Some observers thought she overplayed the part. Even one of the prosecutors, Darren Vahle, would later concede that Sacha "didn't sell well as a witness" and came across as "odd." Normally, Truman would have to tiptoe a bit in cross-examining a seventeen-year-old girl who claimed to have endured such a shocking ordeal. But her combativeness gave him license to respond in kind, barreling into the absurdities of her claims about call-girl parties, videotaped kink shows and the rest.
Sacha stood by her story even though by now it was several stories, from the one she told her grandmother about Charles touching her, to accusing her mother the next day, to the shifting chronology of the variant versions she told at the D&N hearings and in Leopold's courtroom. When it was over, the state's star witness retreated to the women's room and became violently sick.
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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"I spent an hour and a half in the bathroom," Sacha says now. "I was convinced they were going to send me to a mental hospital."
Critical as it was, Sacha's testimony may not have been the defining moment of the trial. In sex-offense cases, prosecutors are allowed to introduce evidence of prior bad acts even acts remote in time and very unlike the charges at hand that would never be permitted in most other criminal trials. Farrar's jury got to hear two other adolescent girls accuse him of sexual assault.
The girls were the daughters of his second wife, Tina. Years after Farrar left Illinois, the youngest had come forward with an account of Farrar having intercourse with her up to twenty times when she was five. Her older sister, who would have been eight at the time, alleged that Farrar had oral sex with her.
The defense considered the allegations highly refutable. Farrar had remained friendly with Tina and her daughters after they split and had even had conversations with them about visiting him in Colorado in 1995. An official investigation into the claims wasn't launched until 1998, after he'd had a falling out with his ex, and had resulted in no charges. The case had big problems: The younger girl said her recollection of the assaults had come to her in a dream; Farrar insists he never lived in the house where the girl said these assaults occurred; and the alleged ongoing, brutal rape of a five-year-old had apparently gone unnoticed by the rest of her family.
Yet prosecutors brought the girls from Illinois to tell their story again, in an effort to give more weight to Sacha's account. "The prosecutors were allowed to admit this evidence because it was ostensibly similar, for establishing an MO," Walta explains. "They argued it as a kind of law of probability. How is it possible that lightning could strike the same man twice? He would have to be the unluckiest man on earth."
In closing arguments, Vahle and Truman agreed that the case came down to credibility whether you believed Sacha or Charles and Debbie. But it also came down to the prior allegations. Neither accusation had much chance of prevailing on its own merits. Combined, though, they made an unbeatable stew of depravity and transgression.
The jurors clearly didn't believe Sacha on several points. They acquitted Farrar of sexual exploitation of children (the videotape incident), inducement of child prostitution (the call-girl party) and some other king-sized whoppers. But they found him guilty on 22 counts.
"I was floored," Farrar says now. "But I've had a lot of time to think about this. If I was on that jury, would I have convicted myself? I think I would have. It wasn't any one thing. It's just the trust you put in kids. You don't think they are going to be lying about something like this. And the charges are stacked not one count, not two, but thirty. Something must have happened, there are so many."
Farrar was taken to his sentencing hearing in high-security gear: leg and belly chains, handcuffs and black box, the works. Like they were expecting him to explode. But he was calm when Judge Leopold handed him the 145 years. The waiting was over. He now knew exactly what to expect from his life.
All he could do, he told the judge, was hope that some day his accuser would come forward and tell the truth.
******
A few weeks after the Farrar verdict, Sacha asked Cathy Timmons if she could borrow a video camera. Her aunt assumed it was for a school project, but Sacha told her she wanted to make a statement admitting that she'd committed perjury.
"I asked her, 'Do you want to change your story because it's torn everybody apart, or because it isn't true?'" Timmons remembers. "She said it wasn't true, that she shouldn't have said it. She said it got out of control and she didn't know how to stop it."
A couple of days later, Debbie arrived in Oklahoma. She was still facing trial herself, but she'd received permission from the court to visit Dustin and Brittani, now staying with her parents, for Mother's Day. She expected that she would have to steer clear of Sacha. But Sacha sought her out and insisted that the two of them sit down and talk.