October 2, 2023 • 43 mins
Most of you have probably heard the story of the Hart family, the couple that drove a car off a cliff with all of their adopted children inside. Our guest Roxanna Asgarian unfolds the story with details that we’ve never heard before, including an investigation into the child welfare system.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
This book is about grief, It's about loss, and it's
about what parents we consider good parents and which parents
we give chances to.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:56):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with the details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. Most of you have probably heard the
story of the Heart Family, the couple that drove a
(01:18):
car off a cliff with all of their adopted children inside.
Our guest rock Sanna as Garian unfolds the story with
details that we've never heard before, including an investigation into
the child welfare system. I'll warn you that much of
this is difficult to hear. Well, why don't we start
(01:39):
with the story of the birth families. How these kids,
these six kids, ended up with these two women, and
how potentially these two women ended up in the state
they were in when they made this terrible decision. So
let's start with the families.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
So there's two birth families.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
The first birth family that I encountered where the Davis is,
and that's a birth family of Divine Tay, Jeremiah, and Sierra.
And so they were actually the second group of kids
that were adopted, but I started with them because we
were all living in Houston. So the kids were removed
from their mom because she had a drug problem. She
(02:15):
used cocaine that came up when she gave birth to
Jeremiah at first, and then when Sierra was born and
Sherry tested positive for cocaine. The kids were ultimately removed
from her care and she was living with a man
named Nathaniel who was a much older guy who was
actually the primary caretaker. And Nathaniel was sober, he received
(02:38):
disability benefits, and he was, by all accounts, are really
loving father. He was the first person I actually ended
up talking to was Nathaniel. They were removed from him
when they were removed after Sierra's birth, so ultimately they
moved to their aunt's house. And their aunt's name was Priscilla,
(02:59):
and Priscilla as a church going woman who worked full
time at a hospital in Houston at the time. DeVante, Jeremiah,
and Sierra had an older brother named Dante, and all
four of those kids were initially involved in this CPS case.
So all four of those kids lived with Priscilla up
until this fateful day when she was unable to find childcare.
(03:24):
She got called into work and her daughter, who was
a grown woman at that time, usually watched the kids,
but she was unable, so she asked Sherry, who's their
birth mother, to watch the kids. And while she was
out and Sharry was there with the kids, a caseworker
stop by unannounced, and because Sherrie's rights to her kids
(03:46):
were terminated, she wasn't allowed to be around them, and
so the kids were removed immediately when the caseworker showed up.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
So this is four kids at this point who were removed.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yes, and Dante was the oldest, so he was ten
at this time. He was acting out. He was the
oldest so he understood sort of what was going on
more than the other kids. He really didn't want to
be removed from his family. He was fighting and arguing,
and he ended up getting sent to a residential treatment center,
which is sort of like an institutional setting for mostly
(04:19):
foster youth. So he was split from his siblings at
that time. Kind of the frustrating thing about this story
is that Sherry terminated her rights voluntarily because she was
told that she needed to do that in order for
Priscilla to adopt the kids, because you can't adopt kids
when they have legal parents already.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
So these four kids go into foster care, well one
of them goes into a residential facility, but the other
three kids go into foster care. What is their journey
to where they eventually land with the hearts?
Speaker 2 (04:49):
So Texas has a website that you can look at.
It's called the Texas Adoption Resource Exchange, and you can
essentially shop for kids that you would like to adopt
using that website. So Jennifer and Sarah Hart, who are
a white married couple who both were from South Dakota
but at this time we're living in Minnesota. They were
(05:12):
looking at the Texas Adoption Resource Exchange which they called
TAR and they stumbled on DeVante and Jeremiah and Sierra,
and they had used this website two years earlier when
they adopted their first set of three children, also from Texas,
so by that point they'd already been through the process
once it went really quickly. Kids have to live in
(05:33):
pre adoptive homes for at least six months before you
can initiate adoption, and they had lived with their aunt
Priscilla for five and a half months. She was attempting
to adopt them even though they got removed. She had
hired an attorney, she got denied, and then she appealed
that decision, but before that appeal went through in the courts,
(05:53):
the kids were already adopted by the Hearts.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
I'm surprised that they did not give prential treatment to
a family member, but I guess she had a mark
against her for leaving the kids with their birth mother,
who had no rights and who obviously had some problems
to begin with. Is that the thinking? Why would they
not hold to see what Priscilla was going to do?
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yeah, So I actually spoke to another judge who wasn't
involved in this case, but he was a judge for
these types of cases in Harris County, and he said
that was actually not the way that it should have gone.
If her appeal would have gone through, then the adoption
would have been void.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
It felt pretty rush.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
It was basically at the exact time when it could happen.
It happened despite the fact that there were family members,
and despite that there is a federal mandate that family
members must be given preference for placement of kids who
are involved with CPS. That is there for a reason,
and that's because there's plenty of research that shows that
(06:53):
kids do best with their families, They do best with
their parents, and when they can't be with their parents,
they do best in family homes. And we understand this
across the child welfare system, but I think in the
case of the Davis family, it became clear that to
me that sometimes the preference is more theoretical than it
(07:13):
is actual.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
So will you educate me a little bit on in
time where we are and what is the view of
a same sex couple adopting kids, because I just assumed
it was not going to be that easy, particularly in
a state like Texas.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah, that's a good question, and it's an interesting wrinkle
in the case. I think I started looking into the judges,
you know, in Harris County, and there's a whole history
of corruption and racism, and there are actually instances of
not the judge in this case, but a judge next
door being very vocally anti LGBT for adoptive parents. So
(07:52):
I think that that is true that there. It kind
of depends on the judge. The judge in the Davis
family's case was really super interested in speed in clearing
out the docket, so to speak, you know, in his mind.
And I spoke to him actually about this case, and
he said, there are kids that languish in foster care,
which is true, especially sibling groups, because they're hard to
(08:15):
place multiple kids. And he said Minnesota has been great
for like providing people who want to adopt essentially, and again,
because they had already adopted three kids from Texas, they
kind of knew the process. I will say that at
the time that the Davis kids were adopted, there had
already been an allegation of abuse against Jennifer and Sarah
(08:37):
Hart regarding the three children that were already adopted.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Were they in Minnesota during that accusation or were they
in Oregon at that point.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
They were in Minnesota and that either got totally missed
by Texas, which it kind of looks like it did.
I have some records, so I have their actual adoption paperwork,
and I also have the foster care case file of Dante,
the oldest.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
All of the movil stuff that was happening.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Is in that file as well, because they kind of
grouped the file by birth mom.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
So this judge is moving through his docket quickly. Are
we also thinking that he's looking at these three black
children and thinking they are better off with a white family.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
I think that the facts of this case make that
pretty clear. The officials that were involved assumed that the
white women were a better home for the kids. There's
a couple of ways that that becomes clear. Like in Priscilla,
the aunt's appeal that got denied, the court said why
should she have another bite at the proverbial apple, you know,
(09:37):
like they were saying, no, you can't adopt these kids,
and we're going to be a little.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Mean to you about it too.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
But on the other side, the you know, the abuse
allegation sort of just went by. I mean, there was
no charge, you know, like criminal charge. Yet at that
point a criminal charge did happen later, but it felt
very clear that Texas thought, Okay, this is the best
place that these kids can end up, and after that
just kind of wipe their hands and never really checked,
(10:06):
although they did continue to pay monthly payments per child
to the Heart Women until their murder.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Will you tell me about the first family and those
kids before we sort of get into Sarah and Jennifer
and what they were like.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Sure, So, as I was reporting this story, nobody knew
who the family of Marcus and Hannah and Abigail was,
and that was partly because Texas refused to disclose that information,
even to the police who were investigating the murders, which
is I would say an unusual level of confidentiality given
(10:43):
specifics of the case. So it was six months after
the crash when I noticed a family name for Marcus
in a big passle of records that the Sheriff's department
in Washington, which was the last place that the family lived,
released to the public. I guess it's important to note
that the police did have these files as well. I
just looked up the name on Facebook. I knew they
(11:05):
came from the Corpus Christi area, and I ended up
reaching out to their grandmother, and it became clear almost
immediately that she did not know what had happened to
the children. So I ended up telling her that, which
was really awful because it had been six months. It
was a huge national story, as you remember, so that means,
(11:26):
you know, millions of people heard this awful news before
the family was told. I got to know Tammy, who's
the birth mom of Marcus and Hannah and Abigail, and
her story which involves experiencing childhood sexual abuse at a
really young age and having resultant mental health struggles, so
she spent time in like a state mental hospital as
(11:47):
a child. She was experiencing homelessness and housing instability when
she had Marcus, who's the oldest. Marcus was being raised
mostly by Tammy's grandparents great grandparents, but ultimately the reason
they were removed from Tammy was Hannah got really sick
and needed to go to the hospital, and Tammy didn't
(12:09):
trust the hospital in Columbus, Texas, where they were living,
and she wanted to go to Houston, but she had
two other kids and they couldn't fit in the ambulance
and she didn't have a ride there, and so there
was this period of time that she was trying to
figure out a way to get Hannah to the hospital,
and she ended up calling her caseworker, who picked her
up and took them to the hospital and immediately handed
(12:30):
her removal paperwork and the kids were removed at that point,
and Tammy was actually charged with medical neglect and she
ended up having to spend time in jail because she
couldn't afford to pay the fees that resulted from the case.
