Speaker 1: On November eight two, eighteen, our field reporter Lawrence Smiley
Speaker 1: made the four hour drive from San Francisco to the
Speaker 1: Mendocino Cliff where the Heart family died. I'm sitting here
Speaker 1: at the memorial on the edge of the bluff. There's
Speaker 1: a wooden cross, and on it is we honor and
Speaker 1: remember you love from your adopted brothers and sisters from
Speaker 1: around the world. Adoptees deserve better hashtag adopted Voices. There's
Speaker 1: six stuffed animals lined up in a row, a lion,
Speaker 1: a bear, a monkey, another bear, cow, kind of a
Speaker 1: draggled teddy bear. There and in front of them are
Speaker 1: stones that have the kids names on them. Davante, Canna, Abigail, Marcus, Sierra, Jeremiah.
Speaker 1: It's right on the edge of the bluff here whether
Speaker 1: it's just the sheer straight drop. In video she captured
Speaker 1: that day, you can see the makeshift memorial, she describes.
Speaker 1: It's a colorful pile of rock formations, fresh flowers, and
Speaker 1: teddy bears covered in a thin coating of dust. There's
Speaker 1: a wooden sculpture of a heart with wings bearing the
Speaker 1: handwritten inscription please take care of yourselves and others lives
Speaker 1: are not for the taking. The teal green Sea turns below.
Speaker 1: As we sit down to record this final episode. It
Speaker 1: has been eight months since the crash. In that stretch
Speaker 1: of time, I Justine have found out that I'm expecting
Speaker 1: my second child and am now weeks away from giving birth.
Speaker 1: It's been surreal to watch the rough sketch of a
Speaker 1: human life take form while also contemplating the lives of
Speaker 1: six children who will never get to grow up. Some
Speaker 1: days we feel like we know Marcus, Hannah, Vante, Abigail,
Speaker 1: Jeremiah and Sierra. Then in telling this story, we are
Speaker 1: honoring them. At other times we feel dirty, as if
Speaker 1: for counting the gruesome but incomplete details of their short
Speaker 1: lives makes us grave Robbers. For Lauren, who has spent
Speaker 1: countless hours reaching out to the people closest to the
Speaker 1: heart family and has endured her share of slammed doors,
Speaker 1: It's been an especially strange journey. As I was coming
Speaker 1: up here, I felt like this sense of dread as
Speaker 1: I got closer and closer to this area. Um it's
Speaker 1: been so many months that I've been looking into every
Speaker 1: last lead that I could find, calling so many people,
Speaker 1: some who talked to me, many who wouldn't and requesting
Speaker 1: all these documents. It's been so much for six months now,
Speaker 1: and to actually come to the spot where the story
Speaker 1: both began for me and and in for them, it
Speaker 1: just had so much anxiety about it, honestly, and sort
Speaker 1: of feeling to write about it. In April two tho nineteen,
Speaker 1: a full year after the crash, a formal coroner's inquest
Speaker 1: will be released to the public. At that time, a
Speaker 1: jury will convene to decide whether this was a murder
Speaker 1: by one person, a conspiracy to murder by more than
Speaker 1: one person, or an accident. And then in so many ways,
Speaker 1: it will be over from glamour and how stuff works.
Speaker 1: This is Broken Hearts. I'm Justine Harmon and I'm Liz Egan.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of people whose voices we tried
Speaker 1: but were ultimately unable to include in this podcast. In
Speaker 1: November two eighteen, over the course of three consecutive days
Speaker 1: and after several months of outreach, Lawrence spoke with Sarah's father,
Speaker 1: Alan Gengler. He decided not to go on the record.
Speaker 1: We also reached out to Sarah's brother Matt, but did
Speaker 1: not year back. Jen's parents and her brother Christopher Heart
Speaker 1: declined to speak to us. Her other brother, Jonathan, says
Speaker 1: his older sister has not been in his life since
Speaker 1: two thousand and wanted only to make a few things clear.
Speaker 1: In an email to Lauren on September eighteen, Jonathan wrote,
Speaker 1: one thing I would like to clarify for myself and
Speaker 1: my family is that Jen was not ousted from the
Speaker 1: family for being gay. I have been openly gay, even
Speaker 1: in high school, and it never affected me living in
Speaker 1: my mom or dad's home. He continued, If anything, all
Speaker 1: this time, my family did nothing but try to help
Speaker 1: and understand Jen, not work against her. Two months after
Speaker 1: he sent that email, Jonathan spoke with us over the phone.
