As a video camera whirred away one afternoon last June, a nine-year-old boy popped his gum and accused his mother of sexually abusing him.
He said his mother, Wanda C., molested him when he was five. And he said she continued molesting him even after he'd been put in foster care at the age of six. During scheduled visits, he said, his mom would wait until the caseworker stepped out of the room and then would right away thrust his hand up her skirt. Or, he said, she'd rub him where she shouldn't.
And then the boy (whom we'll call "Sam") recounted how just two months ago Wanda and her mother stalked him near his foster home. Disguised as old people in Halloween costumes, they waved Snickers bars at him to lure him into their car. Sam said he escaped by pedaling his bike like mad to a construction site, jumping off a very tall roof and pounding frantically for help on a stranger's door.
Since then, Sam muttered, he'd ripped all his mom's pictures out of his album and he didn't invite her to his birthday party.
Looking right into the video camera, he said, "I never want to see her again."
And then he glanced at his foster mother, who was sitting with the half- dozen social workers and lawyers appointed by the Arizona Department of Economic Security's Division of Child Protective Services (CPS) to decide his fate.
"I've already got a mom," he said. "A better mom. The best mom I've ever had. And I'm pretty proud of it, too."
WANDA C., a 35-year-old Avondale waitress, has watched the tape so many times she almost has it memorized. As she watches it, she absently fiddles with a tapestry of Jesus--one of about a dozen likenesses of Jesus that hang in her house. Her fingernails are chewed down to tortured stubs. When she hears Sam say she shoved his hand up her skirt, she offers a dry little giggle. "Lies," she says. "What have they done to my son?"
Conversation is difficult for her because she suffers from an auditory disability that causes what sound like malapropisms. A counselor becomes a "councilperson." To go to therapy is to "be in therapist."
Wanda knows the video she's watching has been reviewed by the judges and lawyers and social workers who have kept her son in foster care for three years. She knows, from state records, that some of those doctors even suggested that she had sexual intercourse with Sam when he was three.
And she knows the tape only reinforces the thinking of the professionals who have tagged her as a pedophile who might harm her son if he were returned to her care. She may never get her son back.
She figures Sam's rage over being in foster care has caused him to tell the "pack of doggone lies" on the tape. She never shoved Sam's hands under her skirt in the CPS office, she says. And she and her mother never tried to kidnap the boy from his foster home.
However, Wanda admits there was once some "sickness" in her relationship with Sam. She admits she let Sam touch her breasts and "bottom part" when the boy was three-and-a-half years old. Even though she swore the child to secrecy while the touching was going on, she insists the incidents only happened about "ten times" and they were not sexual in nature. It was her fundamentalist Christian religion that caused her so much guilt over the sessions that she confessed them to her counselor in 1986, she now says.
When CPS officials took her son away a few days after that 1986 confession, she never dreamed she'd have to fight so long and so hard to try to win the child back.
And she never dreamed she'd become a public figure, of sorts, telling her story last fall to state senators and representatives who are looking into Arizona's child-abuse laws. Wanda's case has been championed by Victims of Child Abuse Laws, a lobbying group also known as VOCAL, as a clear example of how the state wrongly seizes children from their parents after investigating child-abuse complaints. In Arizona, VOCAL has "several thousand" members, says its board chairwoman, Mary Margaret Chapman. State agencies become prime targets of wrath from groups like VOCAL. Chapman and VOCAL volunteer Ruth Barr both oppose foster care and say most abused kids should be treated within the home. "Over 90 percent of families could be helped within the home--if it's sexual abuse, you keep the child there and remove the alleged perpetrator," Chapman says.
Barr admits there might be a "possibility" that Wanda molested her son, but she has championed Wanda's case anyway. To Barr, false charges of sexual abuse are inflaming the entire country. And she tags Wanda as an "innocent country girl" who didn't have the sophistication to battle the system. Barr has been trying to help Wanda for a year now. She told lawmakers that the waitress was poorly represented by state-appointed attorneys. She held a bake sale to get enough money for Wanda to see a good attorney. But the bake sale netted only enough for one visit with the high-priced lawyer. "I'm at my wit's end," Barr says. "I think this is one of the most mishandled cases in the world."
But even though VOCAL touts Wanda's case as a clear-cut example of what happens when state officials become too zealous in taking kids away from their parents, documents obtained by New Times suggest that both the state and Wanda made mistakes.