And she had the same situation as Sherry. When she
(12:51):
gave up her rights. She was under the impression that
they were going to a foster home. Like that foster
home was going to adopt them. It was a black
couple who also had black children, and who told Tammy
that she would be able to be in their lives.
But again, you give up your rights, and you give
up your right to know anything and anything can happen
to the kids after that, and so she doesn't know
(13:13):
what happened with the prospective adoptive family. And there's actually
no records that I could ascertain because of how Texas
is very confidential with its records. In cases like this,
But they did end up in Minnesota with Jennifer and Sarah.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
So at what point in what year do Jennifer and
Sarah have all six kids together?
Speaker 2 (13:34):
In two thousand and eight, they were all adopted, But
there are some files that show that Jennifer and Sarah
did not necessarily think that their family was complete. They
had continued to look for kids on the Texas Adoption
Resource Exchange, and they had also tried IVF successfully.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Well, now I think we need to talk about them
because all of the lives and at this point, what
can you tell me about either woman? Whichever one you
want to go with first.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
We'll start with Jennifer because Jennifer was the much more
vocal person in the couple. Jennifer grew up in here
on South Dakota. She was gay, but she never actually
came out to her dad, at least not explicitly. She
met Sarah in college, and Sarah was from an even
smaller town in South Dakota, right on the border of Minnesota.
(14:30):
They moved to Minnesota after college, and Sarah was working
for a department store and Jennifer she never got her degree,
And I think they started planning pretty quickly after that
for adopting through the foster care system. So they originally
got a foster youth named Brie, who was a teenager
(14:52):
who lived in Minnesota. I think Bree's experience actually shows
a lot because she was able to mean, she lived
there with a couple. Well, she actually saw them looking
through the website and talking about adopting kids, and she
was under the impression that she would be a part
of that family.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
Shortly before they went to go pick up.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Marcus and Hannah and Abigail from Houston, they dropped Brie
off for her therapy appointment, and the therapist told Brie
that it wasn't going to work out and that they
had already had all of her stuff packed up, and
she had no idea and still basically to this day,
has no idea what caused their change in thinking.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
I mean, she was really upset.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
She said that she saw later saw them with their
kids and felt really awful, you know, because it was
this pretty small town in Minnesota where they all lived.
And she still to this day is like very confused
about what happened, especially in light of what came afterwards.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Did you say Brie was black? I can't remember if
you said.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
That Bree was white, and also her rights to her
mother were not terminated, so she wasn't open to be
a permanently. That's part of an issue with the foster
to adopt is that there are some people who use
the foster system as it means, like directly to adopt,
But there are a lot of kids in the foster
system who need temporary safe places with loving parents and
(16:18):
don't need to have.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Their rights of their parents totally severed.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Are people in her life, their lives? Sarah and Jennifer
shocked based on what they know, not about the crash necessarily,
but the allegations that came before it. Does this just
seem completely out of character for either of these women.
But when they came together, something happened, something changed with
both of them. What is even the dynamic?
Speaker 3 (16:45):
Yeah, that's a really good question.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
I think that first and foremost, Jennifer was very active
on social media, and she spun a story, a narrative
about her relationship, about her family, about the kids, and
that heavily influenced how people perceived her and the family.
(17:08):
There were a ton of friends that were completely shocked
by what happened. You know, one of her friends right
after the crash had said, Jennifer and Sarah are the
kinds of parents that this world needs.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
So that was a fiction.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Really that was spun with really beautiful photography of the children,
like in their chicken coop and at the Grand Canyon
and all of this.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
That's partly I think why people were so drawn to
this case is because there was this whole record of
a life, the reality of the situation, and those things
were so hard to reconcile with each other. Before the
inquest happened, there was a line of thinking from a
lot of people who were following the case that Jennifer
(17:54):
was probably the abuser of the family. I think in
this case, though, it became pretty clear that the evidence
that was there actually pointed to both women being involved
in the abuse. The first thing is Sarah was charged
with domestic violence for putting bruises on one of her
(18:17):
children that was in Minnesota. She pled guilty and serve probation.
There was some confusion maybe that like jen had sort
of asked her to fess up to it or something,
but that's not what the evidence showed, and ultimately after
the crash, they looked through the women's cell phones and
they found a whole bunch of really incriminating Google searches
(18:39):
on Sarah's phone about how much benadryl would kill a
certain pound person. The kids were all found to have
ingested huge quantities of benadrul before they went off the cliff,
and you know, searches about like hypothermia, of drowning and
all kinds of really awful stuff. And it became clear,
(19:01):
at least to me, that it was both Jennifer and
Sarah that were involved in the abuse of the kids.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
Let's take these offenses and now let's pick up the
timeline sort of in real time. They're in Minnesota with
these kids, and there's this domestic abuse allegation against Sarah
and she pleads guilty, but they don't lose the kids,
right What happens step by step? Where did they go
and what do they do and what do people see
(19:27):
as this escalates?
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Yeah, so, prior to the criminal complaint, the teachers of
the kids in Minnesota were reporting alarming behavior. So they
were reporting that the kids were really hungry and that
they didn't seem to have enough food to eat, and
that they were asking other people for food and even
(19:49):
looking in trash cans, and to that, Jennifer and Sarah
said that the kids had food issues because of foster care,
which is not rare actually, but it became clear to
the teachers that when they were calling home that the
kids were getting disciplined, and so they stopped basically reporting
this stuff. But when Sarah pled guilty, they pulled their
(20:12):
kids from public school, and that was the last time
the kids were in public school or any school, and
because of that, they lost contact with really any other
adults besides their parents. Sarah had to finish probation, but
once that probation ended, they immediately moved to Oregon. They
lived in Oregon for a little while before a second
(20:33):
investigation started, and this one was reported by friends of
the family who witnessed some really alarming punishment of all
of the kids, but particularly of Marcus. They had gone
to visit this woman at her house and they were
only each allowed to have one small piece of pizza,
(20:54):
but they had ordered a lot of pizza, and so
they had a bunch in the fridge, and when they
woke up in the morning, the woman made a comment
to her husband, like did you eat all the pizza
in the fridge, and that set off Jennifer, who forced
all the kids to lay on their air mattress with
eyemasks on for like the whole day. And it was
Marcus's birthday and she wouldn't let anyone say happy birthday
(21:17):
to Marcus. And the kids were very skinny at this point,
like alarmingly skinny, and Hannah was so small that people
regularly thought that she was like five years younger than
she actually was. That woman reported this, and there was
another investigation, and they actually reached out to the Minnesota
child welfare officials who said, you know, the problem is
(21:40):
these women, they look normal, and when they're confronted with
these alarming behaviors, they have a tendency to put them
back onto the kids and explain it by their trauma
histories and their experience in foster care. And that Oregon investigation,
a doctor found that five of the kids were so
(22:01):
small that they weren't even on the growth charts at
all for their ages, and still they were not removed.
