money to speak of. there was however, ben, the young man that she was caught kissing on the mountain. ben told me that he would help me get there. and that was a sobering thing for him to do. realizing what it was like for him. but he said i will help you. ben had a truck, they decided to leave and then struck on sunday morning, the day before warren jeff s deadline. they left very early before dawn, before church. over the next few days, rebecca gathered together her belongings, her most precious possessions. her photographs, her violin. she took them over to her sister s home nearby. she did not tell anyone which he was doing, not even get elissa. then it was time. a chilly sunday morning, november 2002. i remember what it was like to shut the door to my room and feeling that click shot and knowing that on the other side of that door was anything that i had ever known in my entire life.
i knew this wasn t right. and i took those last moments to be defiant. i refused to take my vows. they just waited for you to say the right word? they said, i remember warren asking about the vows. and then he turned to me and asked me, do i take allen? and i just stood there. my last defense. so what did he do? he asked my mother to stand up next to me. and she stood there and she squeezed my hand. and i finally said okay. yay tears streaming down my face. alyssa and her husband moved into a house near the crick. rebecca moved into rulon dry and house and was unaware of what was happening to her little sister. i was very good from day
and as rebecca was taught to believe, he spoke directly with god. he was our connection to the divide! and so, yes i did owe that to him. so of course, rebecca, along with everyone else in the flds obeyed the profits every directive. to obey was the key to salvation. obedience is the only act you could perform, and anything else was damnation. but as rebecca entered her teens, change was in the air. behind her uncles gentle smile, rules hardened. controlled tightened. not just for rebecca, of course, for all of them. this was her childhood friend, and good andrew chatwin. rulon started teaching you do not have a choice anymore. you have to be perfectly obedient. you are ordered to donate your time, your car, or make sacrifices that you normally wouldn t do because it was hurting your family. so more autocratic? dictatorial? yes, very dictatorial. a lot of members were going around and putting everyone on the spot constantly.
of the prophet s widows. when he did start to marry his wives off. it was like a locomotive out of control. i would see them walk behind him the next day and realized another one is married. it was very troubling. and it felt like being sets to auction. rebecca, perhaps the prettiest of all the prophets wives. but no friend of warren. felt she would be next. i was very concerned about marrying him. i had seen how he had treated his wives and his family. and i knew that even the little freedoms that i had would be taken. and then one day, rebecca and a young man named ben, a member of the flds, went hiking
a second wife and 2 from his third. did you feel different? they told us that we were different from the rest of the world. your parents did? yes. and they told us that we needed to be more obedient because we had this higher way of life. and so, they just created a tremendous gap between us versus them. and terrified us of the outside world. there was a reason for that primal fear. very deep, and an forgotten in the dna of the flds. the raid. it was july 26th, 1953. the governor of arizona ordered the arrest of this man in short creek. and more than 250 children were carted away. some of those families were not reunited for years. rebecca, like every ethel diaz child, heard the story over and over again. from when she was old enough to listen, from the day that they remembered as their most terrible.