Under the Banner of Heaven (6 page)

To date, the Colorado City police department has not disciplined Officer Holm, who is acting like the aggrieved party in this dispute. Assisted by UEP attorneys, Rodney Holm is presently trying to obtain legal custody of Ruth’s children so they can be “raised with FLDS values,” in the company of his other eighteen kids.

In October 2002, the Utah attorney general’s office charged Holm with felony bigamy and three counts of unlawful sex for his relationship with Ruth. The state’s case against Rodney Holm is crippled, however, by a rather significant impediment: in November 2002, Ruth Stubbs disappeared after submitting a signed, handwritten note to the court stating that she did not want Holm to “go to jail!” and refusing to testify against him. As an editorial in the St. George daily
Spectrum
noted, “This turn in an already odd case shows how complicated it is to prosecute the members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who engage in unlawful activities.”

Before she vanished, Ruth Stubbs was living in the Phoenix home of her aunt Pennie Peterson, who ran away from Colorado City herself at the age of fourteen, when the prophet commanded her to become the fifth wife of a forty-eight-year-old man. Sixteen years later, Peterson remains very bitter about the UEP’s polygamous culture. “Polygamists say they are being attacked because of their religion,” she told the
Salt Lake Tribune,
“but where in the Constitution does it say that it’s OK to molest and impregnate young girls?”

The mayor of Colorado City, Dan Barlow, considers apostates like Pennie Petersen to be both misinformed and motivated by revenge, and views the prosecution of Rodney Holm as government harassment of an unorthodox but honorable religious minority. To Barlow, the Holm case is disturbingly reminiscent of the 1953 raid on Short Creek. “They’re coming after us again,” he complains, “and they’re even using the same language.”

But there is a documented pattern of sexual abuse in Colorado City that severely undermines Mayor Barlow’s attempt to frame the issue as one of religious persecution. In April 2002, for instance, the mayor’s own son and namesake, Dan Barlow Jr., was charged with molesting five of his daughters over a period of many years. The town closed ranks around him, and his father, the mayor, went before the court and pleaded for leniency. In the end, four of the daughters refused to testify against Barlow. He got off with a suspended sentence after agreeing to sign a statement that said, “I made a mistake. I want to make it right. I am so sorry. I want to be a good person. I have raised a good family, been a good father. I love them all, a fatherly love.”

“Nobody who knows anything about this religion is surprised Dan didn’t go to jail,” says Debbie Palmer, a former member of the Canadian branch of the religion, barely able to contain her disgust. “Do you have any idea what kind of pressure those poor Barlow girls must have been under not to testify against their father, the mayor’s son? I’m sure the prophet told them that if they said one word, they were going straight to hell. When I was abused by prominent members of the religion, that’s what I was told, every time.”

Folks in Colorado City pay little heed to such blasphemous talk from the likes of Palmer. They’re convinced that Satan, along with nefarious Gentiles and apostates who’ve fallen under his influence, are wholly to blame for the town’s problems. “Satan has been jealous of God since day one,” a young, bright-eyed, very devoted member of the priesthood explains after first looking nervously up and down the dry bed of Short Creek, then looking up and down the wash once more, to make sure nobody is around to see him talking to a Gentile writer. “Satan wants to rule. He doesn’t want God to rule, so he tricks weak people into apostatizing and going over to the other side.” This young man, along with most of the other residents of Colorado City, believes that in very short order the world will be thoroughly cleansed of Satan’s minions— apostates, mainline Mormons, and Gentile writers alike—because the prophet has told him so many times in the past few years.

In the late 1990s, as the new millennium approached, Uncle Rulon assured his followers that they would soon be “lifted up” to the Celestial Kingdom, while “pestilence, hail, famine, and earthquake” would sweep the wicked (i.e., everyone else) from the face of the earth. Fearing that single women would be left behind to perish in the apocalypse because they had not yet been given the opportunity to live the Principle, the prophet married off a spate of teenage girls to older, already married men. Ruth Stubbs was one such bride. When the year 2000 came and went without the arrival of Armageddon, or anyone being lifted up, Uncle Rulon explained to his followers that they were to blame, because they hadn’t been sufficiently obedient. Contrite, the residents of Colorado City promised to live more righteously.

