As a girl, Vicky Prunty dreamed of doing great work for God, of serving with the fervor shown by Mormon founder and prophet Joseph Smith.

By 25, Prunty was married and a mother. Her dream had brought her to a nearby McDonald's--and to polygamy.

Standing in the restaurant, her head swimming with the odor of french fries and the strangeness of the moment, Prunty met the young redhead who would become her husband's second wife, her "sister-wife."

Then and there, her husband sealed the three-way union, pulling an heirloom ring off of Prunty's finger and sliding it onto the hand of his new wife. According to their beliefs, polygamy was the pattern for eternal and celestial joy. But it sure didn't feel like it to Prunty.

"We tried to create a Zion of our own, and it failed," said Prunty, now 34 and divorced, struggling to support six children.

Few people in Utah want to talk publicly about modern-day polygamy, which is believed to be practiced by tens of thousands of Mormon fundamentalists from Mexico to Canada. Estimates put the number of polygamists in Utah at around 30,000, some in remote communes and scores of others in Salt Lake City.

Local officials, who are frantically rebuilding Salt Lake City and polishing its image for the 2002 Winter Olympics, don't ask or tell. Leaders of the 10 million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which repudiated plural marriage more than a century ago, swiftly and secretly excommunicate anybody caught engaging in it.

But last spring, Prunty and a handful of other ex-wives of polygamists decided to speak up.

In March, they formed the group Tapestry of Polygamy, by all accounts the first support group devoted to helping women escape polygamy.

The group has a hot line and a Web site--www.polygamy.org-- offering encouragement and services to women who may be considering leaving.

"Most women are still very afraid of coming out," Prunty said. "Some of them are in danger."

More than three weeks ago, a 16-year-old girl was found abandoned, belt-whipped and severely beaten in remote Box Elder County, northwest of Salt Lake City. The girl said she was trying to escape a 7-month-old forced marriage to her uncle. She reportedly was his 15th wife.

John Daniel Kingston, the girl's father and her husband's brother, was arrested. Authorities charged him with felony child abuse.

All three were members of the Kingston group, a polygamist clan that calls itself the Latter-Day Church of Christ and reportedly has more than 1,000 members. Tapestry of Polygamy knows the Kingstons well; two founding Tapestry members, Rowenna Erickson and her daughter Stacy Erickson, left the Kingston group in 1994.

Rowenna Erickson's father, a former Lutheran from Chicago, and her Mormon mother had abandoned orthodox Mormonism for the more radical message of Charles Eldon Kingston, and joined his growing empire shortly after its founding in 1935.

Rowenna Erickson was born in 1942, and grew up passionate about her faith. In 1962, she married her older sister's husband and bore him eight children. Raising them was a struggle; to help make ends meet, she watched other children in the group for 32 cents an hour and collected aluminum cans.

But she dutifully received her husband's visits every other night, and it was not until her children were grown that she began to doubt what she was doing.

"I heard other women in the group say, `Do you think God really loves women? Why would he let us suffer so much?' " she recalled. "And I thought, if this is so wonderful, why does it feel so horrible?"

Like most fundamentalists, the Kingston group rallied around Smith's 19th Century doctrine of plural marriage, understood by the church to be a revelation of God.

In part, the theology of polygamy harkened back to the family histories of Bible figures such as Abraham and Jacob. In part, it was fueled by the Mormon doctrine that spirits are waiting to enter our world and prevented from reaching higher planes until they do. That makes it the duty of each believer to bring as many children into the world as possible.

Smith and successor Brigham Young preached that doctrine, Young accumulating 55 wives during his leadership. But polygamy also brought intense pressure from the outside world, including a series of federal laws and Supreme Court decisions prohibiting plural marriages.

Finally in 1890, Mormon President William Woodruff issued a manifesto declaring that he would abide by the law of the land, preserving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and paving the way for statehood for Utah in 1896.

By 1904, the church began excommunicating its polygamists, but many hewed to the belief that Smith's revelation was the true word of God and Woodruff's was not. As they were driven from the larger church, they formed their own sects, often resurrecting the early Mormon practices of communal businesses and finances and a hierarchy in which women are not permitted to make even mundane decisions.

For that reason, many women leaving polygamous groups today have to learn the most basic skills for living in modern society.

Stacy Erickson had reached adulthood when she left the Kingston group with her mother. She knew enough about the world to know that she should put her small savings in a bank, but she did not fully understand how banks work.

"The first time I went to withdraw money from the bank I was terrified," she remembered. "How would I tell them what I wanted it for?"

A 25-year-old woman who asked to be identified as Chloe said she was a victim of incest and sexual abuse between ages 3 and 5. At 12, her father began pressuring her to marry her older sister's husband.

She held off, marrying a man of her choosing at age 17. Six weeks after their marriage, he told her he wanted to take another wife. It took her four more years to leave the family, and she still worries about those she could not take with her.

"My mother's going to die in it, and she's miserable," Chloe said.

One of Tapestry's oldest members grew up in a large polygamous family and was satisfied in her polygamous marriage for 30 years before she made the discovery that soured her: One of the sect's leaders had abused her children decades earlier.

"I had a number of mothers and they got along very well and loved us. There are healthy families and loving relationships," the woman said. "But the secrecy hides abuses too."

The large groups such as the Kingston group, some of whom have established their own towns and outposts in rural Utah, Arizona and Idaho, are the best recognized face of polygamy. Many dress in 19th Century style, and some eschew modern technology.