Shortly after that, they moved to Washington, not too far away,
just sort of the other side of Portland basically, and
essentially DeVante started going to their neighbor's house and asking
for food, large amounts of food, and Hannah had one
(22:23):
time ran away in the middle of the night and
told the neighbors that she was being abused and her
parents were racist, and finally the neighbors called that in
to CPS and that was sort of the inciting incident
that led to the family leaving and driving to California
in the first place.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Tell me about the racism allegations. What did Hannah say
was going on in this house?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Well, the thing with Hannah was that she basically jumped
out of the second story window ran over to the
neighbor's house in the middle of the night. The neighbors
were like sleeping and kind of confused and obviously really
like alarm. The other thing is that Hannah, again she
looked really young, so they're thinking like, maybe this is
like an eight year old. I think at that point
she was fifteen. She had no two front teeth because
(23:09):
they had got knocked out, which was another social media
post that was really alarming, where Jennifer's fingers were holding
like an entire tooth root to tip, saying like, oh.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
Hannah's slipped in.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
The rule is no running in the house or something
like that, but she never got replacement teeth, so it
ended up making her look a lot younger. And I
think they didn't get any specifics because shortly after she
came over the family had come to look for her.
Jennifer would not allow the neighbors to talk to Hannah
on her own after they arrived, and again, I think
(23:44):
partly because they thought she was so much younger. They
just thought and they said, oh again with the she
has a lot of problems and you know, and then
she wrote a note where she said I'm sorry, I
shouldn't have come here and all of this, and so
they didn't really get any clear sense of what was
going on. But when Davante started coming over repeatedly and
(24:05):
asking for food, and it wasn't just food for him,
it became clear that it was food for all of
his siblings.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
He told them, though, please don't.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Call CPS because we don't want to be split up
from each other, which is probably a pretty reasonable fear,
you know, because there's six of them.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
And I think that might have contributed to why they.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Were never removed in the first place, was like they
didn't know necessarily who was responsible for them and there's
no process for that. And that became clear because multiple,
multiple people were very alarmed by what they saw with
this family, and repeated attempts to protect the kids went unheeded.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
So do you think Jennifer and Sarah were feeling increasing pressure?
There's more and more incidents because the kids are older
now and they are making kind of bigger moves. They're
getting attention. We talk about the inciting incident. What was
it that got them loaded up into that gold Yukon
and drove down into California to have what happened? What
(25:25):
leads up to that?
Speaker 2 (25:27):
I think that's a good point, that the kids were
getting older. Marcus was nineteen at that time. I also
think that there might have been a sense that their
luck would run out at some point. With investigations, often
people say like, Okay, they must have been really overwhelmed.
I will say that if there was already an abuse
allegation before they adopted the second set of three kids,
(25:48):
they doubled the number of kids. Six kids is a
huge number of kids, but also six kids from two families,
mixed ages, right, and trauma has extensive trauma histories. I
couldn't imagine that and that stands to reason that like
that might have been instead of fast tracking the second adoption,
(26:10):
that might have been like a pause, like, Okay, that's
a lot of kids for anyone. You know, that's a
lot of kids for like trained therapists.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
And then you're thinking, if you're the judge, why are
you not thinking maybe these are parents who are doing
this for the paycheck and that's it. You know that
many kids.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
That's a good point. And it's four hundred dollars per child.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Additionally, DeVante and Jeremiah got disability payments from Nathaniel Davis,
their father figure, that they also continued to receive until
their deaths.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
So this was like twenty six hundred dollars a month.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
And isn't it if the kids need therapy? I interviewed
a different author about a similar sort of situation. If
the kids need therapy or they need anything that's special,
there's more money that the state provides, right with the
intention that you're going to use that money to help
them get the help they need.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Yeah, it's a good point. And it's also true that
the family was really open about taking the kids off
of all of their psychiatric meds, and the foster care
system has a tendency to over medicate children, for sure,
that's documented, But they didn't go to therapy. The kids
didn't continue going to therapy. The thing that happens when
kids get removed from home at a young age, especially
(27:23):
if they get moved around from place to place, is
that every single time they move, they internalize the idea
that they're never going to be safe or stable, that
even if it seems good, it might not last. It
probably won't last, and that's really harmful psychologically for kids.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Well, let's talk about that. We do have to talk
about the psychology or because we've been talking about the facts,
what is going on? What do you think they're doing.
You've got this sort of picture perfect family on the outside.
They're over the top with their social media posts. They're
really trying to present themselves not just as a happy, healthy,
blended family, but like activists. They have them out there
(28:03):
in the Black Lives Matter protests. You know, there's all
this sort of facade going up, but so much bad
behind it. What are people saying about what they were doing,
what they were thinking?
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah, I think you know, I'm not a psychologist, but
to me, Jennifer seemed to have a really sort of
a mindset of like she herself being persecuted, persecuted for
her black children, and persecuted for her lesbian relationship. And
I think she sort of shows the signs of narcissism.
(28:36):
And again I'm not a psychologist, but the idea that
like everything is taken through the frame of herself primarily.
There were some things in the social media posts that
were really inappropriate. I felt, talking about private and kind
of embarrassing potentially situations with the kids, because the kids
were going through a lot of stuff, and you know,
(28:57):
she talked about the first night that Marcus and and
Abigail spent in their home and how Marcus was banging
his head against the wall and you know, bleeding and
screaming and.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
You know, and all this stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
And it's like, if that's true, which we don't know,
and we don't have really any evidence for any of
the stuff that she was saying, but if that's true,
how embarrassing is that for him? You know? I mean
it's a really challenging move. There are thousands of miles
away and the totally different climate in like a basically
all white town. They're never going to see their mom again,
(29:29):
like these are reasons that kids do act out and
it's normal, and you can really understand that.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
And it's framing her as this savior, literally a white savior,
savior coming in and saving him. Look what I have
to deal with. Look at what's happening, and look how
lucky this kid is to have Sarah and me.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
As parents exactly, And even that exact same post where
she was talking about their first night there she said,
if not us who we have natural maternal instincts and
we have gits of love and all this kind of stuff.
And it's like, the central character in the story, especially
in the story of adoption and especially adoption from foster care, right,
(30:10):
should not be the parent, because it's the kid's journey,
and the kid is experiencing it with a lot less
power and with a lot more internal instability, without really
understanding developmentally the sort of context for it, just having
really big feelings around it.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Are we seeing anything in their backgrounds that points to
these tendencies before they have any of these children, maybe
even before we met. I'm assuming people have been looking
and talking to family members or talking to friends from
high school.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
So I did speak to some family members that ended
up not wanting to be on the record, and there
were a couple specific stories that were quite alarming, especially
regards to Jennifer.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
There was one story about how.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
One of Jennifer's siblings was using a Q tip and
she walked by and banged her head against the Q tip.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Ooh, okay. So they get into the gold Yukon and
when are they thinking the timeline starts for obviously a
panic to set in. They think that CPS is going
to come knocking at their door and take away these kids,
is that right?
Speaker 3 (31:15):
Right?
