There was a passage in the Bible that resonated with her. In Isaiah 6:1–8, God appears, surrounded by smoke and seraphim, seeking someone to spread the Word. God asks: “Whom shall I send?” And Isaiah pipes up: “Here am I. Send me!” Galbraith saw herself as answering a call. She had gotten into law enforcement to help. And here were victims who needed help in some of their darkest hours. She didn’t always know how to make things better for them. But she knew she had to find a way.
“People say, ‘Why do you work sex crimes and kid crimes?’ I don’t enjoy it. But someone’s got to do it. And someone’s got to do it well.”
—
It was long after dark when Galbraith pulled into the driveway of her house. She was exhausted. Her final task had been to find a place for Amber to sleep; she was too terrified to spend the night at the apartment. Galbraith had found an officer to take her to a friend’s house.
David had already washed the dishes and put the kids to sleep. His graveyard shift started later that night.
They settled into two couches facing each other in the living room. This was their evening ritual, wedged into the few hours they could find between work and kids. They talked about their days just like any other working couple—it’s just that the Galbraiths’ stories tended to be a bit darker than most.
And so it was this night. Stacy Galbraith went over the details of the case with her husband. She talked about the masked man. About the four-hour rape. About how he had taken pictures.
And get this, she told him. At the end, he made her take a shower.
David had been holding back. But this was too much. In 2008, he had left the Golden Police Department to take a new job as an officer in Westminster, a nearby suburb. Five months ago, Westminster police had responded to a rape at an apartment complex; David had patrolled the complex looking for suspicious people. He knew that the woman had been raped by a masked man. That the man had taken pictures. And that before leaving, he had made his victim shower.
Call my department first thing in the morning, he told Stacy.
We have one just like that.
3
WAVES AND PEAKS
August 10, 2008
* * *
Lynnwood, Washington
It wasn’t much—a one-bedroom apartment like any other, in an apartment complex like any other. She didn’t have a lot of furniture, and some of what there was, was plastic. She propped her two guitars, both acoustic, against a bedroom wall. She kept her computer monitor on the floor, in a corner.
It wasn’t much, but it was hers, the first place she could call her own after years of living in other people’s homes. Marie was proud of the place. She was proud of having a place. She knew that many people who grew up as she did wound up in jail or rehab, or on the streets.
On this Sunday she vacuumed and cleaned. She liked to keep her apartment spotless. She also wanted it tidy, so she walked around, sizing up her stuff, deciding what she could tuck away. Whatever she didn’t need she carried outside and stowed in a storage closet on her back porch. Back and forth she went, through a sliding glass door.
She would spend the rest of the day with friends and at church. Other eighteen-year-olds, in their first months of independence, might dedicate the weekend to testing boundaries and chasing adventure. Marie wanted to settle. She took comfort in normalcy, given how little she’d had growing up.
Marie would later be evaluated by Jon Conte, a University of Washington professor who specializes in mental health issues related to child abuse and trauma. Conte interviewed Marie for five hours and wrote a lengthy report, which included a section on her developmental history:
She met her biological father only once. She reports not knowing much about her biological mother, who she said would often leave her in the care of boyfriends….She reports entering foster care at age six or seven.
Conte’s report continues with the same dry, clinical language, even as it descends into dark terrain. Marie’s memory of life before foster care is “mostly of unhappy events,” Conte writes.
She thinks she lived with a grandmother who did not do a very good job of “taking care of us.” She remembers being hungry and eating dog food. She has no memories of being cared for by her biological mother. She recalls physical discipline that was abusive (e.g., being hit on the hand with a flyswatter).
She does not know if she attended kindergarten. She thinks she had to repeat second grade and had time outs in school. She said she remembers not liking the police because they took her and her siblings away from their home. She was sexually and physically abused. The sexual abuse happened a lot, she said. She recalls seeing the family dogs beaten by her mother’s various boyfriends.
