"She was apologetic," Debbie says. "She was talking about wanting to recant and do a video."
Sacha says she was sleeping badly, eating in binges or not at all, and trying to figure out how to undo what she'd done. She didn't make the video or take any formal action to help Farrar for almost a year; other relatives apparently dissuaded her, telling her she risked prison herself if she changed her story. But she'd made up her mind on one point: She was not going to testify against her mother. "There was no way I was going through that again," she says.
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.
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Sacha Bruce, now 26, recanted her testimony shortly after Farrar's trial — and was attacked by prosecutors.
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As the date for Debbie's trial approached, social workers, therapists and prosecutors Christine Schober and Darren Vahle called Sacha several times, urging her to testify. Her aunt and grandmother say Sacha became hysterical at the prospect, threatening suicide. They also maintain that she told the prosecution that if called upon, she would admit to having made it all up.
"She'd say that, and they'd redirect the whole conversation," says Cathy Timmons. "They'd talk about how they were going to put her in a nice hotel, pick her up at the airport they wouldn't listen when she said she couldn't go on with it. They didn't say anything about how maybe we should all go talk to the judge."
Schober and Vahle would later deny that Sacha had threatened to change her story. Schober said that Sacha told her she "thought her mother should be convicted of everything that happened" but just couldn't endure the stress of another trial. Her office "ultimately left the decision up to Sacha," she testified.
But not without some arm-twisting first, including a looming contempt-of-court action against Sacha for her refusal to cooperate with the prosecution. Summoned before a judge in Oklahoma, she informed him that she wouldn't go back to Colorado to testify and told him to kiss her ass. "My grandmother told me she appreciated the sentiment but not the language, and it was not to happen again," she says.
Her grandmother, Juanita Timmons, testified that the standoff ended only after she left a message for Schober saying, "We may have to come, but you won't like it." The case against Debbie was soon dismissed.
Notes in Schober's file, later produced in court, describe the factors shaping that decision: "Considering all this child had been through...the fact that the Farrar jury said they would have a very hard time convicting mom, and she has already lost her home, her husband, and her kids, we have decided, Darren Vahle and I, not to force this child to come here and testify against her will."
The quick abandonment of the case against Debbie, once it was clear Sacha wasn't on board, raises questions about whether the prosecutors believed their own theory of the crime, defense attorney Walta suggests. "The allegations she made against her mother were in some ways more disturbing than what she said about Mr. Farrar," he says. "The fact that case was simply dismissed because she didn't want to testify has always struck me as something that didn't smell right."
The dismissal was the beginning of a renewed relationship between Sacha and her mother a fragile one, amid much chaos. Sacha ran away from the Timmons home and told the police a wild story about her grandmother trying to force her to marry a boy who abused her. She shacked up with a guy who was cooking meth, got strung out, then called Debbie to rescue her. Debbie did. At eighteen, sober and no longer under the supervision of social services, Sacha decided to proceed with her recantation.
"I'm done running from this," she told her mother. "I'll face the consequences. Find me a lawyer."
Sitting in his cell one year and 25 days after a jury found him guilty, Farrar learned that his stepdaughter was withdrawing all her accusations. "All the emotions just came rushing forward again," he says. "I was walking on cloud nine. I knew I was going home and the family was coming back together again."
An investigator from the public defender's office told him that his attorneys hoped to have him back on the streets in two to six months, based on the newly discovered evidence. But it took Judge Leopold nearly two years to rule on Farrar's motion for a new trial, which drew fierce opposition for reasons that went well beyond the question of his guilt or innocence.
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Among sex-crime prosecutors and judges, a recanting victim is regarded with great suspicion. It's the flip side of believing the children: If the children change their story, they must have been pressured into it by relatives or are suffering a mental breakdown. Despite research that indicates as many as one in five reports of sexual abuse are false and that false reports are even more prevalent when custody issues or other acrimonious family disputes are involved prosecutors continue to regard recantation as a mental-health issue."Recantations are routinely used by victims to disengage the criminal justice system response," declares a position paper on the topic by the Oregon Attorney General's Sexual Assault Task Force, "and are therefore NOT, by themselves, indicative of a false report."