Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - In the Valley of Sin: CPS worker speaks up, flees to Canada with 5-year-old

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

In the Valley Of Sin" is a six-hour docu-series that examines the mid-90's witch-hunt that pitted neighbor against neighbor in Wenatchee, Washington, when police uncovered a monstrous child sex ring known among its membership as 'The Circle.'Local authorities alleged that dozens of children were raped in the bedrooms of their parents, in the homes of their neighbors, and at ritualized orgies on the altar of a church. But there was one problem: there was no sex ring, a truth that only emerged after 43 parents were arrested and dozens of children were made wards of the state.Today, Nancy Grace speaks with a social worker who questioned the claims. Ultimately, Paul Glassen was fired, and he was so worried about repercussions that he moved his family, including his 5-year-old son to Canada.Joining Nancy Grace today: Paul Glassen - Fired by CPS & moved family to Canada Tom Grant - Award-winning journalist (30+ years), former reporter, KREM, Associate Professor of Journalism at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College,  co-executive producer of “In the Valley of Sin” and other documentaries, www.drthomasgrant.com  Steve Lacy - Defense Attorney , former Mayor, East Wenatchee Dr. Teresa Gil - Professor of Psychology and Psychotherapist, 25 years Working with Child Abuse and Trauma Victims, Teresa Gil PHD.com, Author: "Women Who Were Sexually Abused as Children: Mothering, Resilience, and Protecting the Next Generation"  Kathryn Lyon - Author, “Witch Hunt: A True Story of Social Hysteria and Abused Justice”, former public defender, Pierce County, Washington. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Growing up in a rural area myself, I have come to appreciate that childhood and what could be more wholesome than the apple capital of the world, Wenatchee, Washington, now home to one of the worst child sex scandals ever. Didn't anyone stop and notice what was happening? Didn't anyone stand up and say, this is wrong? As this couple and that couple, this mother, that father, a pastor, his wife, all thrown behind bars on charges of child rape and child molestation. No one thought to question what was going on around them. It's so easy to blame just one person, Detective Perez, apparently drunk on power with an extra dose of arrogance added in. But what really happened? What about all the other lawyers, the prosecutors, the social workers that were part of this

so-called investigation? As we explore one of the worst travesties of justice ever to take place in our country that we know of. You know, as I've said before, you hear of people being rounded up in the night and dragged away from their homes in countries like Russia and China, North Korea, but here in America, mothers and dads literally being taken away from the supper table with their children sitting there charged with child rape. With me, an all-star panel to analyze what happened, players that were there when it all went down. But in case you're wondering who was standing by twiddling their thumbs as it all played out in front of them, doing nothing, take a listen to this.

It surprises even me how traumatizing it is. I haven't slept well the last two nights in anticipation of this interview. But that's how post-traumatic stress works you have the flashback experience so I lie awake a flashback experience. You are hearing a former Child Protective Services worker, Paul Glasson, who now says how traumatizing it is if he even looks back on what happened in Wenatchee. If you didn't hear what he said, listen again. It surprises even me how traumatizing it is. I haven't slept well the last two nights

in anticipation of this interview. But that's how post-traumatic stress works. You have the flashback experience. So I lie awake. Lie awake, thinking back on what happened with me. That CPS worker, Paul Glasson, fired by CPS for reporting a recantation of some of these children. Recant, that means you've given a statement and you want to take it all back. We're reporting a recantation of some of these children.

Recant, that means you've given a statement and you want to take it all back. You want to recant what you said. Also with me, Tom Grant, award-winning journalist, former reporter, KREM, and the co-executive producer of In the Valley of Sin. You can find him at drthomasgrant.com. Steve Lacey, a defense attorney, former managing partner of Lacey, Kane, and Cube, former mayor of East Wenatchee. Boy, I bet he's got some stories to tell. Teresa Gill, professor of psychology, psychotherapist, 25 years working with child abuse trauma victims, and the author of Women Who Were Sexually Abused as Children, Mothering, Resilience, and Protecting the Next Generation,

