Blog: A Mormon Cover Up

This work is memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been recreated.

Joseph has released a podcast about the Mormon Cover Up. Search “Mormon Cover Up” where you listen to podcasts.

Father with his children in Copper*, AZ in the early 1980s. Rare happy photos of our family.

Mother's class photo from the LDS Mormon boarding school. she is the only person in the photo with their arms crossed, glaring at someone off camera, but not the camera person.
Mother’s class photo from the LDS Mormon boarding school. She is the only person in the photo with their arms crossed, glaring at someone off camera.

Mother is a product of the 1960’s Latter Day-Saint Mormon education system. The boarding school where most of her family lived was shut down before the New Zealand Royal Commission began an inquiry into the reported abuses at The Church College of New Zealand.

Mother continued the Mormon education path at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah. Mother has a bachelor’s degree in Social Work.

While completing her degree, mother set her sites on finding an American husband. Father was a Returned Missionary and ready to start a family. They engaged after 6 weeks of dating and two proposals where Mother said “no”. She loves to say that father proposed 3 times.

If father had only stopped proposing after those two red flags none of this would have happened. They would marry, have four kids and allow three of them to be permanently damaged before father would finish college.

There are many people and entities that could release documents and truthfully testify to what occurred in our LDS Mormon home from 1975 – 1996. My female parent, the BYU-educated social worker, may be blackmailing people to stay silent. Perhaps my dead sister’s first love.

1967 photo from LDS Mormon Boarding School, my grandfather was a maintenance man.
1967 photo from the LDS Mormon Boarding School that Mother attended. My Papa was a maintenance man. So, he did not live with his family either?

The Family

  1. Bishop, Doctor, known as Russell* or Father.
  2. Relief Society President, Seminary Teacher, also known as Ingrid* or Mother.
  3. Oldest sibling of six children, known as Stefanie*.
  4. Second born child, rape victim. Died at 27 after giving birth to two children. aka Courtney*.
  5. Third born child, known as me, or Joseph*.
  6. Fourth born child, known as Murph*.
  7. Fifth born child, The Golden Child, known as Karen*.
  8. Sixth born child, known as Ezra*.

Minor Characters

  • Grandma*, paternal grandmother.
  • Grandpa*, paternal step-grandfather.
  • The Dirty Mormon Cop*, a Police Officer that stonewalled the 1990 Child Protective Services investigation.
  • Brother & Sister Ralph*, LDS Mormons that hid me from Child Protective Services in 1994.
  • Anthony*, Courtney’s boyfriend approximately 1991 – 1994.
  • Papa*, maternal grandfather.
  • Nana*, maternal grandmother.

Places

I have also changed the names of some of the cities we lived in. In Utah, I did not change the names: we lived in Provo and Orem. In Arizona we lived in Copper*, AZ for some of my pre-school years and all of kindergarten. Next was Gateway*, AZ for the summer and first month or two of 1st grade.

We left Arizona and moved to a state thousands of kilometers away. First we lived in a small suburb of a big city, Reading*. This is where the first CSA took place. After Mother learned about the CSA we moved to our next home in Springfield*; this is where the CSA was concealed by the LDS Mormon church in a Ward meetinghouse that I visited as recently as December 2021.

WARNING: This blog is about a successful cover-up of physical abuse, mental abuse and Child Sex Abuse (CSA) that my sister, brother and I were subjected to from 1984-1985. The chapters that have CSA described have warnings. The CSA is in red boxes like this one so you can skip over those details if you’d like. Thank you for reading.

young boy sits on a slide, his young sister behind him in a garden fairy outfit.
Joseph and Courtney in Copper*, AZ. Buckle up kiddos, your lives are about to change.

Click for next page, The Beginning and The Child SA