Of course, no one except for the mother and her son knows whether the sexual abuse occurred. Strict confidentiality laws prohibit state social workers and psychologists from discussing Wanda. But Tim Schmaltz, who heads the division of the Department of Economic Security that oversees CPS, insists that his agency does all it can to keep kids with their families.
More than half of the 3,300 kids who are removed from their homes by CPS each year are returned within two years, Schmaltz says. But occasionally, the agency has to "remove the kid permanently from the family if the family doesn't have the skills, will or knowledge to protect the child." Schmaltz says the state is so concerned with keeping kids home instead of in foster care that it started an experimental one-year program to treat abused kids and troubled families within home settings. It is more humane and costs less: $3,000 per year for home care as opposed to $9,000 to $11,000 for foster care.
Schmaltz knows only too well that VOCAL gets upset with CPS for not returning kids like Sam to their natural homes. But he says "occasionally there is a very controversial case" that is so complex that there are no clear-cut heroes and villains.
The story of Wanda C. and her son is one such case.
THE CHILD When Sam was a preschooler, his pediatrician tried to give him a physical examination. But the boy's anxious mother refused to let the child undress. She said she was afraid some harm might come to him if he took his clothes off. The child lived with his mother and grandparents and an aunt and her children in a small apartment in Avondale. Because of the cramped conditions, he slept in the same bed with his mom. The doctor learned the two had rarely been separated.
Bothered by the mother's obsessive clinging to her child, the pediatrician suggested the two begin counseling at a west-side mental-health clinic. After a few sessions, the mother learned not to be quite so frantic and even let Sam go to the bathroom alone. Sam went through kindergarten and one month of first grade at a local public school. Then one day in October 1986, when he was six years old, Wanda confessed to her counselor that she had allowed him to touch her privates when he was three-and-a-half years old. State officials hastily called Sam, his mother, and his maternal grandparents to a meeting at St. Joseph's Hospital's Center for Child Abuse Prevention. Doctors showed Sam anatomically correct drawings and dolls, and the boy admitted the touching had occurred. But he was reluctant to discuss it because his mother had sworn him to secrecy. A hospital report says Sam was "cooperative, well-developed, well- nourished" and did not appear to be in any distress, although there was a "history of sexual abuse." Doctors also noted "a three-centimeter scar on the left buttock" that Sam said was the result of a "whoopin'" from his mom. The child had a bad case of impetigo, a bacterial skin infection, on his face.
The doctors and social workers told Wanda that the boy must be moved out of her bed and into a different room within a week. Wanda became nervous and defensive, a counselor later wrote. According to the counselor, Wanda said: "I can't stop sleeping with him . . . I'm like a child. He's my security blanket. Don't back me in a corner."
Doctors concluded Wanda was suicidal and decided she should be committed to Maricopa County Medical Center for treatment of depression. The boy should be turned over to the state of Arizona.
Sam was admitted to Phoenix Children's Hospital, where he stayed for a couple of months. Hospital notes say he cried frequently for his mother, had nightmares and a lousy appetite. "He has reported feelings of sadness and suicidal ideation," one doctor wrote. Another doctor said the boy threatened suicide.
Sometimes, Wanda and her mother and stepfather came for joint therapy with the child. The family became more and more frustrated as days went by and the boy was not released to them. A social worker wrote: "Mother and grandmother very agitated over plans for foster care . . . they do not understand why patient can't come home." Sam, too, became nervous. He was given a powerful drug, Ritalin, to control his hyperactive behavior.
After about two months, Sam was transferred to a crisis center, and later into a series of foster homes. One foster mother wrote the boy still missed his mom. "He continually says he doesn't want to be here; he doesn't like it; he doesn't have to stay. He says his mother is out of the hospital and will come and get him . . . He talks about his mom all day."
After Sam moved in with a different foster parent, he continued therapy and saw his mom about twice a week. "He said he loved his mom and wanted to live with her but not until she could learn not to touch him," one CPS report says. Gradually, Sam grew more hostile toward his mother. After he'd been in foster care about three years, he alleged his mother continued to try to abuse him sexually during carefully supervised visits in state offices or at her home. He even contended that Wanda stripped naked in a state office when the caseworker left the room. He also insisted his mother and grandmother tried to kidnap him while dressed in Halloween costumes. He said he never wanted to see his family again and let CPS officials videotape his account of the alleged molestations.
