Sarah Marie "Sam" Doggett is on the run. She's a blonde 16-year-old with braces on her teeth. She's got 15 dollars in her pocket. And she's determined to get away, but not from her parents. Sam says she loves her parents. She's on the run from Washington's Child Protective Services.
Sam's parents have been convicted of child sexual abuse. Sam says they did not abuse her. She's the oldest of the Doggett's five children and she believes her parents are innocent of all charges. But Sam's youngest sister, a nine year old, gave testimony that put their parents in jail.
Sam believes the people working with Wenatchee's CPS office are the ones who put that testimony in her little sister's mouth. Sam believes that's why her caseworker let her know a few days ago that he was moving her again, for the sixth time in six months. She believes the caseworker wants to stop her from testifying at her parent's sentencing, to stop her from telling the court how CPS manipulated her. She said she wasn't going to let CPS mess with her again. So she ran. She refused to tell anyone where.
A little over a year earlier, Sam Doggett had been living with her family in Wenatchee. She was the oldest of five children of Mark and Carol Doggett. Her brother was two years younger. But Sam was closer emotionally to her 12-year-old sister, Liz, and to the two youngest sisters. In fact, she had a terrible time getting along with her brother. That's one of the main reasons why she and her parents agreed in the summer of 1994 that Sam could go to California to temporarily live with another family.
She started the 1994-95 school year in Ukiah, California, where she lived with Kathi and Paul Hansen. The arrangement proved good, so the Hansens went to court in California, and obtained temporary legal guardianship of Sam, with the blessing of Sam's parents. The guardianship was effective through early March of 1995. Sam did well in school. She had 3.3 grade point average. She was an Honors English student and involved in school activities. Then, in early December, she got the phone call.
Her sister called Sam and said their brother had raped her. Sam blamed herself. She says today that if she'd been at home in Wenatchee, it wouldn't have happened. In the note Sam wrote that day, she indicated much the same thing. Then she took a lot of Dexatrim capsules, in a suicide effort.
Sam was hospitalized before being released to the Hansens. She was given a prescription for an anti-depressant, and had no such problems after that. However, Sam's suicide episode touched off a storm back in Wenatchee.
Sam's parents learned about her note that same day and questioned their son. Their son admitted to having sexual contact with his sister. The
Doggetts took him in for counseling. Two days later, police detective Robert
Perez and a Child Protective Services supervisor went to Orchard Middle School and questioned the Doggett children. The detective then took the children home, and told the parents that it was a family matter. Perez and Abbey did not believe the girl, and told the parents that the sexual contact between kids had been mutual. They said Mark and Carrol Doggett would have to deal with it, not the state.
The parents decided to send the boy to live with his aunt in Moses Lake. That way, they reasoned, the remaining girls in the house would be protected, but the boy would still be with family.
However, as the police officer would later testify at trial, he thought that was suspicious. Shortly after Christmas, Detective Perez and CPS supervisor Tim Abbey went to Moses Lake. Though the aunt objected, they took the boy into custody and questioned him for several hours. This time the boy said not only that he had molested his sister, but that his parents had molested him and the other children in the family. The police immediately took his little sisters into custody. The 11-year-old would testify at trial that she was also pressured into making allegations against her parents. Police arrested Mark and Carol Doggett on charges of child sex abuse. The girls, ages 9 and 11, were placed in foster care.
However, 12-year-old Liz was in California with Sam. She was visiting her sister during the Christmas holiday. Police and CPS officials had obtained a court order in Washington to take the Doggett children into custody. Now they made the law stretch across state lines. In early January, Detective Perez and CPS caseworker Pat Boggess arrived in Sacramento and called the Hansens. They said they needed to take Sam and Liz back to Wenatchee. They asked that Kathi Hansen drive the girls the three hours from Ukiah to Sacramento. Kathi remembers it was storming, but she agreed.
Kathi Hansen says she really was given no choice in this matter. She brought her papers showing that she was Sam's guardian, but Perez and Boggess weren't interested in seeing them. Hansen says she was told that Washington's criminal investigation took precedence over her California guardianship. She says she was never shown any court order allowing the Washington officials to pick up the kids. No California officials appeared to assist. Yet Kathi Hansen relinquished the children, a decision she later regretted.