and Katherine Lyons, former public defender there in Pierce County, Washington, and author of Witch Hunt, A True Story of Social Hysteria and Abused Justice. First of all, to you, Paul Glasson, just hearing you talking about the flashbacks you have, knowing you were going to be asked questions about the Wenatchee witch hunt, this has got to just wait on your mind for all these years, like a sack of rocks you're carrying around. What happened? Take me back to the time this all went down. What happened? Well, it all started for me when I was visiting a teenager from my caseload

who was being held in juvenile detention. And I was there simply to discuss her being moved to another foster home. And she suddenly blurted out that she had told a bunch of lies. Those are her words, told a bunch of lies about dad, meaning her foster father. And she went on to say, and the policeman, the policeman was out to get dad and told me I had to say those things or he would know I was lying. Did you just stop in your tracks? I did. I did because it was not my job to continue a criminal investigation, even though that's what was being suggested. I simply reassured her that she had said one thing to the police from the day before.

She was saying a different thing to me today, and that it would be some time before she would have to testify in any court case, and we would arrange for her to see a mental health counselor. And I asked her who she had seen in the past that she might like to see again. Now, I believe you're talking about Annie Rodriguez, and that was Bob Devereaux's foster daughter? Yes. Yes. That's right. You know, I want to go back to that particular case, to Tom Grant joining me. He's a co-executive producer of In the Valley of Sin. And I've got to tell you something, Tom, when I would hear that

child molestation cases had been dropped in my world, that's not real. It was really only until I have spoken to these adults, then child victims, who were telling me how all this has really ruined their lives. The years of self-loathing and hatred for ratting out their moms and dads over false claims. I've just, I've been floored. What can you tell us about Annie Rodriguez's case, Tom. You know, Annie loved her foster father, but she was also, you know, she was a teenager who had other issues. She had a boyfriend who was trouble, and Bob didn't want her spending all the time with her boyfriend.

And so she was mad at her foster father. And so she put iodine in his drink to poison him. You know, it was wrong. And that's why she ended up in juvenile care, the juvenile detention center. But Bob, you know, Bob didn't really hold that against her, but everybody was targeting Bob Devereaux, this foster father who took care of girls like Annie. And that's how this got started. The police detective went in and asked her again and again, if her foster, well, not just if her foster father had abused her, but telling her that her foster father had abused her, but telling her that her foster father had abused her and pressuring her into making this statement.

Later on, she talked to me and, you know, as well as to other people and recanted. But, you know, nobody would believe her then. You know, it really feeds in to what you are writing about, to Katherine Lyons, former public defender. They are in Pierce County, Washington, and author of Witch Hunt, A True Story of Social Hysteria and Abused Justice. You hear the child, in this case, one of the children, Annie Rodriguez, blurting out, no prodding, no pushing, no leading, no cross-examination, just blurting out. I lied about my dad. Those were all

lies. Yet it didn't seem to matter. Catherine? Yeah, it didn't matter because the belief was there. And besides, as I mentioned in an earlier episode, there's explanations for that in the literature about child abuse that kids recant, and they change their story, and they deny because that's part of the symptomatic behaviors of child abuse. And so there was plenty of literature that would support some of this stuff, but none of it to support the methods that were used here. But of course, that wasn't known. And when I first came to Wenatchee, I had really not heard that much about it. It was a couple of years after some of these cases had been kicked around and charges had already been made against some of the more limited people, I guess, in terms of their intellectual behavior that lived in that valley. But it didn't get in the paper.

It's not even popular to write about this kind of thing. So unless it had more of an impact on the cities west of the mountains, there wasn't a lot of interest in writing about this. So I hadn't even come across it until my boss called me into his office and suggested I go look into this. I had done a lot of child abuse cases. Nobody wanted them, of course. But I also found that if there's one area where you might be falsely accused for whatever reason, it's in the area of child abuse because it's slippery territory. And that's so interesting, Catherine Lyon, because as a crime victim myself and a former prosecutor,

I've always said that's one of the cases where you can really count on the victims because the children aren't really old enough. They don't have the wiles, the know-how, to create an elaborate lie and then stick to it over and over and over. And as we see here, that was true. The children tried to recant. They could not keep up the lie. But it didn't matter.

Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. 43 adults charged with nearly 30,000 counts of child molestation, 60 children in all named victims. Back to Paul Glasson, former Child Protective Services, who suddenly he's talking to this little Annie Rodriguez teen who's lashing out at her foster dad because he doesn't want her hanging out with her boyfriend all the time. And she blurts out, I lied about my dad. I lied about my dad. Okay, so Paul Glasson, when you hear this, who do you tell? After I left the interview with the child, I went directly to the director of the juvenile detention center and told her that Annie was beginning to recant.

But I also told her that beyond her recantation, Annie was clearly making it understood that she had been led to to making the false accusations by the police officer. sex acts, claiming my foster dad had performed those acts on me, and then told me, you know, I had to say that was the case, that was true, or he would know I was lying. And the other girls have already accused dad, and so I needed to do so as well. Well, that was clearly a coercive interview, interrogation that the police had conducted with her. And the detective was who? Bob Perez. You know, it's hard enough for, as Catherine Lyon was just pointing out, people don't want to hear about it. People don't want to read about it.

Child molestation. I get it. When I would have child molestation cases, juries, the jurors would actually wince when I would describe what the indictment said and what I was intending to prove. Some of them would look away. When the child would be on the witness stand, they would look down. They would physically recoil. Well, another demonstration of that is that it's taken 25 years for the documentary to be made about those events. At the time, there were a couple of different production companies who approached those of us involved and discussed making such a documentary, but it didn't happen back then. It took 25 years for someone to have the courage to do this.

And I've got to say that what makes it even more shocking is the landscape, the backdrop. And that would be Wenatchee, Washington, because it's such a rural, beautiful area. As I like to say, nothing but apple orchards and green trees, as far as the eye can see, because that's where parents move to keep their children safe. That all said, back to Paul Glasson, Annie Rodriguez's caseworker. So you didn't prod her, you didn't press her. She blurted this out. And the first person you told was who? The woman who was in charge of the juvenile detention. She was very much involved in the things there. I don't remember the names, but I know her husband was one of the prosecutors in Chelan County.

After you reported it, what, if anything, happened? Well, I got a call from my supervisor, Juana Vasquez, sometime that afternoon. I continued doing my job and got a call, and she said, you need to get back to the office. There's a lot of wild stories going around the office about you. Okay, that's never good. Go ahead. So you go back to the office and what are the wild stories? Well, she told me that the police were saying that I had tampered with the witness, meaning

talking to Annie, and gotten her to recant her story. And as I've said many times in the years since then, that's the one thing that they could do that would convince me that Annie's suggestion that she had been coerced was true. They tried to deflect the blame. The irony of their charge of witness tampering, of course, is that if what she said was true, they were the ones tampering with the witness by coercing her into false testimony.

I want to go to Steve Lacey, a veteran defense attorney, former managing partner of Lacey, Kane & Cube, and the former mayor of East Wenatchee. Steve, thank you for being with us. When you hear the word witness tampering, that's not a phrase that just falls off, that just trills off a civilian's tongue. That's a very serious charge. Witness tampering? What do you make of what you're hearing Paul Glasson say? He's trying to do his job. Well, it was interesting when I was, I represented both Paul and Juan Garcia and Juan Abasquez at one point after Paul and Juan and Juan had all been fired from DSHS. Ultimately, the only person that went to trial.

Well, hold on just a moment, Steve Lacey. Paul Gleison, you didn't tell me they canned you. They canned Paul. They canned Juan Garcia. And they terminated Juan Abasca. They were the three individuals you were talking earlier about why people didn't stand up and state what they knew or oppose what was going on. Well those were the three people that did and all those three people lost their jobs. You're telling me that this the CPS workers that tried to stand up against what was happening all got fired.

Correct. And they all brought suit over that discharge, and Juana finally ended up in trial. She was the only one that did by that time, Paul and Juan. Okay, hold on. Wait, wait, wait. Paul Glasson, Juan Hugh. Juan Garcia. And you named one other, did you not?

Juan Ovano, yes. He was this Paul's supervisor he just mentioned who supervised all the case workers within the foster care system, as well as some of the foster homes. Well, both of you are right. I've been saying, why didn't people stop it when they saw what was happening? But here, you're hearing about three individuals, in addition to the pastor, Roberson, that tried to stop it. I want you to take a listen to this.