“Predicting the end of the world is a win-win situation for Uncle Rulon,” apostate DeLoy Bateman observes. “You can always just blame it on the iniquities of the people if it doesn’t happen, and then use that as a club to hold over their heads and control them in the future.”

THREE

BOUNTIFUL

The essential principle of Mormonism is not polygamy at all, but the ambition of an ecclesiastical hierarchy to wield sovereignty; to rule the souls and lives of its subjects with absolute authority, unrestrained by any civil power.

Salt Lake Tribune, February 15, 1885

Nine hundred miles north of Colorado City, just over the Canadian border, the Purcell Mountains rise steeply from the wide, green bottomlands of the Kootenay River. Here, a few miles outside Creston, British Columbia, a cluster of houses and farms stands amid the hayfields, hard beneath the precipitous, thickly forested slopes of Mount Thompson. This bucolic-looking settlement is known as Bountiful. Although its rain-soaked surroundings are a far cry from the desiccated landscape of Colorado City, the two places are inextricably linked. Bountiful is home to some seven hundred Mormon Fundamentalists who belong to the UEP and answer unconditionally to Prophet Rulon Jeffs. Girls from Bountiful are regularly sent south across the international border to be married to men in Colorado City, and even greater numbers of girls from Colorado City are brought north to marry Bountiful men.

Debbie Oler Blackmore Ralston Palmer spent most of her life in Bountiful. In 1957, when she was two years old, her father, Dalmon Oler, moved his family to the Creston Valley in order to join a fundamentalist group that had settled there a few years earlier. It was led by a handsome, charismatic man named Ray Blackmore who had allied the group with the UEP polygamists in Short Creek/Colorado City under Prophet LeRoy Johnson.

Like many Canadian Mormons, Ray Blackmore was descended from Utah polygamists who had been sent north of the border to continue the doctrine of plural marriage when the LDS Church was forced to renounce polygamy in the United States. By the time Debbie moved to Bountiful, families headed by Eldon Palmer and Sam Ralston had already joined the Blackmore clan and were openly practicing plural marriage.

Upon arriving in Bountiful, Debbie’s father wasted no time in acquiring his own plurality of wives, eventually marrying six women and fathering forty-five children, of whom Debbie was the oldest. In an attempt to keep track of so many offspring, her father resorted to giving all the kids born in any given year a name beginning with the same letter. “We called them the A’s or the T’s or the J’s or whatever,” he explained on Canadian television. Nineteen seventy-six, for example, was the era of the J’s: between June and October of that year, Oler’s wives gave birth to Jared, Jeanette, Julia, and Jennifer.

Dalmon Oler acquired his second wife, Memory Blackmore, just a year after arriving in Bountiful. She was the oldest daughter of Ray Blackmore, and her marriage to Debbie’s dad gave Debbie her first inkling that plural marriage wasn’t always as wonderful as she had been told. “Mother Mem” was insecure and terribly jealous, and she beat Debbie when her birth mother wasn’t present. When Debbie was six, her birth mother died, and Mem grew even more violent in her treatment of Debbie, who, even as a young girl, was proving to be intelligent and willful and disinclined to defer blindly to authority. Debbie tended to ask questions and to think for herself—qualities not regarded as attributes in the Fundamentalist Church.

Until 1986, when Rulon Jeffs assumed leadership of the UEP, the prophet was LeRoy Johnson, a plainspoken farmer known to his followers as “Uncle Roy.” Many of Johnson’s sermons were variations on the theme “The path to heaven is through total obedience.” Today, Uncle Roy’s legacy is visible throughout Bountiful, where the community motto—“Keep Sweet, No Matter What”—is posted on walls and refrigerator doors in every home.

Mormonism is a patriarchal religion, rooted firmly in the traditions of the Old Testament. Dissent isn’t tolerated. Questioning the edicts of religious authorities is viewed as a subversive act that undermines faith. As the eminent LDS first counselor N. Eldon Tanner famously declared in the official church magazine,
Ensign,
in August 1979, “When the prophet speaks, the debate is over.” Men, and only men, are admitted to the priesthood and given positions of ecclesiastical authority, including that of prophet. And only prophets may receive the revelations that determine how the faithful are to conduct their lives, right down to the design of the sacred undergarments individuals are supposed to wear at all times. All of this holds true in both the mainstream LDS Church and in the Fundamentalist Church, although the fundamentalists take these rigid notions—of obedience, of control, of distinct and unbending roles for men and women—to a much greater extreme. The primary responsibility of women in FLDS communities (even more than in the mainline Mormon culture) is to serve their husbands, conceive as many babies as possible, and raise those children to become obedient members of the religion. More than a few women born into the FLDS Church have found this to be problematic. Debbie Palmer is one of them.

