Hometown Betrayal

A Tragic Story of Secrecy and Sexual Abuse in Mormon Country

The following is an excerpt from Hometown Betrayal, by Emily Benedek, available now from Greenleaf Book Group.

PART I

PROLOGUE

A Little Bird, Lying There Broken

MAY 21, 1983, dawned sunny and warm in Hyrum, Utah, a rural town of about 5,000 souls named after the brother of Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism. The tiny, white trumpet flowers of the catalpa trees had already burst open in bunches, and the bark of the tall ponderosa pines oozed its butterscotch-scented sap. John Miller, who had gone to his office that Saturday at E. A. Miller & Sons, the family meatpacking plant, for a few hours, realized the spring day was too beautiful to waste inside, so around noon he headed home. He pulled into his driveway and ran into the house to ask his wife, Valarie, if she’d go for a drive with him. He’d just imported a Mercedes-Benz 280SL, and he wanted to take her for a spin. After checking that the neighbors would keep an eye on the Miller’s six-year-old daughter, Annie, Valarie jumped in the Mercedes beside him, her long, brown hair loose. John put down the top. Valarie was 28 years old, and John was 30.

After a pleasant drive, they returned home. Valarie went into the house, and John struck up a conversation with a neighbor. “I remember what happened next like it was yesterday,” said their son, Ryan, then three and a half, who had remained at home with his toddler sister, Erin, and their nanny while their parents were out and was then walking atop a wall at the end of the driveway. “My mom suddenly ran out of the garage, frantic. She said my sister, Annie, had been in an accident. I remember my dad jumping into the car, and them racing down the street.”

John and Valarie sped to the center of town where they saw a group of people “gathered around a little lump in the middle of the street.”1 Their daughter, John recalled, “looked like a little bird fallen from its nest, lying there, broken.” She was on her back, gasping for air. Blood dripped from both her ears, and her pupils were rolled back into her head. No emergency responders were yet on the scene, but John remembered someone saying, “Give her a blessing, and let’s pray.” As an elder in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, John had the authority to offer a prayer for healing, so he placed his hands on his daughter’s head and “blessed her to live,” all the while realizing the terrifying indications that his first-born was grievously injured and likely near death.

John’s boss, uncle, and mentor, Junior, materialized beside him. Someone placed a coat over Annie to keep her warm, and a couple of men came out of the local pool hall and propped up her feet on a six-pack of Budweiser.

Finally, the paramedics arrived and went to work. Valarie kept reaching for her daughter, trying to gather her into her arms, but the EMTs restrained her. She finally was able to get ahold of the little girl’s limp hand. “Oh, Annie,” she kept saying. “It’s okay, it’s all right.”

John sketched out a picture of what had happened from information offered by onlookers. Annie, a “pretty, capricious, little blonde” in his words, “verbal and full of life,” had decided with her friend Holly and Julie, Holly’s 14-year-old sister, to bike into town, although Annie knew the family rules allowed her to ride her bike on only the quiet street in front of their house. The girls took off, three in a row, Annie in the rear, a bit wobbly on her beloved pink two-wheeler. Reaching Main Street, they pedaled along the sidewalk under a canopy of trees, stopped at the drug store to buy candy, then decided to cross the street to go to the library. Riding carefully inside the lines of the crosswalk, Annie and Holly made it across the busy thoroughfare, but Annie abruptly reversed course and, without looking left or right, re-entered the crosswalk to head back to Julie, who was still on the other side. Annie was immediately struck by a truck going 40 miles per hour and thrown more than 20 feet.

The EMTs loaded Annie into the ambulance and notified Logan Regional Hospital they were bringing in the injured girl. Annie’s pediatrician, Dr. Stowell, was paged at home. Before leaving the scene, Valarie passed by the young, desolate truck driver who had struck her daughter. She stopped and told him in her soft voice, “It’s not your fault.” An onlooker was stunned “by Valarie’s ability to be so kind and forgiving.”

The ride to the hospital took only 15 minutes, and Dr. Stowell, who had also taken care of Valarie when she was a child, wasted no time in examining her daughter. He was alarmed that she was still unconscious and unresponsive. Her pupils were dilated and fixed, and blood and spinal fluid dripped from her right ear. He ordered her into the operating room.