At the suggestion of Sam's psychologist, CPS officials went to Maricopa County Superior Court to prevent Sam's family from seeing him. CPS also reported the alleged abuse to the Avondale Police Department. The Maricopa County Attorney's Office refused to prosecute the case.
That's not unusual. Terry Jennings, supervisor of the County Attorney's sex-crimes unit, says his division turned down about a third of the approximately 600 child-sexual-abuse cases referred for prosecution in 1989. "Our policy is to file charges if there is a reasonable likelihood of conviction," he says. That doesn't mean, he adds, that prosecutors believe the abuse didn't happen in those cases that are turned down. It's a matter of whether there's enough evidence for a successful prosecution, Jennings says.
Wanda was not prosecuted, but lawyers have gone to court to prevent her from visiting Sam.
The boy, now nine, has not seen his mother or his grandparents for more than a year.
THE MOTHER
The doodle of the woman in the cage was frightening. The words "Help me" came out of the woman's mouth. "That was me," Wanda now says. She drew the picture of the woman on a letter to her counselor in 1986 in which she admitted having allowed Sam to touch her. She told the counselor the touching happened only ten times and then it stopped. But she felt guilty. She wanted to get better.
To this day, Wanda says she doesn't know why she allowed Sam to touch her: "I do not know. I do not even know who started it. It started when he was three-and-a-half year old and stopped when he was four." She says over and over that the sessions weren't sexual. "Shoot, I had a boyfriend at the time," she says. "Sam was just a baby. Why would I want to have sex with my son?"
Her son was really all she had. She had dropped out of school in eighth grade and went to work at the various small businesses owned by her mother: a used furniture store, several restaurants, a cleaning service.
She says she hated her father, who had been verbally, but not sexually, abusive to her. "They [state officials] say my dad may have did something to me," she says. "He never did." Some psychological profiles of Wanda note that she and other male relatives played childhood sexual games. None of the reports regard those incidents as serious. "Like my doctor has put it through to me, it was just child's play," says Wanda. "Every child does that. But CPS, they made a big holy deal out of the dang thing."
Eventually, her parents divorced and her mother remarried. In 1980, when Wanda was living with her mother and stepfather and working at their Youngtown restaurant, she got pregnant. Her longtime boyfriend bailed out. "Sam's father was good, very good, to me until I got pregnant. Then he left town," she says.
She insists the abandonment didn't depress her too much. She says she was buoyed by her close family and her religion. "I am what they call a Pentecost," she says. "If you're a Pentecost, you're not afraid to clap your hands and rejoice in God. You don't sit in church like a dumb bunny."
Sam was delivered by C-section, and that, she says, "snapped my mind." Wanda says she "went into another world where it was just me and Sam." She says her world was like "a rainy dark day hanging over me." She was so unaware of the world around her, she says, that she let her clothes go out of style. "They looked like they came from oldy old old days," she giggles. It was only after therapy that she realized she was suffering from a severe postpartum depression.
She knew she was overprotective with her son and gladly went to counseling at her pediatrician'ssuggestion. She got to trust her counselor so much that she eventually wrote the note about letting Sam touch her. "I was beggin' for help," she says. She says the day she was confronted by CPS workers at St. Joseph's "it was just too much all at once." She was so overwhelmed she forgot to tell the team of doctors that the touching sessions had stopped. "The doctors said that touching went on for a long time, which was a lie. And later they wanted me to say I had sexual intercourse with my son. I would not say that. I would not tell a lie." She found herself arguing with CPS over whether Sam should share her bed, she says, and before she knew it doctors talked her into checking herself into the county hospital. "They said I needed a rest. They said I could have Sam back when I got out. It did not work thataway at all."
Wanda was released from the hospital five days later, records show, after she "prayed to God to get out of that doggone place." She says her depression lifted at the hospital, after an evening of intense prayer. "CPS put me down for my religion, too," she says. "But that is what happened. I felt like a flower opening up."
She says the numerous family counseling sessions were frustrating for her, and sometimes she lost her temper. "One caseworker told me I hugged my son like a lover," she recalls. "I told that caseworker: `You're nothin' but a crazy ol' woman.' She didn't like that at all."
