My family always stayed with the Jessops on the Utah side of Short Creek when we made the long drive south for church meetings and events. Likewise, the Jessops stayed with us in Salt Lake during visits to the prophet’s compound or as a pit stop on their way to visit their relatives in the FLDS-only community of Bountiful, British Columbia, just across the Canadian border. The community in Canada was much like the one in southern Utah in that its thousand or so members lived isolated from outsiders. Members of all three FLDS communities operated under the same umbrella of priesthood leadership and convened in Short Creek several times a year for important religious events and community activities.
Our mother, Laura Jessop, was fourteen years older than I was, and she and I had rarely spoken during our family visits. I was much friendlier with her three younger sisters, who were closer to my age. Still, I shared everyone’s optimism about Laura and hoped that her addition would mark a positive turning point for our family. Mom hoped for a friend in Laura. So did Mother Audrey. I just wanted the fighting in our house to stop and for us to all be a happy family.
Unfortunately, things would only get worse.
We follow the prophet.
—FLDS PARABLE
It hadn’t always been so tense in the Wall house hold. Growing up, I remember many good times with my family. There were camping trips, picnics in the mountains, and countless visits to the FLDS communities in Canada and southern Utah for festivals, celebrations, and group events. There were struggles, but I remember so much happiness, and how much I loved my dad.
Sixteen of Dad’s children were still living at home when I was born on July 7, 1986. I was the eleventh of my mother’s fourteen children, and number nineteen of Dad’s eventual twenty-four. My father was in the delivery room for my birth, and he always said that I came out smiling and continued to smile throughout my childhood. He nicknamed me Goldilocks because of my long silky blond hair and the way I skipped around the house reciting the Grimms’ fairy tale and performing it in skits for my family.
I was still quite young—only a few months old—when a dramatic fire changed the course of life for our family. At the time, we were living in our new nine-bedroom house on Claybourne Avenue. One crisp morning in November my mother was in the kitchen preparing breakfast for three of her young boys and cleaning up from a hectic morning of getting eleven children off to school. After putting some raw honey on the stove to melt, she went down the hall to the nursery to check on me. I had awakened and had decided I was hungry, so my mother lovingly took a few minutes to address my needs. While she was feeding me, my older sister Rachel called from Alta Academy, and my mother talked to her as she nursed me.
The blaze started when she was out of the room. The boys were happily eating oatmeal when a heating element on the old stove exploded and turned the pan of honey into a fireball. The flames quickly spread to the cabinets, which were made of a highly flammable material; upon seeing the flames, my brother Jacob ran into the nursery to alert my mother. My mother was still on the phone with Rachel, and it took her a few minutes to ask Rachel to call back and to calm Jacob enough to comprehend what he was saying. Her heart was pounding as she raced after Jacob to the kitchen only to be greeted by the grim sight of flames licking at the kitchen walls. Justin, Jacob’s twin brother, stood at the sink throwing small cups of water onto the flames to try to put them out.
Just then the phone rang, jolting my mother into action. She rushed to answer it, hoping that whoever it was could send help. It was Rachel calling back, and Mom screamed into the phone that the house was on fire, instructing her to get word to my father. Mom immediately herded the twins and my two-year-old brother, Brad, to safety, but the fire spread rapidly. Windows of the house exploded from the heat as she came back in to pull me from the nursery. In the end, I escaped uninjured, but my mother needed medical treatment for burns she received during the rescue.
After a frantic search for my father, who was volunteering as a teacher at Alta Academy, Rachel found him and shared the catastrophic news. As Dad raced home, he could see the thick black smoke rising from halfway across the valley. His heart dropped and a sick feeling entered his stomach as he realized the seriousness of the blaze and the danger we were all in. He arrived home to find the street packed with fire trucks, but to his relief we were all collected safely outside.
Once the flames subsided and the trucks had dispersed, the damage was assessed, and it was crushing: the top floor of our house had been completely destroyed, and the basement had suffered damage as well. Our neighbors on the block immediately came to our aid. Even the local Mormon bishop arrived with donations of clothing and offered a place where we could stay temporarily. Our family was shocked by the outpouring of kindness from people outside our church. Their actions contradicted what we had long been taught about the “evil” character of outsiders. Here were so many non-FLDS people offering help in our time of need, despite knowing about the secret and misunderstood life our family led.
While the loss of our home was traumatic, it was nothing compared with the loss we suffered later on that day. That night, November 25, 1986, as we were recovering from seeing our home and possessions go up in flames, we received word that our prophet, Leroy S. Johnson, had passed away at age ninety-eight. The entire FLDS community was devastated, and suddenly the fire in our home took a back burner.
To say that the prophet is the most important figure in the FLDS is an understatement. He is viewed as an extension of God. His words and proclamations are equal to the word of God on earth. A prophet’s death was a profoundly tragic occasion, one that forced us to set aside our own situation and focus on the church.
In particular, Uncle Roy’s death took a huge toll on the FLDS community. Part of what had endeared him to us was the important role he played in reuniting the people after the notorious raid of 1953 when members of Arizona law enforcement stormed Short Creek, arrested 36 men, and sent 86 women and 236 children on buses to Phoenix in an attempt to put a stop to their polygamous lifestyle. The governor of Arizona at the time, J. Howard Pyle, said the raid was in response to reports of child abuse and men taking young girls as brides, but the governor’s goal of abolishing polygamy failed after graphic photographs of children being ripped from their mothers’ arms surfaced in the media. In the days after the raid, Uncle Roy vowed to reunite every single family in the community, and in the years to come he followed through on his promise, showing his love and loyalty to his people.
For a few years before his death, we’d been told that Uncle Roy suffered from shingles and deteriorating health. According to what people were saying, Rulon Jeffs and several other church elders had been overseeing the meetings and taking care of church business. There were a number of church elders with more seniority than Rulon Jeffs, but a disagreement between members of the priesthood council over the interpretation of key church ordinances ended with Rulon, the religion’s oldest living apostle, as our prophet’s likely successor.
With nowhere to live, we moved in with another church member, Woodruff Steed, and his family. Woodruff owned an enormous home in Draper, in the southern end of the Salt Lake Valley. His house accommodated not only his seven living wives and dozens of children but now our large family as well. His ten-acre