Sam Doggett didn't want to go with Perez and Boggess. She denied that her parents had ever been involved in sexually abusing her. She did not believe they had abused any one. She questioned her sister about it, and Liz said their parents had done nothing to her, either. But Sam reluctantly agreed to cooperate and go back to Washington State. She says Perez and Boggess promised that she and her sister would be kept together and allowed to live in the same foster home. She says she was told she would only be in Washington State for a couple of weeks.
Her first inkling of what Perez and Boggess were up to came after they interviewed Liz at the California CPS offices. Sam says she waited for three hours while Liz was interviewed. She didn't understand why it took so long, especially since Liz said her parents had done nothing. When Liz came back, she was upset. Sam says her sister told her that Perez and Boggess claimed their father had a baby by another woman, and that her father had been shooting up heroin. Sam told her not to believe any of it. It wasn't true.
All four flew back to Wenatchee with a layover in Seattle. That's when Perez began questioning Sam. She recalls being in a waiting room at SeaTac when Perez said to her: "I know your father raped you, why don't you just admit it." She tried to ignore him. He repeated the same statement to her several times, as though he were trying to embarrass her in front of all the people around. She couldn't understand how the caseworker would just sit there and let Perez say such things. But she did.
When they arrived in Wenatchee, Sam felt the betrayal hit. At the airport, Sam was told that she and Liz were being sent to different families.
Sam remembers clutching Liz and her sister clutching her. They cried and screamed that they wouldn't be separated. Sam says someone grabbed her from behind and pulled her away from her sister. She struggled and she believes she hit caseworker Pat Boggess in the head. The last thing she remembers seeing of her sister is someone dragging her away.
Sam was taken to a foster home. She was upset and had a long talk with her foster mother. But, as Sam recalls now, she quickly settled in as best she could. She thinks she was there a week or two, and that she was spending a lot of time helping her foster mom. Then her caseworker called her to the CPS offices.
The only time Sam had seen her caseworker, Dean Reiman, was when she arrived at the airport with Liz. Reiman had driven her from the airport to her foster home. She didn't know that Reiman was married to Patt Boggess.
Now she spoke to him again for just a couple of minutes.
Reiman told Sam that she was suicidal, and she needed to be hospitalized. Then an ambulance crew stepped in, put her on a stretcher, and restrained her arms with manacles. She couldn't move. The ambulance hauled her off on a four-hour trip to an Idaho mental institution, Pine Crest in Coeur d'Alene.
Sam couldn't believe what was happening to her. When asked if she was suicidal, she says, "Not at all." No counselors had talked to her since her arrival in Wenatchee. She hadn't mentioned anything about being suicidal to anyone. She hadn't been evaluated by her caseworker. But here she was, tied down to a stretcher, being forcibly placed in a what seemed to her a jail. When she arrived at Pine Crest, she was told she couldn't have any outside contacts with her friends or her family. The facility was locked as she wasn't allowed to leave. And the counselors seemed to have an agenda with another purpose.
"They didn't ask me about suicide," she says, sarcastically. What they asked her about was sexual abuse. As she recalls, they told her they knew she'd been abused. They told her that her sister had confessed to it. They asked her is she knew about "playing house" or if she'd ever had to put on the "maid costume." The stories had apparently come from police reports of interviews with her siblings. When the case came to court, the game and costume business would be shown to be untrue. But no one seemed to question it then. Except Sam. She says, "It was ridiculous." Counselors considered her to be in denial.
Sam Doggett spent five weeks in the mental hospital. She says she was diagnosed as suicidal and bulimic. Even today, CPS Regional Supervisor Roy Harrington describes her as "a very troubled girl." Sam says, "How does he know. He never met me." Harrington's primary knowledge of Sam is through her files and through anecdotal information supplied by her caseworkers. But
Sam's parents smile and describe her as a good kid. Her former legal guardians say she's a smart teenager with normal teenage problems. Friends of the family say she was dealing with those normal problems quite well until
CPS got hold of her.
Sam says adamantly that she was not suicidal when she was sent to the hospital, and that she is not suicidal now. She is angry. She feels the reason CPS sent her to the hospital was to punish her and to try to get her to change her story. Sam had refused to say that her parents abused her. She had told her sister not to believe what police and caseworkers told her. "They tried to make me think I was crazy," she said. Family friend Paul O'Connor believes CPS not only sent Sam to the mental institution to try to break her, but to make other people believe that her story was not credible. He says CPS and police sex abuse investigators have turned Wenatchee into "Wen-Nazi."