Speaker 2 (31:15):
So they came home, actually I think they were home
because they didn't answer the door, so the caseworker put
her card in the door. When the caseworker returned, still
not unable to get a hold of the family, the
card was gone. But also the Yukon was gone. And
they had a little sort of a small wall along
(31:36):
their driveway and it was like they had backed into
the wall and like toppled over some of it. I
think the panic set in before they ever left. I
think they probably realized or maybe thought that just because
they had recently been investigated in Oregon, you know, and
like you said, the kids were getting older, which means
they were able to leave. I think they had a
(31:58):
lot of that white savior idea that like the kids
couldn't function without them. I think they probably did also
believe that the kids are really messed up and kind
of assigned all those behaviors.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
You know.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I think probably in their minds, they thought the things
that they were doing, like with the withholding food and
all that were like necessary.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
In some way.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
It did seem like they had like a complex right
of like being the victimized people. And so in that
frame of mind, they probably thought that if they couldn't
have the kids, then you know, I mean, that's really
awful to think, right, that you would think of killing
your family before you would think of just letting them
exist without you.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Yeah, they think they're doing them a favor. I mean,
any of the research I've done on family annihilators, some
of them say in their heads, they don't want to
live with a shame, They don't want them to go
on without them. They wouldn't be able to function. It's
so narcissistic, and it makes me wonder what that day
was like. Do you think that they left Washington knowing
that this was going to be a plan that this
(32:58):
is what they should do, or do we get the
impression from any of the evidence that this was spur
of the moment, even if that means they decided that
morning to do this.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Yeah, I think the evidence shows that they were kind
of figuring it out as they were driving because of
Sarah's Google searches, so she searched for no kill shelters
for dogs, they had animals. I think it started forming,
like how to do it. I think they did realize
that they were trapped before they left, but I don't
know that they came up with the plan. It's really
(33:29):
hard to say because there's the evidence on their phones.
There's the evidence on the car itself, right that shows
that they didn't break But I don't know what was
like in that car and how they were able to
drug the children or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Are either women talking to friends texting in the days
leading up to this at all. I had read somewhere
that maybe Sarah regretted something beforehand. This just seems like
everybody's on edge.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
Yeah, Sarah.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
This was a while back that Sarah had told one
of her coworkers that she wished that she knew that
you don't have to have a big family.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Okay, tell me about that day. So the crash happens
on March twenty sixth of twenty eighteen. What do we
know from I know their CCTV, there's receipts, there's cell
phone records. Piece together what happens leading up to what
happens on March twenty sixth.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
So they left the house and they started driving. I
don't think they stayed at any hotel or anything. They
stopped at a grocery store and bought some bananas and
snack foods. They parked their car at this turnoff off
the Pacific Coast Highway, and there was another couple, like
(34:46):
an older couple who had an RV and was driving
down the coast from Alaska. They heard the car, and
they poked out and saw the car. And then he said,
in the middle of the night, this was like three
in the morning, he heard what sounded like bottoming out.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Wait, what is bottoming out mean? Exactly?
Speaker 2 (35:02):
You ever hit like a speed bump too fast, you know,
like it makes a loud sound where the bottom of
the car hits the ground. Okay, what he thought happened
was that they had like peeled out to go down
to the town which was nearby, so he thought maybe
they just left fast. He said he thought he heard
something like off the cliff, and that he thought maybe
(35:24):
it was a seal, and then he went back to bed.
He left with his wife the next day. And then
there was a German tourist who spotted like it was
a lookout point, right, so people would come there and
park their car and look at this beautiful view. And
that's what this German tourist was doing when they noticed
the car flipped on its hood at the bottom of
(35:46):
the cliff.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
And we know that. We have rescuers going down there
and they're looking and tell me what the scene is
because it's a total disarray.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Yeah, it was a really difficult scene, actually a crime scene,
because the car was actually on the shore but partly
in the water, and because of that, the tide had
been coming in and out right. So in addition to
the impact, which was a huge impact because it was
one hundred foot cliff that the car went off and
it was on its hood, there was also this tide
(36:18):
which was coming in and going out. There had been
a storm recently, so it made it really challenging for
investigators to find the rest of the bodies, because three
of the kids were found, two of the kids were
found much later, one was found weeks later, and one kid, Davante,
was never found. And that's partly because the conditions were
(36:41):
so changeable. So, like one of the searchers said, you'd
go down to the beach at two pm, and you'd
go down at the beach at eight pm, and it
was like a totally different beach. You were seeing all
different things, which made it really challenging for people to
do the search.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
What does the car say actually happened? Because a car
I can tell you right the black box inside the
car can tell you whether or not the car was
breaking at the time of a crash or accelerating.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Yes, it accelerated off the cliff. That became clear pretty
early on when there were no skid marks. You often
see some evidence at the street level that there's breaking,
that there's attempts to, you know, turn really fast or
something like that.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
So there was nothing like that at.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
The actual and there's a berm, like an eighteen inch berm,
which is just like a raised amount of earth around
the whole lookout just for safety, and so you would
have to accelerate to get over that.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
What is the toxicology saying about the two women and
the kids that they were able to recover? I know
we talked about benadryl. Did both women take benadryl or
was there alcohol?
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Sarah took benadryl.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Sarah wasn't driving shoes in the passenger seat, so all
of the kids and Sarah were found with like massive
amounts of benadryl, like overnoses of benadryl, and Jennifer was drunk.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Has there been any kind of reckoning with the foster
care system in Texas once this story came out and
these families, I mean the Davis family in particular, I
know that they had been interviewed. Was there any kind
of a reckoning? Were there apologies? Was there acknowledgment that
this was a mistake.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
No, there was no acknowledgment at all on the part
of Texas. The caseworker that was Tammy's caseworker, so she
had a big hand in placing Marcus in Hannah and Abigail,
and after that adoption went through, she actually wrote this
glowing letter of recommendation that this family should get any
kids that they want right they're just the wonderful parents.
(38:41):
I followed up with her and asked her sort of
how she felt about it, and she said, I don't know.
Something must have happened, but I still don't really believe
it that they did this. And I said, have you
read the news stories? And she said no, Will you
tell me?
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Do you know what happened to Bree who was a
teenager who too lived with the hearts, and to Dante,
who was the ten year old who did not go
with them, who would have presumably ended up dead but
instead went to like a mental health facility.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
So Brie I reach out to her.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
She still lives in Minnesota, in the same town she
actually works for like a behavioral health program. She seems fine,
and she's in contact with her mom and they get
along well and they've sort of worked through some of
their issues that they'd had that had resulted in her
being in care. With Dante, his story is a big
part of the book, and he spent years in that institution,
(39:36):
which it's called a mental health facility, but they don't
provide very much mental health care and the place is
rife with abuse. He did experience abuse there at least
one documented incidence where his shoulder was dislocated by a
staff member. He actually was able to reunite with Nathaniel
at age sixteen. He walked across town, he recognized the neighborhood.
(39:59):
He went and found Nathaniel, and Nathaniel was able to
gain custody of him before he aged out.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
This was Sherry's boyfriend and not his biological son.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
No, but he never gave up hope, and he never
gave up hope on the other kids too until he
found out that they were killed, and it was really tragic.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
It was really tragic.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
For Dante too, because Dante has years and years of
case reports where he was begging his caseworker to contact
his siblings. He felt responsible for them being taken from
him because he was the oldest and he thought that
his bad behavior led to their removal. He felt responsible
(40:39):
for that also. He begged to the point where they
did ask Jennifer and Sarah if he could have a
phone call with them, and they said no.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
What has been the lesson? Do you think just in
the national news, what do people take away when they
read your book or any narrative on this story.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
My hope is that my book adds to what's out
there already about this case that helps people understand that
the way that the child welfare system works or doesn't
work greatly contributes to traumatizing kids, because I think we
have this tendency to think of parents who are involved
with CPS as bad parents, bad people, and that you know,
(41:21):
removing kids from that situation is helping them.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
But I think that's often not true.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
I think there are so many kids that are stuck
in foster care dealing with just really horrific abuse in care,
and that we provide no support to them, real emotional support,
like a kid needs someone who loves them, and we
take all the people, all of their family away. Even
this case, like the Heart Family case, is a story
(41:48):
that Texa is considered a win, and it's not a win.
So I want to sort of draw attention to the
idea that the system is not set up to really
help children.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amrosi. Our associate
producer is Alex Chi. This episode was mixed by John Bradley.
Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga Executive
(42:32):
produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow
Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked
and on Twitter at tenfold more and if you know
of a historical crime that could use some attention from
the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info
at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for
(42:54):
true crime authors for Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
This book is about grief, It's about loss, and it's
about what parents we consider good parents and which parents
we give chances to.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:56):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with the details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. Most of you have probably heard the
story of the Heart Family, the couple that drove a
(01:18):
car off a cliff with all of their adopted children inside.
Our guest rock Sanna as Garian unfolds the story with
details that we've never heard before, including an investigation into
the child welfare system. I'll warn you that much of
this is difficult to hear. Well, why don't we start
(01:39):
with the story of the birth families. How these kids,
these six kids, ended up with these two women, and
how potentially these two women ended up in the state
they were in when they made this terrible decision. So
let's start with the families.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
So there's two birth families.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
The first birth family that I encountered where the Davis is,
and that's a birth family of Divine Tay, Jeremiah, and Sierra.
And so they were actually the second group of kids
that were adopted, but I started with them because we
were all living in Houston. So the kids were removed
from their mom because she had a drug problem. She
(02:15):
used cocaine that came up when she gave birth to
Jeremiah at first, and then when Sierra was born and
Sherry tested positive for cocaine. The kids were ultimately removed
from her care and she was living with a man
named Nathaniel who was a much older guy who was
actually the primary caretaker. And Nathaniel was sober, he received
(02:38):
disability benefits, and he was, by all accounts, are really
loving father. He was the first person I actually ended
up talking to was Nathaniel. They were removed from him
when they were removed after Sierra's birth, so ultimately they
moved to their aunt's house. And their aunt's name was Priscilla,
(02:59):
and Priscilla as a church going woman who worked full
time at a hospital in Houston at the time. DeVante, Jeremiah,
and Sierra had an older brother named Dante, and all
four of those kids were initially involved in this CPS case.
So all four of those kids lived with Priscilla up
until this fateful day when she was unable to find childcare.
(03:24):
She got called into work and her daughter, who was
a grown woman at that time, usually watched the kids,
but she was unable, so she asked Sherry, who's their
birth mother, to watch the kids. And while she was
out and Sharry was there with the kids, a caseworker
stop by unannounced, and because Sherrie's rights to her kids
(03:46):
were terminated, she wasn't allowed to be around them, and
so the kids were removed immediately when the caseworker showed up.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
So this is four kids at this point who were removed.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yes, and Dante was the oldest, so he was ten
at this time. He was acting out. He was the
oldest so he understood sort of what was going on
more than the other kids. He really didn't want to
be removed from his family. He was fighting and arguing,
and he ended up getting sent to a residential treatment center,
which is sort of like an institutional setting for mostly
(04:19):
foster youth. So he was split from his siblings at
that time. Kind of the frustrating thing about this story
is that Sherry terminated her rights voluntarily because she was
told that she needed to do that in order for
Priscilla to adopt the kids, because you can't adopt kids
when they have legal parents already.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
So these four kids go into foster care, well one
of them goes into a residential facility, but the other
three kids go into foster care. What is their journey
to where they eventually land with the hearts?
Speaker 2 (04:49):
So Texas has a website that you can look at.
It's called the Texas Adoption Resource Exchange, and you can
essentially shop for kids that you would like to adopt
using that website. So Jennifer and Sarah Hart, who are
a white married couple who both were from South Dakota
but at this time we're living in Minnesota. They were
(05:12):
looking at the Texas Adoption Resource Exchange which they called
TAR and they stumbled on DeVante and Jeremiah and Sierra,
and they had used this website two years earlier when
they adopted their first set of three children, also from Texas,
so by that point they'd already been through the process
once it went really quickly. Kids have to live in
(05:33):
pre adoptive homes for at least six months before you
can initiate adoption, and they had lived with their aunt
Priscilla for five and a half months. She was attempting
to adopt them even though they got removed. She had
hired an attorney, she got denied, and then she appealed
that decision, but before that appeal went through in the courts,
(05:53):
the kids were already adopted by the Hearts.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
I'm surprised that they did not give prential treatment to
a family member, but I guess she had a mark
against her for leaving the kids with their birth mother,
who had no rights and who obviously had some problems
to begin with. Is that the thinking? Why would they
not hold to see what Priscilla was going to do?
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yeah, So I actually spoke to another judge who wasn't
involved in this case, but he was a judge for
these types of cases in Harris County, and he said
that was actually not the way that it should have gone.
If her appeal would have gone through, then the adoption
would have been void.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
It felt pretty rush.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
It was basically at the exact time when it could happen.
It happened despite the fact that there were family members,
and despite that there is a federal mandate that family
members must be given preference for placement of kids who
are involved with CPS. That is there for a reason,
and that's because there's plenty of research that shows that
(06:53):
kids do best with their families, They do best with
their parents, and when they can't be with their parents,
they do best in family homes. And we understand this
across the child welfare system, but I think in the
case of the Davis family, it became clear that to
me that sometimes the preference is more theoretical than it
(07:13):
is actual.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
So will you educate me a little bit on in
time where we are and what is the view of
a same sex couple adopting kids, because I just assumed
it was not going to be that easy, particularly in
a state like Texas.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah, that's a good question, and it's an interesting wrinkle
in the case. I think I started looking into the judges,
you know, in Harris County, and there's a whole history
of corruption and racism, and there are actually instances of
not the judge in this case, but a judge next
door being very vocally anti LGBT for adoptive parents. So
(07:52):
I think that that is true that there. It kind
of depends on the judge. The judge in the Davis
family's case was really super interested in speed in clearing
out the docket, so to speak, you know, in his mind.
And I spoke to him actually about this case, and
he said, there are kids that languish in foster care,
which is true, especially sibling groups, because they're hard to
(08:15):
place multiple kids. And he said Minnesota has been great
for like providing people who want to adopt essentially, and again,
because they had already adopted three kids from Texas, they
kind of knew the process. I will say that at
the time that the Davis kids were adopted, there had
already been an allegation of abuse against Jennifer and Sarah
(08:37):
Hart regarding the three children that were already adopted.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Were they in Minnesota during that accusation or were they
in Oregon at that point.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
They were in Minnesota and that either got totally missed
by Texas, which it kind of looks like it did.
I have some records, so I have their actual adoption paperwork,
and I also have the foster care case file of Dante,
the oldest.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
All of the movil stuff that was happening.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Is in that file as well, because they kind of
grouped the file by birth mom.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
So this judge is moving through his docket quickly. Are
we also thinking that he's looking at these three black
children and thinking they are better off with a white family.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
I think that the facts of this case make that
pretty clear. The officials that were involved assumed that the
white women were a better home for the kids. There's
a couple of ways that that becomes clear. Like in Priscilla,
the aunt's appeal that got denied, the court said why
should she have another bite at the proverbial apple, you know,
(09:37):
like they were saying, no, you can't adopt these kids,
and we're going to be a little.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Mean to you about it too.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
But on the other side, the you know, the abuse
allegation sort of just went by. I mean, there was
no charge, you know, like criminal charge. Yet at that
point a criminal charge did happen later, but it felt
very clear that Texas thought, Okay, this is the best
place that these kids can end up, and after that
just kind of wipe their hands and never really checked,
(10:06):
although they did continue to pay monthly payments per child
to the Heart Women until their murder.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Will you tell me about the first family and those
kids before we sort of get into Sarah and Jennifer
and what they were like.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Sure, So, as I was reporting this story, nobody knew
who the family of Marcus and Hannah and Abigail was,
and that was partly because Texas refused to disclose that information,
even to the police who were investigating the murders, which
is I would say an unusual level of confidentiality given
(10:43):
specifics of the case. So it was six months after
the crash when I noticed a family name for Marcus
in a big passle of records that the Sheriff's department
in Washington, which was the last place that the family lived,
released to the public. I guess it's important to note
that the police did have these files as well. I
just looked up the name on Facebook. I knew they
(11:05):
came from the Corpus Christi area, and I ended up
reaching out to their grandmother, and it became clear almost
immediately that she did not know what had happened to
the children. So I ended up telling her that, which
was really awful because it had been six months. It
was a huge national story, as you remember, so that means,
(11:26):
you know, millions of people heard this awful news before
the family was told. I got to know Tammy, who's
the birth mom of Marcus and Hannah and Abigail, and
her story which involves experiencing childhood sexual abuse at a
really young age and having resultant mental health struggles, so
she spent time in like a state mental hospital as
(11:47):
a child. She was experiencing homelessness and housing instability when
she had Marcus, who's the oldest. Marcus was being raised
mostly by Tammy's grandparents great grandparents, but ultimately the reason
they were removed from Tammy was Hannah got really sick
and needed to go to the hospital, and Tammy didn't
(12:09):
trust the hospital in Columbus, Texas, where they were living,
and she wanted to go to Houston, but she had
two other kids and they couldn't fit in the ambulance
and she didn't have a ride there, and so there
was this period of time that she was trying to
figure out a way to get Hannah to the hospital,
and she ended up calling her caseworker, who picked her
up and took them to the hospital and immediately handed
(12:30):
her removal paperwork and the kids were removed at that point,
and Tammy was actually charged with medical neglect and she
ended up having to spend time in jail because she
couldn't afford to pay the fees that resulted from the case.
