Read Online Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer - Free Book Online Page B

psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital. While she was recovering, an acquaintance named Michael Palmer came to visit her in the hospital. Palmer—a thirty-eight-year-old long-haul trucker married to two of Winston Blackmore’s sisters—was part of the religion but worked outside of Bountiful. Debbie recalls that during his visit, Palmer “touched me and kissed me. He made me feel beautiful.” When she was released from the hospital, though, the community still thought of her as a difficult, uncontrollable woman, and nobody was sure what should be done with her.
    Uncle Roy—who was by then ninety-three years old, very ill, and fast fading into senility—came to Canada and asked Debbie if there were any men that she liked. Michael Palmer, she replied. “So the prophet told Michael to marry me,” she explains. “I became Michael’s third wife. At first life with Michael was wonderful. He held me and helped me throw away my pills. When I had my first baby girl by Michael he was happy and actually played with the baby. He encouraged me to have ideas. I loved him.”
    The marriage was not without difficulties, however. The two women already married to Michael, Marlene and Michelle Blackmore (who happened to be Debbie’s stepdaughters), were intensely jealous of each other, and Debbie’s installation in their home as a new “sister wife” only added to their misery. Sharing Michael proved especially difficult for Michelle, his first wife. On the nights when it was Michael’s turn to sleep with Debbie, Michelle would listen from the room directly below, alternately crying hysterically and straining to hear sounds of passion that would prove to her that Michael preferred Debbie. “I found Michelle this way one night when Michael and I had just finished making love and I went downstairs to check on the children,” says Debbie. “When I saw her, I felt like we were trapped in the middle of a nightmare. I felt violated, but the shame and agony I saw on her face made it impossible for me to even say anything.”
    At one point Michelle discovered that Michael had had intercourse with Debbie when she was pregnant—a serious violation of the Law of Chastity. Debbie remembers being confronted afterward by Michelle, “her face black with rage and pain, spitting out her venomous jealousy: ‘You are a harlot and a whore, and because you tempted Michael to have sex with you while you are pregnant, he is an adulterer, and my chance to be exalted is gone! I’m going to tell Winston, and you’re going to be in big trouble.” “ Michelle did, and Debbie was.
    In 1986 Uncle Roy died, and Rulon Jeffs became the UEP’s new prophet. In the climate of upheaval that followed, there was turmoil in both Bountiful and Colorado City. Because Michael worked outside of the community, among Gentiles, he fell out of favor and was secretly voted out of the priesthood. He was crushed when he learned of his rejection, and the disappointment triggered a latent instability in his personality.
    Michael became emotionally withdrawn and angry. He sexually molested one of Debbie’s sons, as well as another boy outside of the family. On October 27, 1986, Debbie’s daughter Sharon was lying in bed with a high fever. Michael went into her bedroom, Debbie says, “and began wiping her face with a cold cloth. Then he took the nightgown off her thirteen-year-old body and washed first her back, then her breasts. When she asked him to stop he acted like he didn’t hear her and kept doing it. He washed her over and over, and then put the nightgown back on her and put her between his legs on the carpet and continued to massage her breasts and scalp.”
    After blurting out to her mother what Michael had done, Sharon cried uncontrollably for weeks. She told Debbie that she was “terrified she would have to marry Michael, because some of her friends in Colorado City had had to marry their stepfathers after being molested by them.”
    In December 1987,