Thursday, July 22, 1999
Rape conviction haunts family
Girl says her words were misinterpreted
BY DAN HORN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Charlene and Fred Dever, with Kristen, in 1987 photo.
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When Fred Dever asks a parole board to free him today, his strongest supporter will be the stepdaughter authorities say he raped 12 years ago.
The girl, who was 4 years old at the time, says her stepfather has spent nearly a decade in prison because investigators twisted her words to get a conviction.
To make her point, she has signed her name to pamphlets urging his freedom, put her photo on a Web site dedicated to his release and written letters to prison and parole officials.
Kristen at 15
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“I remember everything,” says Kristen Dever, now 16. “My daddy didn't touch me.”
While conflicting statements in rape cases are not new — a Cincinnati man was freed just last week for that reason — Kristen's persistent defense of her stepfather has made the Dever case one of the most controversial in Hamilton County.
To Mr. Dever's family, including Kristen and her mother, the case shows how zealous authorities can misconstrue the words of a child to convict an innocent man.
To police and prosecutors, it shows how abusers can manipulate their victims long after the crime.
No matter who is right, the family's odyssey is a case study in why rape charges involving children cause such anguish and uncertainty.
With no physical evidence and no eyewitnesses, as in the Dever case, the outcome hinges on how adults interpret the words of a child.
“These are always difficult cases,” says Judge Robert Gorman, who presided over Mr. Dever's trial. “And this was a very unusual case.”
It began with a phone call late Oct. 21, 1987, to the Mariemont police department.
Diane Potter, who lived in the apartment above the Devers, told police shortly after 10 p.m. she had overheard a disturbing conversation while listening through the heating ducts.
“I heard Fred groaning,” Ms. Potter testified. “I heard him tell Kristen to count to 600 and I heard her counting, and then he said, "Oh, that feels so good.' And she said, "Oh, does that feel good, Daddy?'”
Neither Mr. Dever nor Kristen disputes that such a conversation took place. But they say it had nothing to do with sex.
“Bits and pieces of what she thinks she heard, she really heard,” Mr. Dever says. “But it's an incorrect situation ... She's got these sinister thoughts.”
Mr. Dever, a furniture mover before his arrest, was home with his adopted daughter that night because his wife, Charlene, was working a late shift as a waitress.
He says he was taking a bubble bath in the tub to ease his bad back when Kristen walked in. To get some peace and quiet, he says, he asked the girl to go into the hall and count to 600.
She kept returning to the bathroom, and he says he agreed to let her stay.
At some point, Mr. Dever says, Kristen walked over to the tub. “Then she grabs a sponge and says she wants to help out,” Mr. Dever says.
While washing his back with the sponge, he says, Kristen asked “does this feel good Daddy?”
Twelve years later, Kristen describes the night in similar detail.
She remembers the video they watched before Mr. Dever took his bath. When the World Series game came on, Kristen says she got bored and went into the bathroom.
“He told me to leave,” she says. “He said go count to 60 20 times, but I didn't know how to count, so I kept going in.”
She says she picked up a sponge, washed his back and asked “if it felt good.”
At age 4, however, she says she couldn't express herself well enough to explain what really happened.
“I was so confused,” she says now. “I must've misunderstood.”
The next day Mariemont Police Officer Mike Wilson approached Mrs. Dever at work.
When Mr. Wilson explained the abuse allegation, she was stunned, butshe went home, picked up Kristen and drove to the police station.
“I asked if her daddy had ever touched her and she said, "No way, Daddy never touched me nowhere,'” Mrs. Dever says.
She says Mr. Wilson warned her that she could lose custody if she did not cooperate. Mr. Wilson has retired and could not be reached for comment.
She agreed to take Kristen to the Department of Human Services, where Mr. Wilson and social worker Beth Casbeer videotaped a 40-minute interview.
