Just outside the courtroom, on a bench beside the door, the accused—slightly balding, just turned 40, wearing a suit that his wife had bought at a garage sale and a tie he had borrowed from his lawyer—was sleeping, too, sitting upright, tie still straight, coat still buttoned neatly.
About him buzzed the voices of a dozen or more relatives and friends—some from distant cities who had come to Dallas at their own expense to testify to his good character and reputation, some from his neighborhood who had taken off from work to be with his wife, Michele, and his mother, Thelma, when the verdict came in. Just under the surface of their casual words lay a dull edge of fear.
About 4 p.m., April 27, 1990, five hours after the jury had retired to reach its verdict, Darryl Hughes, a private detective who worked for the defense attorney, turned to me and whispered what nobody else in the corridor had dared say: “I don’t like this. I’m getting a real bad feeling.”
On the afternoon of June 20, 1989, the day his nightmare would begin, James took his mother, who was visiting from out of town, to see the Sixth Floor, the exhibit about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. While they were gone, a stranger came to the house in North Oak Cliff where James and Michele live and work.
Michele, who was nursing her infant son when the stranger knocked, handed the child to the babysitter and answered the door. The stranger identified herself as Alice Umbach, a caseworker for the Texas Department of Human Services. She asked to talk to Michele in private. When they were alone, Ms. Umbach said: “Your husband has been charged with sexually molesting your neighbors’ daughter, Sally.”
Sally is the three-year-old girl next door, the adopted daughter of Stephanie and Fred. Sally had been a frequent playmate of Michele and James’ own four-year-old, Clara.
Ms. Umbach said Stephanie believed James had molested Clara, as well as Sally.
“That’s not possible!” Michele said. “My husband would never do anything like that!”
“Where is your daughter?” Ms. Umbach asked.
Michele told her Clara was playing down the street.
“Well, I have to get a statement from her,” Ms. Umbach said, “or else I’m going to have to take her with me or have your husband leave the house.”
“She was real brusque,” Michele remembers. “She reminded me of, like, a bill collector.”
Michele agreed to go to the house where Clara was playing and bring her home. Ms. Umbach insisted on accompanying her. “At that time,” Ms. Umbach’s report reads, “the mother seemed very, very upset, but more shocked than anything.”
They returned with the little girl, and, to be out of earshot of the babysitter in the house, they went to the second floor of the garage, where Michele and James—both of whom are professional artists—have separate studios.
“She talked to Clara in my studio,” Michele remembers, “and I went into James’ studio. I closed the door. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I was so upset I could hardly catch my breath.”
Ms. Umbach reports it differently: “She was hovering very closely by, and kept walking by and poking her head into the room. I explained to Michele once again that I needed to talk to her daughter alone, but she seemed very hesitant to do so. It was very difficult to keep Clara’s attention while Michele kept walking back and forth.
“Clara…seemed very fascinated with my purse. We started going through different items in my purse and me telling her what they were…. Every time I would try to get to the sexual abuse, she would quit talking, say she did not want to talk, or put her head down. I told her that I knew it was very difficult for her to talk about this, but that it was my job to talk to little girls like her and find out about these things so they wouldn’t happen anymore. She still refused to discuss it.”
Michele, believing the caseworker was badgering her child, came back into the room. Ms. Umbach’s report says, “I told her that Sally had already told the police and a child psychologist about the abuse, and although I had not had a chance to interview her myself, I felt very strongly that the child’s statements were accurate.
“I then started to try to talk to Clara again,” the report says, “and Michele stated, ‘Go ahead, tell her that nobody has touched you like that.’ I then decided that this was not going to work…. I told Michele that I realized she was very upset, but that she was hampering my investigation by insisting on being very nearby when I interviewed her child.”
At that point, James came up the stairs. He saw Michele’s face and said, “What’s wrong?”
Michele introduced him to Ms. Umbach. “Can you step in here?” Ms. Umbach asked. The four of them—including Clara—went into Michele’s studio. Ms. Umbach shut the door. “You’ve been charged with sexually molesting your neighbors’ daughter, Sally,” she told James.
“What?” James said. “Is this some kind of bad joke? I’ll take a polygraph test!”
Ms. Umbach told James the crime against Sally had taken place in Clara’s bedroom, with her also present, while Michele was taking a nap. “You put your finger in her vagina,” she said. “It was digital penetration.”
“She stated it like it was a fact,” James said later. “In a real intimidating kind of tone, a bullying kind of attitude. And Clara was standing there in shock.”
According to Michele, Ms. Umbach then looked at her and said, “I still need to get a statement from your daughter, or I am taking her with me. Maybe you can help me.”
The two women and Clara returned to James’ studio. Michele took her daughter into her lap. Ms. Umbach asked Clara: “Has your papa ever touched you where you go tee-tee?”
“No,” Clara said. She laid her head on her mother’s shoulder.
“Has your papa ever touched Sally where she goes tee-tee?” Ms. Umbach asked.
The child hid her face in Michele’s shoulder. Then she got up and walked about the room, then came back to her mother’s lap.
