The Wall Street Journal, Friday, October 13, 1995,
Thirty-one-year-old Kerri Knowles was due to go on trial in Wenatchee, Wash., last week when the prosecutor unexpectedly asked for a postponement. Among the many townspeople accused of sex crimes against children, Mrs. Knowles had been in jail since April 4, when the chief sex-crimes investigator, Detective Robert Perez, came to her house to arrest her and to say he had witnesses testifying she had attacked over a dozen children
Ma. Knowles's trial had to be put off because the key prosecution witness - none other that Detective Perez's own 11-year-old foster daughter - had become uncontrollable. Two weeks earlier, indeed, she had been arrested for malicious mischief in the second degree. The crime victim bring the complaint, it would appear, was Detective Perez himself, in whose home the girl had begun hurling property while in a fit of rage.
Within a few days the girl had recovered sufficiently to appear as prosecution witness in the trial of her older half-sister Donna - one of the numberous persons in town accused of molesting her. Then came the eve of the Knowles trial, whereupon the chief child witness again began exhibiting symptoms of raging hysteria. "Recantations is not a concern for us," prosecutor Roy Fore emphatically assured the local press. Detective Perez in turn announced that the police side of these cases was now closed, and that he had no plans to investigate any more suspects
Small Comfort
Welcome as this news was in a town that had seen more than 40 people accused, it was small comfort to the 22 already in jail. Nine of the accused in Wenatchee still await trials.
Exactly how the first allegations came to be made against any of the accused is best know to Detective Perez, who has explained that it is his custom to destroy original notes of his interrogations; there are not audio tapes. Still, nothing done or undone in these investigations has in the slightest dampened official enthusiasm for the cases built.
Wenatchee Police Chief Ken Badgley has expessed his full support. The town mayor, Earl Tilly, for his part issued a declaration in which he noted that the children of Wenatchee had suffered losses no less terrible than those suffered in the Oklahoma City bombing. As to critics of the investigations - of which there have been some in Wenatchee - the mayor explained that some people with questionable motives were engaged in "police-bashing."
An early target of those investigations, Robert Devereaux, now spends his time watching and waiting - a man bereft of all that he cared for. A former businessman, he had been reluctant when his wife decided to run a group foster home. But by the time of their divorce, Mr. Devereaux had found, apparently, the work of his life. An observer in a position to know attests that Mr. Devereaux was the rarest of foster parents - the sort who did not burn out. There are now, the same source notes, "no less than 200 girls in Wenatchee who owe thanks to him and him alone, for the only stability and support they have ever known in their lives."
Of the alleged crimes charged to Mr. Devereaux, his former foster daughter Nikki scornfully declares: "This is a man who cared about discipline and modesty and about us. This is a man who went without all year and bought nothing for himself so he could give us - we were all girls - a proper Christmas."
Mr. Devereaux's problems began, to be sure, precisely because the residents of his foster home were all girls. Shortly after his divorce, the foster home they once praised as exemplary became, for Child Protective Service workers, an object of darkest suspicion. CPS workers came to schools attended by Mr. Devereaux's foster children to ask them if he had exposed themselves to him, and worse. In July 1994, Mr. Devereaux was arrested by the newly appointed head of sex investigations, Detective Perez, and charged with hundreds of counts of child rape and molestation.
The above-cited witness to Mr. Devereaux's work with the girls was in fact child care caseworker Paul Glassen - to whom it also fell to hear the confession of the 15-year-old who had come to recant the accusations made against her foster father. She had told the police the dreadful lies about Dad, she explained, because she was furious at his effort to discipline her. For reporting this recantation, Mr. Glassen was not only handcuffed and taken off to be booked on charges of "witness-tampering"- he became, also, instant persona non grata at Child Protective Services, from whose premises he was physically escorted and told not to return. There were, he was to discover, far greater dangers ahead.
One of the central features of the Wenatchee sex-ring cases is the confession of one Linda Miller - a 38 year old woman who confessed, she avers, only after hours of interrogation, enforced sleeplessness, and threats from Detective Perez. It is an extraordinarily woven history - one that may be worth scholarly study someday.
In this confession, composed of Detective Perez's own summaries of what the witness said (there being no actual verbatim record), there appears, now, the name of Paul Glassen, along with other Wenatchee citizens critical of the investigations. Here we read that there was "a guy named Paul. Paul said he worked at C.P.S. (Child Protective Services) and that if I didn't shut up he would take my kids away." References to a man named Paul became a regular item in the child witness's accusatory statements.
Shortly after, Mr. Glassen took his family off to Canada. Unlike most of those accused, Mr. Glassen was not the poorest of the poor; he could afford a lawyer. What he was not will to do, he explained, was to risk having Child Protective Services come and take his own five-year old away, as they had taken so many others.
Mr. Devereaux, in turn, was not willing to risk years in prison - charged as he was with monstrous sexual crimes - and so agreed to take a plea. It is a measure of the case against him that prosecutors agreed to send a man allegedly responsible for the vilest of crimes against children out in the world a free man, in exchange for a confession that he had (a) once spanked a child and (b) warned someone he might be arrested ("rendering criminal assistance").
All told, Child Protective Service personnel and Detective Perez have, together, had a busy few years in Wenatchee, while unearthing remarkable allegations of child sex abuse - not all of them connected to sex rings. Mark and Carol Doggett, a couple in their early 40's, are now each serving 11 years for alleged regular sexual assault of their children.
The oldest of their five children, Sarah "Sam" Doggett, now 16, has been on the run from the ministrations of Child Protective Services ever since she appeared on television to denounce the charges against her mother and father as ludicrous. The day after her television appearance Child Protective Service personnel came looking for her. Local CPS Supervisor Tim Abbey informed a visiting journalist a few weeks back that Sam was in need of protection - and that it was certainly true that her mother and father had regularly molested their children sexually.
In Hiding
In the small living room of the house where she is hiding out, many miles from Wenatchee, Sam Doggett rages at the stories about her mother and father, whom she describes as loving and gentle. She ranges at having, herself, been taken off to a licked facility in Idaho where therapists sought to help her overcome he "denial" of her parents' behavior - and she rages, too, at the "memory recovery' treatment given her small sisters to help them remember details of abuse. Her parents, devout Mormons, never even watched a PG-rated movie. At home in the morning, she notes, their family held a prayer circle, in which each child asked God's help for the challenge of the day ahead. At her parents' trial, the prosecutor charged that the Doggetts were sending secret messages to their children via the Bible - to prove which point he cited the underlined admonition "Honor Thy Father and Mother."
The Doggetts would not now find themselves in prison, separated from
their children, had they not gone to Child Protective Services to ask for
help on discovering that their difficult 13-year-old son had forced himself
on his younger sister. In short order, Child Protective Services concluded
that the son was not the problem, but that the parents had, instead, been
molesting all their children. Why, Sam asked, as others have, would parents
who lined their children up and raped them nightly as charged then march
off to ask help from Child Protective Services for their son's sexual problem?
It is only one of the many questions shouted to the heavens by this furious
daughter of a family lost.
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Ms. Rabinowitz is a Journal
editorial page writer.
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