Runaways
One night in April 1999, Laura Chapman went on a rescue mission outside Salt Lake City. She helped two 16-year-old girls - escape from their families. Had she not helped them get away, they would likely have been married off to men whom they barely knew. 48 Hours Correspondent Erin Moriarty reports.
Chapman is a mother of five herself. She was afraid that if anything went wrong, she would be charged with kidnapping. But she took the risk rather than see the teen-agers - Kathy and Sarah - get trapped in plural marriages.
"I wish that, you know, there had been someone there when I was 15 or 16, to do this for me," says Chapman, who was the child of a polygamous marriage, the sixth child of the third wife and the 25th child of 31.
Chapman's family belongs to one of Utah's largest polygamous sects, which believes that men have to marry many wives. When she was 18, a husband was chosen for her. "There [were] no other options," she says. "I couldn't say I didn't want to get married."
Her proposed mate was a neighborhood boy who played football with her brothers. She had never kissed him before their wedding. But Chapman thought she was lucky. Her husband George was young, and she was his first wife. Together they had five children.
On their 10th wedding anniversary, George told her that he wanted a second wife. So she left him and took her five kids with her. She got a divorce, and in the last eight years finished high school and earned a college degree. She has no regrets about leaving.
Now she helps others get out. Chapman was first alerted to the girls' situation by a sympathetic aunt of Kathy's, who asked Chapman to help the girls.
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As is often the case in polygamous families, the girls' mates were to be chosen for them. "I actually want to know the person before I get married to them," says Kathy.
And some observers say that in many polygamous sects, there habeen a millennial rush to marriage. Some church leaders have announced that the world could come to an end as early as the end of 1999. Because members believe you can't get into heaven unless you're married, there could be a rush to marry off teens like Sarah and Kathy.
Sarah thinks that her family had already chosen her husband, a man in his 40s who already had another wife.
According to Chapman, if the girls stay with their families, they marry. Because she was afraid that their families would come after them, Chapman took the girls to a safe house, the home of a family that agreed to take them in.
Since the girls are under age, Chapman wanted to have a judge declare them "emancipated minors," which would legally sever their ties to their parents and allow them to be placed in permanent homes. Because this was a delicate legal situation, Chapman urged the girls to have no contact with their families. From experience, she knows that leaving behind a family, and a way of life, can be very difficult.
The girls left their parents letters to explain why they ran away. "I picked this time to leave because I am certain that you're going to make me get married to someone I don't know," Kathy wrote. "This is not the way I want to live my life."
"It's sad that kids would have to choose between their families and just simply being able to have an education or marry someone they love," Chapman says.
Chapman and the two teens belonged to the same polygamous sect, with headquarters in an isolated area on the southern border of Utah.
Women in this community seem to have one prime role in life. "It was...stay barefoot, pregnant, uneducated, in poverty and frightened of the outside world," says Chapman.
To find out what happened to Kathy and Sarah, read Sect's Pull Is Strong.
Produced by David Kohn;