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CNN Live Today

Man Serves Time for Bigamy

Aired March 20, 2002 - 14:56   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: An update now on a man whose lifestyle and in-your-face attitude has brought the issue of polygamy to national attention. Tom Green is now serving time at a Utah prison after being convicted last year of a bigamy charge. As CNN's John Vause recently discovered, Green is sticking with his beliefs, and his wives are sticking with him.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN VAUSE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): For more than a decade, Tom Green has been the very public face of polygamy, openly defying Utah state laws and the Mormon church. These days, he's prisoner No. 32248.

TOM GREEN, POLYGAMIST: I don't regret standing up for my beliefs publicly. I want my children and my grandchildren to know that I'm not ashamed of my lifestyle and I'm not ashamed of my beliefs.

VAUSE: Home alone on their remote property, his five wives and 29 children, all under 16. Since being sent to jail, three of his wives have given birth.

HANNAH GREEN, WIFE: It's been a real challenge. There's a huge void in the family. There is the sadness of not having Tom here.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hi!

VAUSE: They moved down here seven years ago, ever since they were evicted from a trailer park in Salt Lake City for being polygamists. They live in a collection of old, battered trailers, more than a hundred miles from the nearest store.

They have no savings. Tom Green hadn't had a job in years. The wives make a modest living selling magazine subscriptions. It's a daily struggle.

H. GREEN: Climbing under the house in zero degree weather to glue pipes together because your drain doesn't work.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Or redoing a chimney that has rusted out.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Normally it would be Tom doing that.

VAUSE (on camera): Chopping firewood. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Or going up the mountains with a big old chain saw.

VAUSE: And you guys do that?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We do that.

VAUSE (voice-over): But there has been help from other polygamist families and complete strangers. There's even a Web site asking for donations.

VAUSE (on camera): How to do you feel about that?

T. GREEN: I'm overwhelmed.

VAUSE (voice-over): Every week, Linda, the head wife, drives more than 200 miles to the state jail just outside Salt Lake City. On this day she brings wife Shirley and eight of the eldest boys.

LINDA GREEN, WIFE: There are some days it's all we can do just to keep going and living life. And you can't stop living. It is like there's been a death in the family.

VAUSE: They get two hours together once a week.

(on camera): Tough to say goodbye.

T. GREEN: The saying good-bye isn't nearly as tough as the loneliness I feel that night, when the lights are out and I'm not talking to anybody else, and I'm not watching something on TV and I'm not reading a book. It's time to go to sleep and it's just me and my thoughts, and my memories. That's the toughest time of all.

VAUSE: In those moments, he says, there are some regrets. He wonders if appearing on all those sensational talk shows brought this dilemma upon himself. Still, the decision, he says, was his. He'd hoped to change the laws preventing plural marriage.

(on camera): Tom Green is hoping for parole by February next year, which means he will have served about 18 months of a five-year sentence. Prison officials here describe him as a model inmate, and they say, under normal circumstances, there's every chance he would be released. But there's a problem. He's still facing a charge of rape.

(voice-over): Prosecutors say Green is guilty of the statutory rape of Linda. They were married when she was just 13. She had her first child a year later. If convicted he could be sentenced to another 20 years. Even so, the wives say they plan to wait for their husband on that lonely desert property in Utah. John Vause, CNN, Salt Lake City.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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