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her that “he was going to give me ten licks for every wrongdoing.”
    After whipping his daughter, John Kingston departed, at which point the girl fled from the ranch and limped five miles along a dirt road until she reached a gas station, where she called the police. Both John and David Kingston were arrested and subsequently convicted in highly publicized trials. John was found guilty of child abuse and locked up in the county jail for twenty-eight weeks; David was sentenced to ten years in prison for incest and unlawful sexual conduct. And Mormon Fundamentalists all over the West immediately found themselves uncomfortably back in the public eye.
    But if the Kingston convictions made the fundamentalists in Colorado City edgy, they became considerably more nervous in April 2000 when another Utah polygamist, Thomas Arthur Green, was charged with bigamy and first-degree felony rape of a child. The Kingston trial, although front-page news in Utah, didn’t make a big splash elsewhere. The state’s prosecution of Green turned into a public spectacle, largely of Green’s own creation, and his plural marriages were featured in every major media outlet from Seattle to Miami.
    Fifty-four-year-old Tom Green is a fat, bearded man with a receding hairline, thirty-two children, and five wives (he has married at least ten different women all told, but the other five have left him). The oldest of his current wives is twenty-two years younger than he is; the youngest is twenty-nine years younger. Home for the gigantic Green family has long been a collection of decrepit trailers plunked down on ten acres of desert in Juab County’s desolate Snake Valley, way out toward the Nevada line, a hundred miles from the nearest paved road. Green has modestly christened this little kingdom Greenhaven.
    Unlike most polygamists, who conscientiously avoid outside scrutiny, Green has an insatiable thirst for publicity. He and his wives have opened their lives to numerous print journalists and have eagerly appeared on such television shows as Judge Judy, Jerry Springer, Queen Latifah, Sally Jessy Rafael, and Dateline NBC. They decided to seek this media attention, Green explained in a public statement, after he woke up one morning and “heard a voice say to me, ”Don’t hide your light under a bushel, but let your light so shine before men so that they will see your good words and glorify your Father in Heaven.“ I told my wives what I had heard and that I understood from it that God wanted us to be an example that plural marriage can work… We are not ashamed of our beliefs, and we are certainly not ashamed of our family… We just want people to realize that polygamists are not a threat, we are not fanatics, we are not criminals.”
    Unfortunately for Tom Green, Juab County attorney David O. Leavitt—the younger brother of Utah governor Mike Leavitt—happened to turn on his television one night in 1999 to see Green boasting of his young wives on Dateline NBC. Although Leavitt had long known about Green’s polygamous colony out in the west desert, until he saw Green holding forth in prime time, he’d had no intention of prosecuting him. As a child Leavitt had had friends who were the offspring of polygamists, and his own great-grandfather had married a plurality of wives. In 1993, when Leavitt was fresh out of law school and working as a public defender, he’d even defended a polygamist, and won, by arguing that the religious freedom guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution overruled state laws criminalizing plural marriage.
    But then Leavitt saw Green bragging on national television that he had married all of his current wives when they were mere girls. One of them was only thirteen when he, at age thirty-seven, got her pregnant. According to Utah statute, when an adult male has sex with a thirteen-year-old child, a first-degree felony has been committed. “Tom Green at first blush appeared to be someone that no one should bother,” Leavitt