Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith Read online

  The girl reported to the police that immediately after her sixteenth birthday, her father, a businessman named John Kingston, had pulled her out of high school and forced her to become the fifteenth wife of his brother, David Kingston—the girl's thirty-two-year-old uncle. Both Kingston brothers are among fifteen hundred members of the so-called Kingston Clan, a Mormon Fundamentalist sect based in Salt Lake County, officially known as the Latter Day Church of Christ, led by patriarch Paul Kingston, a lawyer who is married to at least twenty-five women and has sired some two hundred offspring.

  Twice the girl tried to run away from David, but she was caught each time. After the second escape, she sought refuge with her mother—who promptly turned the girl over to her father. John Kingston then drove her to a remote ranch near the Utah-Idaho border that the Kingstons used as a “reeducation camp” for wayward wives and disobedient children. He took the girl into a barn, pulled his belt off, and used it to whip her savagely across the buttocks, thighs, and lower back, inflicting hideous injuries. The girl later told a judge that before the beating began, her father warned her that “he was going to give me ten licks for every wrongdoing.”

  After whipping his daughter, John Kingston departed, at which point the girl fled from the ranch and limped five miles along a dirt road until she reached a gas station, where she called the police. Both John and David Kingston were arrested and subsequently convicted in highly publicized trials. John was found guilty of child abuse and locked up in the county jail for twenty-eight weeks; David was sentenced to ten years in prison for incest and unlawful sexual conduct. And Mormon Fundamentalists all over the West immediately found themselves uncomfortably back in the public eye.

  But if the Kingston convictions made the fundamentalists in Colorado City edgy, they became considerably more nervous in April 2000 when another Utah polygamist, Thomas Arthur Green, was charged with bigamy and first-degree felony rape of a child. The Kingston trial, although front-page news in Utah, didn't make a big splash elsewhere. The state's prosecution of Green turned into a public spectacle, largely of Green's own creation, and his plural marriages were featured in every major media outlet from Seattle to Miami.

  Fifty-four-year-old Tom Green is a fat, bearded man with a receding hairline, thirty-two children, and five wives (he has married at least ten different women all told, but the other five have left him). The oldest of his current wives is twenty-two years younger than he is; the youngest is twenty-nine years younger. Home for the gigantic Green family has long been a collection of decrepit trailers plunked down on ten acres of desert in Juab County's desolate Snake Valley, way out toward the Nevada line, a hundred miles from the nearest paved road. Green has modestly christened this little kingdom Greenhaven.

  Unlike most polygamists, who conscientiously avoid outside scrutiny, Green has an insatiable thirst for publicity. He and his wives have opened their lives to numerous print journalists and have eagerly appeared on such television shows as Judge Judy, Jerry Springer, Queen Latifah, Sally Jessy Rafael, and Dateline NBC. They decided to seek this media attention, Green explained in a public statement, after he woke up one morning and “heard a voice say to me, ‘Don't hide your light under a bushel, but let your light so shine before men so that they will see your good words and glorify your Father in Heaven.' I told my wives what I had heard and that I understood from it that God wanted us to be an example that plural marriage can work. . . . We are not ashamed of our beliefs, and we are certainly not ashamed of our family. . . . We just want people to realize that polygamists are not a threat, we are not fanatics, we are not criminals.”

  Unfortunately for Tom Green, Juab County attorney David O. Leavitt—the younger brother of Utah governor Mike Leavitt—happened to turn on his television one night in 1999 to see Green boasting of his young wives on Dateline NBC. Although Leavitt had long known about Green's polygamous colony out in the west desert, until he saw Green holding forth in prime time, he'd had no intention of prosecuting him. As a child Leavitt had had friends who were the offspring of polygamists, and his own great-grandfather had married a plurality of wives. In 1993, when Leavitt was fresh out of law school and working as a public defender, he'd even defended a polygamist, and won, by arguing that the religious freedom guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution overruled state laws criminalizing plural marriage.

