Authors: Elissa Wall
Warren was referring us to the parable of the ten virgins from Matthew 25, in which ten virgins set out under the cover of darkness to meet their bridegroom. On their journey, a split occurs between the “wise” virgins, who have brought extra oil for their lamps, and the “foolish” virgins, who have not. Though all ten are believers, the rift between those who are prepared and those who are not is clear. Warren wanted to determine where that split in faith existed in our church and dispose of our “foolish virgins” while there was still time.
But before the foolish virgins could be separated from the wise ones, a leader would need to be established.
To our surprise, that day Warren invited a respected elder from the congregation to the podium. The congregant had become a close devotee of Warren’s in recent years. That Saturday, we sat in the meetinghouse in rapt silence as the elder recalled an event from earlier that week, when Uncle Warren had dedicated a church farm, the land, the water, and its workers. It was imperative to receive this special blessing before establishing a home or a business. The church elder said that watching Warren perform the important ritual was like “watching Jesus Christ walk through the masses and bless the water, the fish, and the bread.”
“He’s just as holy, he’s just as pure,” the elder said of Warren. “He is the Lord’s servant. He is as his father. He does lead and guide us through him. Warren Jeffs is our leader.”
This devoted follower was the first man to stand up and declare this. Since he was a well-regarded elder, it was no surprise that Warren used him to deliver the first statement. As I sat in the meetinghouse that day, I struggled to take it in. “This is a test,” I repeated over and over in my head. I couldn’t believe that Warren Jeffs would be the next prophet. Only a few weeks prior, Warren had insisted that he had no such aspirations and that Uncle Rulon would continue to lead us.
The following week, there were more puzzling declarations in church. This time, Warren’s brother Isaac stood up and affirmed the elder’s proclamation. He told us that his father had “confidence” in Warren and wanted him to be his successor. There was a feeling of mystery circulating among the people that only grew as the weeks went by. While Warren had publicly declared that none of Uncle Rulon’s wives would be remarried, he started to arrive at church surrounded by several of them. Normally, this would indicate that the women were either sealed to him or were about to be placed by his side. The suspicion went unconfirmed, as no one dared ask about it.
I worried what this would mean for Kassandra. Before Issac’s speech, she confided in me that Uncle Warren was secretly marrying some of his father’s wives, and she was terrified that she would be next. Despite Warren’s public claims that nothing would happen to her, it seemed less and less likely that he would uphold what he had promised.
S
everal days after Issac’s testimony, Kassandra called me to ask if I could give her a hand moving some of her things from the prophet’s home. She said she was getting married and she wanted to make sure that she was ready when her day arrived. The news came as a surprise, but she assured me that her marriage would not be to Warren.
“Who are you marrying?” I asked, confused yet intrigued.
“I can’t really talk about that now,” Kassandra replied with an air of mystery. She just told me that she needed to be prepared. “I’ve seen some of the other girls married, and if they don’t have their stuff together, then they don’t get to take it with them.”
Eager to help, I drove over to Uncle Rulon’s and met Kassandra outside. Her room was on the lower level, with a door just down the hall that led out to the back of the compound. I couldn’t understand why she was in such a rush, or why she kept looking both ways before stepping out into the hallway. “Let’s hurry. Get it out,” she implored, referring to the furnishings we were carrying. She had me nearly sprinting from the house with each trip we made to my Ford Ranger truck. Finally we headed to my trailer. Kassandra wanted to store her belongings in our shed. I didn’t really think much of it, and more than anything else, I was glad that her life was taking this enlivening turn.
A few days later, on November 2, I arrived home from work to find an unfamiliar truck parked on the gravel drive in front of my trailer. Suddenly, I saw Kassandra emerging from the storage shed.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, surprised to see her so late in the day.
“I’m just coming to get some of my stuff.”
“Are you getting married?” I inquired.
“Not yet, but I will soon.”
“Well, whose truck is that?”
A slight breeze swept through the trailer park and Kassandra hesitated, appearing nervous. “I don’t know. I got dropped off,” she said. “It was here when I arrived.”
It didn’t make sense that she would move her things without a vehicle. I could tell that something wasn’t right, and I attempted to follow Kassandra back into the storage shed, but she prevented me from entering. “What’s going on?” I asked her with a flare of frustration.
