Deadly Vows Read online

  They appeared dumbstruck. Mormons are accustomed to questions about polygamy, which they view as a dark chapter in their church’s history, and mainstream Mormons not only don’t practice polygamy, but they are almost pathologically opposed to it. The discrepancy they were not prepared to discuss was that Smith said God had shown him that polygamy was necessary for salvation. Without plural marriage, he had said, there was no eternal life in the celestial kingdom—Mormons’ version of heaven. Each man had to have at least two wives “sealed” to him in order to progress through the plan of salvation, which they viewed as a teaching program for gods-in-training, who couldn’t possibly populate the worlds they would eventually be given to rule without multiple wives.

  Later, when Utah was seeking statehood, the federal government, in an attempt to avoid a “Mormon state,” outlawed polygamy and said Utah would never become a state as long as it tolerated polygamy. In a surprise move, the church’s then-prophet, Wilford Woodruff, announced that God had spoken to him and forbidden polygamy:

  “I, therefore, as President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, do hereby, in the most solemn manner, declare that...we are not teaching polygamy or plural marriage...and I deny that plural marriages have during that period been solemnized in our Temples.” (from The Manifesto, issued by Wilford Woodruff, 1890, later canonized as part of the church’s Standard Works and accepted as divine revelation)

  The move, politically savvy, had enabled Utah to attain statehood but it also created a giant rift in Mormonism, with some saying the church had become apostate, trying to change the will of God. Ultimately, that split led to the Fundamentalist LDS church, which still practices polygamy to this day in defiance of federal and state laws, and which has become infamous because of the excesses of “prophet” Warren Jeffs, who both married multiple underage girls and gave other underage girls to aging men in the church for them to marry.

  Many in the LDS church (mainstream Mormonism) are embarrassed by both the fundamentalist LDS offspring and its own polygamous past, seeking to distance themselves from plural marriage as much as possible. But the polygamy legacy also called into question the nature of the “revelations” that guided the church and provided a vector for me to challenge whether the missionaries had even fully considered who was right: Joseph Smith, the church’s founder, or Wilford Woodruff, the later “prophet” who rescinded the founder’s prophetic teaching. Both couldn’t be right, because Mormons also followed the Bible, which said the nature of salvation was unchanging.

  I pressed the matter further; this was where my actions triggered unintended consequences. Wanting to set them at ease that I wasn’t judging their religion because of its past, I said the fatal words: “I don’t have a problem with polygamy. Most of the patriarchs in the Bible were polygamous, so I’m not criticizing it. Polygamy is fine. I’m just wondering how it is you reconcile a belief in an unchanging God with such a clear change in what your prophet said was necessary for salvation.”

  Because polygamy had been declared necessary for salvation by the man who had founded the church, it presented a big problem for them when the church later said God had changed his mind. That was really the only reason I had brought polygamy up and it worked: the missionaries didn’t have an answer for me. They promised that they would ask higher-ups and return with a reply, but they never did.

  I didn’t think for even the tiniest moment that my words might touch off a chain reaction in Sean’s mind; I was focused on my misguided desire to “rescue” these good people from their religion. I’m not proud of it, and if I could, I would apologize to Mormons everywhere for my former prejudice against their religion. It was the height of arrogance to assume my religion was so superior to warrant that I “rescue” others from their own religions.

  But my words took up roost in Sean’s mind and, over the next several weeks, we had numerous academic conversations about polygamy, the gist of them being about how and why polygamy was discontinued in Christianity itself.

  We could find no line of demarcation. Polygamy just disappears from the Bible after the period of the patriarchs, with no explanation given. It briefly reappears during the time of the kings, with Solomon notoriously having 800 wives and concubines, some of whom he apparently never even met. But then, from the early kings period through the rest of the Bible, polygamy simply disappears and is never again practiced. Though the Bible never condemns the practice, the experiences of those who participated in it in the Bible are generally reported negatively.