She recalls multiple moves from one state to another before being removed from her home…
As for Marie’s life in foster care, Conte’s report forgoes the details:
Suffice it to say it is fairly typical for children in state care: multiple placements, frequent moving of locations (homes) and schools, adult caregivers and professionals coming in and then out of her life, some distressing or abusive experiences, and a general lack of permanency.
Marie was the second of her mom’s four kids. They were half siblings, but didn’t call themselves such. “I have an older brother and younger brother and younger sister,” Marie says. Sometimes she’d be in the same foster home as her siblings. Most times they were separated. Whether she has brothers or sisters on her father’s side, she can’t say.
Marie was medicated from early on for depression. “I was on seven different drugs. And Zoloft is an adult drug. I was on that at eight.”
The hardest part, she says, was being kept in the dark about the workings of foster care. Adults wouldn’t say why she was being moved. They would just move her. She had “probably ten or eleven” foster families and was placed in a couple of group homes. She preferred to be outside, but sometimes became a shut-in. “When I lived in Bellingham, I played in my room a lot by myself. My stuffed animals.”
Switching schools can be daunting. For Marie it was routine. “Start over, make new friends. It was a little bit rough, but I got used to doing it.”
The beginning of high school promised an end to all the instability. The first day of school might fill most students with anxiety, but for Marie that day couldn’t come soon enough. She was starting tenth grade in Puyallup, some thirty-five miles south of Seattle. She’d landed all the classes she wanted. She’d made lots of new friends. Most important, she was with a new family. She loved the family, and the family loved her. They planned to adopt her.
“It was pretty awesome,” Marie says.
Then, at school, on that very first day, Marie got pulled out of class. A support counselor told her: You can’t live with this foster family anymore. They’ve lost their license. The counselor, bound by confidentiality, provided little explanation. Marie simply had to leave—the family, her friends, the school. “I pretty much just cried,” she says. “I basically had twenty minutes to pack my stuff and go.”
As a short-term placement until something else could be lined up, Marie went to stay with a couple, Shannon and Geno, in Bellevue, a booming high-tech center just east of Seattle, with a skyline all its own. Shannon, a real estate agent and longtime foster mom, had met Marie through meetings for kids with troubled pasts and had sensed a kindred spirit. They were both “kind of goofy,” Shannon says. “We could laugh at each other and make fun. We were a lot alike.”
The two hit it off. To Shannon, Marie was “real likable”—it was as simple as that. Marie wasn’t bitter about all she had been through. And she didn’t bristle at all that was ahead. Shannon didn’t have to push Marie out the door to school, even with Marie knowing that the school was likely just another way station. Marie could carry on a conversation with adults. She brushed her teeth; she brushed her hair; she was, in a word, easy, or at least “she was a lot easier than a lot of the kids we had.” Marie wanted to stay in Bellevue, and S
hannon wished she could. But Shannon and her husband had another foster child at the time, a teenage girl who required a great deal of attention. Otherwise, Shannon says, “we’d have taken Marie in a heartbeat.”
Marie left Shannon’s home after a couple of weeks. She moved in with Peggy, who worked as a children’s advocate at a homeless shelter and lived in Lynnwood, a smaller suburb about fifteen miles north of Seattle.
“She was my very first foster child. I was preparing for a baby. I had a crib—and they gave me a sixteen-year-old,” Peggy says, with a laugh. “And it was fine. I have a background in mental health and I’ve been working with kids for a really long time. And I think the agency just thought, ‘She can handle it.’ So.”
The state provided Peggy with hundreds of pages on Marie’s history, chronicling her abuse and the litany of placements. “It was heartbreaking,” Peggy says. She read most, but not all, of the file. “In some ways you don’t want to know everything. You want to be able to look at a child and not make assumptions about who they are, you know? You don’t want to put a label on them. When I meet a child, I want to meet a child as they come to me.”