As John paced in a waiting area outside, his uncle Junior and his wife, Norma, arrived, as did John’s mother and his four brothers, one after the other. They all cried and prayed, silently and out loud.

After about 20 minutes, John saw Dr. Stowell walking toward him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “She’s very seriously injured.”

The doctor told John and Valarie that Annie had been put on a ventilator. The medical team had tried to lower her blood pressure with steroids and other means, but she had not responded. Because Logan Hospital did not have a CT scanner, they were unable to establish the extent of the brain injury.

“We need to get her to a neurosurgeon,” he said, “and the nearest is Ogden. I don’t know if she’ll make it there, but I think we should try.”

“She isn’t going to die,” Valarie said quietly.

McKay-Dee Hospital was 45 miles to the south, and Annie was readied for another ambulance ride. Peggy Wolfley, one of the nurses who had worked to stabilize the struggling child, said she would accompany her in the ambulance and try to keep her alive. Valarie stepped toward Wolfley in the corridor and said, with a calm certainty, “I trust you to do this. I know that you can save her.”

Annie remained stable throughout the 45-minute trip. At McKay-Dee, the neurologist, Dr. Glen Church, met the Millers at the emergency entrance. Annie was sent for a CT scan and readied for surgery immediately. “I felt as though my heart was in my hands,” John recalled. He looked over at Valarie and saw she was “praying furiously that somehow Annie would survive. She refused to believe Annie might not make it.”

After an hour or so, Dr. Church approached Valarie and John and told them that their daughter had suffered an injury to her brain stem and three fractures in her basilar skull. She also had indications of trauma to her abdomen and a possible pelvic fracture. He explained that they had inserted a tube into their daughter’s head to relieve the pressure and that he was worried about the continued leak of cerebrospinal fluid into her right ear canal; he’d been unable to determine the location of the wound and feared an untreated tear might allow bacteria entry into her brain, which might then lead to meningitis. He repeated Dr. Stowell’s fear that she might not survive. “But kids can surprise us,” he added. “They can be quite resilient.”

John and Valarie asked to see their daughter, and the doctor prepared them by explaining that a tracheotomy had been performed to help her breathe and that she’d been placed in an induced coma. “Annie was engulfed in a large hospital bed,” John recalled, “her little head wrapped up, and a tube protruding from it, leading to the brain monitoring machine that was measuring the internal pressure.” Later, the nurses explained that Annie’s life might be in danger if the number on the dial reached 10.

As John and Valarie sat vigil beside their daughter, they were informed that the waiting room had filled with relatives and friends. The boy who had been driving the truck was there, along with his parents, all of whom were employed at E. A. Miller. John’s mother, Emma, left at midnight to go to John’s house (which he’d recently built next door to hers) to stay with Ryan and Erin.

“Valarie and I stayed on, consoling each other,” John said. They also kept speaking to Annie, hoping she could hear them. “We need you to come back,” they told her. But Annie’s condition remained perilous. One night, John witnessed the pressure in his daughter’s head spike to 24, and the neurologist on call discussed with them the possibility of unhooking her from the breathing machine. John and Valarie dismissed the suggestion out of hand. They knew that Annie was fighting for her life, and they were committed to fight alongside her. Indeed, she rallied, and the pressure went down.

Ten days later, John’s mother and Valarie’s parents spent the night at the hospital so John and Valarie could go home and rest. The next morning, John stopped by E. A. Miller for the first time since the accident. He was struck by how differently he felt there. As he walked down the hall toward his office, he remembered how important work had always been for him, but “now none of it seemed important anymore.” He was proud of his efforts to modernize the company, acknowledging that his work “was an integral part of who I was.” Or so he thought. “Now, all that mattered was family, my children, and little Annie laying in the hospital bed.”

In the following days, they took turns staying with Annie. At work, John found it difficult to refocus, but he realized being at the plant gave him an opportunity “to feel productive” and to take his thoughts, even for just a brief moment, “away from the helplessness of worrying about Annie.” It occurred to him that Valarie didn’t have such an outlet. “She would sit in her rocking chair in a daze. I believe she felt it was up to her to save her daughter by exhibiting faith. She had convinced herself that if she possessed enough faith, Annie would live. For hours, Valarie would rock back and forth, with no expression on her face. Just staring emptily and rocking. I grew very concerned about her.”

