Authors: Elissa Wall
Even after her testimony, I waited to hug her during one of the intermissions and was heartened when she whispered these words: “I’m sorry. I know you know what’s right.”
O
n September 19, my ex-husband, Allen Steed, took the stand. During the course of his testimony, I was overwhelmed by a dual sense of loathing and pity. Like Jennie, he had obviously been instructed to uphold a homespun image on the stand, and he appeared in an unpressed denim shirt and casual pants. I knew that Allen owned plenty of suits; I’d seen them hanging in his closet in the trailer. And he knew it was appropriate to dress more formally in court. The handful of FLDS supporters who’d come to court each day to show their support of Warren all donned black suits and ties.
Allen looked very self-conscious and like he was about to crumble. His meek, humble demeanor almost sickened me. I wasn’t sure if it was an act or if in the years since I’d left him he’d become this pitiful. He had a glazed cloudiness to his eyes that matched the look I’d seen on my mother’s face when the FLDS teachings had pushed every other thought from her mind. I was shocked along with many of those in attendance when Allen’s questioning began with his lawyer present and the reading of his Miranda rights. He hadn’t yet been formally charged with any crimes but by taking the stand and testifying he was waiving his right to self-incrimination.
Allen spoke so quietly throughout his testimony that it was almost impossible to hear him, and he was frequently reminded to speak up. Initially it seemed his nerves had gotten the better of him as he sat rattling off a chain of pro-FLDS statements and claiming for the jury that we had actually had a good marriage. As I listened to him speak, an image flashed briefly in my mind—Allen and me in the trailer during one of our painful nights when he forced sex on me. I was almost shocked to see him here at all, but then I knew what he was doing. He had to look good in front of the prophet, just like everyone else. Otherwise, he would have nowhere to turn. I felt a pang of sympathy for Allen; this was probably a last-ditch effort on his part to receive a new wife and start again on his path to heaven. He was willing to fall on the sword for Warren. Watching this whole legal process, I had seen Warren throw so many under the bus as he was now doing with Allen. In an effort to prove his innocence, he had thrown the blame at the feet of my mother, Uncle Fred, my sisters, my father, and even me. This act was a public statement that he was willing to condemn someone else to jail in order to win his freedom.
“Elissa Wall was your wife, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Are you related to her?”
“We have the same grandfather. Our grandmothers are separate,” he said, as if that detail rendered our situation any more legal or justified.
The defense established that Allen and I had known each other and seen each other from time to time in Hildale at Uncle Fred’s house.
“How did you get along before the marriage?”
For some reason, part of me expected Allen to admit that he had been cruel to me—a nasty tease. Instead, he responded, “I didn’t do much with her, so…” It was left for the jury to intuit that we had no relationship either way.
“Did you do any dating growing up?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Any dancing?”
“A little, mostly with my sisters.”
“Any kissing?”
“No, sir.”
Allen was then asked to explain his interpretation of placement marriage.
“I believe we have a God in heaven who looks down upon the earth. He sees his children and decides who should get married to each other, and then he tells his prophet, and he places the marriage together.” A shudder ran up and down my spine.
“Did you understand there was anything illegal or wrong about your marriage because you had a shared grandfather?”
“No,” Allen responded in a near whisper. At this time, his testimony was interrupted over and over again. He was so nervous he could not keep his volume up and he was constantly being stopped and asked to repeat what he’d said.
“So, did you propose to Elissa?”
“I believe I did. Yes, sir.”
Now my agitation became palpable. Up until this point, Allen’s testimony had been a series of misinterpretations and at best half-truths. With this line he began to spin a tale on Warren Jeffs behalf. Never was there anything even resembling a proposal between us. In fact the very idea that a man would propose to a woman ran counter to the concept of “placement marriage.” The FLDS just didn’t do that. Still, Allen rambled on, flying by the seat of his pants.
In discussing our wedding day, Allen was asked to detail his feelings, and the discrepancy between his and my own were glaring.
“I don’t remember too much about it—I was kind of you might say on cloud nine.”
“You were excited?”
“Very. Yes, sir.”