She was growing visibly anxious. As I pressed her for details, Ryan Musser emerged from the shed, and in a flash everything came together.
“We’re leaving,” Kassandra announced.
Her statement shook me to the core. My heart sank and I started to cry. “You lied to me.”
“I had to get you to help me,” Kassandra said.
“You used me!” I shouted. “How can you do this? How can you leave Mom and the girls? How can you leave us here?”
For weeks, Kassandra had been borrowing my cell phone and my truck. I never asked her any questions. But now, faced with news that she was leaving the community, I was angry over the deception and terrified that I would never see her again. Aside from Mother and my two young sisters, she was all I had left. As members of the prophet’s family, Rachel and Michelle were all but removed from my daily existence. My contact with both of them rarely went beyond the superficial “Hello, how are you? I love you.” Without Kassandra, I’d be completely lost. She had become my lifeline and one of my greatest reliefs from my problems with Allen.
“You are horrible for taking her away,” I declared to Ryan.
At sixteen, I was too young and faithful to understand why she was doing this, and I believed that she was making a big mistake. Sensing that I was going to try to stop her, Kassandra reached out and grabbed my cell phone and car keys.
“What are you doing?” I said in desperation. I wasn’t going to let her go without a fight, and she knew it. I wanted to call Mom to see if she could talk her out of it, and she refused to return my phone and keys until she and Ryan were safely on their way. I stood in tears as they finished packing up and, over my continuous protests and sobs, started up the engine.
“Please stay,” I begged. “You can’t leave us. Don’t just abandon everything.”
I knew that things were bad for Kassandra; they were bad for me too. But I couldn’t imagine abandoning my mother and sisters like I’d been abandoned. I’d seen it happen too many times. It only caused more pain.
I clung to her like a child when she embraced me for our final goodbye. Stepping up into the passenger seat, she tossed me my cell phone and car keys. The dust from the truck’s spinning tires blew into my face as she and Ryan drove off down the road. Heartbroken, I nearly collapsed. By the time I reached my mother’s, I was inconsolable.
“What’s wrong, Lesie?” Mom asked softly, stroking my hair and trying to calm me down. I was so upset I couldn’t speak and at first just stood before her, my shoulders shaking uncontrollably and tears rolling off my cheeks.
“Kassandra’s gone,” I finally told her. Both Sherrie and Ally were in the room when I blurted out the news, but I was too numb to relate any more of the story and could hardly react when Ally fell apart. We hadn’t lost a sibling since Caleb left two years before, and all the pain that had been lying dormant came flooding back. Once again our family had been torn apart; once again I had been left alone.
I didn’t tell Allen about Kassandra, but this kind of news traveled fast and he heard it from someone else. He said he was sorry but expressed concern about the influence that Kassandra’s departure might have on me.
“She is a wicked example,” he told me. “And I hope she doesn’t wear off on you.”
In the days following Kassandra’s departure, the shakedown was intense. Uncle Fred began with my mother, interrogating her for hours, wanting to know where Kassandra was, what had happened, and how. Mom was directed to write a letter of explanation to Uncle Warren outlining all she knew about the circumstances surrounding her daughter’s defection. My interrogation was even more rigorous. Kassandra had used my cell phone, and she and I had been captured removing her belongings on the video system that monitored the perimeter of the prophet’s compound. My unwitting role in Kassandra’s flight was now on tape and being used as evidence of my alleged involvement in her defiant act of betrayal.
It felt like I had just committed murder or a bank robbery with the way Uncle Warren and Fred questioned me for hours. Fred demanded to see my cell phone, and he almost confiscated it for good after he learned that Kassandra had used it to make calls in the days leading up to her escape.
“I had no idea,” I insisted. “I had no clue that Kassandra was doing anything other than what she told me. I trusted her. She told me she was preparing to be married, and I believed her.”
But Fred didn’t believe a word I said. He was certain that I had purposely moved my sister’s stuff from the prophet’s home and had acted as an accomplice by storing it in my shed. While I loved my sister, I grew furious at her for what she had done. I felt she had thrown Mom, Sherrie, Ally, and me to the wolves, seemingly without a thought about what impact her actions would have on us. I had thought she was my best friend and my closest confidante, but she had been hiding the truth from me. She had forced us to answer for her, but the only answer we could give the priesthood was “I don’t know.”
