Back then, I didn’t really understand much about the FLDS, but I knew that we were different from the people living around us in our Salt Lake City suburb. For one thing, we weren’t supposed to play with other kids in the neighborhood, and we usually kept the curtains in the house drawn to protect our privacy and the secret life we led. Unlike most of the neighborhood kids, we didn’t get on the yellow school buses and go to public schools. Instead, we went to a special place, Alta Academy—a huge, unassuming white brick house that had been converted into a school for members of the FLDS. We also dressed differently from everyone else, wearing long church undergarments that covered our entire body and stretched from the neck to the ankles and the wrists. On top of these, the girls and women wore frilly long pioneer- style dresses year-round, which made it hard to play in the backyard and even harder to stay comfortable in the summer heat. Whereas most kids would go out in shorts and a T-shirt, we didn’t own either, and even if we did, we would not have been allowed to wear them.
At the time, I didn’t really know why everything had to be so different; all I knew was that I had to “keep sweet” and not complain. We were God’s chosen people—and when Judgment Day came, we would be the only ones allowed into heaven. Judgment Day was known to the FLDS people as the day the destruction of the Lord would sweep across the earth, bringing fire, storms, and death in its wake. The wicked would all be destroyed and when it seemed like none would survive, the Lord would lift the worthiest people—us—off the earth while the devastation passed beneath us. Then we would be set back down and would build Zion, a place without sadness or pain. We would reside there with God and enjoy a thousand years of peace.
My father, Douglas Wall, was an elder in the FLDS Church. For him, and indeed for our whole family, receiving a third wife was a major blessing and an important milestone on the long road to eternal salvation. The idea of having more than one wife had become an integral part of the Mormon religion after Joseph Smith founded it in 1830, but the Mormon Church officially abandoned the practice of polygamy in 1890, in part, so that Utah could gain statehood. Still, some of its members continued to practice in secret at the risk of being excommunicated. By 1935, some of the men who’d been expelled from the Mormon Church formed their own breakaway sect, first known as “The Work” and decades later as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They viewed plural marriage as a central tenet—and the only way to attain eternal salvation.
Members of the FLDS believe they are following the true Mormon religion as it was first envisioned by Joseph Smith. One of its central teachings is the idea of celestial marriage, in which a man must have a minimum of three wives to gain admittance to the highest of the three levels of heaven. That Dad was getting a third wife meant that he had begun to secure a place in the Celestial Kingdom for himself and his family.
Eleven of Dad’s twenty-two children were still living at our home in Salt Lake City, Utah, when he broke the news that Saturday evening in October 1995. Many of my older siblings were married and had moved out to start lives of their own. My family lived on a quiet street in a suburb called Sugar House, about thirty blocks southeast of Temple Square, the headquarters of the Mormon Church, located in downtown Salt Lake City. Established in 1853, six years after Brigham Young guided the Mormon pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley, Sugar House was named for the sugar mill whose contruction had never been completed there. Still, the name stuck.
Our house was set back about twenty feet from the road, with views of the Wasatch Mountains in the distance. Large pine trees and shrubs in the front yard obstructed much of the view and made the house appear smaller than it really was, but Dad had always loved this location because it had a big backyard where the kids could play. More important, it afforded a degree of privacy, which was crucial, since we didn’t want people to know too much about us. Because plural marriages were forbidden in Utah, our family, like all families in the FLDS, was concerned about the attention we could receive if the outside world knew what was going on inside our house.
What helped families like ours stay under the radar in Salt Lake was the fact that our numbers were few and we were all scattered throughout the Salt Lake Valley. At the time, there were about ninety FLDS families residing in the area, and if we had all lived together in the same location, our way of life may have drawn more attention and brought repercussions from the state government.
My father was beaming that Saturday night as he sat at the head of the dinner table. On either side of him sat his two wives, the mothers of the family, who would have to make room for one more at their table. Sharon, my biological mother, was my father’s second wife. Audrey, my father’s first wife, was known to me as Mother Audrey. The atmosphere was filled with excitement as we looked at one another with the expectation of a good future. My father’s face seemed to swell with pride as we talked about how we would prepare for the ceremony and make room for our new mother. My older sister Rachel and some of my other family members began preparing a song that we children would sing in honor of our new mother’s arrival.
But when the revelry of the night gave way to the realities of daylight, the anxiety of the situation became palpable. Receiving another mother into the family is supposed to be a wonderful, joyous occasion; we had always been taught that this was a gift from God to be celebrated and revered. But beneath our outward joy, a larger, ominous tension lurked, as no one—not my father, my mother, Mother Audrey, or my siblings—was sure how this would impact the volatile chemistry that was already at work in our house.
For as long as I could remember, there had been an undercurrent of contention and unrest in our family. The relationship between Mother Audrey and my mother was complex and often fraught with misunderstanding as their natural feelings of insecurity and jealousy created problems for us all. Trying to coexist in a single-family home with multiple children and two women sharing the same husband had presented challenges that began soon after my mother arrived more than twenty-five years earlier.
Dad met Audrey when he was fifteen. They attended the same high school and traveled there on the same bus. Dad was class president and a football star in his junior year at Carbon High School when a friend set him up with Audrey, a beautiful and vibrant senior. Audrey was smart, educated, and outgoing. The chemistry was right, and they became sweethearts, marrying in August of 1954.
Since neither was raised in the FLDS Church, they came to the faith by chance. After Dad and Audrey had been married for several years, Audrey’s parents converted to the fundamentalist religion. Eager to bring them back to mainstream Mormonism, Dad and Audrey began to study the FLDS religion to learn all that they could about the faith. At the time the church was still known as the Work, and Dad and Audrey’s plan was to scrutinize The Work’s teachings and find its flaws, but instead found themselves swayed to its views.
A few years after joining the FLDS, my father saw my mother, the woman who would become his second wife, through a chance encounter during a trip down to southern Utah. Dad’s training as a geologist made him a valuable resource to the FLDS community, and at that time he’d been working a lot with the main community in the twin border cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, helping them to find sources of potable water.
My mom grew up in an FLDS family in southern Utah and was a member of the church choir. My father first noticed her during a service he attended one Sunday, as she sat with the choir waiting to perform. She bent down and whispered something to her father, Newel Steed, the conductor of the choir, and the slight movement caught my Dad’s attention.
Dad later told me that at that moment, he heard a voice telling him, “Sharon Steed belongs to you as your next wife and you will speak next.” Dad was extremely surprised when he was called up to the podium just minutes later to address the people. Men of the FLDS are taught they hold