  But then Leavitt saw Green bragging on national television that he had married all of his current wives when they were mere girls. One of them was only thirteen when he, at age thirty-seven, got her pregnant. According to Utah statute, when an adult male has sex with a thirteen-year-old child, a first-degree felony has been committed. “Tom Green at first blush appeared to be someone that no one should bother,” Leavitt explained to reporter Pauline Arrillaga of the Associated Press in November 2000. “But this is a man who has taken thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children, deprived them of any education, married them, impregnated them, required the state to pay the bill, and has raped a thirteen-year-old girl.” Five months after the Dateline show aired, Leavitt filed charges against Green, who was supporting his oversize family by drawing welfare checks.

  Investigators from the Utah attorney general's office have documented that between 1989 and 1999, Tom Green and his dependents received more than $647,000 in state and federal assistance, including $203,000 in food stamps and nearly $300,000 in medical and dental expenses. These same investigators estimate that had they been granted complete access to pertinent government files as far back as 1985, when Green began his polygamous lifestyle, they would have been able to show that Green received well over $1 million in welfare.

  Linda Kunz Green, now twenty-eight, was thirteen when she married Tom Green. She insists that he has done nothing wrong, that she is no victim. She says that she enjoys being a plural wife and points out that getting married to Green was her idea. Leavitt counters that Linda is simply a victim of what psychologists call the Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages sympathize with, and later defend, their captors. “The ability to choose is an ability that Linda Green never had,” Leavitt argues.

  At the time Linda Kunz married Green, her mother, Beth Cooke, was also married to Green, although Cooke has since left him. (Seven of the ten women Green has married, and all of his current wives, were the children of his other wives when he married them; he has made a habit of marrying his stepdaughters, all of whom were sixteen or younger when he brought them into his matrimonial bed.) Cooke was raised in Short Creek, the product of a polygamous family. In 1953, when she was nine years old, she watched Mohave County sheriff's deputies arrest her father and thirty other men in the Short Creek raid. Three years later, at the age of twelve, Cooke was married off to her stepfather, Warren “Elmer” Johnson, the brother of Prophet LeRoy Johnson. Cooke became one of seven women married to Elmer.

  In 1984, after Elmer Johnson had died and the husband who succeeded him had departed, Cooke and her two daughters were introduced to Green at a Sunday school meeting. “I paid particular attention to him,” Cooke told freelance journalist Carolyn Campbell, “because my friend said she had met Tom Green and he was the ugliest man she had ever met.” Cooke, who is four years older than Green, thought otherwise. She found him handsome, as well as highly intelligent. She was impressed with the way he took charge of the meeting. He asked her out on a date, during which he announced that he was going to marry her—a prophecy that was fulfilled in short order. The newlyweds honeymooned in Bountiful, Canada, a colony of UEP polygamists in southeastern British Columbia.

  By 1985 Cooke couldn't help noticing that her thirteen-year-old daughter, Linda Kunz, was “showing feelings” toward Green. Linda liked to sit in her stepfather's lap and would “hang on to him for the longest time.” She talked about him constantly, and eventually asked Cooke if she could marry Green. Cooke consented, and in January 1986, Linda married Tom Green in Los Molinos, Mexico, a polygamous outpost on the Baja Peninsula. “I was happy for my daughter because she was happy and it was what she wante
d,” Cooke said afterward. “I was happy to share her with a man I loved very dearly and thought was a very special person.” Linda Kunz Green was pregnant with Green's child before her fourteenth birthday.

  Even though Beth Cooke left Green, she defends her daughter's marriage to him. “Fifteen years later,” she said in a 2001 interview with journalist Campbell, “I feel that time has proven it was a good decision. . . . They are prosecuting Tom based on nineteenth-century morals. Now, who cares who sleeps with who? They are all consenting adults. Right now, there are lesbians, homosexuals and single people living together all the time. There are married people living with others who they are not married to.”

  David Leavitt doesn't consider Green's plural marriages a matter of religious freedom or a harmless sexual relationship between consenting adults. Leavitt views Green as a pedophile, plain and simple. “He preyed on little girls who, from the cradle, knew no other life but polygamy,” Leavitt told Holly Mullen, a reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, in August 2002. “He robbed them of their childhood. When I looked at this picture I realized it was about five women, all of them given in marriage by their mothers, all of them raised by their fathers to marry as children. They are victims of pedophiles, and they are victims of the state of Utah, which turned its back on polygamy for sixty years.”

