"Our system is totally and royally screwed up," says Sacha Bruce, now 26 years old and still fighting to get her stepfather out of prison. "I don't know if they believed me or not or if they were just covering their own butts. I wanted this fixed. I thought I would be leaving the courthouse in handcuffs, and they would let him go."
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Farrar with sons Charlie and Eric in 1991.
Farrar with sons Charlie and Eric during a recent visit at Sterling.
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The son of an Air Force officer, Charles Farrar kicked around several states, from North Dakota to Texas to Illinois, before arriving in Colorado in the early 1990s. He was in his late twenties, hardworking and ambitious. He also had two young sons with him from his second failed marriage.
One night he began chatting on a phone dating line with another single parent, a woman named Debbie. She lived in Westminster. He lived in Aurora. They decided to meet at a truck stop in Commerce City, kids and all.
Debbie turned out to be a petite, outgoing woman with two daughters and a son: Sacha, Brittani and Dustin. She had a history of getting mixed up with violent men and had recently fled a relationship in New Mexico after she discovered that her boyfriend had been neglecting and abusing her children while she was at work even tying them up and sticking them in a closet.
Farrar, too, had a tumultuous background; his second marriage, to a stripper, had not ended well. But he figured he'd learned from his mistakes. He had a good job at a Safeway bread plant and was working his way up to a foreman position. The couple hit it off immediately. The kids, all under the age of ten, seemed to get along, too. When the date was over, Sacha and Dustin tried to sneak Charles's boys, Eric and Charlie, into their station wagon so they could keep playing.
After a few months of driving between each others' apartments, Farrar proposed that they move in together a matter of economy and convenience as much as passion. "At first she shot me down," he recalls. "Then about three weeks later, she changed her mind."
Debbie who has since started a new life in another city and doesn't want her last name published doesn't recall any doubts. "He was a very nice guy," she says. "He treated me good, and he treated the kids good. We did things as a family, and that's what I wanted."
In 1995 the couple and their extended brood moved into a house in Aurora with a large back yard. They started with a pile of bills, but Farrar was determined to turn that around. He worked long hours at the plant, then picked up work on the side cleaning houses; eventually he got into renovating and flipping them, generating a six-figure bank account in the process. He built a swimming pool and a clubhouse for the kids.
Debbie remembers those years as very busy but happy times. "For the most part, the kids all got along," she says. "There were times when Charles and I had conflicts, when I felt he favored Charlie and Eric over my kids, and vice versa. But we tried to treat them all the same, and to this day they're brothers and sisters."
Because Debbie also worked, processing Medicaid forms for Adams County Social Services, Farrar decided to move his elderly parents into the home, too, so they could help supervise the children. In 1998, a new baby, Austin, joined the clan, bringing the population of the house up to ten.
"Yes, there were six kids," recalls Eric Farrar, now twenty. "But our Christmas trees were covered in presents. It was a wonderful life."
Yet not so wonderful, perhaps, for Sacha, the oldest of the children. She was a bright, creative girl, but also one who demanded and expected other people's attention. The expanding household made that increasingly difficult.
Sacha, her siblings say, had always been...different. She'd struggled with dyslexia at first, but when she finally learned to read, she took to it with a vengeance, devouring fat tomes like Gone With the Wind in a single marathon session. She would then start acting like a character in the book and persist in it for days, or claim that some adventure she'd read about had happened to her.
"Sacha had an issue with being honest and factual," Debbie says. "When she graduated from kindergarten, they gave them certificates for different things. Hers was for storytelling."
As she grew older, Sacha seemed to live increasingly in her own head. She binged on Nora Roberts, Danielle Steel, Phyllis Whitney. She had few friends at school, usually younger kids that she traded Pokémon cards with in the lunchroom. But she could spin a yarn like nobody you ever met. Cathy Timmons, Debbie's sister, was astonished by how quickly her niece could improvise an elaborate and detailed story. Timmons watched the adolescent Sacha explain to one acquaintance that she was a certified air-conditioning technician, to another that she was a trained chef.
"At first I just thought she had an active imagination," Timmons says. "But when she got older, the stories she would tell she would say it like she believed it. You'd call her on it, because you were there and you knew it didn't happen, and she'd still argue with you."