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  But Muslims, particularly foreign Muslims, support polygamy. So Sean found himself with odd allies: Muslims and homosexuals, both of whom had previously found themselves on the business end of his writing and both frowned upon by every other aspect of his religion.

  One of the things that made Sean so effective at evangelism was the way he could immerse himself in the culture of the group he was trying to reach. Islam was no different. Sean read up on Islam and its adherents and began developing friendships with Arabic people online with whom he could discuss polygamy.

  “The Quran limits you to four wives,” he told me after he and I had reconciled. “I don’t support the limit, but it also says if a wife is disobedient, you are to beat her soundly on a couch.” He laughed. “I’m pretty sure Gloria Steinem [a leader in the feminist movement] would have a problem with that.”

  As it was everywhere Sean appeared, his brilliant mind threw open doors for him in the Christian polygamist movement. Almost as soon as he started studying the subject, Sean became an expert on it, to the point that many who had been involved with it for years began coming to him for wisdom and advice. That pattern that had established itself when Sean was a twenty-one-year-old pastor, where older and more experienced people sought him out for spiritual guidance and leadership, had continued at the Cerullo ministry—and now, finally, into his latest venture: polygamy.

  Because polygamy is illegal, paranoia permeates the ranks of “the movement,” as Sean called it, even though Christian polygamists do not actually break anti-polygamy laws, since they don’t actually marry their plural wives in the eyes of the law. As far as the law was concerned, Sean had one wife and Joy was his live-in girlfriend, with whom he had two children. But Sean considered them both wives in the eyes of God and that’s where the paranoia about being caught as a polygamist stemmed from.

  Christian polygamists are intensely secretive and suspicious of outsiders. In their minds, the government is just looking for reasons to swoop in and start arresting people for daring to marry more than one person. Fear of discovery leads many to take extreme measures to hide their involvement; Sean was no exception. As he dug his way into the community, mostly online, he took on two aliases: Sulimon and Barclay. The first, he told me, was an Arabic translation of Solomon, the biblical king infamous for having eight hundred wives and concubines; the second is Sean’s middle name.

  Adopting those aliases, Sean took on the persona of wise sage, doling out practical and spiritual advice—two things that had always been his strengths—to those struggling with “the lifestyle,” which called itself by several names, the most prominent of which were Christian Polygamy and Patriarchal Christianity. Sean favored the latter. His advice was almost always insightful and practical. Sean had a knack for knowing how to solve complex problems with what seemed to be minimal effort and maximum efficiency.

  Patriarchals were adamant about the structure of their belief about what they considered to be an inaccurate and borderline distasteful term for their lifestyle: polygamy, which means “often married.” That word, to them, was a huge umbrella that covered what they believed but not accurately enough to define it. The term “polygamy” was offensive to some Patriarchals, because the umbrella was too large.

  “I’m not a polygamist,” Sean once announced to me. “I’m a polygynist.”

  Polygyny is a marriage between one man and multiple women, an arrangement the Patriarchals believe is created and approved by the Bible. Polyandry, however (marriage between one woman and multiple men) is believed to be an abomination, because there is no precedent for it recorded in the Bible. Patriarchals speak vehemently against such practice as usurpation of God’s plan for man at the very least and open rebellion against God at the worst. Men were the spiritual leaders, not women. It was an abomination to suggest that a woman could marry multiple men.

  Sean related a story he had read about a woman in India who had several husbands.

  “It’s disgusting,” he said. Lost on him was the irony of criticizing anyone’s marital arrangements in the face of his own, which were anything but mainstream. Polyandry found itself derided by almost all of the Patriarchals, though, none of whom seemed to see the hypocrisy in opposing one kind of plural marriage over another based on interpretation of a religious text.

  Sean’s nature would not let him commit halfway. He threw himself into polygamy the way he did with evangelism, India and working for televangelists. He became a leader in the far-flung and secretive community, molding his belief system to fit the strictures of the lifestyle he had adopted as his own.