And she had the same situation as Sherry. When she
(12:51):
gave up her rights. She was under the impression that
they were going to a foster home. Like that foster
home was going to adopt them. It was a black
couple who also had black children, and who told Tammy
that she would be able to be in their lives.
But again, you give up your rights, and you give
up your right to know anything and anything can happen
to the kids after that, and so she doesn't know
(13:13):
what happened with the prospective adoptive family. And there's actually
no records that I could ascertain because of how Texas
is very confidential with its records. In cases like this,
But they did end up in Minnesota with Jennifer and Sarah.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
So at what point in what year do Jennifer and
Sarah have all six kids together?
Speaker 2 (13:34):
In two thousand and eight, they were all adopted, But
there are some files that show that Jennifer and Sarah
did not necessarily think that their family was complete. They
had continued to look for kids on the Texas Adoption
Resource Exchange, and they had also tried IVF successfully.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Well, now I think we need to talk about them
because all of the lives and at this point, what
can you tell me about either woman? Whichever one you
want to go with first.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
We'll start with Jennifer because Jennifer was the much more
vocal person in the couple. Jennifer grew up in here
on South Dakota. She was gay, but she never actually
came out to her dad, at least not explicitly. She
met Sarah in college, and Sarah was from an even
smaller town in South Dakota, right on the border of Minnesota.
(14:30):
They moved to Minnesota after college, and Sarah was working
for a department store and Jennifer she never got her degree,
And I think they started planning pretty quickly after that
for adopting through the foster care system. So they originally
got a foster youth named Brie, who was a teenager
(14:52):
who lived in Minnesota. I think Bree's experience actually shows
a lot because she was able to mean, she lived
there with a couple. Well, she actually saw them looking
through the website and talking about adopting kids, and she
was under the impression that she would be a part
of that family.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
Shortly before they went to go pick up.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Marcus and Hannah and Abigail from Houston, they dropped Brie
off for her therapy appointment, and the therapist told Brie
that it wasn't going to work out and that they
had already had all of her stuff packed up, and
she had no idea and still basically to this day,
has no idea what caused their change in thinking.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
I mean, she was really upset.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
She said that she saw later saw them with their
kids and felt really awful, you know, because it was
this pretty small town in Minnesota where they all lived.
And she still to this day is like very confused
about what happened, especially in light of what came afterwards.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Did you say Brie was black? I can't remember if
you said.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
That Bree was white, and also her rights to her
mother were not terminated, so she wasn't open to be
a permanently. That's part of an issue with the foster
to adopt is that there are some people who use
the foster system as it means, like directly to adopt,
But there are a lot of kids in the foster
system who need temporary safe places with loving parents and
(16:18):
don't need to have.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Their rights of their parents totally severed.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Are people in her life, their lives? Sarah and Jennifer
shocked based on what they know, not about the crash necessarily,
but the allegations that came before it. Does this just
seem completely out of character for either of these women.
But when they came together, something happened, something changed with
both of them. What is even the dynamic?
Speaker 3 (16:45):
Yeah, that's a really good question.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
I think that first and foremost, Jennifer was very active
on social media, and she spun a story, a narrative
about her relationship, about her family, about the kids, and
that heavily influenced how people perceived her and the family.
(17:08):
There were a ton of friends that were completely shocked
by what happened. You know, one of her friends right
after the crash had said, Jennifer and Sarah are the
kinds of parents that this world needs.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
So that was a fiction.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Really that was spun with really beautiful photography of the children,
like in their chicken coop and at the Grand Canyon
and all of this.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
That's partly I think why people were so drawn to
this case is because there was this whole record of
a life, the reality of the situation, and those things
were so hard to reconcile with each other. Before the
inquest happened, there was a line of thinking from a
lot of people who were following the case that Jennifer
(17:54):
was probably the abuser of the family. I think in
this case, though, it became pretty clear that the evidence
that was there actually pointed to both women being involved
in the abuse. The first thing is Sarah was charged
with domestic violence for putting bruises on one of her
(18:17):
children that was in Minnesota. She pled guilty and serve probation.
There was some confusion maybe that like jen had sort
of asked her to fess up to it or something,
but that's not what the evidence showed, and ultimately after
the crash, they looked through the women's cell phones and
they found a whole bunch of really incriminating Google searches
(18:39):
on Sarah's phone about how much benadryl would kill a
certain pound person. The kids were all found to have
ingested huge quantities of benadrul before they went off the cliff,
and you know, searches about like hypothermia, of drowning and
all kinds of really awful stuff. And it became clear,
(19:01):
at least to me, that it was both Jennifer and
Sarah that were involved in the abuse of the kids.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
Let's take these offenses and now let's pick up the
timeline sort of in real time. They're in Minnesota with
these kids, and there's this domestic abuse allegation against Sarah
and she pleads guilty, but they don't lose the kids,
right What happens step by step? Where did they go
and what do they do and what do people see
(19:27):
as this escalates?
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Yeah, so, prior to the criminal complaint, the teachers of
the kids in Minnesota were reporting alarming behavior. So they
were reporting that the kids were really hungry and that
they didn't seem to have enough food to eat, and
that they were asking other people for food and even
(19:49):
looking in trash cans, and to that, Jennifer and Sarah
said that the kids had food issues because of foster care,
which is not rare actually, but it became clear to
the teachers that when they were calling home that the
kids were getting disciplined, and so they stopped basically reporting
this stuff. But when Sarah pled guilty, they pulled their
(20:12):
kids from public school, and that was the last time
the kids were in public school or any school, and
because of that, they lost contact with really any other
adults besides their parents. Sarah had to finish probation, but
once that probation ended, they immediately moved to Oregon. They
lived in Oregon for a little while before a second
(20:33):
investigation started, and this one was reported by friends of
the family who witnessed some really alarming punishment of all
of the kids, but particularly of Marcus. They had gone
to visit this woman at her house and they were
only each allowed to have one small piece of pizza,
(20:54):
but they had ordered a lot of pizza, and so
they had a bunch in the fridge, and when they
woke up in the morning, the woman made a comment
to her husband, like did you eat all the pizza
in the fridge, and that set off Jennifer, who forced
all the kids to lay on their air mattress with
eyemasks on for like the whole day. And it was
Marcus's birthday and she wouldn't let anyone say happy birthday
(21:17):
to Marcus. And the kids were very skinny at this point,
like alarmingly skinny, and Hannah was so small that people
regularly thought that she was like five years younger than
she actually was. That woman reported this, and there was
another investigation, and they actually reached out to the Minnesota
child welfare officials who said, you know, the problem is
(21:40):
these women, they look normal, and when they're confronted with
these alarming behaviors, they have a tendency to put them
back onto the kids and explain it by their trauma
histories and their experience in foster care. And that Oregon investigation,
a doctor found that five of the kids were so
(22:01):
small that they weren't even on the growth charts at
all for their ages, and still they were not removed.
