Reckoning in Wenatchee

By Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the
Journal's editorial board.

(Article rec'd by CPR via email September 23, 1999)

In September 1995, spectators filed
into a Wenatchee, Wash., courtroom for
the sentencing of Manuel Hidalgo
Rodriguez, a migrant farm worker convicted
a few weeks earlier of child rape and
molestation. Such events were by this
point no longer new in this small city
where, it was reported, Wenatchee's
Child Protective Services workers and
police Detective Robert Perez had jointly
succeeded in uncovering rings of child
molesters operating all over the place.

Here, it was
alleged, bands of Wenatchee citizens
met one or twice a
week or more in order that they
might, all
together, abuse groups of children. These
activities took
place, according to testimony gathered
by Child
Protective Services counselors and Detective
Perez, in an
extraordinary variety of locations, among
them a church and
church camp, not to mention
numerous private
homes including one where--the
chief child
witness reported--townspeople waiting to
molest children
lined up outside the bedroom to wait
their turn, while
others used stepladders and climbed
through the
windows.

The 33-year-old
Mexican worker awaiting sentencing
that September day
was but one of the many
Wenatchee residents swept off to trial
and prison in 1994 and 1995. By the
time the investigations were done, 43
people had been charged, 21 of them
imprisoned. In addition to being
impoverished, as were nearly all those
accused and convicted, Mr. Rodriguez
could neither speak nor understand
more than a few words of English.
Still, he had no trouble grasping the
implications when his court-appointed
attorney told him to plead guilty in
exchange for a short sentence, just
six months--advice he had angrily refused.

Now in the courtroom, a translator
whispered rapidly in his ear as Chelan
County Superior Court Judge Carol
Wardell pronounced the sentence--51/2
years. Once, early in his trial,
Manuel Rodriguez had raised his voice, to shout
that these were "all lies!"--and been
advised to calm himself. This day he said
nothing as he stood stiffly erect,
eyes on the judge. He should also expect to
be deported, Judge Wardell announced,
after he had served his prison term.

Most of the
Wenatchee residents charged with
violating
children had been named by two girls,
ages 10 and
12. In 1995 the younger girl,
Donna,
accompanied Detective Perez (the
newly
appointed head of the police
department's
sex-abuse unit) and two rapt
child-services workers, on a drive through
town, wherein
she pointed out all the houses (a
total of 23)
in which she and other children had
supposedly
been attacked--an event dubbed
"The Parade
of Homes." That name came from
local
skeptics of the sex-ring charges, of which
Wenatchee had
a small but intransigent
number--a
number who made themselves
heard even in
days when the city's only
newspaper,
the Wenatchee World, and the
city's entire
professional and legal
establishment brooked no doubts about
the charges, or about the importance
of the investigation that had
uncovered so much unspeakable evil.

Mr. Rodriguez would likely not have
been among those charged but for his
marriage, in 1992, to the half-sister
of the girls soon to begin telling Detective
Perez about hundreds of rapes. These
two star witnesses for the prosecution,
it turned out, also lived in Detective
Perez's household as foster daughters.
This curious relationship did nothing
to diminish the national attention that
would focus on these prosecutions,
with their nearly 29,000 counts of sex
crimes, their allegations of church
orgies and of child victims forced to march
up to bunk beds in groups of six.

The younger girl, who had been
undergoing psychiatric treatment for
behavioral problems, in due course
named her own biological parents as
molesters, along with numerous others.
In April 1995, in the course of
questioning by Child Protective
Service workers and a detective, she named
Manuel Rodriguez. Four months later he
was convicted, after a three-day trial,
Judge Wardell presiding.

In Mr. Rodriguez's trial, the Chelan
County chief prosecutor produced an adult
witness in addition to the two girls.
A twice-convicted sex offender recently
arrested again, the witness had been
spared the possibility of another felony
conviction--and thus the prospect of a
life term under Washington law--when
the prosecutor offered a deal. In
exchange for testimony against Manuel
Hidalgo Rodriguez and others accused
in the Wenatchee cases, he would be
allowed to plead guilty to a lesser
charge, and the prosecutor would
recommend a short sentence, work
release and time served. This witness
duly testified that he had seen the
defendant molest the younger girl.

