"There Were Good Times"

We visit the edge of the cliff six months later. Here's what we know—and what we don't. How do we reconcile the good with the bad? And where do we go from here?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
On November eight two, eighteen, our field reporter Lawrence Smiley
made the four hour drive from San Francisco to the
Mendocino Cliff where the Heart family died. I'm sitting here
at the memorial on the edge of the bluff. There's
a wooden cross, and on it is we honor and
remember you love from your adopted brothers and sisters from

(00:25):
around the world. Adoptees deserve better hashtag adopted Voices. There's
six stuffed animals lined up in a row, a lion,
a bear, a monkey, another bear, cow, kind of a
draggled teddy bear. There and in front of them are
stones that have the kids names on them. Davante, Canna, Abigail, Marcus, Sierra, Jeremiah.

(00:52):
It's right on the edge of the bluff here whether
it's just the sheer straight drop. In video she captured
that day, you can see the makeshift memorial, she describes.
It's a colorful pile of rock formations, fresh flowers, and
teddy bears covered in a thin coating of dust. There's

(01:13):
a wooden sculpture of a heart with wings bearing the
handwritten inscription please take care of yourselves and others lives
are not for the taking. The teal green Sea turns below.
As we sit down to record this final episode. It

(01:35):
has been eight months since the crash. In that stretch
of time, I Justine have found out that I'm expecting
my second child and am now weeks away from giving birth.
It's been surreal to watch the rough sketch of a
human life take form while also contemplating the lives of
six children who will never get to grow up. Some

(01:56):
days we feel like we know Marcus, Hannah, Vante, Abigail,
Jeremiah and Sierra. Then in telling this story, we are
honoring them. At other times we feel dirty, as if
for counting the gruesome but incomplete details of their short
lives makes us grave Robbers. For Lauren, who has spent
countless hours reaching out to the people closest to the

(02:18):
heart family and has endured her share of slammed doors,
It's been an especially strange journey. As I was coming
up here, I felt like this sense of dread as
I got closer and closer to this area. Um it's
been so many months that I've been looking into every
last lead that I could find, calling so many people,

(02:40):
some who talked to me, many who wouldn't and requesting
all these documents. It's been so much for six months now,
and to actually come to the spot where the story
both began for me and and in for them, it
just had so much anxiety about it, honestly, and sort
of feeling to write about it. In April two tho nineteen,

(03:04):
a full year after the crash, a formal coroner's inquest
will be released to the public. At that time, a
jury will convene to decide whether this was a murder
by one person, a conspiracy to murder by more than
one person, or an accident. And then in so many ways,
it will be over from glamour and how stuff works.

(03:26):
This is Broken Hearts. I'm Justine Harmon and I'm Liz Egan.
There are a lot of people whose voices we tried
but were ultimately unable to include in this podcast. In
November two eighteen, over the course of three consecutive days

(03:47):
and after several months of outreach, Lawrence spoke with Sarah's father,
Alan Gengler. He decided not to go on the record.
We also reached out to Sarah's brother Matt, but did
not year back. Jen's parents and her brother Christopher Heart
declined to speak to us. Her other brother, Jonathan, says

(04:08):
his older sister has not been in his life since
two thousand and wanted only to make a few things clear.
In an email to Lauren on September eighteen, Jonathan wrote,
one thing I would like to clarify for myself and
my family is that Jen was not ousted from the
family for being gay. I have been openly gay, even

(04:31):
in high school, and it never affected me living in
my mom or dad's home. He continued, If anything, all
this time, my family did nothing but try to help
and understand Jen, not work against her. Two months after
he sent that email, Jonathan spoke with us over the phone.
He doesn't want his voice on this podcast, but he

(04:52):
gave us permission to relay the following. Nobody has done
anything to warrant this, he says. All I have seen
my whole life is her getting my parents, grandparents, anybody
jumping through hoops to give her what she wanted. And
that's all I can say. People loved her, They really
stuck up for her. It really hurts me when this

(05:14):
stuff gets reflected on my parents. That really hurts my feelings.
My mother is wonderful and she did put up with
a lot from my sister. We all did. Sources close
to the Genglers told us the family had not been
in touch with Sarah for a long time, but it
was Sarah's choice to cut off contact. The distance, one

(05:36):
says had nothing to do with them rejecting Sarah's sexuality.
Back in August, Lauren connected with Hannah Scott, a professor
of criminology at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology
who has spent a lot of time studying the psyche

(05:56):
of women who commit heinous crimes in ad into her
work as a criminologist victimologist. Scott is the author of
one of the only known studies on female family annihilators,
or women who kill their children and or their spouses.
She said she wasn't surprised to hear that Jen and
Sarah fiercely controlled who had access to them and the kids.