His smile and the weird look in his eyes began to make me gag.
“Did you have an understanding about how men and women make a baby?”
“Not really,” he responded. When the subject turned to our honeymoon, Allen continued to misconstrue the details.
“Did you become more comfortable with each other at that time?” Bugden asked.
“You could say that.”
“Was there any hugging going on?”
“Yes.”
“Kissing?”
“Yes.”
“Sure,” I thought, enraged. “If you call a one-hundred-dollar dare that I had been pressured to perform an actual kiss.”
“In public or in private?”
“More so in private.” Of course he would present it this way to make it seem as though I was cold with him in public and different when we were alone. When it came to the bedroom, it was his word against mine, and that was the best angle Allen could take. What followed was a grossly misrepresented tale of how Allen and I had learned about sex together, at first claiming that we hadn’t had any intimate contact for the first three months of the marriage and saying that he had exposed himself to me in the park as a means of making me feel more comfortable around him.
When asked to describe our first sexual encounter, Allen’s response cut through me like a knife. “She woke me up and asked if I cared about her,” he recounted. “She rolled close to me, asked me to scratch her back, and one thing led to the next. I felt like she was ready to go forward.”
As these words escaped his lips, I began to experience the symptoms of a classic panic attack; the pressure and pain had bottled up inside of me, and hearing this skewed interpretation of the sexual contact with Allen proved too much. Tears rolled down my cheeks, which were growing red hot with frustration. I became short of breath and my shoulders shook from my attempts to hold my sobs in. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. Looking up, I saw the kind face of the uniformed bailiff.
“Do you need to go out?” she whispered. She found her answer in my pleading eyes. I wasn’t sure if I was permitted to leave the courtroom during the testimony and was grateful that she’d noticed my pain and given me an out. Jumping up from my seat in the second row of the gallery, I followed her to an empty courtroom, where Lamont and Roger immediately joined me.
The defense was trying to label me a lying, adulterous woman. Before the trial I honestly did feel a sense of sympathy for Allen. He was both a victim of Warren’s power and a perpetrator, but after hearing Allen’s revisionist history of our marriage, any remorse I’d felt evaporated. I was enraged by his sheer audacity and his unwillingness to take responsibility for what he’d done. The way he was speaking telegraphed that he didn’t feel the least bit apologetic for how he’d treated me and the crimes he’d committed against a fourteen-year-old child.
While I was out of the room, Allen went on to testify about his counseling sessions with Warren, explaining how Warren had instructed him to get me to love him, so that I would obey out of love. He said that Warren had told him to “take things slowly.”
“It was a rough and rocky road, then we learned to love one another,” he told the court. “And I’m sure it wasn’t easy, knowing what I didn’t know then.”
Allen admitted to the jurors that as much as he wanted to believe that he was in charge of the marriage, it simply wasn’t true. “I tried to make decisions with wisdom and love, and a lot of times I didn’t voice my decision, knowing there would be opposition.
“If she decided to do something I didn’t want her to do, she would do it anyway,” Allen muttered. He even told the court that although I was avoiding him and he was hearing rumors that I was seeing someone else, it had never crossed his mind to ask Warren for a release from the marriage.
When I finally felt composed enough to return to the courtroom, Craig Barlow was just beginning his cross-examination of Allen. I was glad I’d come back, because watching the state’s attorney tear Allen to shreds was satisfying. Even under the questioning of the defense, Allen’s testimony seemed shaky and hard to believe. Now that he was experiencing real pressure from the prosecution, cracks began to form in every other word he said. He was trapped, by his false testimony and the pattern of deception he had chosen to protect his prophet. Before Craig Barlow even asked his first question, Allen blurted out, “Uncle Warren has done nothing wrong.”
Stopping in his tracks with a half grin, Craig informed Allen that usually the witness waits for a question before giving a response. Allen’s oddly timed declaration of allegiance to Warren Jeffs suggested right away that he would do anything, even lie, for his prophet.
Craig immediately established that Allen’s claims about his motivation behind the exposure incident in the park were ludicrous. Then he asked, “How did you communicate sex to her? What was the language you used?”