  Leavitt's case proved convincing in court. In August 2001, Green was convicted of four counts of bigamy and one charge of criminal nonsupport of his family. He was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay $78,868 in restitution.

  A year later, Leavitt put Green on trial again, for the additional—and considerably more serious—charge of having sex with Linda Kunz when she was thirteen, a crime that could have put him in prison for life. This time around, however, Green got lucky: although he was found guilty of first-degree felony child rape, the judge gave him the minimum sentence, five years to life, to be served concurrently with his previous five-year sentence for bigamy.

  The relatively soft punishment riled many Utahans. Two days after Green was sentenced, an editorial in the Spectrum—the daily paper of St. George, Utah, an LDS stronghold less than forty miles from Colorado City—opined,

  Taxpayers and—most importantly—children lost during Tuesday's sentencing hearing for now-infamous polygamist Tom Green. . . .

  In some polygamist relationships, particularly those involving young girls, there is a bit of brainwashing that goes on both before and after the illegal “marriages.” Girls are led to believe that such a relationship is one way to salvation. Then, they typically are taken as wives by men twice their ages.

  Without the context of spiritual marriage, there would be no debate that these are acts of pedophilia. . . .

  A man committed what amounts to statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl and, basically, won't serve any time for it.

  David Leavitt was also dismayed by Green's lenient sentence. “People in the state of Utah,” he proclaimed, “simply do not understand, and have not understood for fifty years, the devastating effect that the practice of polygamy has on young girls in our society.” But Leavitt went on to say that a change in how polygamy was regarded by Utahans had begun: “The ball is rolling. Time will demonstrate that this society will understand that the practice of polygamy is abusive to children, is abusive to women, is abusive to society.”

  Leavitt prevailed against Green in court, and he won plaudits from the LDS Church and establishment editorial writers. But like Arizona governor Howard Pyle, who was voted out of office for masterminding the Short Creek raid of 1953, Leavitt discovered that his anti-polygamy crusade was not popular with the people. In November 2002, the voters of Juab County responded to the conviction of Tom Green by giving the boot to prosecutor David Leavitt.

  Ever since the conviction of the Kingstons—even before Tom Green was first charged with bigamy—Mormon Fundamentalists have received support from the American Civil Liberties Union and gay-rights activists in advancing their claims of religious persecution. It has been an especially curious, and uncomfortable, coalition: FLDS doctrine proclaims that sodomy and homosexuality are egregious crimes against God and nature, punishable by death—yet gays and polygamists have joined forces to keep the government out of the bedroom. This partnership is made even more incongruous by the fact that on the other side of the issue, radical feminists have allied themselves with the resolutely antifeminist LDS Church to lobby for aggressive prosecution of polygamists.*

  As they have been forced out of the shadows into the probing glare of the news media, polygamists continue to insist that they are simply trying to live in accordance with their deeply held, constitutionally protected beliefs. “What goes on in our homes here is nobody's business,” asserts Sam Roundy, Colorado City's polygamous police chief. “We're not infringing on anybody. Don't we have the right to practice our religion?”

  But polygamy is a crime in all fifty states, as well as in Canada, and police officers are sworn to uphold the law. This point became problematic for Chief Roundy on February 6, 2002, when Ruth Stubbs—the third wife of one of his police officers—fled Colorado City with her two children and appeared on the evening news in Phoenix, complaining that she had been beaten by her husband, Rodney Holm, and that polygamy is intrinsically abusive.

  Ruth, nineteen when she left Holm and visibly pregnant with her third child, had been pulled out of school following the sixth grade. Immediately after her sixteenth birthday, she was summoned to a meeting with Uncle Rulon and his son Warren Jeffs, who informed her that in twenty-four hours she would be marrying Officer Holm—a handsome, taciturn man who was exactly twice as old as she was. Ruth had wanted to marry someone else, a boy much closer to her own age. When she balked at becoming Holm's plural wife and asked for some time to consider her options, her older sister Suzie Stubbs—one of the two women already married to the police officer—called Ruth “an asshole for doing that to Rod.” Suzie leaned hard on Ruth to become Holm's third wife, until Ruth finally caved in and married him.

