"It's a shitty place to come from," says Pennie Peterson, Ruth Stubbs' older sister who fled 15 years ago fearing for her life. "It messes with your mind."
Domestic War
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Ruth Stubbs soon found herself trapped in Rodney Holm's spacious home at the mouth of Maxwell Canyon in Hildale.
The two-story, barn-styled house appears to be well above the financial means of a man who earns $29,000 a year as a Colorado City cop.
Mortgages, however, aren't something Colorado City residents worry about. Their homes are built piecemeal and paid for with cash. The land is owned by the church-controlled United Effort Plan. Residents pay only property taxes and utility bills.
But the cost of living cheap is extracted in other ways.
Soon after Ruth moved in, whatever limited freedoms she had as a single teenager were revoked. Ruth had to ask her husband for permission to leave the house, to spend money, to even eat some sugar or drink a cup of coffee.
"I couldn't do anything without asking," Ruth told AG's investigators.
Any money she earned working a $6-an-hour job at the gas station/mini-mart had to be turned over to her husband, right down to the last dime.
Her living quarters were little more than a jail cell. Ruth was consigned to a bedroom that was a converted office.
"I just had a little bed on the floor and, and [the room] had a bathroom hooked to it," she said.
It was the only place she could find respite from the ongoing power struggle between her sister, Suzie, and the second wife, Wendy Holm.
Things were already complicated in the household before Ruth arrived. Wendy had been married to Rodney Holm's brother. When that marriage ended in divorce, the Prophet gave Wendy to Rodney. Consequently, all three of Rodney's wives were sisters-in-law.
Yet this entanglement is nothing by Colorado City standards. One young woman who left the area several years ago said she figured out her family tree and found she was related to more than 1,000 people in the Colorado City area.
The Holm household was anything but content.
Wendy and Suzie had hated each other from the moment Wendy entered the home eight years earlier. Naive Ruth soon found herself a foot solider in Suzie's war.
"Suzie pitted me against Wendy," Ruth said.
The bitterness extended to the children.
"I know Suzie hits Wendy's kids sometimes, you know, when she feels like it or whatever," Ruth said to investigators. She said babies and toddlers among the 20 children in the home were sometimes left in the care of 6-year-old kids.
Ruth said Rodney Holm, meanwhile, stayed aloof from the fray, telling her to "love" her sister wives.
He spent much of his time in a laundry- and bathroom-equipped shop behind the house. He often slept in the out building, summoning whichever wife he chose to the quarters to spend the night. The wives generally followed a three-night rotation and would get hugely upset if Rodney favored one of the others on an assigned evening.
Ruth said her sister would get vicious toward her even on her assigned nights with Rodney.
"She'd call me a bitch, you know. She'd call me names and get pissed every time I was with Rod," Ruth said. "It made it miserable to live there."
Spontaneous sex was rare, but it did occur. Ruth said she sometimes had sex with Rodney at his brother Greg's Colorado City office while her husband was on police duty. This would happen on nights when Rodney was supposed to be with one of the other wives.
A month into the marriage, Ruth discovered she was pregnant.
"I cried," she said. "I felt if I wanted to leave, now . . . I couldn't."
Her daughter Maranda was born on October 5, 1999. Just more than a year later, her son Winston was born. Ruth found herself on the typical fundamentalist Mormon track that could lead to a dozen children before the age of 30.
Two years into the marriage, Ruth said, she began discussing with her sister the possibility of leaving. Suzie strongly objected.
"If you leave right now, it's going to make Wendy so happy," Ruth said her sister told her. "Don't leave! Don't leave!"
Rodney soon discovered her desire to get out and began haranguing her. "That's what the devil wants you to do," Ruth said he told her.
Rodney took Ruth to see Prophet Rulon Jeffs' son, Warren, who had become the "mouthpiece" for his ailing father.
Ruth said Warren Jeffs spat out a frightening warning: "You can either live here and live in hell, and then when you die have eternal happiness. Or else, you can go out into the world and live in hell and die and even have more eternal hell."
With each passing day after that, the now 18-year-old Ruth – pregnant with her third child – became more and more depressed.
"I thought a lot about, you know, maybe, you know, the Lord will love me enough to take my life, you know, and get me out of here."
Girls Brainwashed
The Arizona grand jury investigation into Colorado City begun under former attorney general and now governor Janet Napolitano has continued under her successor, Terry Goddard.
