Killer Instinct

Unable to find relatives willing to take the Tate boys, Jeffco put them back in foster care while they looked for families who might adopt them.

"The first time I met Michael Tate, he was under a table with his hands over his ears," remembers Alice Johnson, the Jeffco adoption caseworker who tried to find a home for Michael.

Michael seemed much younger than six. He didn't ask any questions and wouldn't speak to anyone. After his foster parents told her that Michael was throwing tantrums, screaming, biting himself and even ripping his hair out of his head, Johnson tried to engage him. But Michael refused to tell her what was bothering him. Then one day while they were riding in her car and Johnson was making small talk, Michael asked why she was so mad at him. It seemed to come from nowhere, and Johnson thought it really odd, because she wasn't angry at all.

Michael started saying other odd things, that people were looking at his privates or down his pants. He threw his backpack at his bus driver's head. He kicked a hole in the wall, and kicked a toilet so hard that he bruised his toes. One day he came home from kindergarten with two dead hamsters in his pocket. No one knew if Michael had killed them, then tucked them away, or if the hamsters had just suffocated.

By the time he was seven, Michael was being assessed for suicidal ideations. Memories from a time when he didn't know how to speak were suddenly overwhelming him. He moved to another foster home near Colorado Springs. That's where Tammy and Dave Wachtl, who were interested in adopting him, first met Michael. Tammy Wachtl took eight hours of parenting classes, researched his history and was ready to quit her job so that when they adopted the boy, she could be a full-time mother.

"When I did the research, the one thing that every single person said was if I could take him, I would take him in a heartbeat. That's just the kind of little boy that he was," Tammy remembers. "He clearly needed 100 percent of a parent's attention."

The Wachtls took Michael to the park and played on the monkey bars. Dave posed for a picture hugging Michael.

"When are you coming back?" Michael asked as they left.

The adoption was under way in July 1995 when Michael's foster parents asked the Wachtls to take the boy for a week so that they could go on vacation. (Those foster parents were subsequently charged with abuse.) At the Wachtls' mountain home, Michael got so excited that he ran smack-dab into a glass window that he thought was open. When Dave took Michael outside to play catch, a ball hit him on the wrist, lightly, and Michael went berserk, screaming like a wounded wild animal for twenty minutes about an injury that hadn't even left a mark.

The Wachtls took Michael to Chuck E. Cheese and a Rockies game, but he kept having fits. At home when he'd throw a tantrum, he was too strong for Tammy to handle. If she couldn't deal with Michael when he was so small, she wondered what she'd do when he got bigger. Then one day when she was driving Michael around, he accused her of looking at his shorts out of the corner of her eye. He started kicking the car's window, hysterical, and tried to jump from the moving vehicle.

It became very evident that he needed a lot more mental-health treatment than we could provide, and my husband brought me down to earth on that," Tammy says. "We would have had to become missionaries to make it work."

Michael was deemed unadoptable and placed in another foster home, where he took to setting fires indoors. He made unfounded accusations of abuse against his new foster mother, bit her breast, and complained that she was hitting him each time she touched him. He began breaking furniture and referring to himself in the third person. He also reported that he had hallucinations of spiders and voices laughing at him.

In January 1996, Michael went to Children's Hospital for two weeks, admitted on a bipolar diagnosis. When he left the hospital, he lasted just one day in his previous foster placement. Back at the hospital for another eleven days, he reported that he heard voices telling him to hurt someone. And at the next facility where he landed, he told a staffer that he'd learned everything that he knew about sex by engaging in the act with his mother. In a subsequent interview, he said that he was forced to watch his mother have sex and that she'd penetrated him digitally and that he did the same to her, as well as to a cat and a dog.

By the time Michael was thirteen, he'd been moved ten more times — from foster homes to treatment facilities to psychiatric hospitals — and his list of diagnoses now included post-traumatic stress disorder, which doctors thought could have been the result of a sexual assault from before he could speak. They also said that Michael was manic, that he had a personality disorder and bipolar disorder with psychotic features. He'd call out names of people who weren't in the room, then freeze up and stare into space, only to break the silence by screaming "Don't kill me!" and "Don't rape me!"