Ruth Stubbs’s flight from Colorado City

Ruth Stubbs’s flight from Colorado City brought a private marriage into public view and made her both a witness to alleged abuse and a focus of competing claims about religious freedom, family authority, and state law. She left with her two children in February 2002, visibly pregnant with a third, and described a marriage she said she had not freely chosen. The case that followed exposed how difficult it could be to prosecute alleged unlawful conduct when the person at its center later withdrew from the process and disappeared.

A Marriage Arranged in Adolescence

Stubbs had been taken out of school after the sixth grade. Shortly after her sixteenth birthday, she was summoned to a meeting with Rulon Jeffs and his son Warren Jeffs. They told her that she would marry Rodney Holm, a Colorado City police officer, within twenty-four hours. Holm was twice her age and already had two wives, one of whom was Stubbs’s older sister, Suzie.

Stubbs wanted to marry a boy closer to her own age. When she balked and asked for time to consider her options, Suzie pressed her to accept the marriage, and Stubbs eventually did so. Her account thus described more than an age-disparate plural marriage: it traced the decision through a short deadline, family pressure, and the intervention of religious leaders. The narrative offers no account of what choices Stubbs had after the marriage beyond her eventual departure.

Leaving and Speaking Publicly

On February 6, 2002, at nineteen, Stubbs left Colorado City with her two children and appeared on the evening news in Phoenix. She said that Holm had beaten her and argued that polygamy was inherently abusive. Her public appearance moved the dispute beyond the household and the community: it placed her account before a wider audience and connected it to the question of whether women could choose whom to marry and how their lives would be governed.

Stubbs was visibly pregnant with her third child when she left. The timing and circumstances made her departure a consequential break from her existing family life, but the account does not describe where the children went afterward or what arrangements were made for the pregnancy. Her aunt Pennie Peterson provided a place to stay in Phoenix. Peterson had also left Colorado City as a teenager, after being directed to marry an older man as his fifth wife, and had remained critical of the United Effort Plan’s polygamous culture. Her home placed Stubbs with a relative whose own departure gave her a personal history of leaving the community.

Religious Privacy and Public Law

The dispute challenged the claim that plural marriage was solely a private religious practice. Sam Roundy, Colorado City’s polygamous police chief, had publicly defended the right of residents to practice their religion within their homes. Yet police officers were also sworn to uphold the law, and plural marriage was illegal in every U.S. state and in Canada. Holm’s position as an officer made the conflict especially pointed: he was accused of conduct prohibited by the laws he was expected to enforce.

The reported facts also raised the question of Stubbs’s age when the marriage became sexual. The book states that Holm’s relationship with her involved intercourse when she was sixteen, which it identifies as statutory rape and a felony in both Utah and Arizona. The legal case therefore concerned not only bigamy but also unlawful sex involving a minor. In Stubbs’s account, those legal questions were inseparable from the circumstances in which she said she had been told whom to marry.

Colorado City’s mayor, Dan Barlow, presented the prosecution differently. He described the case as government harassment of an honorable but unorthodox religious minority and compared it to the 1953 Short Creek raid. The book sets that defense against Stubbs’s allegations and the state’s charges, showing how the language of persecution and the language of criminal accountability competed to define what had happened.

Charges, Withdrawal, and Disappearance

The Colorado City police department had not disciplined Holm at the time described. With assistance from United Effort Plan attorneys, he was seeking legal custody of Stubbs’s children so they could be raised with FLDS values alongside his other eighteen children. The custody dispute made the consequences of Stubbs’s departure more than symbolic: control over the children remained contested even as she pursued life outside the community.

In October 2002, the Utah attorney general’s office charged Holm with felony bigamy and three counts of unlawful sex relating to his relationship with Stubbs. The case then suffered a major setback. In November, after submitting a signed handwritten note to the court saying she did not want Holm jailed, Stubbs refused to testify and disappeared. The text does not establish why she changed her position, where she went, or what happened to her afterward. Her disappearance left the prosecution without her testimony and made an already difficult case harder to pursue.

An Unresolved Departure

Before vanishing, Stubbs had been living at her aunt’s Phoenix home. Peterson’s earlier flight offered a family precedent for leaving, but the account does not claim that the two departures had identical circumstances or outcomes. Stubbs’s own disappearance after withdrawing from the case remains the action’s unresolved ending: she had first made her experience public, then ceased to be available as a witness, without the text explaining that reversal.

The episode holds two conflicts in view without resolving either. Stubbs’s account challenged the idea that religious protection could settle questions of consent and age; the prosecution tested whether state law could be enforced within a community that understood intervention as persecution. Her flight made those conflicts visible, but her later absence left both the legal process and her personal outcome uncertain.