When Annie surprised the doctors by making it to two weeks, the neurologist began to think she might survive. John then wondered what her life might be like if she did pull through. He became very angry when one of the nurses said, “She won’t be the same. This girl here is not the same girl that you knew before.”

Eventually, Annie was weaned from the drugs that kept her unconscious and, later, unhooked from the ventilator. The tube in her head was removed. After some weeks, she seemed to begin moving her hands, though it didn’t seem to be purposeful. “Finally, her eyes opened,” John said, “but she stared with more of a glaze, and then stared into space.” After that, “her eyes moved from side to side, but she still wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone.” It never occurred to him that she might be blind. At this point, though she was breathing on her own and coming closer to consciousness, Annie had no body control and was in a diaper. “I would talk to her and ask her to squeeze my hand, but nothing.”

Annie had been in the hospital for about a month when her pediatrician came to visit. He told John he felt Annie was aware of him when he entered the room. “His years of experience had taught him that brain damage in children was unpredictable,” recalled John. “He had seen children recover from very severe injuries, even though, on a statistical basis, their chances had been slim.”

After five weeks, Annie was transferred from the ICU to the pediatric ward, where she was visited by a variety of therapists every day. Annie was belted into a wheelchair with her head stabilized by a head strap “because she couldn’t control anything, and her neck would droop.” The following week, she was moved to a rehabilitation center.

On August 15, almost three months after the accident, Annie went home for the weekend. Although the family was jubilant over Anne’s progress, the strain of the ordeal had taken its toll on Valarie. John had kept a daily journal since his Mormon mission as a young man, and that day he wrote, “Valarie is having a hard time thru all of the problems with Annie. She has lost a lot of weight and emotionally is very exhausted. I am very concerned about her.”

At the end of August, the rehab center said its staff had done all it could for the girl. She was still in a diaper, her eyes were open but sightless, and she couldn’t communicate except, as John put it, “for an odd scream she would make to express discomfort.” She remained in a partial coma, and she couldn’t move her arms or legs. The doctors said further improvement depended on the “regeneration of neural connections,” which John hoped would come with time and “the prayers of friends and family.” Valarie’s father, Denzel Clark, said that Valarie was very upset by a hospital staffer who told her that Annie would remain a vegetable.

A few days after Annie’s return home, Debbie Clark Cooper, Valarie’s older sister, came to pick up Ryan to stay with her family for a few days. She remembered seeing an emaciated Valarie rocking in her chair, dark circles under her eyes, still beseeching God to help her child get well. Debbie overheard Valarie tell someone, “I know a place where I can go where I can’t feel any of this pain.”

Debbie had an eerie sense that Valarie was not new to that place.

Nevertheless, small signs of improvement “brought enormous hope and happiness,” John told a writer who prepared a narrative about Annie’s accident and recovery. He continued:

I vividly remember one day when she gave us one of these little signs. We had to feed her by using a syringe, which we would place in her mouth and squeeze liquid nourishment into the back of her throat. About a month after Annie had been home, I was clowning around and loaded a syringe with water and squirted it playfully at the other kids. Not being a particularly good shot, I missed and landed a direct strike on the bridge of Anne’s nose.

A tear came to her eye and trickled down her cheek. It was the first sign of emotion we had seen from her since the accident, and I was overcome with joy. It might seem heartless to feel so elated that my daughter was crying, but to me it signified that she was registering feeling, and that she could convey emotion. I apologized to Annie for squirting her with water, but each time I said I was sorry, her bottom lip and chin curled up. This single tear and the subtle facial movements were major milestones. This meant she was waking up. We all shed tears together as hope was renewed.

Not long after, Annie laughed for the first time since the accident. She also seemed to be moving her right hand with some intention. Then she slowly formed the word mommy. A few weeks later, John said she was mouthing the ABC’s — not in her formerly sweet, high voice but rather with a rough, throaty sound. Gradually, her sight returned; the doctors theorized that the extreme pressure in her head may have damaged her optic nerves, which repaired themselves over time.

