A few months ago, a new police chief – an outsider with no ties to the community – was sworn in after a jury ruled that the previous force, made up entirely of church members, was guilty of religious discrimination. But there are signs that others have moved on: last November, Hildale elected its first ever female, non-FLDS, mayor. There are still about 10,000 active members of the church in the region, most of them in Short Creek. It has taken a long time for change to come to Short Creek, as the community starts to reckon with its leader’s legacy. Warren Jeffs married about 80 women and children. Jeffs, now 62, has wed around 80 women and children over the years, though the state doesn’t recognise these marriages. In 2011, he began a life sentence for sexually assaulting two girls aged 12 and 14, whom he described as his “spiritual wives”. He banned socialising, as well as contact with the outside world. Soon after he assumed the leadership, he began splitting families apart, taking young girls as his own brides, and excommunicating members, mainly young men, from the church. Jeffs, a tall, slim man with dark eyes, has been president and prophet of FLDS since 2002, continuing to run the cult from his prison cell. “Even though it was his house, it feels good,” she says. Decker has turned the 44-room mansion where Jeffs and his wives lived into a refuge for other women fleeing the same church.

Now the walls around Short Creek’s houses, real and figurative, are coming down.

Women wear long-sleeved prairie dresses that stretch down to the ankles, and pin their hair in a bun.

The church teaches that having multiple wives (each of whom is assigned to a man) is ordained by God.

The town in which she lives has started to open itself up to people outside the cult for the first time in 90 years, and to welcome back excommunicated members.įor three generations, the twin cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona – collectively known as Short Creek – have been home to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as FLDS, a religious sect that split from the Mormon church in 1930 its members wanted to continue to practise polygamy. Decker has made a life for herself, and recently remarried. Jeffs is seven years into a life sentence for sexual assault.

Flds book escape