I had the ultimate responsibility to decide whether or not what I was being asked to do was ethical. Being a dedicated worker wasn't enough. In fact, being a dedicated worker was enough to get you in trouble. I was so fearful. We made the decision that we were going to be moving to Canada. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. I had the ultimate responsibility to decide whether or not what I was being asked to do was ethical.

Being a dedicated worker wasn't enough. In fact, being a dedicated worker wasn't enough to get you in trouble. I was so fearful. We made the decision that we were going to be moving to Canada. You're hearing the voice of Paul Glasson, a child protective services worker, who was so hounded and so maligned after he tried to stop the case against this little girl's father, Andrea Rodriguez. He was fired and believed he had to move to Canada. With me in addition to an all-star panel, is Paul Glasson. Paul, what led you to think you needed to move to Canada?

Well, I had a son who was only five years old at that time, coincidentally about the same age as Pastor Robertson's daughter. And at first, even with the witness tampering charge, they were simply saying I was a bad social worker. But I learned eventually that Perez wasn't satisfied with that and started to get witnesses to say, suggest that I was also part of the child abuse, the circle of child abusers. And once I heard that, I knew that my child was vulnerable, that they could justify picking my child up, putting him into foster care, subjecting him to this psychiatric care that they used on children. And I called Steve, Steve Lacey, my attorney,

and I said, you can tell the prosecutor I'm available. Anytime he wants to talk to me, I'll return from Canada to appear, but I'm getting my child out of their jurisdiction so that they can't get at him. And at the time that I decided that, I felt like, well, you know, maybe in the future I will feel I was being alarmist and this was foolish for me to leave the country with my child. But I'd rather be safe than sorry. What did your wife say?

I don't think my wife completely understood what was going on. As you've said so accurately, all of this was incredible, literally incredible, unbelievable. Did she go with you? She did, not right away. We owned a house there. My wife was an instructor at Wenatchee Valley College. In fact, it was interesting when you mentioned Bob Devereaux and the girls in his home. I would sometimes hear from my wife about the girls in the Devereaux home

who were students of hers at the college because Bob encouraged them to go on with their education. You know, to Steve Lacey, the defense attorney for Paul and others, it almost sounds like an Orwellian work of fiction where the state can just randomly decide to just take you and claim the worst thing about a parent that you have raped or molested your own children. It doesn't really seem real, Steve, but it is. It did not take more than an hour or so of reading the police reports, the works of fiction that Mr. Perez created, Bob Perez created for these cases, for me to realize that something was really amiss. I mean, Tom. Did you talk to the prosecutors and say this? I mean, I would see a defense attorney coming from the end of the hall at the courthouse and go, uh-oh, here he, she comes to some story about their client didn't do it and blah, blah.

But there were occasions when the lawyer would say, listen, this is real. He did not do it. And this is why. And prosecutors have a duty to listen. The story of Mr. Devereaux's case was a case study in exactly what you're talking about. I didn't lack credibility with the prosecutors of Bonacci because of my previous encounters with them. But after reading the reports, and Tom Grant can probably attest to what some of them, how fantastic some of those reports were, I realized that it couldn't possibly be true what they were claiming against Mr. Davro. So I rounded up 105 witnesses to basically disprove rather than their allegations. I figured with child abuse, instead of engaging in a presumption of innocence, you pretty

much needed to prove innocence. And so then I took those witnesses and everything I had to the chief deputy prosecutor, who I knew. And I went through that with him in great detail, challenged the prosecutor, Mr. Reese, to try the case against my client and not leave it to his chief deputy who had the case. And that afternoon, they showed up in my office ready to deal because they finally had an attorney who would put the pieces together. And Mr. Devereaux was not one of the 29 or 30 people that went to prison because it wasn't that hard to put it together. And the people that were representing up to that point, the defendants in the so-called sex ring were undermanned contract defense attorneys. It wasn't until I and some of the guys, a good retained counsel from out of town, got involved that some of these cases fell apart.