(06:17):
She was, however, surprised by the way Jen used Facebook
to maintain a facade of familiar bliss in the case
of an abusive person. And it's clear that either one
or both of the parents in this family were abusive.
The outward impression management using social media is kind of
an interesting twist. Although most people now are using social media,

(06:39):
but nobody I didn't think it's really looked at the
abusive partner and how they negotiate their identity. We assume
that people who are abusive are abusive both in their
private lives but also in their public lives, and we
know this now not to be true. Many people who
are abusive in their private lives are well respected in

(06:59):
their communities and not considered abusive, and this is problematic
for us. It's inconsistent, and I think as human beings
we like to see consistency. If you want to continue
to abuse and have access to victims in your family,
these acts of private violence have to be managed because
if you do anything outside the house that might alert

(07:21):
people to the fact that you're abusive, you may lose
your ability to continue to abuse, or, in this case,
I suspect, lose the ability to raise the children in
a way that they felt was appropriate and not be
objected by other people. And when we say it that way,
certainly we can understand all parents understand that they should
raise their children in a way that they feel as appropriate.

(07:44):
Scott says that female annihilators are vastly understudied demographic, and
a lot of that has to do with the fact
that we as a culture have a hard time believing
that a woman or women would kill their own children.
As we started to go through the literature and we
discussions and we pursued this idea as women in criminology,
which is largely a male dominated discipline with a lot

(08:07):
of male focused and patriarchal values, we started to understand
that there was something that was missing. One of my
first writings was looking at the female serial killer, which
at the time when I started my writing way back
in the day, didn't exist according to many people, and
so I spent a lot of time challenging those values
and saying, yes, they do exist, and not only exist,

(08:28):
they exist in large numbers. The monikers that we tend
to give to women, both in serial and mass homicide,
giggling grinnies, things like that, murdering moms, these are very
sexist when we compared to the names that the men
are given. We tend to make light of the fact
that women may engage in these criminal acts, and as
a result, often we don't take them seriously. We don't

(08:50):
take them seriously. It's something to keep in mind when
considering that cryptic note from a Minnesota child welfare worker
after the first incident of abuse was report it back
in two thousand eight. The problem, it said, is these
women look normal. Though Hannah Scott has never seen a
case quite like this, one that continued abuse across several

(09:11):
states makes it unique, and there has been little research
on same sex domestic violence, she has seen incidents of
women who kill their families with what might sound like
a counterintuitive motivator love. The woman and her children are
often separated and living in a separate dwelling, or have
left the spouse and are living in another place, even temporarily.

(09:33):
They killed their children because they couldn't see them being
raised by the opposite parents, for example, or they couldn't
see themselves actually sustaining these children now that they were alone.
We haven't found convincing evidence that Jen and Sarah were
headed towards a breakup, or, as we explored in the
previous episode, that there was some catastrophic future event on

(09:54):
the horizon, but their relationship had been strained over the
years they had spent months of time apart. Jen would
often travel with some or all of the children while
Sarah would stay home to work. Sarah was the sole
breadwinner and money was tight. Jen once emailed a friend
that she and Sarah expressed themselves in different ways. She wrote,

(10:19):
for quite some time, I have felt very underappreciated and
taken for granted in our relationship, and at times unloved.
While I know deep in my heart how much she
loves me, she is just horrible about showing it. We
are complete opposites in this regard. The email continued, I

(10:39):
never missed an opportunity to tell someone how much they
mean to me and that I love them. As a mom,
I have felt that I've been raising the kids on
my own. She admits this too. While she loves them
with all her heart, she has not been fully present
with me or the kids. The last known footage of
Sarah Hart is of her leaving Coals at PM on

(11:03):
March eighteen, three days before the crash, and a mirror
seven minutes before child protective Services arrived at their home.
She's wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt pulled over her head
and is clutching her cell phone. It's impossible to know
what was going through her head, or if she knew
what was about to happen. It's impossible to know what

(11:25):
she and Jen did or didn't talk about over the
course of the next few days, but Hannah Scott says
the unimaginable might have seemed well logical to these women.
People can be overwhelmed to not necessarily experiencing mental illness.
In some cases, homicide, even though we feel comfortable saying

(11:46):
it can be a very rational choice to some people
given their life circumstances. When Lauren met with Mendicino County

(12:19):
Sheriff Tom Allman, he reiterated what he said many times before.
He is no longer viewing this incident as an accident.
He holds out very little hope that DeVante will be
found alive. Do I have any hope? I guess I
have hope. Do I have any realistic hope? No, I don't.
The fact that there's been no indication that he's alive