Speaker 1: He doesn't want his voice on this podcast, but he
Speaker 1: gave us permission to relay the following. Nobody has done
Speaker 1: anything to warrant this, he says. All I have seen
Speaker 1: my whole life is her getting my parents, grandparents, anybody
Speaker 1: jumping through hoops to give her what she wanted. And
Speaker 1: that's all I can say. People loved her, They really
Speaker 1: stuck up for her. It really hurts me when this
Speaker 1: stuff gets reflected on my parents. That really hurts my feelings.
Speaker 1: My mother is wonderful and she did put up with
Speaker 1: a lot from my sister. We all did. Sources close
Speaker 1: to the Genglers told us the family had not been
Speaker 1: in touch with Sarah for a long time, but it
Speaker 1: was Sarah's choice to cut off contact. The distance, one
Speaker 1: says had nothing to do with them rejecting Sarah's sexuality.
Speaker 1: Back in August, Lauren connected with Hannah Scott, a professor
Speaker 1: of criminology at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology
Speaker 1: who has spent a lot of time studying the psyche
Speaker 1: of women who commit heinous crimes in ad into her
Speaker 1: work as a criminologist victimologist. Scott is the author of
Speaker 1: one of the only known studies on female family annihilators,
Speaker 1: or women who kill their children and or their spouses.
Speaker 1: She said she wasn't surprised to hear that Jen and
Speaker 1: Sarah fiercely controlled who had access to them and the kids.
Speaker 1: She was, however, surprised by the way Jen used Facebook
Speaker 1: to maintain a facade of familiar bliss in the case
Speaker 1: of an abusive person. And it's clear that either one
Speaker 1: or both of the parents in this family were abusive.
Speaker 1: The outward impression management using social media is kind of
Speaker 1: an interesting twist. Although most people now are using social media,
Speaker 1: but nobody I didn't think it's really looked at the
Speaker 1: abusive partner and how they negotiate their identity. We assume
Speaker 1: that people who are abusive are abusive both in their
Speaker 1: private lives but also in their public lives, and we
Speaker 1: know this now not to be true. Many people who
Speaker 1: are abusive in their private lives are well respected in
Speaker 1: their communities and not considered abusive, and this is problematic
Speaker 1: for us. It's inconsistent, and I think as human beings
Speaker 1: we like to see consistency. If you want to continue
Speaker 1: to abuse and have access to victims in your family,
Speaker 1: these acts of private violence have to be managed because
Speaker 1: if you do anything outside the house that might alert
Speaker 1: people to the fact that you're abusive, you may lose
Speaker 1: your ability to continue to abuse, or, in this case,
Speaker 1: I suspect, lose the ability to raise the children in
Speaker 1: a way that they felt was appropriate and not be
Speaker 1: objected by other people. And when we say it that way,
Speaker 1: certainly we can understand all parents understand that they should
Speaker 1: raise their children in a way that they feel as appropriate.
Speaker 1: Scott says that female annihilators are vastly understudied demographic, and
Speaker 1: a lot of that has to do with the fact
Speaker 1: that we as a culture have a hard time believing
Speaker 1: that a woman or women would kill their own children.
Speaker 1: As we started to go through the literature and we
Speaker 1: discussions and we pursued this idea as women in criminology,
Speaker 1: which is largely a male dominated discipline with a lot
Speaker 1: of male focused and patriarchal values, we started to understand
Speaker 1: that there was something that was missing. One of my
Speaker 1: first writings was looking at the female serial killer, which
Speaker 1: at the time when I started my writing way back
Speaker 1: in the day, didn't exist according to many people, and
Speaker 1: so I spent a lot of time challenging those values
Speaker 1: and saying, yes, they do exist, and not only exist,
Speaker 1: they exist in large numbers. The monikers that we tend
Speaker 1: to give to women, both in serial and mass homicide,
Speaker 1: giggling grinnies, things like that, murdering moms, these are very
Speaker 1: sexist when we compared to the names that the men
Speaker 1: are given. We tend to make light of the fact
Speaker 1: that women may engage in these criminal acts, and as
Speaker 1: a result, often we don't take them seriously. We don't
Speaker 1: take them seriously. It's something to keep in mind when
Speaker 1: considering that cryptic note from a Minnesota child welfare worker
Speaker 1: after the first incident of abuse was report it back
Speaker 1: in two thousand eight. The problem, it said, is these
Speaker 1: women look normal. Though Hannah Scott has never seen a
Speaker 1: case quite like this, one that continued abuse across several
Speaker 1: states makes it unique, and there has been little research
Speaker 1: on same sex domestic violence, she has seen incidents of
Speaker 1: women who kill their families with what might sound like
Speaker 1: a counterintuitive motivator love. The woman and her children are
Speaker 1: often separated and living in a separate dwelling, or have
Speaker 1: left the spouse and are living in another place, even temporarily.
