I Speak For This Child: True Stories of a Child Advocate

by Gay Courter

  Just a few weeks past her fifteenth birthday, Alicia had her whole life in front of her. From her records I knew she had academic potential but was a mediocre student. Her fervor was reserved for attracting boys, but if she could learn to find satisfaction in accomplishing something through school or work, perhaps she would realize she didn’t need a man to validate her self-worth. On the other hand, the more common scenario of using a sexual liaison to get out of foster care—either by dropping out of school or getting pregnant—seemed likely. Worse, Alicia easily could fall for any man who showed her any attention, one who might use her, abuse her, turn her onto drugs, infect her with AIDS, or otherwise ruin her chances for a future with more possibilities. I knew she liked animals and computers, music and movies, children and photography, old boats and cars. I could see her working in a veterinary hospital (her stated choice) or doing accounting on a computer (she did well in math) or singing in a church choir, or restoring automobiles. Rapidly her image metamorphosed from her schoolgirl blouse to a white lab coat to a smart business suit to a pair of overalls.

  As she babbled on, though, I noticed that the thick coating of makeup made her skin into something older, harsher. Her blouse was unbuttoned to reveal the tops of her breasts overfilling a lacy bra. When a guy in tight pants swaggered by, Alicia tossed her head, batted her eyes, and thrust her shoulder forward provocatively. Though I tried to block them, Alicia’s other possibilities loomed up in a series of images of her modeling for a sleazy photographer, hanging out in a seedy bar, selling her body on a street corner, wasting away in a hospice. I blinked back tears and tried to follow her patter without prejudice. Then Alicia asked a question that abruptly brought the present into focus.

  “Do you think you could?”

  “Could what?” I said, not certain I had heard her right.

  “Could you find my missing mother?”

  “I don’t know …,” I began slowly. “It might not be something that guardians are supposed to do. Also, nobody has heard from her for at least ten years.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked shakily.

  “When I was in fifth grade, she drove up to the house. My father took the rifle from the wall and ran outside waving it. I heard her pleading to see us. My father called her a whore and warned her that if she ever came around again, she’d regret it. When she tried to get out of the car, he cocked the hammer. Rich was there then, he saw it too. He started to run out to stop Dad, but Dad pointed the gun at Rich and forced him back in the house. My mother gave up, got back in the car, and started to leave. When she passed by the front of the house, I saw her real close. She was crying so hard her face was shining.” Alicia leaned forward, knocking her soda cup forward. We both ignored the spill. “That means she wanted to see us … and that she really loved us. Only Dad wouldn’t let her and she was scared of him. Everyone was scared of him.” Alicia trembled, not with sadness, but rage.

  Where was Tammy? What if she were in jail, or worse, dead? What if she was a prostitute or an addict? Wasn’t it better for Alicia to have some fond memories than to be slapped with the truth? No, I decided that only the truth would clear up her fantasies.

  Alicia was waiting for my response, and when I did not answer at once, she lashed out at me. “You won’t help me either! I asked Mitzi and she said she didn’t have anything in the file and that was that. So what am I supposed to do? Forget I ever had a mother?”

  “No, Alicia, no,” I said in as soothing a voice as I could muster. “You need to know what happened to her. I just am not sure how to do it. I’ve never tried to find a missing person before, so I don’t know how difficult it might be. Also, you might learn some things you’d rather not have known.”

  “Like what?” Alicia asked challengingly.

  I stated my fears about her mother turning out to be a disappointment. “Okay, that’s a possibility,” she admitted. “It’s also possible that Rich is right. He believes she died in an accident. I don’t know where he got that from, but if it is true, I’d want to know. It must be in the records somewhere, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “But isn’t there also a chance that she is alive and that she does still love me and wants me? I’m sure she doesn’t know where I am. Maybe she doesn’t know what happened with my father. Now that he’s out of the picture, maybe she’ll take me back.”

  My chest expanded with the same immense hopes. “Let’s go home and talk to Ruth about this. I want her to know what we are doing because she might feel a little jealous.”