(12:41):
should cause someone to say, well, he was in a car.
But I have no problem of someone bringing DeVante into
our office today and saying, listen, DeVante is alive and
well and he was just hiding out. I'd give the
kid a big hug and say we've never met it's
very nice to meet you. Sheriff Allman and his team
have spent the past eight months trawling the coastline for

(13:02):
the missing children, examining the evidence they do have, and
preparing for the upcoming Corners inquest. Almond says, an inquest
of this nature hasn't happened in Mendocino County in over
fifty years, but according to the law, its function is
to inquire into and determine the circumstances, manner, and cause
of all violent, sudden or unusual deaths. Over the course

(13:26):
of two days in April, a jury of twelve citizens
will rule what the cause of death was for all
the bodies found at the crash site. Sheriff Allman says
he hopes to live stream the event in order to
put the questions to bed once and for all. We
have a job to do just to find out the
truth of what happened. We have gathered a team of

(13:47):
experts that will be making sure that what we are
going to say at the inquest is true and accurate.
And a Corner's Inquest is going to, in my opinion,
give evidence that will shock the consciousness of people who
are following this case. What can you give not a bit.

(14:09):
I'm not going to talk about any of that. I'm
gonna tell you that we're not on a fast timeline
to throw this information out right now. But um, this
will be a water cooler conversation throughout our nation. For
those who were critical of how long it took to
positively I d Hannah's remains, Almond says d NA simply
isn't something you can match overnight. I think that TV

(14:33):
has presented a false narrative to viewers regarding how easy
it is to get DNA compared to fingerprints. Fingerprints are
really good if you know which fingerprint to compare it to.
It I've taken I'm going to guess hundreds, if not thousands,
of burglar reports where fingerprints were obtained. But if you
don't have anybody to compare them to, Okay, so you

(14:54):
have fingerprints and DNA is the same way. If we
have DNA, you know, from a foot and we said,
all right, gosh, we have the DNA results. If we
don't have anybody to compare them to, then it's the
same as a fingerprint. These children were adopted and we
didn't have a lot of information, so it wasn't an
easy task to do. He says. The biggest hold up

(15:16):
in this case has been trying to get information from
the adoption agencies. The fact that law enforcement has been
stymied at finding out information regarding the adoption records and
the accountability of foster parents should concern a lot of people.
Whether or not this was a crime or an accident

(15:38):
when it happened, I don't think law enforcement should have
been told no by adoption organizations that say we're not
going to give you that information. Prior to this case happening,
I had no idea the amount of confidentiality that adoption
agencies focused on. While I don't want to disrupt somebody's

(15:58):
life with adoption record, when a death happens, I would
have to ask myself, why would an adoption agency or
government agency be so determined to keep information private? So
how much of what happened to the heart children can
be put on the agency's tasked with making sure our
youngest citizens are being looked after properly. Dr Doris Houston,

(16:21):
the interim director at the Illinois State University School of
Social Work, points to the lack of interstate communication between
all parties. She also singles out the state of Texas,
from where all six children were adopted, as keen to
terminate parental rights and collect placement fees from the government.
On average, she says, a family like the Hearts could

(16:42):
stand to collect twelve hundred dollars a month for each
adopted child. We have found that over the past decade,
the Hearts have taken roughly two hundred and seventy thousand
dollars from the state of Texas. These are taxpayer dollars
that are being spent to support children. Why can we
then expect that families would be expected to at least

(17:05):
do an annual check in, maybe goes for the first
few years ago to some of the support groups, I
was surprised to find that Texas essentially has a standard
of automatically preparing the paperwork for adoptions. It makes it
difficult to envision the effort is really being put into

(17:29):
family reunification if from day one, that is the policy
to begin to prepare children for adoption. Dr Houston says,
once an interstate adoption is completed, the state of origin
is no longer responsible for an adopted child's well being,
with Texas allowing the children to be adopted in Minnesota,

(17:51):
they essentially are absolved of all of those responsibilities if
now rests at the hands of the receivings eight. Frankly,
there really has not been movement in in a real
meaningful way to do a national adoption protection registry where
information is shared. Hannah Scott, the author of the study

(18:15):
on annihilators, calls these interstate disconnects linkage blindness, a term
coined by criminal justice expert Steven Egger. We still do
have trouble in the United States finding individuals who both
move frequently and kill or commit serial crime. Sometimes cities
don't even time each other, but states certainly have more