Speaker 1: They killed their children because they couldn't see them being
Speaker 1: raised by the opposite parents, for example, or they couldn't
Speaker 1: see themselves actually sustaining these children now that they were alone.
Speaker 1: We haven't found convincing evidence that Jen and Sarah were
Speaker 1: headed towards a breakup, or, as we explored in the
Speaker 1: previous episode, that there was some catastrophic future event on
Speaker 1: the horizon, but their relationship had been strained over the
Speaker 1: years they had spent months of time apart. Jen would
Speaker 1: often travel with some or all of the children while
Speaker 1: Sarah would stay home to work. Sarah was the sole
Speaker 1: breadwinner and money was tight. Jen once emailed a friend
Speaker 1: that she and Sarah expressed themselves in different ways. She wrote,
Speaker 1: for quite some time, I have felt very underappreciated and
Speaker 1: taken for granted in our relationship, and at times unloved.
Speaker 1: While I know deep in my heart how much she
Speaker 1: loves me, she is just horrible about showing it. We
Speaker 1: are complete opposites in this regard. The email continued, I
Speaker 1: never missed an opportunity to tell someone how much they
Speaker 1: mean to me and that I love them. As a mom,
Speaker 1: I have felt that I've been raising the kids on
Speaker 1: my own. She admits this too. While she loves them
Speaker 1: with all her heart, she has not been fully present
Speaker 1: with me or the kids. The last known footage of
Speaker 1: Sarah Hart is of her leaving Coals at PM on
Speaker 1: March eighteen, three days before the crash, and a mirror
Speaker 1: seven minutes before child protective Services arrived at their home.
Speaker 1: She's wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt pulled over her head
Speaker 1: and is clutching her cell phone. It's impossible to know
Speaker 1: what was going through her head, or if she knew
Speaker 1: what was about to happen. It's impossible to know what
Speaker 1: she and Jen did or didn't talk about over the
Speaker 1: course of the next few days, but Hannah Scott says
Speaker 1: the unimaginable might have seemed well logical to these women.
Speaker 1: People can be overwhelmed to not necessarily experiencing mental illness.
Speaker 1: In some cases, homicide, even though we feel comfortable saying
Speaker 1: it can be a very rational choice to some people
Speaker 1: given their life circumstances. When Lauren met with Mendicino County
Speaker 1: Sheriff Tom Allman, he reiterated what he said many times before.
Speaker 1: He is no longer viewing this incident as an accident.
Speaker 1: He holds out very little hope that DeVante will be
Speaker 1: found alive. Do I have any hope? I guess I
Speaker 1: have hope. Do I have any realistic hope? No, I don't.
Speaker 1: The fact that there's been no indication that he's alive
Speaker 1: should cause someone to say, well, he was in a car.
Speaker 1: But I have no problem of someone bringing DeVante into
Speaker 1: our office today and saying, listen, DeVante is alive and
Speaker 1: well and he was just hiding out. I'd give the
Speaker 1: kid a big hug and say we've never met it's
Speaker 1: very nice to meet you. Sheriff Allman and his team
Speaker 1: have spent the past eight months trawling the coastline for
Speaker 1: the missing children, examining the evidence they do have, and
Speaker 1: preparing for the upcoming Corners inquest. Almond says, an inquest
Speaker 1: of this nature hasn't happened in Mendocino County in over
Speaker 1: fifty years, but according to the law, its function is
Speaker 1: to inquire into and determine the circumstances, manner, and cause
Speaker 1: of all violent, sudden or unusual deaths. Over the course
Speaker 1: of two days in April, a jury of twelve citizens
Speaker 1: will rule what the cause of death was for all
Speaker 1: the bodies found at the crash site. Sheriff Allman says
Speaker 1: he hopes to live stream the event in order to
Speaker 1: put the questions to bed once and for all. We
Speaker 1: have a job to do just to find out the
Speaker 1: truth of what happened. We have gathered a team of
Speaker 1: experts that will be making sure that what we are
Speaker 1: going to say at the inquest is true and accurate.