Michele repeated Ms. Umbach’s question. “I asked her a couple more times, and so did Umbach,” Michele said later. “Finally, when I asked her again if Papa had touched Sally, she shook her head. No.”
Ms. Umbach told Michele that, based on her daughter’s responses to the questions, she believed Clara had been sexually molested.
Michele asked Ms. Umbach if she and James should get a lawyer. Ms. Umbach reports: “I told them that was up to them.”
But Michele remembers the response differently: “She told me, ‘You don’t need to call a lawyer. This might be nothing. I haven’t talked to Stephanie, and I haven’t talked to Sally, so you don’t need to get a lawyer.’”
Ms. Umbach’s report indicates she and Stephanie had talked on the phone earlier in the day. It was their first contact. Ms. Umbach hadn’t yet talked with Sally, and wouldn’t for another week.
Michele recalls the caseworker’s final comments as she was leaving: “I’m sorry, Michele. Women have this happen. I know it’s really a shock for you. But you need to protect your children.” She said Michele would have to bring Clara to the DHS office later for an extended interview.
“I went back into the house,” Michele said. “James was sitting in the chair in our bedroom, looking like he had been hit by a train.”
Together, they walked back to their studios, and Michele called a lawyer. He told her to come with James to his office immediately.
At 9:30 that evening, Michele walked over and knocked on her neighbor’s door. Stephanie opened it. “Just a minute,” she said. “I’m on the phone.” She returned to the phone. “Michele is here,” she said, and hung up.
“Oh, Michele,” she said as she returned. “I never meant to hurt you.”
“James and I feel like we’ve been hit in the face with a baseball bat,” Michele said.
“Michele, it happened, and it’s true, and it has happened many times,” Stephanie said.
“I told her that I didn’t believe James would ever do that,” Michele said later. “But judging from her face I could tell she truly bel
ieved James would do such a thing. I tried to stay calm, and asked her when this was supposed to have happened. She said it had been happening for over a year! And she told me that Sally had had recurring yeast infections way back since September. I told Stephanie that I had been sexually abused by my grandfather when I was a child, and how I had just gone through an incest recovery program, mostly because of James’ love and support. And that if Sally was abused, I knew how she might feel, and I could imagine how Stephanie would feel.
“I told her that our friendship was important, and that Sally was important to us, but to please really think and be sure before she pointed the finger at James.”
James and I have been friends for a long time. We worked together for several years, and after he quit the magazine where I worked and became a free-lance illustrator we would meet for lunch from time to time to catch up on each other’s lives. So I wasn’t surprised to come to work and find a phone message from him: “Must meet you for coffee immediately. Emergency.” It was typical of his messages when he wants to get away from the drawing board for a while. I called him, and we arranged to meet at a restaurant in Oak Cliff.
As we sat down, I noticed that his face was a pale gray, as if he had been ill for a long time, but I didn’t remark on it. We sipped our coffee and made the usual small talk for a few minutes, then he quietly dropped the bomb: “A woman came to my house and accused me of sexually molesting my next-door neighbors’ little girl.”
I was speechless. How does a man respond to such a statement? Of all the crimes and sins that can be attached to a man’s name, sexual molestation of a child is the filthiest and most unmanly.
“I would rather be accused of murder,” James said. He was speaking calmly, unemotionally, as he always does, but his eyes were full of anger and fear.
He told of Alice Umbach’s visit the day before, and his and Michele’s meeting a few hours late with Gary Noble, the lawyer Michele had called. Mr. Noble had been recommended to her, James said, by the director of the Incest Recovery Association, where Michele recently had undergone group therapy.
“Noble says this is what they call a ‘super felony,’” James said. “If I’m convicted, I could go to prison for five years to life. There’s no probation, unless the jury gives it. The judge can’t give probation in a super felony case.”
I was remembering stories I had heard about the treatment that child molesters receive from their fellow inmates. I was trying to imagine what the lives of Michele and the children would be if James went to prison.
Then James asked if I would write about his case.
“Follow me through it,” he said. “From the inside.”
“Why would you want that?” I asked.
“So I won’t get swallowed up by the system without somebody knowing about it,” he said.
Two days after Alice Umbach’s visit, Gary Noble had arranged for James to take a polygraph test with Wayne Baker, a private investigator who specializes in the field. James told me the Dallas police had assigned his case to the Youth and Family Crime Division. “I could get arrested, get handcuffed and taken to jail at any time,” he said.
James asked Mr. Baker if I could sit in on the test. The investigator said that would breach the confidentiality that he liked to keep with his clients, but that James could show me the results later, if he wished.
He grilled James for three hours, asking all sorts of questions, but always leading back to the question, which he asked in three slightly different ways: “Did you put your finger in the vagina of Sally?”
“No,” James replied each time. After the session, James showed me the polygrapher’s report. He had passed.
Two days after that, a Saturday morning, Mr. Noble had James call together his neighbors to tell them of the accusation.
It’s a typical middle-class North Oak Cliff block, lined with old trees and close-together, 60-year-old brick houses. Most of the older residents have sold their homes in recent years to couples now in their 30s and early 40s, most of them with a small child or two.
