If it were up to Joseph and Lori Jessop, they would be back at their Yearning for Zion polygamist ranch in West Texas, not living in a vast San Antonio home with a hot tub and leather sofas.
Their three blond children clamoring around them — springing off trampolines and needing noses wiped and coats zipped up over matching outfits — mask the despair the Jessops say they feel over their detachment.
“The loneliness, you can’t imagine it,” Lori Jessop says. “This is not the life we chose.”
Back on the land the couple left after about 440 children were removed from their parents in a state raid that the courts ultimately struck down, another sect family is still healing. Edson Jessop and his wife, Zavenda Young, say their four youngsters won’t sleep alone and think every motorhome on the horizon is a bus coming to take them away. “We are very much a disrupted community,” Edson Jessop says.
Nearly nine months after the raid, families upended by the largest-ever U.S. child-welfare case cling to their culture.
Some members of the Utah-based Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints hunker down in suburban subdivisions across Texas, struggling to maintain piety and an austere lifestyle in the face of influences they consider immoral. Others have moved back to the ranch, trying to restore sanctity and self- sufficiency to their once-thriving community.
Members of the breakaway Mormon sect say the state jumped to conclusions based on religious bigotry, sweeping into their sacred temple and snatching healthy, happy children based on a hoax call and bad information from their critics. Child Protective Services says that it was required by law to check out the initial tip — purportedly a distraught sect teenager’s plea for help to a women’s shelter. It is now suspected of being from a Colorado woman with a history of filing false police reports.
Agency leaders defend the mass removal as necessary so caseworkers could investigate their suspicions. State courts ultimately ruled, though, that Child Protective Services removed too many children without enough proof each was at risk of abuse, especially those who hadn’t reached puberty.
CPS recently capped its nine-month investigation with a report saying a dozen girls younger than 16 were “spiritually united” to adult men in the past four years. Of the 12, seven gave birth, CPS said. And nearly two-thirds of sect families investigated had children who were abused or neglected, mostly through inappropriate exposure to underage marriages.
Sect parents, though deeply affected, hardly call the shots in what has become a protracted legal and public-relations battle between their church and Texas. Some say living at the ranch still is too risky. Others, confident that CPS can’t convince the public that the sect’s youth should be foster children, have urged all sect members to return.
Four recently agreed to talk.
Joseph and Lori Jessop admit they were among the luckiest parents at the ranch.
The gentle, well-spoken couple (he’s 27, she’s 26) say they have had a monogamous marriage so far, putting them on safer legal footing than many of their friends. Although other mothers were separated from their children, attorneys succeeded in keeping Lori Jessop with her infant.
Many families remain under court-ordered monitoring for months, but the Jessops say they were the first family to be “nonsuited,” or dropped from court oversight, after they moved to San Antonio.
Still, the Jessops complain of unwanted outside influences on their children. The tots have asked questions about scantily clad women, cigarette smoke, rock music and road rage. They have picked up the command “Mine.” And they’ve described — in detail — the images they were shown in custody to determine whether they had been victims of sexual abuse.
“It’s all about exposure,” Lori says, a flash of anger breaking on her face. “You walk into a store, and it’s all right in front of them.”
At the sect’s 1,700-acre ranch, only a third of the roughly 440 children who lived there last spring are back.
The indictments of sect men have unsettled many — though they pray judges and juries will “do the right thing,” says Zavenda Young, 44.
Edson Jessop says his children have nightmares and want to sleep with their parents because of the raid and nearly six weeks spent in foster care. Two of the children stayed in Waco; the other two in Houston.