Speaker 1: And a Corner's Inquest is going to, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: give evidence that will shock the consciousness of people who
Speaker 1: are following this case. What can you give not a bit.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to talk about any of that. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna tell you that we're not on a fast timeline
Speaker 1: to throw this information out right now. But um, this
Speaker 1: will be a water cooler conversation throughout our nation. For
Speaker 1: those who were critical of how long it took to
Speaker 1: positively I d Hannah's remains, Almond says d NA simply
Speaker 1: isn't something you can match overnight. I think that TV
Speaker 1: has presented a false narrative to viewers regarding how easy
Speaker 1: it is to get DNA compared to fingerprints. Fingerprints are
Speaker 1: really good if you know which fingerprint to compare it to.
Speaker 1: It I've taken I'm going to guess hundreds, if not thousands,
Speaker 1: of burglar reports where fingerprints were obtained. But if you
Speaker 1: don't have anybody to compare them to, Okay, so you
Speaker 1: have fingerprints and DNA is the same way. If we
Speaker 1: have DNA, you know, from a foot and we said,
Speaker 1: all right, gosh, we have the DNA results. If we
Speaker 1: don't have anybody to compare them to, then it's the
Speaker 1: same as a fingerprint. These children were adopted and we
Speaker 1: didn't have a lot of information, so it wasn't an
Speaker 1: easy task to do. He says. The biggest hold up
Speaker 1: in this case has been trying to get information from
Speaker 1: the adoption agencies. The fact that law enforcement has been
Speaker 1: stymied at finding out information regarding the adoption records and
Speaker 1: the accountability of foster parents should concern a lot of people.
Speaker 1: Whether or not this was a crime or an accident
Speaker 1: when it happened, I don't think law enforcement should have
Speaker 1: been told no by adoption organizations that say we're not
Speaker 1: going to give you that information. Prior to this case happening,
Speaker 1: I had no idea the amount of confidentiality that adoption
Speaker 1: agencies focused on. While I don't want to disrupt somebody's
Speaker 1: life with adoption record, when a death happens, I would
Speaker 1: have to ask myself, why would an adoption agency or
Speaker 1: government agency be so determined to keep information private? So
Speaker 1: how much of what happened to the heart children can
Speaker 1: be put on the agency's tasked with making sure our
Speaker 1: youngest citizens are being looked after properly. Dr Doris Houston,
Speaker 1: the interim director at the Illinois State University School of
Speaker 1: Social Work, points to the lack of interstate communication between
Speaker 1: all parties. She also singles out the state of Texas,
Speaker 1: from where all six children were adopted, as keen to
Speaker 1: terminate parental rights and collect placement fees from the government.
Speaker 1: On average, she says, a family like the Hearts could
Speaker 1: stand to collect twelve hundred dollars a month for each
Speaker 1: adopted child. We have found that over the past decade,
Speaker 1: the Hearts have taken roughly two hundred and seventy thousand
Speaker 1: dollars from the state of Texas. These are taxpayer dollars
Speaker 1: that are being spent to support children. Why can we
Speaker 1: then expect that families would be expected to at least
Speaker 1: do an annual check in, maybe goes for the first
Speaker 1: few years ago to some of the support groups, I
Speaker 1: was surprised to find that Texas essentially has a standard
Speaker 1: of automatically preparing the paperwork for adoptions. It makes it
Speaker 1: difficult to envision the effort is really being put into
Speaker 1: family reunification if from day one, that is the policy
Speaker 1: to begin to prepare children for adoption. Dr Houston says,
Speaker 1: once an interstate adoption is completed, the state of origin
Speaker 1: is no longer responsible for an adopted child's well being,
Speaker 1: with Texas allowing the children to be adopted in Minnesota,
Speaker 1: they essentially are absolved of all of those responsibilities if
Speaker 1: now rests at the hands of the receivings eight. Frankly,
Speaker 1: there really has not been movement in in a real
Speaker 1: meaningful way to do a national adoption protection registry where
Speaker 1: information is shared. Hannah Scott, the author of the study
Speaker 1: on annihilators, calls these interstate disconnects linkage blindness, a term
Speaker 1: coined by criminal justice expert Steven Egger. We still do
Speaker 1: have trouble in the United States finding individuals who both
Speaker 1: move frequently and kill or commit serial crime. Sometimes cities
Speaker 1: don't even time each other, but states certainly have more
Speaker 1: difficulty talking to each other. Each state has its own
Speaker 1: set of laws. We know that there are eight people
Speaker 1: who reported to the police that there was an use
Speaker 1: of situation. This happened over ten years in three states,
Speaker 1: and once the family became detected, they moved to another state.
