Some of her siblings wanted to confront Sacha but didn't know how. It was months before Brittani even learned the real reason why she was in foster care. "I was told it was because my parents smoked in the house," she recalls.
"I remember Sacha explaining in one of those meetings the stuff that happened," says Charlie, "and how she used to drink nail polish remover and bleach to remove the pain. I don't know why I didn't say, 'What the fuck are you talking about?' I never believed her story from the beginning."
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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Sacha says she began to regret what she'd done almost immediately. She had not expected to end up in crummy foster homes for months, waiting for the okay to move in with her grandparents. She had not expected her siblings to be removed from the house, too. She turned out not to be pregnant, much to her relief, but the therapists kept pushing her to talk about her problems until she refused to speak, and then they kept pushing anti-depressants on her until she felt like a zombie.
But her lot was better than some. "I don't want to say I hate her," says Charlie, "but she tore my life apart. She destroyed it. We should have had such a different life. I should have been somebody else."
All the siblings have horror stories about foster care filthy conditions, neglect and worse. One of the boys says he was sexually assaulted by an older teen who had a prior record of sex crimes. The victim reported the assault to the police the next day.
"All they did was move [the older boy] to another place where he could have no more contact with that house," he says. "I never heard anything else about it. It didn't make much sense to me. I mean, that's why we were in foster care, because of what supposedly happened at our house. But it really was going on in the foster home, and nobody cared."
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Farrar made it clear to his attorneys from the start: There would be no plea bargains, no weasel deals that would leave him branded as a sex offender for life. He wanted vindication.
His strategy was simple: Just get on the stand and tell the truth. "I knew I would be acquitted," he says now. "I knew what I'd done and what I hadn't done. Not knowing the law or anything, I guess I was being sort of stupid."
But his attorney, Craig Truman, did know the law. Defending a kiddie sex case, he says, is never easy not even when there isn't a shred of evidence and the alleged victim's story is as contradictory and convoluted as the tale Sacha told. The issue is so inflammatory, the believe-the-children mantra so pervasive, that potential jurors walk into the courtroom inclined to castrate the defendant before they've heard a word of testimony.
"We never have skepticism about these cases, because we believe the victims," Truman says. "The most recent one of these I did, we questioned 65 or 70 jurors. And a third of them said they couldn't be fair; they'd vote guilty just on the basis of the charges. It's easier to do murder cases."
In fact, he adds, Farrar would probably have been facing less severe penalties if he'd beaten Sacha to death in a drunken rage: "Many of my people are doing more time for a pat on the bottom than they would have if they pistol-whipped somebody. I'm not in favor of sex assaults, but I'm also not in favor of pistol-whipping."
Farrar was adamant. No deal. He and Debbie would tell their story, Sacha could tell hers, and any rational person could figure out who was telling the truth.
But his 2002 trial went in directions Farrar hadn't expected. He hadn't counted on the effect of having all these other witnesses, social workers and counselors and police and so on, take the stand and recount what Sacha had told them. The repetition seemed to reinforce the story we believe it, why won't you? And he hadn't expected Sacha to come to court so well-prepared for battle, surrounded by a coterie of social workers, victim advocates and other professionals.
She flew in from Oklahoma, where she was now living with her grandparents. She told an investigator for the district attorney's office that she was terrified about testifying, and her aunt and grandmother knew she was a reluctant witness at best. But none of that came across in the courtroom.
Asked why she no longer lived with Charles and Debbie, Sacha rushed into a speech simmering with grievances. "Around the time I turned eleven," she said, "they began sexually abusing me. And my mom had emotionally abused me for years. She has a history of abusive boyfriends, and after a while it just began to eat me away from the inside out."
"She was a ferocious witness," Truman recalls. "She was snide. She fought with me. She'd wait for pauses to slip things in. She was as feisty as any I've ever had just a very, very angry young lass."