That's all recounted in the documentary. You know, thank God, Paul, that you had Steve Lacey representing you, that had the money, the ability, the resources to know what to do to fight back. Sadly, not all of those 43 adults were as blessed as you. That's absolutely right. And as he just mentioned, the public defender's office was wholly inadequate to defend the people who were being charged and hustled through this legal system. And it was only due to people like Steve that it finally was brought to a halt.

Paul, I got a question for you. With me, CPS worker that tried to stop the witch hunt, he ended up getting fired and having to flee to Canada with his five-year-old son. What was it that led you to think they were going to take your son and turn him against you? Well, they'd already taken Pastor Robertson, Connie Robertson's daughter. And I knew, because I worked in the office, that they used psychiatric services. They had a whole cadre of private counselors in the community who purported to be specialists in child abuse cases. And they would counsel these children to build their testimonies for court cases.

As we know, in one instance, they even sent a teenager. I'm sure in more than one instance, they sent a teenager to a psychiatric hospital in Idaho, in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. And she ran away. She did, and she very famously, as soon as she was released after a month there, got in touch with Tom Grant and said she wanted to be interviewed for television. And she said, you know, I've just spent a month being drugged and brainwashed and to try to get me to say my parents did things they never did. Tom Grant with me right now, award-winning journalist, co-executive producer in the Valley of Sin. Do you remember that moment? Yeah, very well. I was standing covering another story when this little blonde girl shows up and starts telling me these horrible stories

about how she'd been mistreated in order to try to make her a witness against her parents. And that was Sam Doggett, one of my heroes in this case. But I have to tell you, go back to Paul Glasson. Paul Glasson was the reason why I decided to do the story. I came down and did interviews with a number of people, but it was Paul Glasson who was so credible and so steady and had written evidence that he'd maintained that showed that Annie Rodriguez had immediately recanted.

And I thought once we interviewed him, this case would turn around because he was so credible. But nobody would believe the story if it didn't fit their preconceived notions that there was this horrible sex ring occurring in Wenatchee. To a special guest joining me now, Teresa Gill, professor of psychology, a psychotherapist, 25 years working with child abuse and trauma victims. She's actually Dr. Teresa Gill and author. Dr. Gill, I'm just a JD. You're the doctor. What do you make of this? who were impacted by this, it was just a lot of sadness that came over me because I don't really know how you undo the pain and the terror of being accused of child sexual abuse and having your children taken from you and put in foster care. And when you listen to the children, they talk about the pain that they experienced, the fear that they experienced, but also the tremendous amount of guilt that they experienced in saying that their parents sexually abused them.

But at the same time, this man, Perez, when he was interviewing them, he would stand up and posture over them. He would threaten them. He had a gun on the table while he was threatening that they would never see their parents again. And they would be in foster care or in juvenile detention center, and their parents were going to be put in prison. And he also said, but if you sign this, and if you say this, I'll let you go back to your parents. What you had was a sociopath who had a lot of power and control in his position and he manipulated it and he had no conscience. crime stories with nancy grace how did everything go so wrong take a listen to this i remember this page tell tell tell tell tell tell see you know it happened You just don't know you're supposed to say anything. But you have to tell. Tell, tell, tell.

Tell, tell, tell. You are hearing one of the alleged child abuse victims, Rebecca Osborne, talking about what she was, quote, supposed to say on the stand. Tom Grant, tell me about Rebecca. Rebecca was five years old at that time when she was, you know, when her parents were arrested. She was then placed with her grandmother through family members, and then police came and ripped her away from her grandmother and placed her in custody of, you know, foster homes

and these kinds of therapists who were pushing her to try and make an accusation. She has been tremendously brave, and she refused to make allegations against her parents, and yet it has weighed tremendously on her over the years. And it's so painful to watch her now because she's reminded me. She tells the most heartbreaking story of, first of all, being taken away from her parents and taken to her grandparents. And every night, the grandmother would say, pray to God his angels surround you and protect you. Then they came and took her from her grandmother. And the last thing her grandma said to her as she was being taken was, keep

praying that God sends his angels to protect you. It's just very, very upsetting. And when I think of the little girl, Rebecca, living through that. And I think of Detective Perez forcing these children into these statements, pointing the finger at their parents. To you, Paul Glatton, what do you think motivated Perez? Well, I've been asked that many times, both back in 1995, 96, and since. And I've always thought that you and you are familiar with this, I'm sure, from your legal backgrounds, that crimes are not all the same in the public's eye. We will overlook white-collar crime, you know, to the extent of millions of dollars. But there are some crimes we love to hate. And one of them, of course, is child abuse and neglect. And that wasn't wasted on somebody like Perez. He knew that getting a reputation for being tough on this particular crime was good for his career.