Shortly after that, they moved to Washington, not too far away,
just sort of the other side of Portland basically, and
essentially DeVante started going to their neighbor's house and asking
for food, large amounts of food, and Hannah had one
(22:23):
time ran away in the middle of the night and
told the neighbors that she was being abused and her
parents were racist, and finally the neighbors called that in
to CPS and that was sort of the inciting incident
that led to the family leaving and driving to California
in the first place.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Tell me about the racism allegations. What did Hannah say
was going on in this house?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Well, the thing with Hannah was that she basically jumped
out of the second story window ran over to the
neighbor's house in the middle of the night. The neighbors
were like sleeping and kind of confused and obviously really
like alarm. The other thing is that Hannah, again she
looked really young, so they're thinking like, maybe this is
like an eight year old. I think at that point
she was fifteen. She had no two front teeth because
(23:09):
they had got knocked out, which was another social media
post that was really alarming, where Jennifer's fingers were holding
like an entire tooth root to tip, saying like, oh.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
Hannah's slipped in.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
The rule is no running in the house or something
like that, but she never got replacement teeth, so it
ended up making her look a lot younger. And I
think they didn't get any specifics because shortly after she
came over the family had come to look for her.
Jennifer would not allow the neighbors to talk to Hannah
on her own after they arrived, and again, I think
(23:44):
partly because they thought she was so much younger. They
just thought and they said, oh again with the she
has a lot of problems and you know, and then
she wrote a note where she said I'm sorry, I
shouldn't have come here and all of this, and so
they didn't really get any clear sense of what was
going on. But when Davante started coming over repeatedly and
(24:05):
asking for food, and it wasn't just food for him,
it became clear that it was food for all of
his siblings.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
He told them, though, please don't.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Call CPS because we don't want to be split up
from each other, which is probably a pretty reasonable fear,
you know, because there's six of them.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
And I think that might have contributed to why they.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Were never removed in the first place, was like they
didn't know necessarily who was responsible for them and there's
no process for that. And that became clear because multiple,
multiple people were very alarmed by what they saw with
this family, and repeated attempts to protect the kids went unheeded.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
So do you think Jennifer and Sarah were feeling increasing pressure?
There's more and more incidents because the kids are older
now and they are making kind of bigger moves. They're
getting attention. We talk about the inciting incident. What was
it that got them loaded up into that gold Yukon
and drove down into California to have what happened? What
(25:25):
leads up to that?
Speaker 2 (25:27):
I think that's a good point, that the kids were
getting older. Marcus was nineteen at that time. I also
think that there might have been a sense that their
luck would run out at some point. With investigations, often
people say like, Okay, they must have been really overwhelmed.
I will say that if there was already an abuse
allegation before they adopted the second set of three kids,
(25:48):
they doubled the number of kids. Six kids is a
huge number of kids, but also six kids from two families,
mixed ages, right, and trauma has extensive trauma histories. I
couldn't imagine that and that stands to reason that like
that might have been instead of fast tracking the second adoption,
(26:10):
that might have been like a pause, like, Okay, that's
a lot of kids for anyone. You know, that's a
lot of kids for like trained therapists.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
And then you're thinking, if you're the judge, why are
you not thinking maybe these are parents who are doing
this for the paycheck and that's it. You know that
many kids.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
That's a good point. And it's four hundred dollars per child.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Additionally, DeVante and Jeremiah got disability payments from Nathaniel Davis,
their father figure, that they also continued to receive until
their deaths.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
So this was like twenty six hundred dollars a month.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
And isn't it if the kids need therapy? I interviewed
a different author about a similar sort of situation. If
the kids need therapy or they need anything that's special,
there's more money that the state provides, right with the
intention that you're going to use that money to help
them get the help they need.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Yeah, it's a good point. And it's also true that
the family was really open about taking the kids off
of all of their psychiatric meds, and the foster care
system has a tendency to over medicate children, for sure,
that's documented, But they didn't go to therapy. The kids
didn't continue going to therapy. The thing that happens when
kids get removed from home at a young age, especially
(27:23):
if they get moved around from place to place, is
that every single time they move, they internalize the idea
that they're never going to be safe or stable, that
even if it seems good, it might not last. It
probably won't last, and that's really harmful psychologically for kids.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Well, let's talk about that. We do have to talk
about the psychology or because we've been talking about the facts,
what is going on? What do you think they're doing.
You've got this sort of picture perfect family on the outside.
They're over the top with their social media posts. They're
really trying to present themselves not just as a happy, healthy,
blended family, but like activists. They have them out there
(28:03):
in the Black Lives Matter protests. You know, there's all
this sort of facade going up, but so much bad
behind it. What are people saying about what they were doing,
what they were thinking?
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah, I think you know, I'm not a psychologist, but
to me, Jennifer seemed to have a really sort of
a mindset of like she herself being persecuted, persecuted for
her black children, and persecuted for her lesbian relationship. And
I think she sort of shows the signs of narcissism.
(28:36):
And again I'm not a psychologist, but the idea that
like everything is taken through the frame of herself primarily.
There were some things in the social media posts that
were really inappropriate. I felt, talking about private and kind
of embarrassing potentially situations with the kids, because the kids
were going through a lot of stuff, and you know,
(28:57):
she talked about the first night that Marcus and and
Abigail spent in their home and how Marcus was banging
his head against the wall and you know, bleeding and
screaming and.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
You know, and all this stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
And it's like, if that's true, which we don't know,
and we don't have really any evidence for any of
the stuff that she was saying, but if that's true,
how embarrassing is that for him? You know? I mean
it's a really challenging move. There are thousands of miles
away and the totally different climate in like a basically
all white town. They're never going to see their mom again,
(29:29):
like these are reasons that kids do act out and
it's normal, and you can really understand that.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
And it's framing her as this savior, literally a white savior,
savior coming in and saving him. Look what I have
to deal with. Look at what's happening, and look how
lucky this kid is to have Sarah and me.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
As parents exactly, And even that exact same post where
she was talking about their first night there she said,
if not us who we have natural maternal instincts and
we have gits of love and all this kind of stuff.
And it's like, the central character in the story, especially
in the story of adoption and especially adoption from foster care, right,
(30:10):
should not be the parent, because it's the kid's journey,
and the kid is experiencing it with a lot less
power and with a lot more internal instability, without really
understanding developmentally the sort of context for it, just having
really big feelings around it.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Are we seeing anything in their backgrounds that points to
these tendencies before they have any of these children, maybe
even before we met. I'm assuming people have been looking
and talking to family members or talking to friends from
high school.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
So I did speak to some family members that ended
up not wanting to be on the record, and there
were a couple specific stories that were quite alarming, especially
regards to Jennifer.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
There was one story about how.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
One of Jennifer's siblings was using a Q tip and
she walked by and banged her head against the Q tip.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Ooh, okay. So they get into the gold Yukon and
when are they thinking the timeline starts for obviously a
panic to set in. They think that CPS is going
to come knocking at their door and take away these kids,
is that right?
Speaker 3 (31:15):
Right?
