Speaker 1: Hi, all, we have some exciting news to share. Paramount
Speaker 1: Plus has turned Burden of Guilt into a docuseries. You
Speaker 1: will get to meet the people involved, You'll hear from
Speaker 1: the people who have never spoken before, and you get
Speaker 1: to see where the story took place. We are so
Speaker 1: proud and excited to share it with you. You can
Speaker 1: stream it right now on Paramount Plus.
Speaker 2: I listened intently to the podcast, and I thought about
Speaker 2: Matthew and Tracy Raquel, and I thought, had.
Speaker 3: Matthew been thrown out of his crib in nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 3: seventy five instead of nineteen seventy one, I would suspect
Speaker 3: that the response would have been different.
Speaker 1: I'm Nancy Glass that this is Burden of Guilt Bonus
Speaker 1: episode number one. Let's go back to nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy four, People magazine published its first issue
Speaker 1: with actress Mia Farrow on the cover. It was also
Speaker 1: the first time UPC codes appeared on packaged goods, and
Speaker 1: that summer, the Watergate scandal forced President Richard Nixon to resign,
Speaker 1: But a few months before that, he signed a groundbreaking
Speaker 1: piece of legislation, the Child's Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act
Speaker 1: known as KEPTA. KAPTA established a national definition of child
Speaker 1: abuse and provided federal funding to each state to prevent, identify,
Speaker 1: and treat abuse and neglect. So the question is why
Speaker 1: did it take so long for the federal government to
Speaker 1: put rules in place. I pose that question to doctor
Speaker 1: Mihail rob a physician and professor in public policy and
Speaker 1: health at the University of Rochester.
Speaker 4: I think a lot of people pinpoint the interests in
Speaker 4: the history of child abuse to the nineteen sixty two
Speaker 4: article by c. Henry Kemp, who described a syndrome what
Speaker 4: you call the battered child syndrome, and this described a
Speaker 4: few cases of children who were intentionally hurt by the
Speaker 4: very people who were supposed to care for them, and
Speaker 4: this helped guide policy.
Speaker 1: Doctor Kemp's revolutionary study was published in the Journal of
Speaker 1: the American Medical Association. It shed light on something that
Speaker 1: had never really been in the public discussion before, child abuse.
Speaker 1: His research showed how parents would switch doctors, falsify medical histories,
Speaker 1: and express concern for injuries that they themselves had caused.
Speaker 1: X rays confirmed what no one wanted to believe. Parents
Speaker 1: and foster parents were beating, in some sometimes killing their
Speaker 1: own children, often under the age of three.
Speaker 4: And these stories were heartbreaking and kind of shocking the
Speaker 4: idea that people were supposed to care for kids it
Speaker 4: might hurt them.
Speaker 1: After doctor Camp's nineteen sixty two study recognized child's abuse
Speaker 1: as a medical condition, that's when change started to happen.
Speaker 4: By the end of the sixties, every single state had
Speaker 4: passed a mandatory reporting law, which did not exist generally
Speaker 4: prior to that. Georgia, for instance, passed its first line
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty five, and state's contraveling together who should be reporting,
Speaker 4: what situation should be reported.
Speaker 1: The state of Georgia, where Matthew Golder and his family lived,
Speaker 1: required doctors, nurses, and public welfare workers to report suspected
Speaker 1: abuse of children under the age of twelve to the
Speaker 1: police or any child welfare agency. But in Matthew's case,
Speaker 1: no one really questioned the story that he was found comatose.
Speaker 4: Back in nineteen seventy one. Yeah, that somebody might think
Speaker 4: that a two year old could throw a baby with
Speaker 4: enough force to cause significant harm is certainly a misunderstanding
Speaker 4: of most things that are known n pdxent trauma, but
Speaker 4: also important to remember that in nineteen seventies, we didn't
Speaker 4: have specialists in child abuse who were limited in the
Speaker 4: testing that was done, and perhaps some embrace of this
Speaker 4: lack of knowledge, because sometimes not knowing fields better than
Speaker 4: really looking at what is terribly disturbing and seeing that
Speaker 4: as it is.