  “Why should she do that?”

  “Because she loves you, Ally-Oop, that’s why!”

  Ruth was very quiet. She heard my explanation, then asked Alicia a few questions. Then she turned to me. “I was adopted by an aunt after my mother died, but I always wanted to find my father. When I was a little older than Alicia, I learned that they had known all along where he was. I became furious because I felt they had kept him from me all those years. My grandmother understood and took me to meet him.” Ruth turned to the wall of photographic portraits in her living room and waited a few seconds to compose herself. “I met him, and I am not sorry I did, but he was—to say the least—a disappointment. A real loser.”

  “But you found some answers …” I said.

  “Yes, so I understand why Alicia wants to do this.”

  “There’s a good chance that we’ll never find her,” I added.

  “But if nobody tries, I’ll never find her anyway,” Alicia said, her eyes staring off in the distance.

  Nancy approved the plan to try to locate Tammy Stevenson. “As long as you think it is in the children’s best interests” was her only caveat.

  I asked Lillian the best way to proceed.

  “Start with the police records on every member of the family,” she suggested.

  My court order gave me access to the criminal records of everyone connected with these children, but since I already had a substantial file on Red Stevenson I had not yet seen any reason to track any others down. I went to the sheriffs records department, handed over copies of my court orders on both the criminal and dependency cases, my identification card as a Guardian ad Litem, my driver’s license as a picture ID, and asked for anything pertaining to Richard Leroy Stevenson, Sr., Red Stevenson, Richard Leroy Hamburg, Red Hamburg, Jeremiah Stevenson, Tammy Stevenson, and Tammy Hamburg. My court order had another name I had not noticed at first: Sunny Rhodes. The night before I had called Alicia and asked if she knew that person.

  “Oh, that was my stepsister, the one that had to move out when my father messed with her.”

  So I added that name to my list, just in case there had been a complaint filed in that case.

  The clerk mumbled something about it being a long list and it might “take some time.” I agreed to wait. Ten minutes later she unlocked the door to her office. “Some of these files are marked confidential. I don’t want you standing around reading them in the hallway. Come in, and I’ll give you an empty desk and start bringing you files.”

  And bring them she did. Handwritten police reports, arrest sheets, investigative files, and more. The first pages referred to Red Stevenson’s arrest for molesting his daughter, but a second set looked almost the same except that the name of the victim was Dawn Leigh Pruitt. Dawn! Alicia’s best friend? There was a doctor’s report on Dawn’s gynecological examination that indicated penetration had taken place. Next there was also a report from a Mrs. Smiley about the suspected abuse of Alicia. I took down that name and phone number. I presumed that she was the person who had initially called the abuse hotline about Alicia’s molestation. Since her name was supposedly off-the-record, I was surprised to uncover it in the police paperwork, but I wrote it down anyway, and later would be glad that I had.

  Farther down in the paperwork there was a complaint from the previous summer accusing Red of the “sexual maltreatment of Cindy, Hallie, and Katie Curry.” The report
went on to describe how the girls traveled with Alicia Stevenson on the school bus and got off at the same stop. They were friends and sometimes they stayed overnight at the Stevensons’ house. Cindy, the oldest, reported that Mr. Stevenson forced her into a room and she had to struggle to get away. Concerned he was going to do something “nasty” to her, she spent the rest of the night on the front seat of his pickup truck with the doors locked. A worker in the groves reported seeing Red Stevenson playing tag with Hallie, and when he caught her, “he slipped his hands under the waistband of her shorts.” Another time Mr. Stevenson held Hallie upside down and wouldn’t put her down until she agreed to something. When the grove worker heard her screams, he came into view, and Red let her go. The youngest, Katie, reported that Mr. Stevenson liked to rub her in “funny” places. Although an official abuse report was filed by Mr. Curry, with the HRS investigation concluding the allegations were “indicated,” no legal action seemed to have been taken.