Ms. Casbeer showed her two anatomically correct dolls and asked if Kristen ever touched “a daddy's private part,” the tape shows. The child shook her head no.
“Has someone had you touch their private part that looked like that?” Ms. Casbeer asked, pointing to the doll.
“I don't know,” Kristen said.
“It's OK to tell if that's happened,” the social worker said a few minutes later. “You didn't do anything wrong.”
“Where's my daddy going to go if I tell you?” Kristen asked.
“If your daddy has to go anywhere, and if your daddy has asked you to touch him, then we want him to get some help,” Ms. Casbeer answered.
Later, when asked again if someone had asked her to touch their private part, Kristen nodded yes.
“Who?” Ms. Casbeer asked.
“My daddy.”
In a later, untaped interview, a doctor at Children's Hospital said Kristen told her that her stepfather put his hands “on my pee-pee” and put “his pee-pee in my mouth.”
Prosecutors describe the statement as powerful and say it helped clinch the case that led to a prison sentence of 10 to 20 years.
Her mother says she suspects the words attributed to the girl were suggested to her because Kristen had never before described her body in that way.
There's no dispute by either side that interview techniques have changed since the 1980s, when cases of child sexual abuse were first getting national attention.
“There's more emphasis now on seeking from the child a narrative,” says Mark Everson, director of the Program on Childhood Trauma and Maltreatment at the University of North Carolina.
Although he would not comment specifically on the Dever case, Mr. Everson says use of dolls and specific “yes and no” questions is less common today than it was a decade ago.
The reason, he says, is that children — especially those between 3 and 5 years old — are vulnerable to suggestion because of their limited understanding of language and their desire to please adults.
Kristen says that's what happened to her. She says she's not really changing her story, only explaining it more accurately than she could 12 years ago.
She says her comments about touching was a misunderstood reference to her stepfather tickling her, bathing her and playing with her on other occasions.
But Prosecutor Mike Allen says the girl's statements prove Kristen had knowledge of sex acts.
“I have no idea why she's changing her story,” Mr. Allen says. “But her statement at the time was as clear as a 4-year-old's statement can be.”
In a written statement, Ms. Casbeer says recantation is not unusual when a child's report of abuse meets with negative reactions from her family.
“When the perpetrator is found guilty and sent to prison, the child feels guilty for breaking up the family,” Ms. Casbeer says.
John Meyers, a California law professor, says investigators sometimes fall into the same trap.
He says it's possible to misinterpret comments when a child is struggling to explain a benign event in the context of a rape investigation.
“It's a real delicate balance,” says Mr. Meyers. “It's an art.”
He also says recanted statements by an older child should not be ignored. But after so many years, he says, it may be too late to decipher Kristen's many statements.
“My guess is, we'll never know where the truth lies,” Mr. Meyers says.
Judge Gorman, now an appeals court judge, says he remembers feeling confident in the verdict at the time. “Nothing's really changed since the trial,” he says. “The evidence was sufficient for a jury to draw that conclusion.”
Mr. Dever says that's not true.
Just as important, he says, was the judge's decision to allow the doctor to tell jurors about her interview with Kristen. That issue went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered an appeals court to reconsider whether the doctor should have been allowed to testify.
Although the appeals court ruled the decision was a mistake and reversed Mr. Dever's conviction, the Ohio Supreme Court later reinstated it.
Mr. Dever says the state court's ruling proves “the system is skewed to prove an allegation.”
He doesn't know what he'll tell the parole board today. Last time, he says, board members told him he was still in denial because he would not admit his crime.
“I'm not willing to admit my guilt for something that never happened,” he says.
Family members are not permitted to address the board, but several have written letters in his behalf.
After he went to prison, he and his wife agreed to divorce because, as she put it, “there was no future. But I'm still standing by him,” she says. “He should have his life back.”
Now living in Florida with Kristen, she says the case continues to torment her daughter.
“No one will listen to me or Kristen. They destroyed us. They destroyed a family.”
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