Tracing a mazelike series of lines with her index finger, Debbie attempts to demystify an incredibly complicated schematic diagram that at first glance appears to map out the intricacies of some massive engineering project—a nuclear power plant, perhaps. Upon closer examination, the diagram turns out to be her family tree.

When Debbie was fourteen, she felt “impressed by the Lord” to marry Ray Blackmore, the community leader. Debbie asked her father to share her divine impression with Prophet LeRoy Johnson, who would periodically travel to Bountiful from Short Creek to perform various religious duties. Because Debbie was lithe and beautiful, Uncle Roy approved of the match. A year later the prophet returned to Canada and married her to the ailing fifty-seven-year-old Blackmore. As his sixth wife, Debbie became a stepmother to Blackmore’s thirty-one kids, most of whom were older than she was. And because he happened to be the father of Debbie’s own stepmother, Mem, she unwittingly became a stepmother to her stepmother, and thus a stepgrandmother to herself.

Following Ray Blackmore’s death in 1974, Debbie’s father, Dalmon Oler, became the leader of Bountiful. He held that position until 1985, when Ray’s scheming twenty-nine-year-old son, Winston Blackmore, successfully forced him from power, ruined him financially, and very adroitly maneuvered to assume leadership of Bountiful himself. Relying on charm, coercion, and a network of spies that the KGB would have envied, Winston consolidated his power over the ensuing years. He is presently the presiding bishop of the church’s Canadian branch, superintendent of the Bountiful schools (which are funded by the taxpayers of British Columbia), editor of the community newspaper, and manager of all the community’s significant business interests. The control he exerts over the lives of his followers is staggering. Winston has also fathered approximately a hundred children, at last count, with more than thirty wives. He answers to nobody but God and the prophet in Colorado City.

After Winston pushed Debbie’s father out of the way, she and Winston became bitter enemies, but they remained tightly bound by a mind-boggling web of family connections. Although Debbie is just a year older than Winston, she is his stepmother. Her oldest daughter is his half sister. Debbie’s actual sister became the first of Winston’s numerous wives.

One of Debbie’s stepchildren is Alaire Blackmore, seven years older than Debbie, who had been adopted by Ray Blackmore at birth. When Alaire was eighteen, she was married to Ray, her own adoptive father. Alaire was thus a cowife to Debbie as well as Debbie’s stepdaughter. After Ray died, Alaire was married to Debbie’s father; when Winston assumed power she was taken from Debbie’s dad and married to Winston—who was her own brother by adoption. Although these relationships are almost impossible to make sense of without a flow chart, such convoluted permutations are simply business as usual in Bountiful and other polygamist societies.

For all their fecundity, Mormon Fundamentalists are strangely squeamish about sex. Boys and girls are forbidden to date, or even flirt, before marriage. Sex education consists of teaching children that the human body is a shameful vessel that should be veiled from the eyes of others at all times. “We were told to treat each other like snakes,” explains one of Debbie’s sons. Women and girls are required to wear long dresses, even while swimming. Boys and men wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts. Both genders must wear sacred long underwear beneath their clothing at all times, even on sweltering summer days. According to the Law of Chastity, sexual intercourse is officially forbidden even between husband and wife unless the woman is ovulating.

Gravel crunching beneath its tires, Debbie’s car rounds a bend, and the house where she grew up suddenly comes into view, moldering at the edge of a soggy hillside bearded in ferns and evergreen forest. It’s been many years since she’s been back here. “See where that car is parked off to the side there?” Debbie says, pointing to an old vehicle rusting beneath a graceful canopy of red cedars. “When I was six, that’s where Renny Blackmore took me. Said he was going to teach me how to drive.” Instead of giving Debbie a driving lesson, Renny (one of Winston’s teenage brothers) sexually assaulted her. “Yechh,” she recalls, grimacing. “Thinking about what he did to me in that car still gives me a creepy feeling.”