‘I felt like I had been sucker punched’
Former Bountiful resident describes upbringing
CRANBROOK — It was May 1975, and 18-year-old Jane Oler had just been told God — through the prophet of the fundamentalist Mormon church — decided she would marry Winston Blackmore the next morning.
“I felt like I had been sucker punched. I felt like I was going to throw up,” she said Wednesday through tears as she testified in B.C. Supreme Court.
“I knew Winston very well. Had I chosen, he would not have been the man I would have chosen for my husband. I didn’t feel like I was in a position to refuse.”
So, the daughter of the church’s presiding elder was married. But after seven children and 27½ years of marriage, as her husband took another 26 wives, she left her husband, faith and the polygamous community of Bountiful in 2003.
Wednesday, she was a witness in the trial of three parents accused of taking their under-aged daughters to the U.S. in 2004 for illegal purposes. Their daughters were under 14 at the time and are alleged to have been taken across the border to become child brides.
James Oler, Brandon Blackmore and Emily Gail Blackmore face between five and 10 years in jail, if convicted.
Because the Crown must prove the parents transported them intending they would be put into illegal marriages, prosecutor Peter Wilson called Jane Blackmore to testify about what her father instructed her and her siblings about obedience, plural marriage, arranged marriages and the roles men and women had to play to be successful in that society.
She testified, too, about what all of them had been taught at church meetings and in school.
Girls and women had to do exactly as their fathers, then their husbands told them, down to the fine details on how to wear their hair and the colour of their dresses.
How much education children received was up to their fathers or presiding elders. Who they married depended on who the “prophet” chose.