  My grasp was that polygamy was based on the outmoded belief that women were the property of men, and therefore it had rightly been dropped when humanity largely came to the understanding that men and women were equals. In early biblical times, I contended, the more children you had, the wealthier you would become, because you would have a built-in free labor force to work the family farm, so it made sense to marry as many wives as possible to generate as many children as possible. Technology had eliminated the need for so many children, so the idea had been dropped. The matter was over in my mind but Sean kept thinking about it, researching it online and reaching out to non-Mormon polygamists he found online during his research.

  For him, polygamy solved several problems. It filled a gap between the miraculous lives of the Bible’s patriarchs and modern Christianity and it provided a solution to a problem that had bedeviled Sean his entire life: sexual attraction for women he wasn’t married to in the face of Bible restrictions forbidding him to act upon it. Why had God approved—even endorsed—polygamy in the Old Testament but now Christianity considered it disallowed? Sean found that the Bible had in fact never forbidden polygamy. If it had never been forbidden, in Sean’s mind, that meant it wasn’t a sin, and therefore he could—at least in the eyes of God—marry as many women as he wanted and not be askew from God’s commandments.

  Using a scripture that describes Jesus as a groom and all believers as brides, Sean even went so far as to say the Bible portrayed Jesus as a spiritual polygamist, because he was married to millions of believers.

  I didn’t share Sean’s intense interest in the subject and he stopped mentioning it to me. But in secret, he had already set his eyes on a second spouse and he had already begun pressuring his wife to comply with his desires, though at that point he was simply laying the groundwork for the demand he would later make. He went out of his way to “teach” her that polygamy was God’s plan. Using his classic collaborative style, he would point to a scripture and say, “Hmm. Isn’t that interesting?” and then let the listener—in this case, his young wife—discover what he had already planned for them to discover. Polygamy wasn’t in the Bible for the purpose of pleasing Sean; it was the way God wanted his “anointed” to live, just like the patriarchs—it was God’s plan that had been somehow lost and had fallen into disuse over the years.

  Sean’s wife was busy with the couple’s newborn son, vulnerable because pregnancy had made her feel fat and she knew that Sean hated fat women. As his plan to get her to comply advanced, he exploited her fears that he would leave her and take their son with him if she didn’t comply with “God’s will.”

  Chapter 10

  SECRET MARRIAGE

  After I moved back to Oklahoma, my salaried job with Morris Cerullo having turned into a more lucrative freelance gig, Sean began getting everyone accustomed to seeing Joy around, even finding her a job at the ministry with him and taking her with the family wherever they went.

  Joy told co-workers she had a boyfriend named Sean—but not that Sean, the one she rode with back and forth from work every day. That would be crazy! He was married! He and his wife had just taken her in because her mother couldn’t afford to pay the rent for both of them. They were simply being good Samaritans. There was nothing more.

  And people bought it.

  “It all seemed so innocent and nice,” Sean’s boss at the ministry said. “They took in this young girl who had no place to go. It looked like a nice, beautiful, Chri
stian thing to do.”

  “I hate every second of it,” Sean’s first wife told me one day when she was giving me a ride to the airport so I could return to Oklahoma. “I don’t believe in a polygamous lifestyle, but I love my husband and I’m not going to leave him.”

  Later, she felt comfortable sharing more details.

  “I was terrified he would take my son,” she told me when I asked why she had acquiesced. “I knew if I didn’t go along with it, he would take [my son].”

  That fear was a powerful motivator that Sean gladly exploited to force his first wife to let him marry Joy Risker, his new girlfriend.

  I didn’t know anything about it, but Sean and Joy had gotten “married” in a ceremony on the beach. To avoid trouble with the law, they signed no official marriage license but, in the eyes of God, Sean told his first wife and Joy—and later anyone who would listen—that Sean and Joy were just as married as Sean and his first wife were. At the time, however, the marriage had to remain their little secret. Sean and Joy were still working for Morris Cerullo and Sean was beginning to get some television airtime as one of Cerullo’s ministers.

