Trouble in East Texas

Margie Cantrell has taken a lot of tough cases in her more than 30 years as a foster mother and group home operator: fire starters, the incontinent, children who were locked in pet carriers, girls so tragically abused they'd "hump anyone who walked through the door," she says. But a Texas social worker who came knocking on her door a few years ago warned that the two children she was trying to place this time—siblings with flaxen hair and faces like angels—were "totally out of control," she recalls.

The girl, now 11, and her 9-year-old brother had been living in a trailer four years ago with little food and no electricity in east Texas; their mother was strung out on methamphetamine and cocaine, according to testimony from child-welfare workers. By the time the two children, and eventually another sister, moved in with Margie and her husband John Cantrell, in Mineola, in 2005, they had worn out several foster homes. Margie Cantrell was not daunted. She had faced tough trials before. Her husband had been paralyzed in a construction accident years ago, leaving the family temporarily homeless. Cantrell says she promised God to serve him however needed if her husband could walk again. Her promise became a calling, she says: "Wherever there are broken kids, John and I have tried to fix them. We have never turned a child away when they have asked us."

The Cantrells have raised 27 children in all, including their three biological offspring. But they had no idea what they were getting into this time. "They sent me these beautiful babies," Cantrell says, shooing the siblings out of earshot. But she, and previous foster parents, had noticed the children displayed dramatic psychological scars of sex abuse. The older girl once pulled the straps down on her princess costume and broke into a raunchy pole dance, to the astonishment of Cantrell's relatives. The boy couldn't control his bowels. Both kids would casually flip through porno mags at gas stops like they were playschool primers. Bit by bit, the children opened up about their past, and out tumbled a bizarre and almost unbelievable story that gripped the tiny town of Mineola for the last year, as a parade of their alleged abusers were imprisoned for life.

The girl was among four of five alleged child victims, who testified in court this month that they had been trained at "kindergarten" to dance erotically and have sex with each other. At night they said they were drugged with "silly pills" and were forced to work for food by performing for a paying audience of adults at a new swingers sex club in Mineola, operating out of a former preschool and church.

Cantrell and her husband had recently moved to Texas from northern California and were shopping in Mineola for a new group-home site when they stumbled on the former club on the outskirts of this quiet town, population about 5,100, of bean processors, retirees, and many churches of all denominations.

"If you look in that room, there's big white flowers on the wall and green leaves," the older girl told her foster mother, before they had entered, Cantrell says. "And that's the stage where I had to do all that sex stuff."