Eventually, the therapist who was treating mother and son together refused to see her anymore, citing her hostility and denial of a problem, but continued treating Sam. The doctor recommended that Wanda not be allowed so many visits with her son and that he not be returned home.
By 1987, she submitted to a series of psychological tests in hopes of getting her son back. One doctor said she was not a pedophile. Another concluded she was insecure, intellectually limited and lacking "personal insight" but that there was no sign of severe mental illness. All of the doctors noted that Wanda denied she'd harmed her son.
She says she's frustrated because in the last three years she "did everything CPS said" to get Sam back. She tried to get her GED, but couldn't pass the test. She moved into an apartment a few doors down from her parents, and set up a separate bedroom for Sam. She took parenting classes. She got a job at Jerry's Restaurant. She continued her therapy.
But she also continued antagonizing CPS officials. For instance, she refused to sign a CPS contract in 1987 that would have brought Sam home. The contract says Wanda would have to continue taking her medication as per a doctor's instructions.
CPS misread the doctor's instructions. Actually, the doctor had ordered that Sam, not his mom, take Ritalin.
Wanda felt the frustration welling up in her. She tried to explain, but couldn't get through to the bureaucrats. She became hostile and said the state was trying to drug her. But most important, she refused to sign the contract and Sam was not allowed to come home.
She has grown increasingly bitter and distrustful of CPS. She figures Sam is so angry at her for abandoning him that he's decided he never wants to see her again.
She is particularly troubled by the kidnap allegation. She admits that she and her mom did run into Sam one time, but she says it was just by chance. She says the boy took one look at her and raced away on his bike. She did not chase him anyplace. "That boy is lying," she says.
She blames much of Sam's hostility on his current foster mother. Wanda says she's heard that the foster mom wants to adopt the boy. "This woman conducts herself in a seductive manner," Wanda told legislators last fall. "When she appeared in court, her skirt was a very short miniskirt and her low-cut neckline exposed herself. I think it is possible that she may be acting in a seductive manner around my son."
(The foster mother, who lives in the west Valley, couldn't be reached for comment.)
Just last week, CPS officials told Wanda she might be able to start visiting Sam again if she owns up to having molested him and takes some more parenting classes. "It looks like they are beginning to believe what I say and not his wild stories," she says. "They say Sam is ready to . . . what's that word, confront me now. He's real angry. Well, I'm ready. Let him confront me. All I want is my son back." THESE DAYS, Wanda and her family spend a lot of time boosting each other's spirits. Her mom is emotional and spunky; her stepdad is calm and measures his words carefully. "We stuck by our daughter no matter what," her mom says. "Nobody can say we didn't stick by our daughter."
After Wanda moved out to please CPS officials, her mom thought she herself might have a chance to get Sam back. Now she's enraged that the state refused to grant her at least temporary custody of Sam. "They said I was unfit to raise him," she says. "They tried to say I knew about what was going on with Wanda and Sam. That's not a true fact. I knew nothing about anything. This feels just like a kidnap, the way they took Sam. It keeps me up nights just worrying.
"I think he wants to come back to us, but he's afraid to ask. That child is just fought down. He knew he couldn't win. He just quit fighting cuz he couldn't fight no more."
Wanda's mom and stepdad have attended every CPS meeting and court hearing with their daughter. They are gradually losing hope that the boy will ever be returned to them because the system is "dirty." But they think he'll come home on his own some day. "I know there will be a time when Sam comes home," says Wanda's stepdad. "That boy knows his family loves him. He'll come home some day."
SAM'S BITTERNESS toward his mom is overwhelming. Last year, he was moved to scrawl a letter to his caseworker: "I don't want no visits with my mother because my mom makes me angry and I don't want to see her anymore. I don't want no visits."
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Looking right into the video camera, he said, "I never want to see her again."
"Lies," she says. "What have they done to my son?"
Wanda admits there was once some "sickness" in her relationship with Sam.
She tags Wanda as an "innocent country girl" who didn't have the sophistication to battle the system.
"I can't stop sleeping with him . . . I'm like a child. He's my security blanket."
"He said he loved his mom and wanted to live with her but not until she could learn not to touch him," one report says.
Wanda says her world was like "a rainy dark day hanging over me."
"One caseworker told me I hugged my son like a lover," Wanda recalls.