Sam was finally released from the hospital and sent to a group home in Omak. She says she had learned one thing in treatment: "Hate." She hates the people at CPS for what they did to her, and for what they did to her family. Her parents were each convicted of two counts of child sexual abuse, all charges involving the nine-year-old girl.
In an interview before trial, that girl was asked by attorneys: "As far as you know, your mom and dad never touched you in a bad way?" The little girl replied, "Right."
But this conversation also took place as part of that interview: "Does (CPS caseworker) Pat (Boggess) think your parents touched you bad?" The little girl nodded yes. "Has she told you, you should remember it?" the little girl nods yes. "Do you want to remember." The little girl says, "Yes." The attorney asks, "Why?" The girl says, "So this could get all over with."
During the trial of Mark and Carol Doggett, that little girl finally did recover her memory, with the help of Pat Boggess and a counselor, Cindy Andrews. The girl remembered that one day her father took her in her brother's room and put his finger inside her. She remembered that the next day, her mother did the same thing. At trial, Pat Boggess sat beside the little girl as she told her story. The jury convicted the Doggetts of that count, and of aiding and abetting each other in that abuse.
Sam believes the prosecution twisted the minds of her sisters. She had a session with the same counselor, Cindy Andrews. Sam says she was told that it would help her sister if she talked with Andrews, so she cooperated. Sam says that Andrews told her she had a "memory block." She says Andrews asked her to think back to some time when she didn't remember anything, and try to recall if her father or mother had been doing certain things to her. Sam was confused and mixed up by all of this. She says she almost began believing that something might have happened to her, something that she didn't remember. But now she says confidently, "I know I don't have any memory block."
Sam believes that was simply part of the manipulation leading up to trial. She was to be a defense witness. Shortly before she testified, the prosecutor came to her and told Sam to keep it simple on the stand, to answer only the questions that were asked and not to volunteer information. Sam now believes her failure to speak out at trial may be one reason why her parents were convicted. The rest she blames on deceit. And she's frightened by hints that her younger siblings were manipulated much as she was.
Sam says that after the trial, she met her 12-year-old sister Liz. She hadn't been allowed to see Liz and describes their meeting as an accident. But Sam discovered that Liz was mad at her. Liz had been told that Sam testified against her parents. Sam told Liz it was just another lie, another of the many lies that police and CPS had surrounded them with. Neither of the girls had testified against their parents.
Sam Doggett has not been given permission to see her sisters since they were separated in January. She has not been allowed to see her parents. She has been placed in foster homes and group homes and institutions. She has been removed from school. Sam's former guardians in California say that CPS worker Pat Boggess promised in January that Sam could still take her final exams from her California school, even though she was being pulled out two weeks before the semester ended. However, Kathi Hansen learned later that CPS called to Sam's school and withdrew her before the term was completed. Following Sam's stint in the locked ward, she was allowed to attend school for almost an entire quarter in Omak, then she was moved and pulled out of school again. She says she has asked to return to school, but her caseworker hasn't let her. She even tried to sign herself up for summer school. But Reiman planned to move her just a few days before it started. That's when she ran.
Sam Doggett first went public with her story by telling a Spokane television station. Police and CPS immediately went after her. Sam had spoken with her foster mother at about 4:30 PM. The story aired at 6:00, and shortly afterward two caseworkers and a police officer contacted the foster parent looking for Sam. A police officer showed up at the home of Sam's friends, saying Sam was a runaway and asking to search the place. Police contacted another family and said Sam was wanted by CPS for questioning. The CPS regional supervisor says it was not retaliation. He says they were simply concerned for her welfare.
Sam says, "They're trying to shut me up." Sam says that what she's saying now is not to protect her parents. She's saying it to protect her sisters and all the other children out there whom she believes CPS is treating in the same frightening manner.
On June 20, just three days before the sentencing hearing for Sam's parents, Sam was told that Dean Reiman planned to move her out of foster care and into a group home in Spokane. "They want to stop me from testifying," she said in a telephone interview. Sam never went back to her foster home, for fear that she would be restrained there if she tried. Sam ran. She didn't say where, just that it was someplace where CPS couldn't mess with her any longer. As Sam says, she's never been abused by her parents. But, she says, she's had enough of her abuse at the hands of CPS.
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