Dec. 16, 1984 The Houston Chronicle Section 1, Page 15
Witch hunt over child abuse scars
Minnesota town, children
By TONY BURTON
New York Daily News
Dec. 16, 1984 The Houston Chronicle Section 1, Page 15
JORDAN, Minn.—The room was too tidy, too quiet. There were no toys in sight. The only signs that this was the bedroom of two children were some forlorn stickers of Fuzzy Bear and his pals, together with cards pinned to a cork board.
The silent room was in the home of Robert Bentz and his wife, Lois. But there were other empty rooms like this scattered through the town of Jordan.
Over the past year, squads of policemen and social workers have taken the children away in the name of kindness and concern for their welfare. Some of the children cried and clung to their appalled mothers, but the children were taken anyway. Then their parents were led away, sometimes in handcuffs, to be accused on scores of counts of sexually abusing the children of the town.
Today, months later, not one of the parents has been convicted. Today, not a single charge still stands on the books. The prosecutor has removed herself for the mess.
But most of the children’s rooms remain empty.
There are those angry enough about what happened in Jordan to call it official kidnapping. A Minneapolis attorney involved in the case says simply, “It’s bizarre. It’s the Twilight Zone down there in Scott County.”
The town lies in a valley in the wheat lands 30 miles south of Minneapolis. There’s one traffic light, a few gas stations and stores, all dominated by the tall steeple of St. John’s church. It is a pleasant-looking town, especially now with a light covering of snow and Christmas decorations brightening the main street.
But any pride in the town has long since fled. Jordan is tainted, notorious across the country as the place where scores of children were allegedly molested by their parents in unholy concert until the authorities stepped in.
Former Mayor Gail Andersen, who was in office at the height of the arrests, says, “It’s a frightened town. People talk to me and then they say, ‘Don’t tell anybody I said it.’
“What happened with the children was official kidnapping. But people here are afraid to protest. And, because of the background to it all, some people are afraid to show a child any affection. Even parents hesitate before giving their kids a hug.”
Bentz, his wife and the others accused can’t see their children, let alone hug them. Thirty-two youngsters, from toddlers to teenagers, are still lost in foster homes, sealed away from their parents, their rooms deserted.
However, family court judges are considering whether to reunite some of the families for the Christmas holidays. For many of the families, it will be for their first reunion in almost a year.
The first accusations were of sexual molestation and there is no doubt it happened, just as it has happened in other towns and cities. But Jordan became different when uglier tales began to spin out of the prosecutor’s office of sex rings and adult orgies involving the children. Twenty-five people were indicted.
The final nightmare came with accusations of animalism, mutilation and murder.
The stunned town saw itself on TV and in the headlines of newspapers from coast to coast that saw fit to print without questioning the melodramatic absurdity of some of the tales.
In the last few weeks, though, an embarrassing problem developed. The accusers started recanting. Most of the lurid stories, it turned out, were lies, feverish fantasies, products of a prosecutor with political ambitions, of a child molester looking for a better deal and of confused, unhappy children playing games in an adult world they didn’t understand.
There was a more sinister aspect to it all—the possibility that the hysterical atmosphere had been exploited to settle scores and intimidate anybody who protested. It had happened before, in New England when witches, not child abusers, were being hunted.
The prosecutor was Kathleen Morris, county attorney of Scott County, who took the role of avenging angel. The talk was that she had her eye on the office of state Attorney General, now occupied by Hubert H. Humphrey III, son of the late vice president. Successful prosecutions might propel her from obscurity to become the first woman attorney general of Minnesota.
Her weapon would be local trash collector James Rud, 27, who in 1983 admitted molesting children in Jordan. As part of a plea bargaining deal, he began to point the finger at other residents, talked of sex parties and agreed to testify against residents.
The arrests began. Children were swept up and taken away for questioning. At that time, Morris, who has no children herself, was always available to the press. Over and over, she said, “Kids don’t lie” and “We must listen to the children.”
By then, some of the children, under intense questioning, had started giving Morris the evidence she needed. Later, attorneys for the parents would raise serious questions about the methods used by investigators and therapists who owed loyalty to county officials.