  Because no one could imagine Sean taking a second wife while he was still married to the first, most people at the ministry who might have doubts about the arrangement just shrugged and went on about their lives. After all, Sean was just living the same stuff he was preaching as chaplain at the ministry. He was opening his home to someone who had no other place to go. He had gotten her a job and he was doing everything he could to make her life better. It was “loving thy neighbor,” just as the Bible had commanded. Almost everyone was fooled.

  Though there is no Bible prohibition against marrying more than one woman at a time, Sean was savvy enough to know that mainstream Christians would have violent reactions to the news that he was a polygamist. In my experience, he was right about that. Sean’s own mother, his chief cheerleader and promoter, told her son he was going to hell when she heard the news that he had taken another spouse in addition to his first wife. Every time someone found out, their reactions were universally negative, and they all went to the same place mentally: Sean wanted an excuse to have sex with women other than his first wife, so he found a loophole in Bible law and exploited it.

  Most people assumed he had started collecting wives to satisfy the wicked lusts of his flesh, not in response to a spiritual prompting by God. He was still working at churches across the country to raise money for India and other mission trips and he knew those doors would slam shut if his family situation came to light, so Sean’s polygamy was, by his own description, “in the closet.”

  Little did he know, the changes in him that appeared subtle to those of us who knew him well and saw him often were jarring to those who hadn’t seen him in a while, and his preaching gigs in holiness and fundamentalist churches were in danger of drying up even without the polygamy problem. The minister who had originally invited Sean to India wasn’t too sure he wanted Sean back anymore after what turned out to be Sean’s final trip there—and his reticence had nothing to do with polygamy.

  “He was inappropriate with some of the girls,” the minister told me. “Just paying them too much attention. He didn’t touch them or anything. But it did seem like he was treating people more like servants.”

  It was a stark contrast from the humble man willing to do anything to help that the minister had first encountered and invited to preach in India. This preacher had morphed into something more like a televangelist than a man hungry for intimacy with God. Sean had grown accustomed to the deference that televangelists receive from everyone around them, and that attitude showed through to the point that it offended the man whose invitation had touched off Sean’s zest for missionary evangelism. The shifts in Sean had finally leaked into what he viewed as his life’s calling. Sean might have found that his life changes were closing doors for him even when it wasn’t clear why. Accepting polygamy was only the most obvious outward sign of the changes that had turned Sean inside-out. He had pulled anchor and floated away from the foundation that had served him so well for two decades: he had almost imperceptibly abandoned the holiness of his grandmother and uncle and had embraced the relativistic morality of the West Coast televangelists he so wanted to imitate. And people were starting to notice.

  But in his mind, being discovered as a polygamist was still the greatest threat. He talked at great length in an e-mail to a polygamist friend about the dangers of “coming out of the closet” as polygamous. Of course, most of the legal danger was imagined; the “marriage” wasn’t official, so he wasn’t breaking any bigamy laws. Joy wasn’t telling anyone she was married, and she wasn’t filing her taxes as married, so they weren’t awry of the IRS.

  No, the danger Sean and his polygamist friends imagined so vividly was mostly in their minds. But that didn’t make them any less paranoid that they might be discovered.

  I had some inkling that Sean was starting to develop inappropriate feelings toward Joy because of an accidental discovery I made at his apartment. The first year that I flew back and forth to San Diego monthly for my meetings with Morris Cerullo, Sean offered to let me stay at his apartment overnight to save me the expense of renting hotel rooms when I was in San Diego. Though sleeping on couches has always bothered me, I accepted, because I’d always been very careful about spending money needlessly.