  Sean said that he had believed in polygamy since he was eight years old, though no one who knew him could remember him talking about it until he met and “married” Joy.

  After Sean and I began to grow closer again, he talked me into becoming an impartial moderator on a polygamist message board. As a non-polygamist, he said, I could be counted on to administer the board fairly and make sure it stayed sane and civil—two things that were becoming increasingly rare in online discussion forums of all stripes.

  On the board, because I had to read every post, I started noticing a forbidden possibility generating a lot of debate: what if a man’s wives form a sexual relationship with each other?

  Sean’s position on the question was that it was perfectly fine, though he stressed that it wasn’t something that happened—or would ever happen—in his family. That said, he added, the Bible’s strictures against homosexuality apply only to men; women are free to have sex with each other as long as they don’t stop having sex with their husbands. It was a view that initially generated controversy but ultimately gathered a following. Sean professed to be not that interested in the debate but he spoke about it almost daily.

  The posters on the board, about 70 percent male, showed they mostly enjoyed the idea that their wives could get together sexually without drawing the ire of God. Many of the men were religious polygynists such as Sean, but as with anything on the Internet, others joined in the fray and made their presence known by posting questionable comments about such female unions. Sean asked me to lock the discussion after it became clear that it would descend into fantasy. But it highlighted that most on the board favored the “many women, one man” model of polygamy, and that such a model was so heavily in favor of men over women that it was actually taken seriously that female homosexuality was acceptable in God’s eyes (as long as they continued servicing their husbands, too), whereas male homosexuality was not.

  The homophobia and misogyny inherent in such a belief escaped all of them.

  The group also actively shunned polyandrists and those who practiced what they called polyamory—love between many, regardless of which gender was in the majority in the relationship—because there were no strictures on the makeup of the relationship. They also spoke against “free love” and wife-swapping or group sex, though some of the board’s members didn’t see the problem with such arrangements.

  “This is a spiritual arrangement,” Sean said as “Barclay” on the board. “Group sex is the same thing as adultery and it has no place in Patriarchy.”

  In the Patriarchal way of thinking, “poly” could only mean one thing in the eyes of God: one man, many women. In that structure, a family could truly be a microcosm of the church itself, they said: a man, who is the head or “priest” of the house, then the women and children, who were his congregation. The Patriarchals (and fundamentalist Pentecostals, too, for that matter) take the man’s “priesthood” in his family seriously. The structure of religion goes like this, from top to bottom: God the Father, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, pastor, man, wife, child. The Holy Spirit isn’t ranked beneath Jesus or the Father, because they are all believed to be one. It is listed closer to the pastor and the man because Pentecostals believe the Holy Spirit is the manifestation of God in humans, meaning it is God’s presence on earth.

  Though they would either deny it or profess confusion at the concept, Patriarchals are dispen
sationalists, meaning they believe God had represented himself to man in three dispensations: Father in the Old Testament, Son in the New Testament and the Holy Spirit since then. The structure of the family hasn’t changed, and to them it is the most important part of the foundation of the church itself, where “church” doesn’t refer to the building in which they meet, but to the combination of all believers into one composite group. It is that group that Pentecostals and Patriarchals alike refer to when they say “the church.” And that church does not stand a chance, in their minds, without the proper understanding and focus on the family, the smallest but most important component in the hierarchy.

  In his personas as Sulimon and Barclay, Sean hammered away at the importance of getting a true understanding of the nature of the family, and “family” became almost a sacred word. Real men, he said, would all eventually end up being polygynists, because they owed it to the women who needed their leadership and guidance. Lots of men would never have multiple wives, he said, because they weren’t “real men,” and couldn’t be trusted to lead their women properly. It was a profoundly and deeply misogynistic view, but Sean did not see it that way and would deny holding misogynistic views unequivocally. Women, he would say, need men, not because men were superior (though he would profess that in private), but because God had structured it that way just as he had structured nature that way. Dog packs needed a pack leader; that’s just the way it was. He ignored the fact that some dog packs are led by females, not males.