Speaker 1: Jan Barry Sandlin ultimately was responsible for beating little Matthew
Speaker 1: and causing his death. I'm going to play some testimony
Speaker 1: that you didn't hear in the podcast earlier. It comes
Speaker 1: from doctor Joe Burton, who became the medical examiner in
Speaker 1: the county a few years after Matthew died. During Jan's
Speaker 1: second trial in nineteen ninety eight, doctor Burton was asked
Speaker 1: about his training and experience identifying child's abuse back in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 5: One first let me add that I had no exposure
Speaker 5: that I even recall in medical school about specifically child abuse.
Speaker 5: But I did when I was doing my fellowship in
Speaker 5: forensic pathology, because we were asked as pathologists to decide
Speaker 5: how people were injured children, adults, old people. But it
Speaker 5: was very minimal back at that time. So in the
Speaker 5: last two decades, a tremendous amount of information has been
Speaker 5: brought forward about all types of child abuse, about radiographic
Speaker 5: changes that are present in child abuse cases, about interpreting
Speaker 5: patterns of injury, and mainly about making health care providers
Speaker 5: more aware of cases where child abuse may exist.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about something else that absolutely floored me. The
Speaker 1: Dacab County corner listed Matthew's death as accidental. But here's
Speaker 1: the thing. That corner in nineteen seventy one had absolutely
Speaker 1: no medical training zero. Here's more testimony, doctor Burton.
Speaker 5: Every county in the state of Georgia has an elected coroner,
Speaker 5: and in nineteen seventy one, the coroner had to be
Speaker 5: eighteen years of age and could never have been convicted
Speaker 5: of a felony. You could be the coroner if you
Speaker 5: ran and were elected, and the coroner had the power
Speaker 5: at least to determine what type of investigation might be
Speaker 5: done in a death. The coroner could write on the
Speaker 5: desertific it and still can a cause of death a
Speaker 5: manner of death in this case. The Cab County in
Speaker 5: the early nineteen seventies utilized the fulling county medical examiners
Speaker 5: doctors just to do autopsies, so there was no real
Speaker 5: investigation of death.
Speaker 1: Doctor Burton was then asked if he was surprised Matthew's
Speaker 1: death was listed as accidental.
Speaker 5: It's unfortunate but not surprising. There was no coordinated investigation
Speaker 5: of death in the cab County at that time. It
Speaker 5: was disjointed.
Speaker 1: Unfortunate, but not surprising. That's tough to hear, but that's
Speaker 1: where things were at in nineteen seventy one and really
Speaker 1: question what happened because no one was trained to ask,
Speaker 1: and there was no coordinated effort to ask.
Speaker 5: There was no correlation of data between the pathologists, police,
Speaker 5: the corner physicians in the hospitals. It was a very
Speaker 5: disorganized way to try to arrive at sometimes complex answers
Speaker 5: about what happened to someone.
Speaker 1: It's hard to blame the system for failing Matthew because
Speaker 1: there really wasn't a system in place in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: one to report child's abuse.
Speaker 4: Nineteen seventies was a different time. You know, children would
Speaker 4: play on supervised, they wouldn't have a car seat. You
Speaker 4: had paint on the walls that had let in it.
Speaker 4: You know, the doctors would be smoking on rounds. Some
Speaker 4: of them might be smoking in the operating room. There
Speaker 4: was a lot less attention to safety and the impact
Speaker 4: on children for some of the choices that adults would make.
Speaker 1: As doctor Roz said, it was a different time back then,
Speaker 1: especially when it came to reporting and identifying wild abuse.
Speaker 4: Back in nineteen seventy one, there was only one state
Speaker 4: that had a hotline for reporting child abuse, and that
Speaker 4: was Florida.
Speaker 1: Florida was also the first date to air public service
Speaker 1: announcements on the radio.
Speaker 4: It's kind of similar to today. You know, if you
Speaker 4: see something saying something I really encouraging people that just
Speaker 4: by making this phone call they could help families immensely.
Speaker 1: So that left families to handle allegations of abuse, and
Speaker 1: in this case, the family was far from functional.