To Peggy’s mind, the two got off to a good start. “She was like a little kid. She was walking around and going in the backyard and checking it out and going, ‘Oh, wow, this is really cool.’ She was very bubbly and full of energy, but she also had her moments when she could be very intense, very emotionally intense.” Marie was upset about being taken from the home in Puyallup. Peggy gave Marie phone privileges, so she could stay in touch with friends there. Marie racked up a huge bill. In time, she worked through her frustration. “I was actually surprised at how remarkably well she was coping,” Peggy says. “She started a brand-new school. It was amazing, really. She could have just said, ‘I’m not going to school.’ But she didn’t. She went, and she did what she was supposed to do. She did chores around the house. I was very impressed with her resiliency.”
But this relationship—a first-time mother paired with a teenage daughter with a history of trauma—figured to be a challenge. And it was. “It was very strained at times,” Peggy says. “It was very hard to have a loving bond with somebody who comes to you when sixteen and already angry. I saw my job at that point as guiding her into adulthood. And I tried to be a loving parent, and a caring parent. But it’s pretty hard to initiate at age sixteen. And I don’t know how she would see it, but—”
Marie saw the relationship as a poor fit. Marie liked dogs. Peggy had cats. Marie liked being in homes with other kids. At Peggy’s she was it. “Our personalities didn’t match at first either,” Marie says. “It was hard to get along.”
Marie stayed in touch with several former foster families and remained particularly close with Shannon. Peggy didn’t mind. She soon became friends with Shannon herself. The two foster mothers shared insights into Marie—and, in a way, raised her together. Shannon, her hair a whirl of curls, was the fun parent. She and Marie went boating. They took walks in the woods. They dieted together, giving up carbohydrates for weeks. Marie trusted Shannon with her emotions; Shannon was someone she could hug and cry with. Marie would sleep over at her house.
Peggy was the disciplinarian. She was the parent who enforced curfew. To her, Marie could come across as flaunty and outrageous. “Really, really big behavior,” Peggy says—like going into a grocery store with friends and riding around on a shopping cart, “getting really silly.” Analytical and measured, prone to saying, “Tone it down,” Peggy did not mesh with Marie in the way that Shannon did. “We were very different,” Peggy says.
For Peggy, it was painful to watch Marie struggle to fit in. When she first moved in with Peggy, Marie was into dark clothes, sort of grungy. But she picked out a feminine white coat with a fur collar, because she thought that’s what girls were supposed to wear, then relegated the coat to the closet when she realized it wasn’t. Peggy could see that Marie wasn’t happy at school. It was “pretty cliquey”—with all the clichés, the cheerleaders and the jocks. Marie was “more of an artist type,” into drawing and music, be it Christian, rock, or country.
Together, Peggy and Marie found an alternative school that was a better fit.
And that’s when things clicked.
Through friends, Marie met Jordan, a high school student who worked at a McDonald’s. “We ended up meeting at a grocery store and then walking around the schoolyard, you know, after hours or something like that,” Jordan says of the first time they were alone. They started as friends and, in time, became boyfriend and girlfriend. To Jordan, Marie came off as happy and easygoing, no matter her past. “She was just a nice person to have around….You never had to worry about sharing your emotions with her. She would never say anything to hurt you. Among her friends and things like that, she was not an attention-seeker. She never did anything openly outgoing or off-the-wall crazy.”
That Jordan would see Marie so differently from Peggy doesn’t necessarily surprise. Peggy saw Marie wanting attention. Jordan saw her avoiding it. Teens can be one person with their friends, another with their parents. But to Marie there was something more to this disconnect, something she would pick up on as the years passed. “People read me different than I see myself,” she says. Marie saw herself as friendly, not flirtatious, as outgoing, not dramatic.