Minneapolis child psychiatrist Jack Wallings, unconnected to the case, said, “You need a lot of experience and training in talking to children under these circumstances. Younger children can become very involved in their imagination.
“What you really need is some neutral body with expertise before it becomes a legal matter. There is sometimes abuse in the name of justice. The system is not geared to handle these cases.”
Now, after losing the only case that came to court, Morris is unavailable. She doesn’t return calls, and a reporter who went to her lakeside home found she had moved the same day without leaving a forwarding address.
The parents were first bewildered, then frightened and finally angry. “After the arrests started, the whole town was terrified because it seemed anybody could be arrested,” said auto-worker Bentz, 37. “I stood up at a City Council meeting and said I didn’t like what was happening. Every time somebody was arrested, the TV stations had been alerted so they could get the accused on film, and there was the town again on the evening news. It was a circus.
“I was quoted in the local paper which came out on a Wednesday. I was arrested the next Friday.”
That was last January. Since then, Bentz has not been allowed to visit or even talk to his youngest children, Billy, 10, and Tony, 7. He has seen his oldest, Marlin, 13, but only briefly. “He’s not the same boy,.” Bentz said. “He’s with older kids in the foster home. He’s smoking and he’s streetwise now. Our family is a wreck.
“When I talked to him, he said, ‘Dad, I told them the truth that nothing had happened, but they wouldn’t believe me.’”
Bentz and his wife went to trial, the first couple to do so, last summer. Their chief accuser, Rud, who had claimed Bentz was involved in sex parties, could not identify him. Morris did not cross examine. In a novel legal approach, she said later, “Why would you ask anybody any questions when you aren’t going to get correct answers?”
The couple was acquitted.
Then Morris announced that she was dropping all charges against other adults to protect the children and to avoid jeopardizing another investigation of much greater magnitude. She was talking about murder.
She handed the case over to state authorities and made herself scarce.
The murder tales offered by some of the children included mutilation, foreign women in see-through dresses wielding whips, dead children buried or tossed into the river, and gangsters in long black limousines. For some reason, it seemed, the Mob’s pornography industry had chosen little Jordan for its operations.
The most credible witnesses were two boys, ages 11 and 12. They took eager investigators hunting for buried bodies. No bodies were found, perhaps because there were no children missing in Jordan.
After one expedition, an investigator said, “I felt like throwing in the towel on that one. It was 90 degrees, mosquitoes all over the place, hot and dirty, and the boy didn’t know where the body was.”
No wonder. Both boys finally admitted they had made it all up.
The mother of the 11-year-old, Helen Brown, recently managed a few minutes with him and asked why he had lied. “He said he was angry about being taken from his home, so he got his own back by telling investigators these stories,” she said. “He said that one time, looking for bodies, he was driven right by our house and he saw his father. He started crying, but they wouldn’t stop.
“He was leading them on a wild goose chase as one way of getting back at them for what they had done to us.”
The Minneapolis Star and Tribune said in a copyright story Saturday that two more children, described as key figures in the case, have recanted testimony implicating more than a dozen adults in sex parties involving children.
But Humphrey says the investigation is continuing.
“The murder investigation is over,” he said. “We are refocusing on child abuse. I shall make a decision as quickly as possible on whether to recharge those people against whom charges were dropped.”
The authorities, even now, haven’t quite finished with Jordan. Still convinced that they are on the right track, officials say they believe other children will take back allegations of abuse because they want to please their parents during the tentatively scheduled Christmas visits.
The lawyers who came into Jordan to defend the parents say that the real victims of the mess are the children, particularly those who really suffered from sexual abuse, because there’s no way that legitimate cases can be presented now.
So far, three children have returned home, those of Deputy Sheriff Donald Buchan and his wife, Cindy. “They have nightmares,” Buchan said. “One of them looked at me and said, ‘Are you my daddy?’ Can you imagine how that makes me feel?”
After the children recanted, trash collector Rud admitted he, too, had lied in hopes of pleasing the prosecutors and getting a lighter sentence. Defense attorney Don Voss says that Morris increased her budget on the grounds that she needed more money to ferret out the deviltry.
“After that, they had to come up with evidence to prove something,” he said. “Never mind the wildness of the stories, the inconsistencies.”