(18:38):
difficulty talking to each other. Each state has its own
set of laws. We know that there are eight people
who reported to the police that there was an use
of situation. This happened over ten years in three states,
and once the family became detected, they moved to another state.
This stopped the process of investigation in one state and

(19:01):
allowed them a reprieve to some degree in the new
states that they had moved to. Because the states cannot
talk to each other, cases of child abuse like this
can go and detected islam As the family continues to
stay moved. Abril Dinwoody, the former executive director of the
Donaldson Adoption Institute, agrees that this story should serve as

(19:22):
a nationwide wake up call. I was that a camp
for families who adopted transractional in and I talked about
that case being a cautionary tale of how broken the
system can be and how important it is for us
all to be taking care of ourselves and doing well
and and getting the help that we need and getting

(19:43):
the help for ourselves and our children. Um and I
talked about it at another sort of gathering of professionals,
some were transracial adoptive parents, and and there's a lot
of head hanging and a lot of tears, and people
are failing it. But I hope that just translate sent
us some more action and more eyes wide open with

(20:04):
some of the real challenges that the system faces, and
quite frankly, that people face. Look, I didn't know the hearts.
I don't I don't know what drove these women to
to do, to adopt to whatever, but like there was
something clearly wrong there too. And even those people who
do such things need to have some kind of care

(20:25):
and support as well, Like like they just don't get
erased either. There's mental health issues and all of this
that need to be addressed that clearly we're not. I've
just found, like when I talked to friends and mothers
in particular, that everyone has something to say about this case.
Everyone honestly reads something about their own life into this

(20:46):
case and feels guilty about that. And even you know,
just like a mom she has a biological child, and
she was just like, Yeah, that case just made me
look in the mirror and realize how much just utter
power you have over young children and how just guileless
they are. You're all they have in those early years.

(21:06):
And it made me almost scared of my own power
that I have being a parent. There's so many layers.
There's so many layers. The power of being a parent
is something we rarely talk about in our daily lives,
but it's something most of us with kids understanding our bones.
Sometimes when I took my two year old in at night,
he recently graduated from sleeping in a crib to a

(21:29):
twin size, he gives me this look like I'm going
to get out of this bed, and I give him
another one that says, don't you dare? And he doesn't,
He doesn't dare What is strange influence to have over
another person? But what if I pushed it a little further?
What if I told him that something bad would happen
to him if he got out of bed. What if,

(21:51):
and this is honestly hard for me to stay out loud,
what if I held him down until it hurts? How
long would he stay in there? Would he love me
me less? Or when his devotion to me becomes stronger,
more desperate, would he wonder what he could do to
make it go back to the way it used to be,
back to when I would line his little bed without

(22:11):
a blanket and cuddle him until he fell asleep, even
though I'm impossibly pregnant and it hurts my back. How
much would his mind go into overdrive trying to get
that feeling and that dynamic back And how would he
process that nearly imperceptible shift. Years later, as Justine has

(22:32):
been transitioning her sweet, flaxen haired two year old from
a crib to a twin bed, I've spent the past
eight months wrapping my mind around the fact that I'm
moving closer to the opposite end of the parenting spectrum
My oldest is almost eighteen, almost Marcus his age. If
all goes according to plan, she'll be attending college next fall.

(22:55):
I think she's ready. Whether or not I'm ready is
another story. But I'll say good bye to her knowing
that my husband and I did our best to give
her the tools she'll need to be successful on her own.
She has a strong moral compass, She knows what she
deserves and how to ask for it. She knows more
about the Battle of Gettysburg than I ever did, and

(23:16):
she also knows not to stick a fork in a toaster.
I share this because I suspect Jen and or Sarah
knew their kids weren't as well equipped for adulthood as
they should have been. At the very least, they had
hardly any experience interacting with other people their own age.
This must have scared Jen and Sarah, even though they
were the ones who put their kids in this position

(23:38):
in the first place, who held them down in a
way similar to the one Justine just described. I think
the best thing you can do is give your kids
firm ground under their feet and the heart. Kids never
really had that, not as babies, not when they were adopted,
not even in the moments before they died. You'll remember

(24:11):
that back in May, when we first started reporting this story,
Lauren went to Woodland, Washington. There, the Hearts neighbor, Dana Decalb,
took her to see where the family lived together. Lauren
and Dana waited through the knee high prairie grass to
get to the blue split level home next door. When
I was up at Dana's house in Washington, I asked
the Decalbs if we could walk over to the Heart property.