  The next report was for a burglary by Richard Leroy Stevenson the previous January. After I read the summary, describing the perpetrator as “emotionally disturbed,” I realized this was a charge against Rich Jr. and not his father, although the incident had not shown up in his HRS file. I asked the clerk to search under Cory’s and Alicia’s names and in a few minutes she located the charges against Cory for stealing a tractor and vandalizing a field of watermelons. He had been given a sentence of a hundred hours of community service but had not completed any of them. Thankfully, Alicia had no criminal file of her own.

  The clerk kept reappearing with additional assault reports against Mr. Stevenson, some as much as fifteen years old. At the bottom of the pile were incidents filed under the name of Hamburg. I leafed through them rapidly and there she was: Tamara Felice Stevenson Hamburg. I copied down her date of birth and a Social Security number, then noted a box that listed an FBI number.

  “What’s this?” I asked the clerk.

  “They get an FBI number when they’ve been charged with a felony,” she explained. The clerk pointed out an arrest sheet from 1979. Tammy had been charged with defrauding an innkeeper by passing a bad check to pay a bar tab. Her last known address was a rural delivery box five miles from the groves. I looked at the signature of the officer who had arrested her: Glen Cunningham. I blinked and stared again. Glen was the father of one of my children’s friends. No longer on the police force, he had started a landscaping business. All of a sudden I decided that I needed something to control the black spots on my rosebushes.

  Not only did Glen Cunningham have the right chemical composition for my horticultural problem, he remembered Tammy Stevenson Hamburg very well.

  “Not a bad kid, just immature. We were in middle school together, and even then she could drink the boys under the table. Cute little thing, good dancer, but she got messed up with that fellow who took her to Oklahoma and dumped her, then came back married to Red Stevenson. When he started running around on her, she took up with another guy who ended up in jail. Really knew how to pick ‘em, didn’t she?”

  “What happened to Tammy?”

  “I heard she moved away with the kid she had with the last guy.”

  I explained that I wanted to find Tammy for her daughter’s sake. “Do you know where I would start?”

  Glen shuffled his feet. “You have a court order, right?” I nodded. “You have her DOB and Social Security number?” I nodded again. “You give them to me and I’ll see what I can do.”

  “But you’re not still on the force?”

  “You want me to try or not?”

  “Thanks, Glen,” I said, and paid for the bug spray.

  On my way back from the nursery I made a slight detour and went by Cory Stevenson’s foster home. I was amazed how both Birdie and Patty seem equally in touch with the mental, emotional, and physical needs of their diverse charges, and Cory was doing splendidly there. Within two weeks Cory had been placed in a special program at his new middle school, had seen Dr. Goldberg, and was on a waiting list for therapy at the county clinic, although he could not get a preliminary appointment for several months. Dr. Goldberg diagnosed Cory as being hyperactive and having a respiratory infection, but too much time had taken place since his bowel problems to diagnose any abuse.

  Even though I was at peace about Cory, I still worried about Rudy and Chris languishing at the MacDougals. To clear my conscience, I had written Lillian a letter stating that I had serious concerns about the suitability of that home for any child and asked that she should pass on the letter to anyone she thought should see it.

  After your experiences at the two meetings with HRS, including the one with Mrs. MacDougal, as well as the visit to her home, you and Nancy might agree that there are indications that this family’s style of child rearing leaves much to be desired. My notes document an authoritarian approach, threatening attitude, verbal abuse, humiliation, expectations far exceeding a child’s emotional and developmental level, punishments with extreme time limits, work and chores above and beyond normal household patterns, and general lack of knowledge regarding contemporary parenting skills.

  Further, in her dealings with me, Renata MacDougal routinely told lies about me and others. She would not permit the siblings to visit and kept this Guardian ad Litem from the home for more than two months until a court and HRS ordered a visit. She never took Cory for medical or therapy appointments, despite frequent requests to do so.