The couples have repaired the houses and settled down to raise their babies in the quiet, humdrum way that people of their generation imagine the ideal American family life to be. Many of them, because of their common interest in parenthood, have become close friends. They have dinner in each other’s homes, pool their junk for yard sales, borrow each other’s tools, babysit each other’s children. On the witness stand, James would call it “a Leave It to Beaver kind of neighborhood.”
One couple who didn’t participate in neighborhood activities were Stephanie and Fred. The only people on the block that they hobnobbed with were James and Michele, and Clara was Sally’s only regular playmate on the street. “We don’t socialize much,” Stephanie would testify during the trial.
James wasn’t yet prepared to tell his mother, Thelma, who was still visiting of the accusation, so his neighborhood friends—about a dozen of them—convened at another house. James and Michele already had told them of Alice Umbach’s visit. The men, especially, were worried about the accusation against James. “It makes you aware of your vulnerability,” one of them said. “This could happen to anybody.”
“My knees buckled when I heard about it,” said another. “I was in shock.”
“I feel like I’ve got a rock about the size of a cantaloupe in my stomach,” James said. He told them that Sally had been taken to a psychologist who put her through play therapy with anatomically explicit dolls—a Mama doll, a Daddy doll, a Michele doll and a Papa doll. (Sally, like his own daughter, called James “Papa.”) “And she kept saying it was the Papa doll who put his finger inside her,” James said. “I’ve helped potty train her, and changed her diaper. I’ve treated her just like my own daughter. …”
“Stephanie and I would go off to garage sales,” Michele said, “and the guys would take turns taking care of the kids. …”
“The opportunity was there,” James said.
Gary Noble arrived and was introduced to the neighbors. He told them of Ms. Umbach’s visit again, and the seriousness of the charge against James. “So the system marches on. The system hasn’t even talked to Sally yet, but the system already has concluded that James is guilty of a first-degree felony called aggravated sexual assault….
“There are children out there who get molested,” he said. “There’s no question about that. For years nobody did anything about it. Now all of a sudden everybody is doing everything about it. There are people called ‘true believers’ who believe that one out of four children are molested. They believe that children always tell the truth and that children can’t be coached. If these people had their way—and thank God they don’t—James would be in jail until he admitted he did it, and then he would go to treatment and get some help, and then he would go to the penitentiary. This is like the Salem witch trials, where people were put to death for what a 10- or 11-year-old girl said.”
He told them about the lie-detector test: “When I called Wayne Baker yesterday, he said, ‘Your man is on the right side. He’s telling the truth.’”
He told them that Ms. Umbach or another DHS worker might come around the neighborhood wanting to talk to their own children. “If you are harassed or threatened,” he told them, “call a lawyer. But not me.”
“We’re living in a touchless society,” Mr. Noble said. “Every time I change my own kid’s diaper, I think of that.”
Although the police hadn’t yet contacted James, Mr. Noble already was preparing his defense. A week after the neighbors’ meeting, he sent James to Dr. Robert Powitzky, a psychologist, to take a battery of tests. The tests were designed to determine whether James fit the profile of a sex offender. During a second session the next day, a sensor was attached to his penis and to a computer, and he was shown slides of naked women and children.
“It was humiliating,” James said later. “Some of the kids were prepubescent, some looked like they had just entered puberty, and some were real little kids—three
, four, five years old. They were really awful slides, awful photography, real amateurish. I kept thinking, ‘My God, these are the actual slides they’ve confiscated from real perverts.’ They made me physically ill. I thought I was going to throw up a few times.”
Then Dr. Powitzky questioned him for two hours. “About two-thirds of the way through the interview,” James said, “I think it was obvious to him that I wasn’t guilty. He told me that if the woman from Human Services called again, Michele should say to her, ‘I’m taking all steps necessary to ensure that my kids are safe.’ He said she should imply a little glimmer of doubt about my innocence, because if they believe Michele is protecting me or is leaving the kids alone with me, they’ll take the kids away from us or, at the very least, make me move out of the house.”
While James was being tested, all the neighbors who had been at the Saturday meeting with Gary Noble had sent their children to James and Michele’s house to play with Clara. “It was gratifying,” James said later. But since Alice Umbach’s visit, Clara had become “real clingy,” he said. “A couple of times a day, she’ll tell both of us that she loves us. She’s more lovey-dovey than usual.”
Meanwhile, Gary Noble had persuaded Ms. Umbach’s supervisor, Lynne Johnson, to allow Clara to be interviewed by Brenda Keller, an independent psychologist, rather than by Ms. Umbach or a psychologist affiliated with the Department of Human Services. Ms. Keller had worked for the DHS for 15 years before going into private practice.
Ms. Keller was to have a few get-acquainted sessions with Clara, win her confidence, then try to find out if she had been sexually molested, or if she had seen Sally being molested, as Stephanie claimed. A videotape was to be made of the interview.
On July 6 Michele and Clara returned home from what was supposed to have been the videotape session. Michele was tired and discouraged. Clara had refused to talk about Sally.
The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories Page 12
