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

explained to reporter Pauline Arrillaga of the Associated Press in November 2000. “But this is a man who has taken thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children, deprived them of any education, married them, impregnated them, required the state to pay the bill, and has raped a thirteen-year-old girl.” Five months after the Dateline show aired, Leavitt filed charges against Green, who was supporting his oversize family by drawing welfare checks.
    Investigators from the Utah attorney general’s office have documented that between 1989 and 1999, Tom Green and his dependents received more than $647,000 in state and federal assistance, including $203,000 in food stamps and nearly $300,000 in medical and dental expenses. These same investigators estimate that had they been granted complete access to pertinent government files as far back as 1985, when Green began his polygamous lifestyle, they would have been able to show that Green received well over $1 million in welfare.
    Linda Kunz Green, now twenty-eight, was thirteen when she married Tom Green. She insists that he has done nothing wrong, that she is no victim. She says that she enjoys being a plural wife and points out that getting married to Green was her idea. Leavitt counters that Linda is simply a victim of what psychologists call the Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages sympathize with, and later defend, their captors. “The ability to choose is an ability that Linda Green never had,” Leavitt argues.
    At the time Linda Kunz married Green, her mother, Beth Cooke, was also married to Green, although Cooke has since left him. (Seven of the ten women Green has married, and all of his current wives, were the children of his other wives when he married them; he has made a habit of marrying his stepdaughters, all of whom were sixteen or younger when he brought them into his matrimonial bed.) Cooke was raised in Short Creek, the product of a polygamous family. In 1953, when she was nine years old, she watched Mohave County sheriff’s deputies arrest her father and thirty other men in the Short Creek raid. Three years later, at the age of twelve, Cooke was married off to her stepfather, Warren “Elmer” Johnson, the brother of Prophet LeRoy Johnson. Cooke became one of seven women married to Elmer.
    In 1984, after Elmer Johnson had died and the husband who succeeded him had departed, Cooke and her two daughters were introduced to Green at a Sunday school meeting. “I paid particular attention to him,” Cooke told freelance journalist Carolyn Campbell, “because my friend said she had met Tom Green and he was the ugliest man she had ever met.” Cooke, who is four years older than Green, thought otherwise. She found him handsome, as well as highly intelligent. She was impressed with the way he took charge of the meeting. He asked her out on a date, during which he announced that he was going to marry her—a prophecy that was fulfilled in short order. The newlyweds honeymooned in Bountiful, Canada, a colony of UEP polygamists in southeastern British Columbia.
    By 1985 Cooke couldn’t help noticing that her thirteen-year-old daughter, Linda Kunz, was “showing feelings” toward Green. Linda liked to sit in her stepfather’s lap and would “hang on to him for the longest time.” She talked about him constantly, and eventually asked Cooke if she could marry Green. Cooke consented, and in January 1986, Linda married Tom Green in Los Molinos, Mexico, a polygamous outpost on the Baja Peninsula. “I was happy for my daughter because she was happy and it was what she wanted,” Cooke said afterward. “I was happy to share her with a man I loved very dearly and thought was a very special person.” Linda Kunz Green was pregnant with Green’s child before her fourteenth birthday.
    Even though Beth Cooke left Green, she defends her daughter’s marriage to him. “Fifteen years later,” she said in a 2001 interview with journalist Campbell, “I feel that time has proven