The outcome of this trial would not
have been hard to predict--though
employment records showed Mr.
Rodriguez was in California and Nevada and
nowhere near Wenatchee for half of the
six years he had was supposed to
have spent molesting the girl. When
concerned Wenatchee citizens concluded
that the defendant badly needed a new
lawyer and provided money to pay for
one--one less reluctant to challenge
the prosecutor--Judge Wardell refused to
allow the delay necessary for the
change. There was no need for any new
attorney, the judge announced; she
didn't know who this attorney was, and
the current attorney was doing a good
job.

Today, in the Washington State
Reformatory in Monroe, Manuel Rodriguez
spends the days cleaning showers, and
waiting for the court's answer to his
appeal. His English is by now much
improved--enough for him to make himself
clear about matters on his mind like
the offers to take a plea. First his trial
lawyer told him to plead guilty as
soon as they met. Guilty. How could he say
that he was guilty of such things?
Just a few months ago the state again
offered to let him plead guilty to a
lesser charge, in exchange for immediate
release, an offer he again refused.

There can be little question about the
reason for the offer of a deal now.
Taking a plea would end this
prisoner's pursuit of an appeal--which, if won,
would make eight Wenatchee convictions
that have now been overturned.
More appeals can be expected for the
11 people still in prison as a result of
the Wenatchee prosecutions.

The prosecutors have cause for
concern. Faith in their cases isn't what it
used to be in Wenatchee or elsewhere
in Washington, notwithstanding the
views of Child Protective Services and
its parent agency, the state's
Department of Social and Health
Services, whose representatives continue to
maintain that horrific crimes of sex
abuse took place in Wenatchee, as
alleged. Notwithstanding either the
views of a hard core of others that
Detective Perez and the Child
Protective Service therapists had comported
themselves properly--indeed,
heroically--in their pursuit of predators until the
arrival of intrusive media from "the
outside," as indignant local commentators
refer to them.

In 1998 a state appeals court
appointed Whitman County Superior Court Judge
Wallis Friel to hold hearings into the
conduct of the investigations and the
evidence against one couple--to
become, inevitably, a commentary on all the
cases. Harold and Idella Everett were
central figures in this story, not least
because they were the parents of the
girls who had made all the accusations.
In his findings--a lethal description
of the behavior of Child Protective Services
therapists, counselors and state
witnesses--the judge enumerated in
elaborate detail the accusations of
the state's two star witnesses, Donna and
her sister Melinda, and concluded that
"no rational trier of fact would believe
these allegations."

In March 1998 a Chelan County jury
deciding a wrongful-termination suit
awarded $1.57 million in damages to
former Child Welfare Services
supervisor Juana Vasquez--a critic of
the abuse investigations and
prosecutions in which her agency
played a central role. Prominent among the
factors leading to her dismissal, it
appears, was her refusal to cooperate with
investigation and, in particular, her
failure to report on the supposed sex
crimes of one accused foster father
(the alleged host of the weekly revels
involving predators climbing through
windows and children in bunk beds).

If it were the case, as the judge
said, that no rational trier of fact would
believe the allegations of the state's
star witnesses, it was no less true that
any counselor or other child services
caseworker expressing skepticism about
the charges could expect trouble. At
the very least they were to be forbidden
all contact with the children involved
lest they could undermine the prosecution
of these cases. According to a 1994
order by officials of the Department of
Social and Health Services children
were to be removed immediately from
counseling with any staff member
harboring doubts about the allegations. As
was soon clear, the child-services
agencies had no lack of counselors who
could satisfy the requirement for
absolute belief.