  “They told me who to marry,” Ruth asserted after she escaped from Colorado City. “I think women should have the right to say ‘yes' or ‘no'—to have the right to say what's going on in their lives.” Not only had Holm broken the law by marrying three women, he had committed statutory rape—a felony in both Utah and Arizona—by having sexual intercourse with Ruth when she was sixteen.

  To date, the Colorado City police department has not disciplined Officer Holm, who is acting like the aggrieved party in this dispute. Assisted by UEP attorneys, Rodney Holm is presently trying to obtain legal custody of Ruth's children so they can be “raised with FLDS values,” in the company of his other eighteen kids.

  In October 2002, the Utah attorney general's office charged Holm with felony bigamy and three counts of unlawful sex for his relationship with Ruth. The state's case against Rodney Holm is crippled, however, by a rather significant impediment: in November 2002, Ruth Stubbs disappeared after submitting a signed, handwritten note to the court stating that she did not want Holm to “go to jail!” and refusing to testify against him. As an editorial in the St. George daily Spectrum noted, “This turn in an already odd case shows how complicated it is to prosecute the members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who engage in unlawful activities.”

  Before she vanished, Ruth Stubbs was living in the Phoenix home of her aunt Pennie Peterson, who ran away from Colorado City herself at the age of fourteen, when the prophet commanded her to become the fifth wife of a forty-eight-year-old man. Sixteen years later, Peterson remains very bitter about the UEP's polygamous culture. “Polygamists say they are being attacked because of their religion,” she told the Salt Lake Tribune, “but where in the Constitution does it say that it's OK to molest and impregnate young girls?”

  The mayor of Colorado City, Dan Barlow, considers apostates like Pennie Petersen to be both misinformed and motivated by revenge, and views the prosecution of Rodney Holm as government harassment of
an unorthodox but honorable religious minority. To Barlow, the Holm case is disturbingly reminiscent of the 1953 raid on Short Creek. “They're coming after us again,” he complains, “and they're even using the same language.”

  But there is a documented pattern of sexual abuse in Colorado City that severely undermines Mayor Barlow's attempt to frame the issue as one of religious persecution. In April 2002, for instance, the mayor's own son and namesake, Dan Barlow Jr., was charged with molesting five of his daughters over a period of many years. The town closed ranks around him, and his father, the mayor, went before the court and pleaded for leniency. In the end, four of the daughters refused to testify against Barlow. He got off with a suspended sentence after agreeing to sign a statement that said, “I made a mistake. I want to make it right. I am so sorry. I want to be a good person. I have raised a good family, been a good father. I love them all, a fatherly love.”

  “Nobody who knows anything about this religion is surprised Dan didn't go to jail,” says Debbie Palmer, a former member of the Canadian branch of the religion, barely able to contain her disgust. “Do you have any idea what kind of pressure those poor Barlow girls must have been under not to testify against their father, the mayor's son? I'm sure the prophet told them that if they said one word, they were going straight to hell. When I was abused by prominent members of the religion, that's what I was told, every time.”

  Folks in Colorado City pay little heed to such blasphemous talk from the likes of Palmer. They're convinced that Satan, along with nefarious Gentiles and apostates who've fallen under his influence, are wholly to blame for the town's problems. “Satan has been jealous of God since day one,” a young, bright-eyed, very devoted member of the priesthood explains after first looking nervously up and down the dry bed of Short Creek, then looking up and down the wash once more, to make sure nobody is around to see him talking to a Gentile writer. “Satan wants to rule. He doesn't want God to rule, so he tricks weak people into apostatizing and going over to the other side.” This young man, along with most of the other residents of Colorado City, believes that in very short order the world will be thoroughly cleansed of Satan's minions—apostates, mainline Mormons, and Gentile writers alike—because the prophet has told him so many times in the past few years.