As a 15-year-old virginal bride, Pamela Jones found her new husband’s evasiveness concerning. When she mustered the courage to ask him, just seven days into their union, what was wrong, his response floored her.

“I’m ready to pursue another wife,” he told her.

Jones, now 60, recounts her early life in the fundamentalist Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times in her unnerving new memoir, “The Dirt Beneath Our Door: My Journey to Freedom After Escaping a Polygamous Mormon Cult” (Matt Holt Books), with writer Elizabeth Riley.

“It had been drilled into me that if I ever tried to leave, God would punish me by taking my life and my children’s, and I feared I was about to die,” she writes. 4

The Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times was founded in upstate New York in

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