  On the surface Renata MacDougal presents well and has complicated reasoning behind most of her actions. However, underneath lies a controlling aspect that might be more relevant in the management of a prison camp than a foster home. Since almost all my contacts with Mrs. MacDougal have been confrontational, I have documented this case carefully. These notes might be of use to some future investigator. Other persons who have been associated with this family have also voiced concerns about the destructive nature of that environment.

  I understand that there is a scarcity of foster homes, and that the MacDougal family has been willing to take difficult cases, but my sense is that no child is well served by a placement there. At best, children in foster care need more emotional support than that family provides. At worst, serious psychological harm could come from putting children with fragile self-concepts there for any length of time. Perhaps this home meets all current HRS standards—at least on paper—but I believe a much more in-depth analysis of that home should be undertaken, with particular emphasis on the mental health of the parents.

  Please understand that the spirit of this letter is not spiteful or vindictive. My only concern is to protect the children there now or in the future.

  Lillian told me the letter had been forwarded to Phyllis Cady and that Rudy and Chris had been assigned guardians of their own. Satisfied, I concentrated on the Stevensons.

  Cory ran out to meet me as I pulled in the driveway. Birdie Rose followed carrying the baby. “I once drove this car!” he said to Birdie and stroked the Thunderbird’s hood.

  Birdie chuckled. “I taught Cory to suction Manuel and he’s great with the baby too. I think he likes being the oldest child and being responsible.” She shifted the baby to her shoulder and went back in the house.

  Leaning against my car, I brought Cory up-to-date on some of the issues that concerned him. His father was getting out of jail in two weeks and we set a date for his first supervised meeting.

  “So how’s it going here?” I asked.

  “I love this place. Birdie and Patty are always fair, not like Mrs. MacDougal. She had a favorite, which was Rudy, and she would bust me for doing stuff, but never Rudy.”

  “What do you mean by ‘bust’?”

  “You know, get more chores to do. There was no dust allowed in that house, not a single speck, so we cleaned every day.” He changed to a high-pitched voice. “Mrs. MacDougal was Little Miss Perfect. She always found something wrong with whatever you did.”

  “I remember that bathroom by the bedroom was really tidy. How did you keep it
so clean?”

  “Oh, that was the easiest one!” Cory giggled. “We weren’t allowed in it.”

  “But it was the one between your bedrooms.”

  “The only toilet and shower we could use were the ones in the garage.”

  “Even in the middle of the night?”

  He nodded. “I should have told you, but Mrs. MacDougal warned me not to trust the Guardian ad Litem.”

  “Have I ever lied to you about anything so far?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Was Mrs. MacDougal always truthful with you?”

  “No, she lied all the time.” He grinned. “Hey, don’t worry, I trust you now.”

  Three days later I returned to my office from lunch and found a note on my desk that read: Cunningham Nursery called to say your order is in.

  I dialed Glen Cunningham at once. While waiting for him to come to the phone, my pulse resounded in my temples.

  Glen didn’t waste any time with a greeting. “Her name now is Tammy Spate. Her address is post office box 9190, Mead, Washington.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Outside of Spokane.”

  “That’s about as far away from Florida as you can get.”

  “You said it. Want her phone number?”

  “How’d you do it?”

  “I have my sources.” When I didn’t respond, he added, “How are the roses?”

  “Haven’t killed them yet.” Then I thanked him and hung up.

  It was noon. Nine o’clock in the morning in Washington State. Should I just pick up the phone and say: Hi, your daughter—remember her, the one you abandoned ten years ago?—wants to know if you love her. I felt dizzy and put my head down on my desk. Here was a woman who had left her children, who had a police record, who probably had been—or still was—a substance abuser. She had married Red Stevenson, who not only had sexually abused his daughter, but may very well have done the same to several of her girlfriends and a stepdaughter. Now she had started a life with a new man and had tried to put her past far behind her. What did I think I was doing meddling in her life? On the other hand maybe she was so settled and so happy that she would welcome her other children. Maybe she had loved them all along but had literally been chased off by Red and his rifle.