Speaker 2 (31:15):
So they came home, actually I think they were home
because they didn't answer the door, so the caseworker put
her card in the door. When the caseworker returned, still
not unable to get a hold of the family, the
card was gone. But also the Yukon was gone. And
they had a little sort of a small wall along
(31:36):
their driveway and it was like they had backed into
the wall and like toppled over some of it. I
think the panic set in before they ever left. I
think they probably realized or maybe thought that just because
they had recently been investigated in Oregon, you know, and
like you said, the kids were getting older, which means
they were able to leave. I think they had a
(31:58):
lot of that white savior idea that like the kids
couldn't function without them. I think they probably did also
believe that the kids are really messed up and kind
of assigned all those behaviors.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
You know.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I think probably in their minds, they thought the things
that they were doing, like with the withholding food and
all that were like necessary.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
In some way.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
It did seem like they had like a complex right
of like being the victimized people. And so in that
frame of mind, they probably thought that if they couldn't
have the kids, then you know, I mean, that's really
awful to think, right, that you would think of killing
your family before you would think of just letting them
exist without you.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Yeah, they think they're doing them a favor. I mean,
any of the research I've done on family annihilators, some
of them say in their heads, they don't want to
live with a shame, They don't want them to go
on without them. They wouldn't be able to function. It's
so narcissistic, and it makes me wonder what that day
was like. Do you think that they left Washington knowing
that this was going to be a plan that this
(32:58):
is what they should do, or do we get the
impression from any of the evidence that this was spur
of the moment, even if that means they decided that
morning to do this.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Yeah, I think the evidence shows that they were kind
of figuring it out as they were driving because of
Sarah's Google searches, so she searched for no kill shelters
for dogs, they had animals. I think it started forming,
like how to do it. I think they did realize
that they were trapped before they left, but I don't
know that they came up with the plan. It's really
(33:29):
hard to say because there's the evidence on their phones.
There's the evidence on the car itself, right that shows
that they didn't break But I don't know what was
like in that car and how they were able to
drug the children or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Are either women talking to friends texting in the days
leading up to this at all. I had read somewhere
that maybe Sarah regretted something beforehand. This just seems like
everybody's on edge.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
Yeah, Sarah.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
This was a while back that Sarah had told one
of her coworkers that she wished that she knew that
you don't have to have a big family.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Okay, tell me about that day. So the crash happens
on March twenty sixth of twenty eighteen. What do we
know from I know their CCTV, there's receipts, there's cell
phone records. Piece together what happens leading up to what
happens on March twenty sixth.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
So they left the house and they started driving. I
don't think they stayed at any hotel or anything. They
stopped at a grocery store and bought some bananas and
snack foods. They parked their car at this turnoff off
the Pacific Coast Highway, and there was another couple, like
(34:46):
an older couple who had an RV and was driving
down the coast from Alaska. They heard the car, and
they poked out and saw the car. And then he said,
in the middle of the night, this was like three
in the morning, he heard what sounded like bottoming out.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Wait, what is bottoming out mean? Exactly?
Speaker 2 (35:02):
You ever hit like a speed bump too fast, you know,
like it makes a loud sound where the bottom of
the car hits the ground. Okay, what he thought happened
was that they had like peeled out to go down
to the town which was nearby, so he thought maybe
they just left fast. He said he thought he heard
something like off the cliff, and that he thought maybe
(35:24):
it was a seal, and then he went back to bed.
He left with his wife the next day. And then
there was a German tourist who spotted like it was
a lookout point, right, so people would come there and
park their car and look at this beautiful view. And
that's what this German tourist was doing when they noticed
the car flipped on its hood at the bottom of
(35:46):
the cliff.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
And we know that. We have rescuers going down there
and they're looking and tell me what the scene is
because it's a total disarray.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Yeah, it was a really difficult scene, actually a crime scene,
because the car was actually on the shore but partly
in the water, and because of that, the tide had
been coming in and out right. So in addition to
the impact, which was a huge impact because it was
one hundred foot cliff that the car went off and
it was on its hood, there was also this tide
(36:18):
which was coming in and going out. There had been
a storm recently, so it made it really challenging for
investigators to find the rest of the bodies, because three
of the kids were found, two of the kids were
found much later, one was found weeks later, and one kid, Davante,
was never found. And that's partly because the conditions were
(36:41):
so changeable. So, like one of the searchers said, you'd
go down to the beach at two pm, and you'd
go down at the beach at eight pm, and it
was like a totally different beach. You were seeing all
different things, which made it really challenging for people to
do the search.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
What does the car say actually happened? Because a car
I can tell you right the black box inside the
car can tell you whether or not the car was
breaking at the time of a crash or accelerating.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Yes, it accelerated off the cliff. That became clear pretty
early on when there were no skid marks. You often
see some evidence at the street level that there's breaking,
that there's attempts to, you know, turn really fast or
something like that.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
So there was nothing like that at.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
The actual and there's a berm, like an eighteen inch berm,
which is just like a raised amount of earth around
the whole lookout just for safety, and so you would
have to accelerate to get over that.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
What is the toxicology saying about the two women and
the kids that they were able to recover? I know
we talked about benadryl. Did both women take benadryl or
was there alcohol?
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Sarah took benadryl.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Sarah wasn't driving shoes in the passenger seat, so all
of the kids and Sarah were found with like massive
amounts of benadryl, like overnoses of benadryl, and Jennifer was drunk.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Has there been any kind of reckoning with the foster
care system in Texas once this story came out and
these families, I mean the Davis family in particular, I
know that they had been interviewed. Was there any kind
of a reckoning? Were there apologies? Was there acknowledgment that
this was a mistake.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
No, there was no acknowledgment at all on the part
of Texas. The caseworker that was Tammy's caseworker, so she
had a big hand in placing Marcus in Hannah and Abigail,
and after that adoption went through, she actually wrote this
glowing letter of recommendation that this family should get any
kids that they want right they're just the wonderful parents.
(38:41):
I followed up with her and asked her sort of
how she felt about it, and she said, I don't know.
Something must have happened, but I still don't really believe
it that they did this. And I said, have you
read the news stories? And she said no, Will you
tell me?
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Do you know what happened to Bree who was a
teenager who too lived with the hearts, and to Dante,
who was the ten year old who did not go
with them, who would have presumably ended up dead but
instead went to like a mental health facility.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
So Brie I reach out to her.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
She still lives in Minnesota, in the same town she
actually works for like a behavioral health program. She seems fine,
and she's in contact with her mom and they get
along well and they've sort of worked through some of
their issues that they'd had that had resulted in her
being in care. With Dante, his story is a big
part of the book, and he spent years in that institution,
(39:36):
which it's called a mental health facility, but they don't
provide very much mental health care and the place is
rife with abuse. He did experience abuse there at least
one documented incidence where his shoulder was dislocated by a
staff member. He actually was able to reunite with Nathaniel
at age sixteen. He walked across town, he recognized the neighborhood.
(39:59):
He went and found Nathaniel, and Nathaniel was able to
gain custody of him before he aged out.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
This was Sherry's boyfriend and not his biological son.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
No, but he never gave up hope, and he never
gave up hope on the other kids too until he
found out that they were killed, and it was really tragic.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
It was really tragic.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
For Dante too, because Dante has years and years of
case reports where he was begging his caseworker to contact
his siblings. He felt responsible for them being taken from
him because he was the oldest and he thought that
his bad behavior led to their removal. He felt responsible
(40:39):
for that also. He begged to the point where they
did ask Jennifer and Sarah if he could have a
phone call with them, and they said no.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
What has been the lesson? Do you think just in
the national news, what do people take away when they
read your book or any narrative on this story.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
My hope is that my book adds to what's out
there already about this case that helps people understand that
the way that the child welfare system works or doesn't
work greatly contributes to traumatizing kids, because I think we
have this tendency to think of parents who are involved
with CPS as bad parents, bad people, and that you know,
(41:21):
removing kids from that situation is helping them.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
But I think that's often not true.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
I think there are so many kids that are stuck
in foster care dealing with just really horrific abuse in care,
and that we provide no support to them, real emotional support,
like a kid needs someone who loves them, and we
take all the people, all of their family away. Even
this case, like the Heart Family case, is a story
(41:48):
that Texa is considered a win, and it's not a win.
So I want to sort of draw attention to the
idea that the system is not set up to really
help children.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amrosi. Our associate
producer is Alex Chi. This episode was mixed by John Bradley.
Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga Executive
(42:32):
produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow
Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked
and on Twitter at tenfold more and if you know
of a historical crime that could use some attention from
the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info
at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for
(42:54):
true crime authors for Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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