Sacha called them the next day. Juanita Timmons, her grandmother, would later testify that the first ten minutes of the conversation was "quite normal," but then Sacha started to hint that she was being abused. Timmons asked her what she meant. She said Charles had touched her.
Timmons asked her if anyone else was involved. Sacha said no. Timmons urged her to report this to a teacher right away.
mark manger
Charles Farrar passed a polygraph and turned down a plea bargain, convinced he'd be acquitted at his 2002 trial. His earliest parole date is 77 years away.
alan prendergast
Sacha Bruce, now 26, recanted her testimony shortly after Farrar's trial — and was attacked by prosecutors.
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That night, Debbie busted her daughter and Dustin for smoking cigarettes. The heated conversation that followed convinced Sacha she could never, ever 'fess up to her pregnancy fears, if Mom could get this worked up over a lousy cigarette.
"She was talking about how worthless we were because we got caught smoking," she recalls. "She'd always smoked. She was being a major hypocrite."
The next day, Sacha visited a counselor at her middle school and said she was having a hard time at home. The counselor asked about her mom's boyfriend and got some jaw-dropping answers. The counselor brought in a social worker and an Aurora police officer, who had many more questions.
As Sacha talked to them, she realized that simply accusing Charles would not be enough. They would just take him away and send her home.
She was going to have to put her mother in the story.
******
Sacha didn't come home from school that day. Worried, Charles called Debbie at work, then decided to drive around and look for her. The police pulled up behind his truck before he could go anywhere.
"I'm sitting there, trying to figure out what the hell is going on," he says. "They asked me where the videotape was. I said, 'What videotape?'"
Sacha's siblings were pulled out of class and summoned to the principal's office, where a social worker showed them anatomically correct drawings and asked them to identify various body parts. (There was a disagreement among the adults over whether eight-year-old Brittani should be shown the male drawing.) No one explained what was going on. The children were sent home, where other social workers were waiting for them and police were searching the house.
"I remember seeing my dad talking to the policemen," Eric recalls, "and the social workers telling us to pack up a few things. We were going to be gone a few days but would be home soon. I was totally confused."
"I remember Debbie crying," says Charlie, "and my grandparents telling her things will be okay. My dad was very angry. I had never heard him curse before."
They took all the kids even Austin, who was a week shy of his second birthday. Farrar was arrested and booked. Debbie bailed him out later that night. The police decided there was no need to arrest her yet, but they asked a lot of strange questions.
"They wanted to know how often Charles and I had sex, who initiated it, what positions," she recalls. "It had nothing to do with the case."
The couple didn't learn what the case was about until they were handed court documents. The enormity of Sacha's accusations left them speechless.
She'd told the police that Charles Farrar had been sexually abusing her since around the time of her eleventh birthday. It began one night when her mother told her to come to their bedroom and had her lie down between them while Charles groped her breasts and crotch. In subsequent encounters, Farrar performed oral sex on her, which she called "munching," forced her to perform oral sex on him and had intercourse with her while Debbie held her down.
They paid her "hush money," usually ten or twenty dollars per episode, and threatened to "put her six feet under" if she told anyone, she said. At one point she was allowed to go to a "Spring Fling" event at school only after she allowed them to videotape a particular kink of theirs having her mother suck her stepfather's semen out of her. Farrar had also urged her to persuade a friend to join her in "doing a party" with several of his beer-drinking buddies, who would pay $30 each to have sex with the girls. Sacha said she'd stalled him by claiming the other girl wouldn't commit to the job.
There was no proof of any of this, just Sacha's word. But to the bewilderment of Debbie and Charles, the official investigation generated by such devastating allegations was minimal, as if the police didn't feel any need to confirm or disprove Sacha's story. Farrar readily consented to a search of the house, which failed to turn up the videotape Sacha had mentioned. The officers didn't collect any clothing for possible DNA tests even though Sacha claimed the most recent assault had occurred just four days earlier.
A medical exam confirmed that Sacha was sexually active. Debbie told police that her daughter had a boyfriend and had asked her to make an appointment so that she could obtain birth-control pills. (Sacha insisted she'd only had sex with her stepfather; nobody bothered to ask the boyfriend.) Debbie also told them that Sacha lived in a "fantasy world," an assertion that several other witnesses would have affirmed, had they been asked.