Flora's War

Getting out, some say, is even harder to do. Almost all of Short Creek Valley's residents are members of a fundamentalist Mormon church that controls how they live and where they believe they'll go after they die. As a key tenet of its faith, and a means of control, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints enforces the practice of polygamy, marrying off girls as young as 15 to adult males for whom multiple, or plural, wives are considered a passport to salvation.

Polygamy is illegal in every state and has been condemned for more than 100 years by the mainstream Mormon Church. But the fundamentalist church here has gone largely undisturbed by law enforcement for 50 years, growing into the largest concentration of polygamists in the nation, a theocracy of more than 5,800 people now ruled from a secure Hildale compound by Prophet Warren Jeffs, who teaches: "A man can go with his wives to be a god in his own right. No man can become a god unless he has more wives than one."

Jessop grew up in Hildale, one of 28 children whom her polygamous father had with the first two of his three wives. At 16, she became one of the few teenage girls to escape the church, running away after marrying a cousin. Now 35, this wiry, waif-like woman lives 350 miles from Colorado City with her second husband, a former Marine, and two teenage daughters in a scruffy Phoenix home. But she has not left the church far behind. In fact, she devotes almost every waking moment to exposing the church as a hotbed of child abuse and helping the community's girls and women escape from the polygamous life she fled. "This is not a religion," she said of the church on a recent TV news show. "This is terrorism."

Frustrated by a failed attempt to prevent her teenage sister Ruby from having to marry an older man, Jessop founded Help the Child Brides, which provides aid to "victims of polygamy." She also is executive director of the Los Angeles-based Child Protection Project. She labored in relative obscurity until last January, when with a Phoenix television news crew along for the ride, she drove from Phoenix to a "safe house" near Colorado City and picked up two teenagers, Fawn Holm and Fawn Broadbent, who had run away together from their church families.