“Dr. Church told us Annie was one of the greatest miracles he had seen,” said John. “My heart was filled with gratitude.”

Valarie continued with her nonstop praying. Her friend Sue Saunders said, “I feel like she prayed Annie awake.” Without that, Sue sometimes wondered “if God would have taken her.”

John threw himself into Annie’s rehabilitation. Most evenings, he carried Annie down into their basement gym for physical therapy. First, he focused on helping her relearn how to sit. “Again and again, I would prop her up, only to see her tip and fall to one side or the other.”

John felt that Annie hated these physical therapy sessions because she “would make a frightened whining sound,” but she eventually learned to hold herself in a seated position, supported by her arms, legs splayed on the floor. The next task he set for her was crawling. “Day after day I sat behind her and helped her lift one arm and then a leg, slowly teaching her how to crawl. It was tedious and at times discouraging, but the slightest bit of progress would give all of us the courage to push on.”

Just as Annie was scrabbling her way back to health, Valarie’s strength seemed to be ebbing away. For five months she had prayed incessantly for her daughter’s recovery, believing her daughter’s future rested completely on the power of her faith. But now, with victory close, Valarie couldn’t seem to shift gears and come out of her fixation. And it was weakening her. During those long months praying for Annie’s recovery, Sue Saunders learned that Valarie had been tortured by frightening flashbacks. “I remember going to her home in Hyrum, and she was pacing the floor and just saying, ‘These thoughts in my head, I feel like I’m going crazy.’ And she kept praying and pacing and fretting,” said Sue.

When Sue asked her to describe what she saw, Valarie said, “I don’t know. It’s just scary and hard.”

Sue said, “That’s when things started to really crumble.”

The morning of September 19, when Valarie woke up, she was frightened to realize that the skin on the left side of her torso had gone numb. From her belly button around to the middle of her back, from her hip bone up to her neck, in a perfect rectangle, she had no feeling.

Then on September 30, Valarie discovered she was pregnant with her fourth child.

Three days later, John noted in his journal that Valarie had suffered frightening seizures that were “extremely painful,” made “her head hurt,” and then brought on great fatigue. The doctor suspected Valarie might have multiple sclerosis (MS), an immune system disorder in which the body’s natural defenses mistakenly attack the body itself — in this case the white matter of the brain and the spine, the material that protects the neurons so that they can transmit signals properly. MS has highly variable courses, but it can lead to trouble with vision and movement, and in the worst cases, paralysis.

On October 10, Valarie’s MS diagnosis was confirmed. Two weeks after that, her father, an engineer for the Union Pacific Railroad, was struck by a train in a switching accident and almost killed. It took him weeks to recover in the hospital.

People like to say that God allows only the challenges people are capable of handling, but an observer might reasonably think this was all just too much to bear. In the span of five months, Valarie had endured her daughter’s almost fatal accident, her father’s train collision, and now a frightening diagnosis and a new pregnancy, which carried its own debilitating prognosis for Valarie because throughout her previous pregnancies, she had suffered extreme morning sickness, causing nausea and vomiting and leaving her unable to eat. Most women, if they experience morning sickness at all, find relief after three months. Not Valarie. And she was starting this new pregnancy already at a diminished weight.

Something was desperately wrong.

There is home movie that was shot in the Millers’ backyard a year before Annie’s accident. In it, Valarie is flirtatious and coy. Her hair is styled in the fashion of Diana Spencer and she exudes a shy insouciance reminiscent of the famous princess. She picks up Annie and flips her through the air — a weightless puff of shiny blonde hair and a poufy red plaid dress.

In a rough-cut typical of home movies before the era of iPhones, the action skips forward almost a year, to months after Annie’s accident, when she is doing exercises with her father at home. There seems nothing therapeutically sophisticated about it — rather more like a cowboy breaking a wild horse. Standing behind her, John holds Annie up on her feet. She is smiling and excited. Then John lets go of her, and she falls toward the floor like a rag doll until John catches her. He lifts her again to her feet, steadies her, then lets her go, and she once again falls in a heap. The camera pans to Valarie, lying on her back on the rug in the same room, near a wall. Her hair is blown out and her makeup carefully done, but her eyes, terrifyingly, are vacant orbs.