Marie figures her happiest years were when she was sixteen and seventeen, and the happiest day may have been one spent with her best friend, another high school student who was teaching Marie the fine points of photography. “I would spend hours at the beach watching the sunset go down and that was one of my favorite things,” Marie says. “There was a particular photo that I really liked that she took. We went to the ocean, it was like seven o’clock at night, I don’t know what we were thinking, I got in there and I jumped out and swung my hair back.”
Her friend captured the moment. Afterward she did touch-up, darkening parts of the picture. Marie looked like a mermaid emerging from the surf, in the glory of the setting sun.
Marie posted the photo on Myspace and preserved it in an online album on Photobucket.
When Marie was a senior, she opted to quit school and study for her general equivalency diploma. That final year with Peggy was marked by tension, the kind familiar to teens and parents just about everywhere. Marie pushed, staying out late. Peggy pushed back, insisting that rules be followed. “You can’t do that,” Peggy would say. “You can’t tell me what to do,” Marie would answer. To Shannon, it was just one of those rebellious stages that can accompany the approach of adulthood: “Wanting to do what she wanted to do. Not wanting to follow the rules. She experimented with different ways to dress, which path she was going to go down. Not unlike a lot of teenagers. Started to smoke, those kinds of things.” In the spring of 2008, Marie turned eighteen. She could have stayed with Peggy, provided she abided by Peggy’s rules. But Marie wanted to set out on her own.
Peggy, searching online, discovered Project Ladder, a pilot program launched the year before. Funded mostly by a state grant, the program sought to reduce homelessness by helping young adults land stable jobs so they could afford a place to live. Program members would learn self-sufficiency and “financial literacy.” Private landlords who housed program members would receive guaranteed rent subsidies and large security deposits. Project Ladder had only fifteen slots for teens transitioning out of foster care, but Marie secured one. She moved into an apartment complex in Lynnwood, allowing her to stay close to Peggy.
In the 1920s, decades before it incorporated and adopted its name, Lynnwood was known for poultry, producing enough eggs in one year that “laid end to end they would stretch from New York to San Francisco.” These days people around Seattle know Lynnwood mostly as a shopping mecca. The main attraction is the Alderwood Mall and its 165 shops, from Abercrombie & Fitch to Zumiez. Marie’s apartment complex advertised views of the Cascades—and proximity to the mall, just a few blocks away.
Marie thought that when she had her feet under her, she�
��d like to go to college and study photography. She used a Nikon digital to shoot animals, insects, and most of all landscapes. She’d go to a beach dotted with driftwood and shoot dog prints in the sand, or the sun on the Sound, or beyond the waves the snow-capped peaks of the Olympics. But for now she settled into retail, landing her first job at Costco, the warehouse club known for generous wages and benefits. Marie offered food samples to customers. Six hours on her feet didn’t bother her. She enjoyed chatting with people, free from pressure to sell. Working also let her make friends outside the foster-care system.
So Marie had an apartment, an income, and her GED. She had a support system in Project Ladder. She had Peggy nearby. After all she had endured—abuse, instability, hunger—she had made it through. Her greatest goal was a simple one—and it was there, right in front of her. “I just wanted to be normal. When I moved out from being in foster care I wanted to be one of those normal kids who had a normal job, a place to live, just wanted to live my life. Try to be as happy as possible.” She didn’t want to let the bad things in her past affect the way she was now.
—
After Marie finished cleaning her apartment, she went to church with Jordan. They had dated for more than a year, but two months ago went back to being just friends. Jordan had begun studying the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion, which condemns premarital sex; Jordan feared being a hypocrite if he and Marie kept dating. Still, their friendship was closer than most. They both had insomnia and would keep each other company over the phone, chatting late into the night. They even talked of getting married one day.
In the evening Marie visited Ashley, a friend she had made when both were studying for their GEDs. Marie didn’t yet have her driver’s license—just a learner’s permit—so she snagged a ride home from Ashley’s mom. When she arrived home, she realized she had left her keys behind; she was always forgetting her keys or her phone. So it was back to Ashley’s, then home again.
A False Report Page 3