  On one of those trips, I nearly missed my deadline for having all my materials together for the meeting with Cerullo, so I called Sean before I left and asked if I could e-mail the unfinished documents to him and then complete them on his computer before I went to the meeting the next morning. I couldn’t use my laptop, because it had died. Sean readily agreed and after he and his wife had gone to bed—and Joy had gone to bed in her room, ostensibly as simply a needy soul they were helping out by giving her a place to stay, which was completely plausible—I sat down at Sean’s computer and began working.

  My way of writing is both feverish and disjointed. I can write very quickly for long stretches of time, but occasionally I need a brief distraction completely unrelated to the subject I’m writing about to clear my head and let me see the project from a new perspective when I start again. At about 1:30 A.M., I closed the document I was working on and rubbed my bleary eyes. On his computer’s desktop, I saw a document titled “novel idea,” so without thinking, I clicked on it. The document was a set of character outlines for a book Sean was working on, to my surprise.

  One character was titled “Beautiful, exotic woman in love triangle” and beside the title was a parenthetical: “(Joy).” I looked at it for a while, wondering what, if anything, the title could mean. It was clear that Sean considered Joy beautiful and exotic, but did that mean anything inappropriate? I decided probably not. Sean was probably attracted to Joy in some mild way but he was in love with his first wife, the mother of his son, and I didn’t think there was any way some character outline in a novel idea meant he was inappropriate toward her.

  Then I saw the next character: “Funny mooch,” and beside the words, I saw a parenthetical “(Leif).” My first reaction was to be annoyed but then I was just hurt. It was probably true, I thought, from Sean’s perspective. I had been incredibly poor for most of our friendship and now that I finally was making six figures, my habits from being poor had persisted. It was hard for me to reject the “mooch” label when I was sitting there, staying rent-free in his apartment, borrowing his computer to finish my work. I could afford another laptop, but I was using my friend’s because it was cheaper. Mooch? Yeah, it was probably true, and I didn’t think anything else about the character outlines, except that I occasionally would wince when I recalled that was how my friend saw me, at least part of the time—and that his opinion was justified by my own actions.

  After the meeting with Cerullo, I went home, still smarting from realizing the verity of the platitude “the truth hurts.” And I vowed that I would try to change my ways, with mixed success, I’m sure. But I also couldn’t shake
the feeling that maybe Sean was playing with fire by having a woman he was clearly attracted to living in his house.

  Sean admitted he was polygamous to me a few months later.

  Computers allow you to copy things from one place and paste them to another. When you copy something, the computer stores it in a special area called the clipboard, where it stays until something else is copied and replaces the original thing in the clipboard. When you go to paste something, the computer doesn’t care what is currently in the clipboard; it assumes you know what’s there and you want that thing pasted into whatever you’re doing.

  Sean and I e-mailed frequently at the time and the conversations were usually quite long. He would often copy small portions of my e-mails and paste them into his response so it was easier to keep track of what we were talking about as the e-mails got too long to be convenient to read. This time, Sean pasted the wrong thing at the bottom of one of our exchanges and I got a full accounting of a conversation he had been having with one of his polygamous friends, including a description of his wedding with Joy.

  At first, I had to re-read it to be sure it wasn’t an elaborate joke. But as I re-read the e-mail, I realized it wasn’t a joke; Sean had really entered into a polygamous marriage with Joy while he was still married to his first wife. Everything made sense now. But my anger was roused. My primary concern was for Sean’s first wife, who at that time always seemed to me like a person who needed to be looked after. She had married Sean with the expectation that, until death did they part, she would be his only wife.

  It wasn’t difficult for me to believe Sean had talked her into allowing him to marry a second wife; after all, it had been clear for years that Sean could talk his wife into anything because of the almost total control he exercised over every aspect of her life. I was angry for her. She had just given birth and was navigating one of the most insecure times in a woman’s life just as her husband had added a younger, more fit woman to the relationship. And then I was angry with Joy. How could she have done that to Sean’s first wife, who had taken her into her home? My anger with Joy was short-lived, however, after I realized she was still basically a child and had no idea of the repercussions of her actions.