Speaker 1: This stopped the process of investigation in one state and
Speaker 1: allowed them a reprieve to some degree in the new
Speaker 1: states that they had moved to. Because the states cannot
Speaker 1: talk to each other, cases of child abuse like this
Speaker 1: can go and detected islam As the family continues to
Speaker 1: stay moved. Abril Dinwoody, the former executive director of the
Speaker 1: Donaldson Adoption Institute, agrees that this story should serve as
Speaker 1: a nationwide wake up call. I was that a camp
Speaker 1: for families who adopted transractional in and I talked about
Speaker 1: that case being a cautionary tale of how broken the
Speaker 1: system can be and how important it is for us
Speaker 1: all to be taking care of ourselves and doing well
Speaker 1: and and getting the help that we need and getting
Speaker 1: the help for ourselves and our children. Um and I
Speaker 1: talked about it at another sort of gathering of professionals,
Speaker 1: some were transracial adoptive parents, and and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of head hanging and a lot of tears, and people
Speaker 1: are failing it. But I hope that just translate sent
Speaker 1: us some more action and more eyes wide open with
Speaker 1: some of the real challenges that the system faces, and
Speaker 1: quite frankly, that people face. Look, I didn't know the hearts.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know what drove these women to
Speaker 1: to do, to adopt to whatever, but like there was
Speaker 1: something clearly wrong there too. And even those people who
Speaker 1: do such things need to have some kind of care
Speaker 1: and support as well, Like like they just don't get
Speaker 1: erased either. There's mental health issues and all of this
Speaker 1: that need to be addressed that clearly we're not. I've
Speaker 1: just found, like when I talked to friends and mothers
Speaker 1: in particular, that everyone has something to say about this case.
Speaker 1: Everyone honestly reads something about their own life into this
Speaker 1: case and feels guilty about that. And even you know,
Speaker 1: just like a mom she has a biological child, and
Speaker 1: she was just like, Yeah, that case just made me
Speaker 1: look in the mirror and realize how much just utter
Speaker 1: power you have over young children and how just guileless
Speaker 1: they are. You're all they have in those early years.
Speaker 1: And it made me almost scared of my own power
Speaker 1: that I have being a parent. There's so many layers.
Speaker 1: There's so many layers. The power of being a parent
Speaker 1: is something we rarely talk about in our daily lives,
Speaker 1: but it's something most of us with kids understanding our bones.
Speaker 1: Sometimes when I took my two year old in at night,
Speaker 1: he recently graduated from sleeping in a crib to a
Speaker 1: twin size, he gives me this look like I'm going
Speaker 1: to get out of this bed, and I give him
Speaker 1: another one that says, don't you dare? And he doesn't,
Speaker 1: He doesn't dare What is strange influence to have over
Speaker 1: another person? But what if I pushed it a little further?