Their number included one Rodney Daut,
assigned to counsel Richard, the one
high-functioning and literate child of
the Everett family--14 years old when his
sisters had begun making their
molestation charges against their parents and
others. From the outset Richard told
investigators the charges were all lies,
that his parents had abused no
one--assertions that so offended Mr. Daut that
his counseling sessions with the boy
consisted mainly of shouting that Richard
was in denial and sick in his mind.
Ultimately, the Everett hearings revealed,
Mr. Daut charged that Richard was not
only a victim but--thanks to his refusal
to admit the fact--also a victimizer
of children and, quite possibly, a future sex
offender.

Among the few staff members to raise
doubts, social worker Paul Glassen
could not have imagined the trouble to
come when he quickly reported, as he
was certain anyone must, that a
15-year-old girl he was counseling had just
recanted her story that her foster
father had molested her--a story she told,
she confessed with shame, because she
had been angry at him for disciplining
her. The foster father, Robert
Devereaux (supposed host of the bunk bed
parties), was a prime target in the
sex-ring investigations.

In short order police entered Mr.
Glassen's office with a search warrant and
arrested him for witness tampering and
several other offenses. Child
Protective Services supervisor Tim
Abbey fired Mr. Glassen, alleging that he
had failed to report other abuse--but
even this did not bring him to full
appreciation of the trouble in which
he had put himself. That he began to
grasp when his name began showing up
on the list of molesters identified by
Detective Perez's witnesses.

Unlike most of those charged--the poor
and the indigent--Mr. Glassen was
educated, a trained social worker, and
he could see the possibilities. For one,
Child Protective Services could move
to take his child away. This was enough
possibility for him. In no time he and
his wife and small son were in a car
headed for British Columbia, where his
wife's family lived.

At the time he thought in a year he
could well look back and see he'd been
foolish to uproot his family, that his
trouble with the agency and the
investigator would soon fade.

"I decided I was willing to take that
chance," he says, today. As it turned out
there was plenty of trouble. The first
months were pure misery in a basement
apartment, with no money coming in,
and certain of his wife's relatives, who
couldn't help exhibiting a certain
suspiciousness toward him when they
learned why the couple had come. The
main trouble was getting work,
impossible for him to do for nearly a
year and a half. He had no idea why until
he discovered that each time a
prospective employer conducted a criminal
behavior check, as social-service
agencies were all required to do, his name
appeared along with a report.

The employer could read in that report
that Paul Glassen had been a suspect
in the molestation of more than 50
children. Further, one of the children he
was suspected of victimizing had been
his own child. The latter claim
suggested that his fears the Child
Services agency might come and take his
child weren't altogether off the mark.

The end of the report advises any
employer who wanted more information to
get in touch either with Detective
Perez or with Ross Carmen. an investigator
for Washington state's Department of
Social and Health Service.

Mr. Glassen's luck changed late in the
summer of 1996. With great
trepidation--he had been out of work a
long time--he approached the
Canadian agency administrator who had
just hired him and informed her of
what she would be finding in the
criminal background check: mention of a
felony, obstructing police, suspicion
of molesting 50 children. She listened to
the details without interruption, he
recalls, and then she asked, "Does this
mean you'll be able to start full
time?"

He is still employed at the agency,
eternally grateful for that moment and that
woman. The experience of being named a
molester of children--the memories
of all that had been possible in
Wenatchee, with a few accusers, zealous
investigators and therapists, and a
vast social services establishment--does
not go away, Mr. Glassen reflects.
Still, he has a settlement of a few hundred
thousand dollars from the city of
Wenatchee, a pending state suit and a letter
declaring that he was not involved or
suspected of crimes of child sex abuse.

In Wenatchee, in the meantime,
prosecutors keep busy struggling against
reversals of conviction in these
cases. Last week the state Court of Appeals
upheld its 1997 reversal of Mark and
Carol Doggett's convictions. (The
Doggetts, whom Judge Wardell sentenced
in 1995 to 10 years and 10 months,
are represented by New York appellate
attorney Robert Rosenthal, also Mr.
Rodriguez's appeals lawyer.) Over the
weekend prosecutors announced that
they would challenge the court's
ruling.

Meanwhile, officials of Child
Protective Services and others in the Department
of Social and Health Services have
been busy with their own special projects,
namely preparation for the lawsuits
still to come.