified me most was that Merril was in charge of the hundreds of children inside the compound. Merril saw himself as invincible and had never been reasonable or accountable to anyone. He was a bully and a coward. And that, of course, made him even more dangerous.
He was careful to protect his own safety, but if he felt desperate and trapped, he was capable of doing something stupid. After a sleepless night, I got up the next day, April 4, and began calling everyone who might know something. I learned that the ranch had been surrounded because the Child Protective Services CPS for Texas wanted to talk to a young girl named Sarah Barlow, who'd made a call to an abuse hotline on March 29, The girl had begged for help, claiming she was forced to marry at sixteen, became pregnant, and was repeatedly raped and beaten by her fifty-year-old husband.
But after resisting for hours, Merril apparently realized that the Texas Rangers weren't backing down. So he finally allowed them and their deputies to enter. They were followed by a team from CPS, who began searching the compound for "Sarah," the young girl who'd made the call.
When they could not find her, the CPS team wanted to talk to all the teenage girls on the premises who were younger than seventeen. Of the twenty girls CPS interviewed, five were named Sarah. One had had a baby at sixteen but she said she was not Sarah Barlow. CPS found other girls under eighteen who were pregnant. Under Texas law, it is a crime to engage in sexual contact with someone younger than seventeen who is not a legal spouse.
I was told that the girls generally refused to answer questions; the few who did talk were defiant in their insistence that no age was too young to get married. The Texas Supreme Court decision that was reached six weeks later described the reception CPS got at the ranch: "When the Department arrived at the YFZ Ranch, it was treated cordially and allowed access to children, but those children repeatedly 'pled the Fifth' in response to questions about their identity, would not identify their birth dates or parentage, refused to answer questions about who lived in their homes and lied about their names—sometimes several times.
Answers from parents were similarly inconsistent: One mother first claimed that four children were hers, and then later avowed that they were not.
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