The pain and betrayal I felt were only compounded by the silent unease hovering over the community at large. The testimonies of the church elder and Issac Jeffs had stirred some confusion over who would lead us, and while no one dared question out loud, there were many who clung to the diminishing hope that Uncle Rulon would return.
Then, at a service on December 1, our community was shocked again when Warren stood at the podium and said, “Unbeknownst to me, Father had prepared witnesses for this time. May we now hear from Sister Mother Naomi.”
Naomi Jeffs was a wife of Uncle Rulon, and the daughter of Merrill Jessop, the church elder who owned the motel in Caliente where my wedding ceremony took place. She was barely twenty when she was sealed to the prophet in 1993 and was very well regarded in the community. Her angelic beauty promoted a communal belief that she possessed an exceptionally pure heart. Even though her reputation was impeccable, I was in utter shock during the service as I watched Naomi step up to the microphone in her long pink dress with the white lace trim. It was highly irregular for a woman to speak in church. In fact, it rarely ever happened.
“I pray for Father’s spirit and for Father to be near me,” Naomi began in a sweet, soft voice. “That he will speak through me. And I will only say that which he wants me to say.
“I first ask, ‘Do we really believe in Uncle Rulon?’ If we do, then we believe that Warren Jeffs is the prophet at this time.”
Naomi’s opening remarks were disquieting, but what she would soon reveal would send a ripple through our congregation. “I am so grateful to be married to our prophet,” she told us, admitting that she had been sealed to Warren. It turned out that Naomi was among the first of seven of Rulon’s wives who had married Uncle Warren in a secret ceremony on October 8. I thought back to the conversation I had with Kassandra in the days before she left. This was clearly what she was referring to, and I started to understand why she had fled. Although I still felt hurt and abandoned by her, part of me—a part I dared not express—couldn’t help but be grateful that she had left before being married to Warren.
As we all digested the startling information, Naomi recounted a series of anecdotes that proved Warren’s natural place as our prophet. We’d always known that Uncle Rulon would return as a young man to carry out his mission, but we’d imagined that he would be renewed in his own skin. Now Naomi was implying that the transformation had been more subtle: Uncle Rulon had returned to us in the form of his son.
Now that I no longer belong to the FLDS, I can understand how an outsider would find all of this ludicrous. But having spent my entire life listening only to this powerful rhetoric, to the constant repetition of these extreme beliefs, I was completely conditioned to believe whatever I was told by the people I believed to be God’s messengers. Though the FLDS are understandably offended by the word
brainwashed,
the truth is, I was, and I could not access, let alone act on, my inherent doubts.
Naomi’s testimony was met with absolute silence as we all sat riveted, listening to her recount her private conversations with Uncle Rulon. “He told me many times before and after his stroke that I would be called as a witness, and he told me many other things that are too sacred to repeat. Just before his death, he told me, ‘Stay close. I need you. I won’t be here much longer. I’m going away, but I will be close.’”
She recalled an instance in which she, Warren, and another of Uncle Rulon’s wives, Mary, were in Rulon’s room. The prophet was sick. “Warren walked out into the hall and I looked upon him and I saw Father’s holy light shine on him. I felt the same feeling on Warren that I had felt on Father. The majesty of his priesthood was shining through him. The brilliance of Warren’s countenance overpowered me and a surge went through my body. At that moment, I knew.
“I bear witness that Warren Jeffs is the prophet,” Naomi declared, her delicate voice resonating through the meeting hall. “I bear testimony that Father kept Warren close for this very reason. Father is closely guiding Warren and will only have him do the Lord’s will.” This carefully orchestrated presentation, along with the testimonies of the church elder and Issac Jeffs, solidified Warren’s position as our new prophet. It had been almost three months since the death of our prophet, and while Warren had assured us that he was not aspiring to any position, he’d continued to lead all of the meetings and prayer services. In fact, several of his staunch supporters had taken to standing outside of the meetinghouse before services to poll male congregants on where their allegiance lay. “Do you support Uncle Warren?” they’d ask, refusing admittance to those who didn’t answer affirmatively. Many of us who now sat listening to Naomi Jeffs’s oration had been screened before entering this life-altering meeting.