To you, Attorney Steve Lacey, former mayor of East Wenatchee, who actually represented Paul Glasson, I've been asked that too. The motivation of Detective Perez and all the others, sycophants that sucked up to him and stood by while this happened. I mean, I guess they saw what happened to Paul. He got fired immediately. He was accused of witness tampering and moved to Canada, ran with his son. What motivated him? Well, I agree generally with what Paul just said, but I have a different take on the motivation that Mr. Perez had, given my knowledge of how the inner workings of DSH went. And remember that I had the value of having the CWS supervisor, Juana Vasquez, as my client for many, many years. And the motivation, think was? His motivation primarily was his ego,

but that ties into building his career. But he also had the emotional support of a whole host of CPS and some CWS workers who basically lauded him as a hero. That just fed Mr. Perez's ego something fierce. He felt that support. He was there. These are people that literally acted like groupies toward Mr. Perez.

With the exception of Paul, who kind of saw what was going on, these people were working behind the scenes as hard as they could to get these disclosures to be made. Juana told me something later or during the course of my representation of her. It kind of explained a lot to me, and I'll share it with you. She said that at that time, if children were in foster care because of abuse or neglect, in other words, physical abuse or neglect, there was one payment given to the foster care people, the foster care parents. But if the kid had disclosed and was considered a child abuse victim, a sex abuse victim, that the amount of

compensation, it wasn't really compensation, it was more of a stipend, that was given to the foster parents was about twice what they would have gotten otherwise, which gave the foster parents themselves, remember, a lot of these allegations, a lot of these caseworkers and foster parents were instigators in bringing these kids forward with these allegations. A money motive. And treating them in ways that kids that didn't make allegations were not treated. They were given better treatment, more attention.

And so you'd wonder why a kid that's 5, 7, 8, 10, 11 years old will all of a sudden turn on a foster parent. Or like Mr. Devereaux in his case. A lot of it had to do with the fact that there was something in it, not just for the caseworkers and the foster parents, but even for the child because of what they perceived to be would be more favorable treatment if they actually disclosed something. To Paul Glasson, who was actually fired when he tried to stop the Wenatchee witch hunt and ultimately fled to Canada with his five-year-old son, Paul, when did you realize your co-workers at CPS were going along with this

and actually thinking the worst of you? Well, there were some indications even before the disclosure, the recantation by Annie. Perez was, just as Steve is describing, he wasn't above bragging about his powers and what he was going to do. And when I said that I was uncomfortable with the way he was speaking in public about our foster families, foster parents, that's when I think the other people in the office began to realize, oh, Paul's not going to go along with this. Juana Vasquez, my supervisor, she warned me. She said, you know, once you started to question Perez's behavior, that was it. You were no longer on the inside group, the group that supported Perez.

Gosh, I can't imagine your whole world crashing in around you. And speaking of Perez, listen to this. Ran me through it. You're going to say this, this, and this happened. You've seen this happen at the church. You've seen these kids were involved. You know, and you just stick to, basically stick to the script, right? Just say what we want you to say and you'll see your parents again.

But if you don't say what we want you to say, you're never going to see them again. And I just kept praying, Lord, let her tell the truth. We raised her right, and let her tell the truth. Let the truth come forward. How this is torn apart, not just a community, but a country that learned of it. And most important, torn apart children from their parents, from their mother and their father. What happens in the docket and Roberson trials? What happened to them after these claims were so brutally made against them, after their children tried to recant? Believe it or not, they go to trial.

That's next in the Valley of Sin. Nancy Grace, Crime Story, signing off. Goodbye, friend. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.