Polygamists fight over childrens' future; mother's mental state questioned
 
By Mike Watkiss
NewsChannel 3 reporter
 
At 46 years of age, and after what she calls a life of abuse, Laurene Jessop, a single mother of five, is facing the daunting task of picking up the pieces and starting her life over from scratch.

Jessop recently gathered up her three young daughters and went on the run, fleeing from the polygamist community of Colorado City.

"I was born and raised in Colorado City," Jessop said, explaining she has 56 brothers and sisters.

Earlier this year, Jessop escaped the community, landing in Phoenix, trying to flee her polygamist husband, who wants to take their children back with him to northern Arizona.

It's a story of a desperate mother and one that is becoming painfully familiar from those who have lived in the closed and secretive polygamist society.

But Jessop has been open about her past, saying that she was molested by her father, Jack Cooke, who served a five-year prison term for molesting his daughters. But Jessop said that was just the beginning of the abuse.

Like most young women in Colorado City, she was given as a so-called plural wife to an already married polygamist man named Val Jessop, a marriage that produced five children and a marriage ordered, as almost all are in Colorado City, by the town's all powerful polygamist prophet.

And from one unhappy family to another, Jessop found herself in almost constant conflict with her husband's first wife, Marie, a woman who is also Laurene Jessop's half sister.
 
Fox11AZ.com
Originally published Friday, July 23, 2004
 
Back