My guess, since it’s little more than a sex cult, is that since her husband is now dead and the woman must be married, she was probably being forced to be wife #16 to some other church father.
Jeffs isn’t dead, he’s still serving a life sentence.
That's exactly what happened after Joseph Smith was killed in a blotched jail break in 1844.
The question of how to divvy up Joseph's harem was one of the primary factors leading to a 2.5 year civil war (as per the historian Hubert Bancroft), their second inter-denominational shooting conflict. The Danites were forced to enforce the law of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles whereby transgressors would be "cut close and square." The State of Illinois' reaction to all of this carnage was one of the main factors leading to the Saints' migration to Utah. The booty battles continued in one form or fashion in the main LDS sect into the early 20th century, and continue in some of the LDS breakaways to this day.