Ruby Jessop’s abduction and disappearance

Ruby Jessop’s abduction and disappearance exposed the gulf between a polygamous community’s internal authority and the protection state agencies were supposed to provide. Her case became a pointed contrast with the extensive response to Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapping: Ruby was returned to members of the faith, and then vanished from outside contact.

Forced Marriage and Flight

At fourteen, Ruby was seen kissing a boy she liked in Colorado City. The community’s authorities treated this as grounds to force her into marriage with an older relative, in a ceremony presided over by Warren Jeffs. Ruby despised the man she was made to marry and tried to flee, seeking refuge at the home of a sympathetic brother. In May 2001, after she was lured away by false promises, members of the FLDS Church allegedly took her to her stepfather Fred Jessop’s home. That was also the house where her sister Flora Jessop had been confined years earlier. Flora, who had fled Colorado City on the day Ruby was born, reported the alleged kidnapping to the county sheriff; when a deputy came to investigate, church leaders said Ruby was on vacation, and he left without further inquiry.

Intervention and Disappearance

A month after Flora Jessop reported Ruby’s disappearance, her efforts prompted the Utah Department of Child and Family Services to require FLDS members to bring Ruby to St. George for a meeting with a social worker. The interview did not take place in circumstances that offered her clear independence: one of the people Flora identified as involved in Ruby’s abduction was present. Ruby told the social worker that everything was fine, and she was returned to members of the faith. The encounter therefore produced an official contact but no lasting separation from the community or protection outside its authority.

Two years later, when Ruby was sixteen, she gave birth to a child. Flora continued trying to reach and rescue her, but no one outside Colorado City had heard from Ruby since the summer of 2001. Her disappearance was not a confirmed account of what happened after that point; it was the unresolved fact that she had effectively passed beyond outside contact, despite her sister’s repeated appeals.

Unequal Responses and Local Authority

Antipolygamy activist Lorna Craig, a colleague of Flora’s, drew attention to the difference between Ruby’s treatment and the state’s response to Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapping. Both girls were fourteen when abducted, and Craig argued that both had endured captivity and sexual abuse within polygamous settings. But Elizabeth’s case brought an extensive rescue operation and criminal prosecutions, while Ruby was returned to the people from whom her sister sought to protect her, without charges or what Craig regarded as a meaningful investigation. Craig also emphasized a difference in the duration of their exposure to the community’s beliefs: Elizabeth had been within it for months, whereas Ruby had been raised there.

The comparison made Ruby’s case more than an isolated failure to locate a missing teenager. Craig attributed the divergent outcomes to the long-standing latitude granted to the polygamous community, and to the local concentration of authority in Colorado City–Hildale. In her account, the mayor, police, and judge were themselves polygamists and obedient to the prophet; a victim seeking help could therefore find that the institutions meant to intervene were embedded in the same order she was trying to escape. That claim echoed the wider portrait of FLDS governance in which religious authority could extend across civic life and family arrangements. Ruby’s return after the social-worker interview, followed by years without outside contact, gave the institutional argument its concrete human consequence.

Marriage, Kinship, and Religious Authority

The account places Ruby’s marriage within a system in which religious authority could organize intimate life as well as public leadership. In Colorado City, men typically had a legal marriage to one wife, while subsequent wives were married to them spiritually by Rulon Jeffs and remained unmarried in the eyes of the state. That arrangement made the community’s religious definition of marriage distinct from civil status; Ruby’s wedding, by contrast, is specifically described as a fundamentalist ceremony presided over by Warren Jeffs. The evidence does not establish the civil status of her own marriage, but it does show that a prophet’s authority was central to its performance.

The surrounding family structures could make kinship ties difficult to separate from religious and political power. In Bountiful, Debbie Palmer’s marriage as a teenager made her a stepmother to her husband’s adult children, while another woman, Alaire Blackmore, became a cowife, stepdaughter, and later wife of successive family members as leadership changed hands. These examples concern a different community and do not describe Ruby’s own family; they illustrate the wider fundamentalist setting in which marriages and family roles could be assigned or rearranged by those with authority. In Ruby’s case, the same authority appears in the decision to marry her after she kissed a boy, and in the later return of her to members of the faith after the social-worker meeting.

The account also describes the priesthood as claiming authority over family relationships. When DeLoy Bateman left the religious community, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to take DeLoy’s wives and children, treating them as belonging to the priesthood and directing that they be reassigned. DeLoy’s wives refused to leave him, an unusual act of defiance in the account. This episode does not establish what happened inside Ruby’s household, but it clarifies why a return to community members could carry consequences beyond a change of address: family bonds existed within a system where religious leaders asserted power over marriage and the placement of wives and children.

Flora Jessop’s Advocacy

Flora Jessop’s efforts to find Ruby were shaped by her own history in Colorado City. After reporting sexual abuse by her father at fourteen, Flora saw the case dismissed; church leaders then confined her in a relative’s home for two years. At sixteen, she was told to marry a man chosen for her or be committed to a state mental hospital. She entered the arranged marriage, later fled it and Colorado City, and became an antipolygamy activist who founded Help the Child Brides. Her alarm about Ruby was therefore informed by direct experience of the community’s control over girls and of the limited protection available to those who challenged it. Flora brought Ruby’s situation to officials before Elizabeth Smart was abducted, but Ruby’s case did not bring a comparable intervention. The contrast gives the sisters’ story its unresolved ending: Flora could make Ruby’s circumstances known, yet her repeated advocacy did not restore contact with her sister.