Secrets and Wives by Sanjiv Bhattacharya

Secrets and Wives by Sanjiv Bhattacharya

Author:Sanjiv Bhattacharya
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-14T16:00:00+00:00


The Sorry Ballad of Heidi and Daniel

Taking the issue of polygamy to any court in Utah is like taking the devil to court in hell.

—Letter to The Salt Lake Tribune, July 12, 1999

I cannot feel safe until I know [Daniel] admits he has done wrong. And I am afraid for the other members of my family who will know . . . that he can do it again, because he doesn’t believe that what he did was wrong.

—Mary Ann Kingston’s Victim Impact Statement for the sentencing of Daniel Kingston—June 29, 1999

What kind of house keeper do you think our Mother in Heaven is? Do you suppose that she rushes off leaving beds unmade and dirty dishes in the sink?

—Order Family Handbook

The attorney general’s reticence in pursuing the Order is understandable. He would risk blowback from both church and state for again focusing attention on Utah polygamy, not to mention the prospect of a shrill fundamentalist lobby shrieking persecution. But he would also be given pause by his office’s most recent skirmish with the Order. No, “skirmish” is the wrong word. The child custody case of Heidi and Daniel Kingston was a war.

The story begins with an incident eerily reminiscent of the Mary Ann Kingston episode: A hysterical fifteen-year-old girl runs down a wintry street to a nearby gas station, where she calls for help. She is fleeing a beating at the hands of her father, Daniel. And when the story ends, she will end up living happily outside the Order, with new adoptive parents, under an assumed name. Her name is Stephanie, and her crime is that she had her ears pierced without his permission.

What Stephanie unleashed with her flight to the gas station was altogether more complex and revealing about the Order than Mary Ann’s case ever was. It not only exposed the cult’s lifestyle, but also its methods and mindset. And, though the case generated enormous attention, the full story has never been told.

There were two girls—Stephanie and her sister Andrea—both guilty of pierced earlobes, and both placed swiftly into foster care with relatives. Stephanie appeared to rebel against her removal while Andrea embraced it, telling investigators of the harrowing life of beatings her family had suffered at Daniel’s hands. And their mother, Heidi Mattingly Foster, fast became a polarizing figure. Her long record of neglect, compounded by her repeated noncompliance with court orders, eventually persuaded the court to remove ten of her children—all but her newborn baby. And yet, in the battle to win them back, Heidi also became a sympathetic rallying point. Somehow she was alone in this battle, this overburdened, pregnant and put-upon woman. Daniel was only required to provide child support payments, leaving him free to spend the rest of his time with his remaining family, an estimated fourteen other wives and 150 or so other children. 51 The case is still known as the Heidi Foster case, not the Daniel Kingston case.

News reports described a convoluted and peculiar trial. Certainly it was lengthy,



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