Speaker 1: What if I told him that something bad would happen
Speaker 1: to him if he got out of bed. What if,
Speaker 1: and this is honestly hard for me to stay out loud,
Speaker 1: what if I held him down until it hurts? How
Speaker 1: long would he stay in there? Would he love me
Speaker 1: me less? Or when his devotion to me becomes stronger,
Speaker 1: more desperate, would he wonder what he could do to
Speaker 1: make it go back to the way it used to be,
Speaker 1: back to when I would line his little bed without
Speaker 1: a blanket and cuddle him until he fell asleep, even
Speaker 1: though I'm impossibly pregnant and it hurts my back. How
Speaker 1: much would his mind go into overdrive trying to get
Speaker 1: that feeling and that dynamic back And how would he
Speaker 1: process that nearly imperceptible shift. Years later, as Justine has
Speaker 1: been transitioning her sweet, flaxen haired two year old from
Speaker 1: a crib to a twin bed, I've spent the past
Speaker 1: eight months wrapping my mind around the fact that I'm
Speaker 1: moving closer to the opposite end of the parenting spectrum
Speaker 1: My oldest is almost eighteen, almost Marcus his age. If
Speaker 1: all goes according to plan, she'll be attending college next fall.
Speaker 1: I think she's ready. Whether or not I'm ready is
Speaker 1: another story. But I'll say good bye to her knowing
Speaker 1: that my husband and I did our best to give
Speaker 1: her the tools she'll need to be successful on her own.
Speaker 1: She has a strong moral compass, She knows what she
Speaker 1: deserves and how to ask for it. She knows more
Speaker 1: about the Battle of Gettysburg than I ever did, and
Speaker 1: she also knows not to stick a fork in a toaster.
Speaker 1: I share this because I suspect Jen and or Sarah
Speaker 1: knew their kids weren't as well equipped for adulthood as
Speaker 1: they should have been. At the very least, they had
Speaker 1: hardly any experience interacting with other people their own age.
Speaker 1: This must have scared Jen and Sarah, even though they
Speaker 1: were the ones who put their kids in this position
Speaker 1: in the first place, who held them down in a
Speaker 1: way similar to the one Justine just described. I think
Speaker 1: the best thing you can do is give your kids
Speaker 1: firm ground under their feet and the heart. Kids never
Speaker 1: really had that, not as babies, not when they were adopted,
Speaker 1: not even in the moments before they died. You'll remember
Speaker 1: that back in May, when we first started reporting this story,
Speaker 1: Lauren went to Woodland, Washington. There, the Hearts neighbor, Dana Decalb,
Speaker 1: took her to see where the family lived together. Lauren
Speaker 1: and Dana waited through the knee high prairie grass to
Speaker 1: get to the blue split level home next door. When
Speaker 1: I was up at Dana's house in Washington, I asked
Speaker 1: the Decalbs if we could walk over to the Heart property.
Speaker 1: They agreed, and we walked down the gravel driveway and
Speaker 1: then cut into the knee high grass up to the
Speaker 1: light blue house. A FedEx delivery notice was still stuck
Speaker 1: on the front door, dated a month after the crash.
Speaker 1: Dana and I peeked through slits in the blinds. The
Speaker 1: living room was sparse except for a few chairs. Inside
Speaker 1: the garage where a Christmas tree box, an electric piano,
Speaker 1: some Star Wars puzzles. In some ways, I felt like
Speaker 1: I was walking onto the set of a play after
Speaker 1: the production had wrapped. All around I recognized things from
Speaker 1: Jen's Facebook posts. There in a shed was the lawnmower
Speaker 1: Davante had ridden with a stalk of grass in his
Speaker 1: mouth like the image of farmer Joe. There was the
Speaker 1: temporary greenhouse, now in a heap that Abigail had stood
Speaker 1: in front of, smiling with a chicken on her shoulder.
Speaker 1: I spotted an ornament hanging from a tree and walked
Speaker 1: over to look at it. It was a ceramic Volkswagen
Speaker 1: hippie van with flower powered details, which was so eerily
Speaker 1: spot onto the image of the family projected and the
Speaker 1: way they died. I wondered if some prankster had hung it,
Speaker 1: or if the hearts had I turned it over and
Speaker 1: saw the price tag was still stuck on the bottom.