  In Sean’s mind, a woman’s weakness was caused by estrogen. Because the same chemical that makes women more curvy and feminine than men also can sometimes intensify emotions, Sean believed women were unable to think rationally enough to be leaders. Their emotions, he said, clouded their decision making, and he took great pains to describe how women argued using inductive, not deductive, logic. The superior deductive logic, Sean said, was based on a foundation of facts—one fact logically led to another, and a person could follow the bread crumbs of those facts to reach a logical conclusion. Inductive reasoning, he said, was based more on feelings and personal experiences; someone had noticed something in the past, and using that experience as a foundation, they would reach a conclusion that might not be true because their past experience was subjective and possibly non-repeatable.

  Women, he maintained, were hopeless inductive reasoners. Though statistics suggest men and women use both types of logic equally, Sean didn’t care. Ironically, it was his experiences with women that had convinced him his point of view was correct. As inductive reasoners who tended to let emotions cloud their judgment, women needed a dispassionate man as a leader, he said. And in Sean, they found the perfect dispassionate leader, because every decision was based on reasoning and meticulous planning. He refused to let emotions enter into anything he did or planned.

  Most men, he said, succumbed to their weaker natures, allowing women to manipulate and control them, and those men did not deserve even one wife, he said, much less multiple wives. It was only the true man of God who had opened himself to the true nature of a man as handed down by God who deserved multiple wives, and the wives of such a man were incredibly blessed to be with a true “priesthood” man.

  He understood that some women would find his theology offensive, and he played up that angle as best he could.

  He started writing a book, tentatively titled “How to Be a Male Chauvinist—and Make Women Like It,” in which he proclaimed: “I know I will be termed misogynistic for my views. If I had ever allowed myself to be moved by such feminist propaganda, I would have already lost myself. I am a man who can only be loved by women who love manhood.”

  “Oh, that book title,” said Tara Walzel, a photographer at Morris Cerullo World Evangelism. “That title was so annoying. I think he did it just to irritate me.”

  Though Sean stressed that polygyny wasn’t for everyone, secretly he confided that men could never reach their true potential until they fulfilled God’s original plan for them—and the women they married couldn’t either. He believed he had discovered a long-lost secret to raising better families and fulfilling God’s plan for mankind, and he committed himself wholeheartedly to making sure the secret didn’t stay lost any longer.

  By that time, Sean was getting more and more comfortable with letting people know his “secret,” too.

  “We were not hiding the fact that we were engaged in plural marriage from anyone,” he would later say. But, while he was becoming more relaxed, the idea that he wasn’t hiding the structure of his marriage from anyone still wasn’t entirely true.

  “Hardly anyone knew his marriage arrangement,” said Victoria Mack, a book editor at the tech publishing company that Sean worked for. “I think, ‘God, might I have been the only one?’ I might have been. He didn’t tell a lot of people, so I have often wondered why he would tell me. I don’t know. He said he couldn’t think of anything more disgusting than for two men to be together, but two women seemed natural.”

  Sean had discussed his polygamy—and the debate over whether women could be with each other sexually—with Victoria on a long trip they took together to Florida for a business conference.

  “The way he approached this multiple wives thing was a total crock of shit,” she said. “I asked him whether he was a Mormon and he said his religion didn’t follow any known philosophy.”

  That was definitely a big change for a man who had long preached vehemently that everyone needs to submit to a higher authority in religion so that no one runs off the deep end.

  “Pride in self-sufficiency is a demon,” he had preached early on. “It makes you feel like you can stand on your own. It will tear you down, it will destroy your vision, and the word of God says where there is no vision, the people perish. We have got to get some perish prevention. When someone begins to think they’re self-sufficient and they don’t need someone teaching them, they’re close to the edge. There is nothing that can replace a church, that can replace a group of people getting together. The Bible says we need a church.”

