2016-06-30
PARTOUN, Utah, May 14--The walls of Tom Green's dining room are bedecked with framed portraits of each member of the family.

His 29 children. His five wives.

More on Polygamy

  • The Tom Green Case: Read the indictment

  • Polygamy Around the Globe: Where it still exists

  • Polygamous Wives Speak Out: "I would never go back...to being a monogamous wife."
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  • Grappling With the Polygamous Past
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  • The Mormon Church and Polygamy: A history lesson

  • Polygamy on the Web
  • ''There's my crime right there,'' he says with a wave at the photos. ''That's my 'continuing criminal enterprise,' '' the words a prosecutor used to describe Green's unorthodox household here in a remote desert valley near the Nevada border.

    Green, 52, goes on trial in Provo, Utah, today for having more than one wife. In a state settled by pious Mormons whose religion once encouraged the practice, polygamy has survived for more than a century in a don't-ask, don't-tell atmosphere.

    But nine months before Salt Lake City hosts the 2002 Winter Olympics, an outlawed lifestyle led by tens of thousands of Americans is under fresh attack:

  • For the first time in nearly half a century, some Utah prosecutors are filing charges of bigamy, the legal term for the crime, against men with multiple wives. Green, who has flaunted his illegal way of life on national TV, is the first of three recent cases to go to trial. (The other two defendants accepted plea bargains to lesser charges.) If convicted on four counts of bigamy, a felony, Green faces up to 20 years in prison.

  • Support groups for and against polygamy have sprung up. Computer Web sites have developed followings, along with books and lobbying efforts in the state Capitol in Salt Lake City, where 90% of state legislators are Mormons. The Women's Religious Liberties Union wants bigamy decriminalized. Tapestry Against Polygamy, founded by former ''plural wives,'' pushes prosecution of polygamy and secret crimes that sometimes accompany it such as incest, wife and child abuse, forced and underage marriages, and welfare and tax fraud.

  • The Utah Legislature last year approved hiring an investigator, dubbed a ''polygamy czar,'' to help counties prosecute crimes within ''closed societies.'' This year, lawmakers passed a ''child bride'' bill that toughened penalties for parents and others who force girls under 18 to marry.

  • The legal blitz and debate have spotlighted polygamy just as world attention turns to Utah in the pre-Olympics buildup. Many of the state's 2.2 million residents consider it an embarrassing vestige of their pioneer past.

  • But with 70% of Utah's population in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, residents have conflicting emotions.

    Faithful Mormons, researching their ancestry for religious rituals, sometimes find polygamists in century-old branches of the family tree.

    More on Polygamy

  • The Tom Green Case: Read the indictment

  • Polygamy Around the Globe: Where it still exists

  • Polygamous Wives Speak Out: "I would never go back...to being a monogamous wife."
  •  

  • Grappling With the Polygamous Past
  •  

  • The Mormon Church and Polygamy: A history lesson

  • Polygamy on the Web
  • Latter-day Saints founder Joseph Smith enshrined polygamy in church doctrine. His successor, Brigham Young, who led the outcast church to Utah in 1847, had as many as 55 wives. Mainstream Mormons such as Republican Gov. Mike Leavitt and U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch have polygamist ancestors. So does state polygamy investigator Ron Barton.

    Various historians, scholars and law enforcement officials estimate that 30,000 to 100,000 people live today in ''plural marriage'' families in the U.S.A. Most are in the West, and most of those are in Utah. They are religious fundamentalists who hold the ''original Mormonism'' belief that multiple wives and children are key to achieving the afterlife's highest blessings. Their forebears went underground after the church disavowed polygamy and Utah outlawed it a century ago as a condition for statehood.

    Except for a few crackdowns since then, government has mostly ignored polygamists. In recent years, disturbing allegations of incest, wife and child abuse and other crimes within some groups came to light. In the most notorious, a member of one of Utah's largest sects went to jail in 1999 for beating his 16-year-old daughter, who fled a forced marriage to her uncle, his brother. The brother went to prison for having sex with her as his 15th wife.

    While other Utah polygamists shied further from the spotlight, Green embraced it. A former Mormon missionary, he defiantly appeared with his family on talk shows such as the Sally Jesse Raphael Show, Queen Latifah, Rivera Live, and The Jerry Springer Show . TV newsmagazines, including Dateline NBC and 48 Hours , trekked 250 miles from Salt Lake City to interview the family here at Greenhaven, a 15-acre homestead of ramshackle mobile homes, old cars and sagebrush.

    Armed with videotape, Juab County prosecutor David Leavitt, the governor's brother, filed bigamy charges against Green, whose wives were young teens when he wed them.

    ''He told 500 million people (on television),'' the county attorney argued in a court hearing last June. Leavitt, who calls Green's behavior a ''Triple Crown'' of crime, didn't charge the wives. He says they are victims.

     

    In a separate case to be tried later, Green faces a rape charge because he married a 13-year-old girl 15 years ago. That girl is now the ''head wife'' of Green's family, Linda Kunz, 28, the mother of six of his children.

    More on Polygamy

  • The Tom Green Case: Read the indictment

  • Polygamy Around the Globe: Where it still exists

  • Polygamous Wives Speak Out: "I would never go back...to being a monogamous wife."
  •  

  • Grappling With the Polygamous Past
  •  

  • The Mormon Church and Polygamy: A history lesson

  • Polygamy on the Web
  • Prosecutor Leavitt created a 27-slide PowerPoint presentation to untangle Green's unusual marriage history--five wives and five ex-wives--for the court.

    Kunz's mother, Beth Cook, was the second of Green's ex-wives. And wives Shirley Beagley, 31, and LeeAnn Beagley, 28, are the daughters of ex-wife June Johnson, who is Cook's sister and who lives next door to be near the four children she bore with Green. Technically, Green wed three of his own stepdaughters, whose mothers are sisters. His other two wives also are sisters: Cari Bjorkman, 25, and Hannah Bjorkman, who turns 24 today.

    The Green spouses live here with 25 children. (The three offspring of Green's non-polygamous first marriage are adults, and one child, Jerry, age 3, died in a fire here in 1997.) After he and his wives took ''a one-year sabbatical from sex'' in 1999-2000, four of them are again pregnant. LeeAnn is due in June, Cari in September, Hannah in October and Linda in January.

    ''People think it's about a dirty old man molesting little girls,'' says Green, who works as a paralegal and anchors a family magazine sales business to feed and clothe the family. To a woman, his wives say they married him voluntarily and cherish their family life together, even if he is old enough to be a grandfather to his younger children, whose ages range from 2 to 14.

    ''If this was only about sex, we'd all leave Tom and get our own men!'' Kunz says. ''We're a completely different culture. For us, it's not strange to be married as teenagers.''

    Former wives of other polygamists say that's just the problem. ''From the cradle, they're taught that they have to be polygamists,'' Tapestry co-founder Vicky Prunty says.

    Green, visibly proud of his offspring, insists that ''people really ought to judge us by our fruits.''

    With prison a possibility, Green recently ordained the five oldest of his sons living at home, who make up their own Boy Scout troop, as priests in the family's fundamentalist faith. ''Just in case,'' he explains, ''I don't come back.''

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