Speaker 1: Ross dressed for less. Walking around the huge yard, I
Speaker 1: couldn't help but question my role as a reporter in
Speaker 1: all this. Certainly I was trespassing of both their property
Speaker 1: and in this family story. I hope that it was
Speaker 1: right to be here looking for any clues as to
Speaker 1: why those six kids were no longer here. The hunting
Speaker 1: feeling was nothing compared to Dana's. She's stuck in an
Speaker 1: unwinnable loop. Should she have called CPS sooner? Wasn't it
Speaker 1: that very phone call that set into motion the events
Speaker 1: that ended with a yukon over a Cliff. Each time
Speaker 1: the conversation turns to the subject, Dana's voice grows thick
Speaker 1: with grief. If she'd call earlier, she wonders, would the
Speaker 1: outcome be the same? Who knows, she says, Who could
Speaker 1: have guessed that? Dana and I both had a question,
Speaker 1: just what did it look like on a daily basis
Speaker 1: inside that house? Dana said something that's stuck in my mind.
Speaker 1: You know, I guess I want to believe that there
Speaker 1: was good times, but it wasn't constant ugly. After all
Speaker 1: of our research, after so many months of digging for
Speaker 1: certain facts, this remains one of the hardest things to
Speaker 1: come to terms with. There were good times, it wasn't
Speaker 1: constant ugly. Jen Hart loved her kids and she killed them.
Speaker 1: These realities coexist. We know this because we've seen the pictures.
Speaker 1: We've watched joy filled videos Zippy Lomax doesn't want to
Speaker 1: share with the public, at least not yet. We've read
Speaker 1: hundreds of emails, texts, and direct messages. We've spoken to
Speaker 1: their friends and families for hours on end. We also
Speaker 1: know this because this story has made us excavate the
Speaker 1: darkest part of our own minds and to address issues
Speaker 1: thoughts and behaviors we've neatly packed away as unfit or
Speaker 1: not for public consumption. The story of the Heart family
Speaker 1: was never going to end well. As one person close
Speaker 1: to them put it, I've always known, I've always felt something.
Speaker 1: It's unfortunate that it happened, But I don't think that
Speaker 1: there's anybody out there that could have stopped it from happening.
Speaker 1: They had no support system, They had no contingency plan.
Speaker 1: They distanced themselves from their families, kept friends at an
Speaker 1: arm's length, preferably on the other side of the screen,
Speaker 1: and closed their blinds unconcerned neighbors. When schools, social services,
Speaker 1: the medical community, and the festival community asked questions, they
Speaker 1: were able to use their white privilege to foster doubt
Speaker 1: and convince people they were normal parents. When anybody got
Speaker 1: too close, Jen and Sarah withdrew they canceled plans, or relocated,
Speaker 1: or moved the conversation to Facebook, where Jen could control
Speaker 1: the narrative. This was their choice. In the end, they
Speaker 1: were alone, and they made so any mistakes unforgivable mistakes.
Speaker 1: Jen and Sarah Hart were in awe of Marcus, Hannah Davante,
Speaker 1: Abigail Jeremiah and Sierra. They also, each in her own way,
Speaker 1: stripped their six adopted children of their agency, their dignity,
Speaker 1: and the futures they deserved. At best, you might call
Speaker 1: these women anti heroes. At worst, they were monsters. But
Speaker 1: neither is the whole story, because what they actually were
Speaker 1: is even harder to accept. They were both. If you
Speaker 1: suspect a child as being abused, call one eight hundred
Speaker 1: for a child that's one eight hundred numeral four a
Speaker 1: c h I L D, or visit child help dot
Speaker 1: org to find out how to report your concerns. For
Speaker 1: access to exclusive photos and videos and documents about the case,
Speaker 1: visit glamour dot com slash Broken Hearts. Have questions for
Speaker 1: us about this podcast, reach us on Twitter at Glamour
Speaker 1: mag or at Broken Hearts Pod. If you like what
Speaker 1: you heard, leave us a review. Broken Hearts is a
Speaker 1: joint production between Glamour and How Stuff Works, with new
Speaker 1: episodes dropping every Tuesday. Broken Hearts is co hosted and
Speaker 1: co written by Justine Harmon and Elizabeth Egan and edited
Speaker 1: by Wendy Nogal. Lauren Smiley is our field reporter. Samantha
Speaker 1: Barry is Glamour's editor in Chief. Ju Leshan and Dianna
Speaker 1: Buckman head up the business side of this partnership. Joyce Pandola,
Speaker 1: Pat Singer and Luke Zeleski are a research team. Jason
Speaker 1: Hope is executive producer on behalf of How Stuff Works,
Speaker 1: along with producers Julian Weller, ben Kiebrick and Josh Saine.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Jen Lance