Elissa Wall - Stolen Innocence - My story of growing up in a polygamous sect, becoming a teenage bride, and breaking free

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 property was big enough for both a small dairy operation and several of his sons’ homes.

Woodruff was my mother’s uncle, but that was not why he offered to let us stay with his family. My father had helped design Woodruff’s house, and the two had cultivated a lasting friendship. In return for lodging our family, Dad agreed to share the two thousand dollars he was receiving each month from the insurance company to cover our family’s living expenses while our home was being rebuilt. In addition to the dairy, Woodruff owned an excavation company, and business had been slow. The insurance money would help to feed his large family.

Woodruff was not the only one experiencing financial difficulty at the time. For almost a year, my father had been in the process of selling the company he’d founded with a partner in the late 1970s. The company, Hydropac, sold components, parts, and seals used in hydraulic and pneumatic equipment and pumps. In its prime, it had about twenty employees and contracts with numerous branches of the U. S. military as well as NASA.

The sale of the company was taking place at the behest of Uncle Roy, who wanted my father to discontinue his frequent business trips and be at home with his family. This was not the first time that my father had sacrificed a high-paying position at the prophet’s direction. Back in the spring of 1967, Uncle Roy had instructed Dad to leave his job at Thiokol Corporation, where he worked on secret, high-tech rocket-development programs. The prophet told Dad that his business travel was interfering with his time with his family and exposing him to outside influences he deemed “worldly.” Uncle Roy wanted his followers close to him, and with little explanation, he told my father to resign from his post and move his family from their Brigham City residence to the Salt Lake Valley. A strong believer in FLDS teachings, Dad trusted in the prophet and, without questioning, did as he was told; he quit Thiokol and moved his family to Salt Lake. The move exacted a huge financial toll on the family, from which they would not recover for years.

A similar scenario played out when my father later went to work at Kenway Engineering, where he had secured a high-paying position as a program manager. There he oversaw projects valued at forty to sixty million dollars and supervised a large staff, but sure enough, after a little while, Uncle Roy told him he had to leave that job for the good of his family.

Because of these two incidents and the financial burden they had placed on our family, my father was understandably reluctant to sell Hydropac, fearing he would lose a small fortune in the process. With two wives and nineteen children, many of whom were still living at home, he had to be careful with his finances. He postponed selling the company for about a year, hoping that Uncle Roy would relent and allow him to keep it.

That hope died with Leroy Johnson. In the wake of Uncle Roy’s passing, Rulon Jeffs became prophet, exerting renewed and vigorous pressure on my father to sell the company. The sale would be for a fraction of Hydropac’s true value, to three FLDS members, among them Brian and Wallace Jeffs, Rulon’s sons, who had been working at the company for about two years. It didn’t matter that none of the men buying Hydropac had experience running a high-tech company, it was what the prophet wanted, and so it had to be done. In the end, my father proved no match for the newly consolidated power of Jeffs, finally acquiescing to priesthood demands and putting his family in financial straits in the process.

After the sale was finalized, Dad had more free time to spend with us at Woodruff’s house, and during this period our family grew further enmeshed with the Salt Lake Valley FLDS community. Woodruff was an influential person in the church, with strong ties to its followers. Since my dad was a convert and didn’t have a real family connection to the religion, we’d always been a little bit segregated from the church. Our time with the Steeds brought us closer not only to their family but to the FLDS way of life.

The eight months at the Steed compound offered Dad, Mom, and Mother Audrey a reprieve from their typical routine and helped them to get along better. These were happy months, and in the years that followed, my older siblings would often share with me their fond memories of that time. It provided a chance for the kids in our family to play with the other children, roaming free on the Steeds’ expansive property and forming close links with the Steed family.

We returned to the house on Claybourne Avenue in time to celebrate my first birthday on July 7, 1987. While most of the money from the sale of Hydropac went to the church, my father had held some back to make improvements to expand and redesign the house, which had been built with a much smaller family in mind. This time my father designed much of the interior to accommodate our large family, and everybody was pleased with the way it turned out. We all hoped the new home would give us a fresh start. After eight months living in four bedrooms at the Steeds’ property, we were finally able to stretch out and make the most of our new surroundings.

I shared the nursery on the main floor with my twin brothers and Brad. Our room was just across the hall from my mother’s, which was kitty-corner to Dad’s suite. Mother Audrey’s room was at the far end of the same hall. All three of the adults’ rooms had queen-sized beds. The living room now had carefully crafted floor-to-ceiling windows, and in the mornings the sun would fill the entire first floor, which Dad had finished in a lovely pale blond wood. Most of the bedrooms for the older kids were in the basement, and unlike the rest of the house, those rooms always felt dark and grim to me, even though there were some windows at grade level. The basement was also where Dad kept his hunting rifles and bows safely secured behind a panel inside an enormous walk-in pantry. The floor-to-ceiling shelves of this pantry were filled with home-canned food, enough to last us for six months. Many members of the FLDS had similar storage spaces, since we were taught that the end of the world was coming and storing food was one way to prepare. It could take several months once we’d settled back on earth after the destructions before we’d again be able to start planting and harvesting our own crops.

At first, living in the nursery room with my brothers was fun. I was born smack dab in the middle of the younger boys in my family and found myself stuck playing with them much of the time. There were two bunk beds, and we liked to jump back and forth from one to the other. We spent hours doing this or tying sheets across the two beds to make a hammock. As my brothers and I jumped around the room, my ankles would sometimes get caught in the hem of my long dress. Like me, my brothers had restrictions on what they could wear. In order to cover their church undergarments, they wore long-sleeved shirts and long pants, even in summertime. Our wild games made the boys hot and sweaty; they were constantly tugging at their collars in discomfort.