Trials And Troubles In Happy Valley

Sex cases:

Though crime and child abuse aren't unknown in well-off circles, the recent troubles are connected, one way or another, with the less prosperous slice of Wenatchee. Few of the major players in the sex cases have jobs. The man who killed his friend with a bat was a newcomer who lived in a trailer; the suspect police have charged in April's double murder was unemployed.

Nothing has so gripped the town as the ever,growing sex-ring scandal. The complicated story begins, really, a few days before Easter in 1994, when a 9-year-old girl was placed in the foster care of a young Wenatchee couple--Luci and Bob Perez. The girl came from an impoverished, abusive background; in 1992, she testified in the successful prosecution of a family acquaintance who had molested her. Her parents' house was a shambles; her father was illiterate; and her mother, according to court documents, had an IQ of 68. There was one intriguing detail about the arrangement: Bob Perez, the girl's new foster father, is the city's chief sex-crimes detective. That spring and summer, Perez happened to be investigating several area parents on suspicion of sexually abusing their children and, more frightening yet, for exchanging kids with friends.

Then, late one September afternoon, the girl told Perez that her parents had molested her and her brothers and sisters. Other siblings confirmed the story. After the mother, Idella Everett, confessed, she and her husband, Harold, pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison. By March, after her parents were put away, the girl expanded her allegations, offering lurid recollections of supposed abuse by others in the community. The accusations are appalling: that dozens of adults swapped children at orgies that took place regularly from 1988 to 1994. Perez and two Child Protective Services caseworkers drove the girl, now 10, around town, and she pointed out 19 locations where she claimed to have been abused as part of what prosecutors say was known as "The Circle." She described gatherings where grown-ups would take children, six at a time, to a room with six single beds. "We had to undress and lay down on the bed; a kid on each bed," the girl said. "The adults undressed and got in a line and took turns with everybody. It was the touching thing, 'the wild thing'."

Such stories have some worried that Wenatchee is careening toward its own version of the McMartin Preschool case, where there are plenty of accusations but little truth to them. Prosecutors here do have a fair track record: of 21 group-sex cases brought in the last 16 months, 12 have resulted in guilty pleas or convictions; eight are pending; only one was dismissed, But the upcoming cases, including the Robersons', are based on elaborate, perhaps improbable, scenarios. "One of the things that sometimes happens in these cases," says Richard A. Gardner, a professor of child psychiatry at Columbia University medical school, "is that children may start out telling the truth, then begin to embellish. And the more incredible the allegations, the more likely they are not to be true."

Just who's telling the truth is precisely what now divides the town. Many critics of the police united under Bob Kinkade, a former cop and part-time Alaska fisherman, in a group called Victims of Child Abuse Laws. "Pure and simple," says Kinkade, "this is a witch hunt orchestrated by Bob Perez." He claims that Perez is on a power trip, leading child witnesses into making false accusations and berating adults into confessions. But prosecutors and Perez's police superiors deny any wrongdoing. They point out that Perez is routinely joined by fellow detectives or caseworkers from the local Child Protective Services.