“We called it ‘in-and-out.’”
My mouth was agape, and my stomach turned in anxious fury. He seemed to just make this up on the spot, compounding his deceitfulness by the minute. We never called anything “in-and-out.” A hush fell over the room as spectators seemed to try to comprehend what he was saying. Even Craig Barlow revealed his astonishment in the line of questioning that followed Allen’s outrageous claim. “So, when you wanted to do it, you would say, ‘Let’s do in-and-out’?”
“Yes, sir,” he replied. At that moment, the only thing that crossed my mind was that Allen was the embodiment of a creep, and I swore never to eat at an In-N-Out Burger again.
Allen tripped over his own words when he claimed that, in an effort not to get pregnant, I had urged him, “Don’t go in me.”
It was clear to Craig that I wouldn’t have had access to that kind of information about conception, nor would I use language like that. Furthermore, if members of the FLDS were only supposed to have intercourse as a means to reproduce, his testimony was hypocritical.
Allen grew so uneasy during the remainder of his cross-examination that at one point he asked to stand, explaining that he would feel more comfortable. It was a strange request, and I could feel a stir of amusement and confusion in the courtroom. It was painfully awkward for me to watch him. I shook my head in disbelief that I had ever been “married” to this odd man. After his testimony, my own musings were confirmed by the comments of people milling about in the hallway outside the courtroom. I heard someone refer to Allen as Forrest Gump.
Stepping down from the stand, his crumpled pants sagged slightly as he made his way toward the exit sign. It was clear from the way his shoulders matched his sagging pants that he knew he’d failed in his attempts to save the prophet. I knew that the defense had utilized Allen as the image of a soft-spoken, confused young man whose heart had been broken by a reckless teenage bride. In the end it seemed that Allen’s testimony had done more harm than good. Even if the words he spoke had been believable, his behavior—his mumbling, his standing, his nervousness—seemed off-putting enough to alienate even the most objective juror. It was as though he was saying the first thing that came into his head, and there was little, if anything, that he was able to clarify.
I was confident that the prosecution had done a good job of scrutinizing the many holes in his story, but there remained a lingering fear in the back of my mind that somehow the jury would believe his version of our marriage and the one that Jennie had offered over my own. I knew that the truth was on my side, but for the first time I wondered if that was enough.
Yea, that great pit which hath been digged for the destruction of men shall be filled by those who digged it.
—
BOOK OF MORMON
T
hroughout the entire trial, Warren Jeffs remained stone-faced and mute, refusing his right to testify in his own defense. Sometimes he stared intently at the witnesses, but mostly he scribbled furiously on the pad in front of him, using silence as his only statement. In the court proceedings before the trial even began, Warren stood with a yellow legal pad and had tried to speak directly to the judge. But at the time his competency was in question and he was instructed that all communications must be made through his attorneys. He was now in a system where he had to abide by the laws of the land. At that moment, he was immediately surrounded by his lawyers and gave up on his effort to read whatever he had written.
Later a photo of the note that he was trying to read surfaced in a newspaper, revealing possible words that may have indicated Warren’s admission that he was not the prophet. It was gratifying to see that the man who’d once assumed absolute power over a people, and over me, was being humbled by the very laws he chose to ignore.
The closing arguments that Friday morning couldn’t have come soon enough. Getting to this final stage had been a journey of more than a year, and I was ready to move on. It would now be in the jury’s hands to decide Warren’s fate. Brock Belnap had taken something of a backseat during the questioning, cognizant of his strengths and humble enough to allow Ryan Shaum and Craig Barlow to carry that portion of the trial. Now Brock stood up to deliver the prosecution’s closing remarks, facing the jury with a strong, sincere, and detailed statement. Rather than taking cheap shots at Warren, he simply redefined the law: “Did this man, Warren Steed Jeffs, solicit, request, command, encourage, or intentionally aid another to commit sexual intercourse with another person without the victim’s—Miss Wall’s—consent? That’s all you have to decide.” He paused for a moment to take a breath. “This is not a religious case,” he explained. “You just need to decide if what the law states is what happened here.