  Eight years later that conviction had left him, at least in practice, and Sean was on his own, submitted spiritually to a man he rarely ever saw in person, twisting his formerly relatively orthodox fundamentalist religion to fit his new lifestyle and as if fulfilling his own prophecy, Sean’s morality began to float adrift.

  Victoria had a rare opportunity to interact with both wives at a Christmas party, where changes in Sean’s first wife had become apparent, too. Gone was the happy girl he had married when she was still a teenager, replaced by a dour, dutiful housewife.

  “Everybody there was Joy’s friend,” she said. “I tried to be friendly with Sean’s first wife, but she just wouldn’t warm up to me. She was an automaton. She was walking around, picking up empty glasses, filling up bowls of nuts, acting like a hired servant. She wasn’t chatting with anybody. But Joy was all friendly and bubbly and happy to finally meet me. She came bouncing out the door when I first arrived; I hadn’t even gotten into the house. Boing, boing, boing, bouncy as can be, bounding out the door. She was so cute.”

  Even as Sean grew more comfortable being known by a select few as a polygamist, Sulimon/Barclay continually earned more and more respect in the polygamist community for his incisive understanding of the Bible, his everyman way of explaining complex concepts and the unassailable moral conviction that had made him such a powerful and in-demand preacher when he was barely into his twenties. Divorce, he said, was the sign of a weak man who didn’t know how to lead his women. It was for men who didn’t deserve to have even the wife they had, and ultimately, it proved they were unworthy of receiving the fullness of the blessings of plural marriage.

  So it was a quandary when Joy started making intimations that she wasn’t happy and that at some point in the future, it wasn’t impossible to imagine walking away from the marriage. Sulimon, the wise and respected leader of so many polygamists, couldn’t afford to have his junior wife leaving him and exposing any weakness in
his God-given leadership skills.

  “On our way home after the conference, he confided, ‘This isn’t working out. She needs to leave, because she’s not doing what she’s supposed to be doing.’ It was September of 2003,” Victoria remembered. She also related his dissatisfaction. “It was a long trip, like eight hours of us sitting next to each other talking. He was saying then that things weren’t going well and something was going to have to change when he got back.”

  But because Sean was so known for being Sulimon/Barclay, the spiritual leader who preached that divorce was serial monogamy for which polygamy was the cure, Joy couldn’t simply be kicked to the curb; she had to come to some other end.

  On that trip he shared more with Victoria. “We talked about a lot of things. Everything, really,” she said. “That’s when he talked to me about watching crime shows and how hard it must be to try to get away with something. It struck me as weird, but nothing I could put my finger on. We had tons of time to talk about a lot of things, so it never really stuck out until later, but it was weird. Something felt off about it.”

  Chapter 12

  THE PERFECT MURDER

  “We need to write a book together,” Sean said to me over the phone. It was the spring of 2003 and our friendship, which had been strained by his polygamy and my reaction to it, had just begun to heal.

  Since my apology, Sean, Joy and I had been bantering back and forth on a blog I hosted; even his first wife got in a word or two but not nearly as many as Joy, who was much more outgoing and opinionated. She seemed too worldly for her age, completely self-assured and comfortable with who she was.

  That said, Joy could still act like a little girl at times.

  “I love hip-hop but not gangster rap or anything that degrades women,” she wrote on “Joy’s New Millennium Page,” an extension of Sean’s website, in 2002. “And as much as I hate to admit it, I love some dirty pop! OutKast, Missy Elliot, Nikka Costa are some of the names that pop out in my head, but these days I am all about some *NSYNC. What has happened in this world where five little men hopping around the stage can cause such a ruckus? I love them boys! I like Justin but JC has that certain something that makes me go hmmmm. He makes me want to put my son in dance lessons. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”