Speaker 6: I think back in that time, I'm sure that people
Speaker 6: were suspicious, but again, what do you do about it?
Speaker 1: Colleen ghibli Reid is an assistant professor at the Camp
Speaker 1: Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect.
Speaker 6: I imagine there was suspicion that something was going on
Speaker 6: by professionals involved with this family from the family members.
Speaker 6: That was kind of insinuated that family members kind of
Speaker 6: thought that something's just not right here. I think that
Speaker 6: back then people may have had suspicions but they're like, well,
Speaker 6: what do I do?
Speaker 4: Who do I call?
Speaker 6: What do I do? How do I get involved? Because
Speaker 6: there wasn't the aware of this, There wasn't the programs,
Speaker 6: there wasn't the campaigns. That just wasn't the case back then.
Speaker 1: And that leads us back to what her colleague Lisa
Speaker 1: merkel Hogen said at the beginning of this episode.
Speaker 2: I listened intently to the podcast, and I thought about
Speaker 2: Matthew and Tracy Raquel, and I thought, had Matthew been
Speaker 2: thrown out of his crib in nineteen seventy four, seventy
Speaker 2: five instead of nineteen seventy one, I would suspect that
Speaker 2: the response would have been different because there at least
Speaker 2: would have been an agency with a multidisciplinary team that
Speaker 2: would pull in the.
Speaker 7: Coroner and the medical doctors and social workers and others
Speaker 7: to really take a deep dive into the injury and
Speaker 7: then ultimately his death.
Speaker 1: If you remember, doctors found a third degree burn on
Speaker 1: Matthew's little foot, he had bruising on his body, and
Speaker 1: even what appeared to be an old fracture to his.
Speaker 7: Clavical Now we have child abuse fatality reviews in all
Speaker 7: states as well, so when severe harm and death occurs.
Speaker 7: There is a multidisciplinary team of professionals in every state
Speaker 7: slash community that do a deep dive into what happened,
Speaker 7: and I suspect they would have found the burns and
Speaker 7: they would have used radiology to see the severe harm
Speaker 7: and the shattered bones that that young four month old
Speaker 7: cherub had.
Speaker 1: If little Matthew Golder had been killed a couple of
Speaker 1: years later, the entire outcome of this story might have
Speaker 1: been different. That is a horrible, shocking and mind numbing thought.
Speaker 1: Barry Salmon might have been investigated and prosecuted well before
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety eight, and Tracy Raquel wouldn't have lived with
Speaker 1: a burden of guilt that she might have been responsible
Speaker 1: for her brother's death. Stay tuned for Burden of Guilt
Speaker 1: at documentary coming in twenty twenty four and airing only
Speaker 1: on Paramount Plus. If you would like to reach out
Speaker 1: to the Burden of Guilt team, email us at Burden
Speaker 1: off Guiltpod at gmail dot com. That's Burden of Guilt
Speaker 1: Pod at gmail dot com. If you or someone you
Speaker 1: know is worried about maltreatment or suspect that a child
Speaker 1: is being abused or neglected. Call the Child Help National
Speaker 1: Child Abuse Hotline. You can call or text one eight
Speaker 1: hundred for a child that's one eight hundred four two
Speaker 1: two four four five three. One way to show support
Speaker 1: is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts and
Speaker 1: don't forget to rate and review Burden of Guilt. Five
Speaker 1: star reviews go a long way, A big thank you
Speaker 1: for listening, and also be sure to check us out
Speaker 1: and follow us on Instagram at Glass Podcasts. Burden of
Speaker 1: Guilt is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of
Speaker 1: Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show
Speaker 1: is hosted and executive produced by me Nancy Glass. This
Speaker 1: episode was written and produced by Todd Gantz. Our iHeart
Speaker 1: team is Ali Perry and Jessica Crincheck. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: Tracy Riquel Burns and her husband Bart. Audio editing and
Speaker 1: mixing by Matt Delvecchio and Nico Aruca. Burden of Guilt's
Speaker 1: theme composed by Oliver Baines. Music library provided by my
Speaker 1: Music And For more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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