(24:33):
They agreed, and we walked down the gravel driveway and
then cut into the knee high grass up to the
light blue house. A FedEx delivery notice was still stuck
on the front door, dated a month after the crash.
Dana and I peeked through slits in the blinds. The
living room was sparse except for a few chairs. Inside
the garage where a Christmas tree box, an electric piano,

(24:56):
some Star Wars puzzles. In some ways, I felt like
I was walking onto the set of a play after
the production had wrapped. All around I recognized things from
Jen's Facebook posts. There in a shed was the lawnmower
Davante had ridden with a stalk of grass in his
mouth like the image of farmer Joe. There was the

(25:17):
temporary greenhouse, now in a heap that Abigail had stood
in front of, smiling with a chicken on her shoulder.
I spotted an ornament hanging from a tree and walked
over to look at it. It was a ceramic Volkswagen
hippie van with flower powered details, which was so eerily
spot onto the image of the family projected and the

(25:38):
way they died. I wondered if some prankster had hung it,
or if the hearts had I turned it over and
saw the price tag was still stuck on the bottom.
Ross dressed for less. Walking around the huge yard, I
couldn't help but question my role as a reporter in
all this. Certainly I was trespassing of both their property

(26:00):
and in this family story. I hope that it was
right to be here looking for any clues as to
why those six kids were no longer here. The hunting
feeling was nothing compared to Dana's. She's stuck in an
unwinnable loop. Should she have called CPS sooner? Wasn't it

(26:20):
that very phone call that set into motion the events
that ended with a yukon over a Cliff. Each time
the conversation turns to the subject, Dana's voice grows thick
with grief. If she'd call earlier, she wonders, would the
outcome be the same? Who knows, she says, Who could

(26:41):
have guessed that? Dana and I both had a question,
just what did it look like on a daily basis
inside that house? Dana said something that's stuck in my mind.
You know, I guess I want to believe that there
was good times, but it wasn't constant ugly. After all

(27:04):
of our research, after so many months of digging for
certain facts, this remains one of the hardest things to
come to terms with. There were good times, it wasn't
constant ugly. Jen Hart loved her kids and she killed them.
These realities coexist. We know this because we've seen the pictures.

(27:26):
We've watched joy filled videos Zippy Lomax doesn't want to
share with the public, at least not yet. We've read
hundreds of emails, texts, and direct messages. We've spoken to
their friends and families for hours on end. We also
know this because this story has made us excavate the
darkest part of our own minds and to address issues

(27:46):
thoughts and behaviors we've neatly packed away as unfit or
not for public consumption. The story of the Heart family
was never going to end well. As one person close
to them put it, I've always known, I've always felt something.
It's unfortunate that it happened, But I don't think that

(28:07):
there's anybody out there that could have stopped it from happening.
They had no support system, They had no contingency plan.
They distanced themselves from their families, kept friends at an
arm's length, preferably on the other side of the screen,
and closed their blinds unconcerned neighbors. When schools, social services,

(28:32):
the medical community, and the festival community asked questions, they
were able to use their white privilege to foster doubt
and convince people they were normal parents. When anybody got
too close, Jen and Sarah withdrew they canceled plans, or relocated,
or moved the conversation to Facebook, where Jen could control
the narrative. This was their choice. In the end, they

(28:57):
were alone, and they made so any mistakes unforgivable mistakes.
Jen and Sarah Hart were in awe of Marcus, Hannah Davante,
Abigail Jeremiah and Sierra. They also, each in her own way,
stripped their six adopted children of their agency, their dignity,

(29:19):
and the futures they deserved. At best, you might call
these women anti heroes. At worst, they were monsters. But
neither is the whole story, because what they actually were
is even harder to accept. They were both. If you

(30:02):
suspect a child as being abused, call one eight hundred
for a child that's one eight hundred numeral four a
c h I L D, or visit child help dot
org to find out how to report your concerns. For
access to exclusive photos and videos and documents about the case,

(30:25):
visit glamour dot com slash Broken Hearts. Have questions for
us about this podcast, reach us on Twitter at Glamour
mag or at Broken Hearts Pod. If you like what
you heard, leave us a review. Broken Hearts is a
joint production between Glamour and How Stuff Works, with new
episodes dropping every Tuesday. Broken Hearts is co hosted and

(30:48):
co written by Justine Harmon and Elizabeth Egan and edited
by Wendy Nogal. Lauren Smiley is our field reporter. Samantha
Barry is Glamour's editor in Chief. Ju Leshan and Dianna
Buckman head up the business side of this partnership. Joyce Pandola,
Pat Singer and Luke Zeleski are a research team. Jason

(31:10):
Hope is executive producer on behalf of How Stuff Works,
along with producers Julian Weller, ben Kiebrick and Josh Saine.
Special thanks to Jen Lance