Mending a Broken Trust
by Mark Sauer, Staff Writer
San Diego Union-Tribune, Sunday 12/17/95
>> 11 years after he sent her to prison, son brings mom home
They came looking for Satan at Richie Shapard's house. After a while,
he conceded that she was there. He pointed at his mother and they
took her away. Richie didn't know any better; he was 9 years old.
Donna Sue Hubbard was put on trial for unspeakable crimes: sex with
children; terrors involving headless bodies and dead babies.
Richie was the star witness. By the time he took the stand in front of
a Kern County jury, the investigators and prosecutors had questioned
him for months. He said what they wanted him to say.
The spell wasn't broken until Richie was in high school and living
with a foster family. Finally he realized what he had done. By then
his mother was seven years into her 100-year prison sentence.
All Richie had left was a shot at redemption.
He recanted his testimony. It was all a horrible mistake; Richie said.
A lie. An appellate court examined the case, deemed it the product of
over-zealous investigators and set Donna Hubbard free.
When she walked out of Valley State Prison near Chowchilla last
month, destitute, hobbled by a bad ankle, battling cancer, her son,
now 21, was waiting.
He brought her home to National City to live with his family, with his
wife and two kids, the youngest a baby girl named Donna.
After 11 years apart, it was a mother and child reunion - with lyrics
by Stephen King instead of Paul Simon.
"Looking back, I don't see how they could take a 9-year-old kid and
twist him and turn him to the point where he would end up convicting
his own mom," Shapard said. "All they did was tear up a family. We
might not have been much of one, but we were a family.
Before the McMartin Preschool case made international headlines,
long before Dale Akiki was accused of heinous crimes in San Diego,
authorities in Kern County set about unearthing what they believed
was one of the widest child-abuse conspiracies in American history.
Between 1982 and 1985, they identified eight child-sex rings operating
in the hardscrabble towns around Bakersfield. Fifty adults were
prosecuted; 26 were convicted. Most of the alleged victims were the
sons, daughters, nephews and nieces of the accused.
As would happen in scores of similar cases around the country in the
following decade - including McMartin and Akiki - the investigation
began with a report of conventional molestation.
A man named David Kelly befriended boys in the area, acting as a big
brother with their parents' approval. He took them on outings, to
Magic mountain and elsewhere, and sometimes kept them at his house
overnight.
Then, one 6-year-old told his mother that Kelly was fondling him. She
reported it to sheriff's detectives, who soon interviewed the other boys
-- including Richie Shapard.
Donna Hubbard said she was shocked to learn of the allegations, and
immediately agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. She testified
against Kelly at his preliminary hearing.
But investigators in the sheriff's sex-crimes task force thought more
was going on in the community.
At law-enforcement conferences, in child-abuse newsletters, they had
been hearing about a new threat: satanic cults whose wicked rituals
included members slaughtering babies and making children drink
blood and eat feces. They feared this evil had arrived in Bakersfield.
The boys were questioned again and again and again. The case
widened until the spotlight finally fell on Donna Hubbard.
Investigators convinced the youngsters - including Richie - that she
must have been involved, too. The once-eager prosecution witness now
found herself in jail, a disbelieving defendant.
"It was devastating," she said, her face awash in pain at the memory.
"I was in total shock. I cried and cried and couldn't stop. I remember
sitting on the bunk in my cell and banging my head against the wall.
"I couldn't understand what was happening to me. I asked God what I
could have done that was so terrible to be in the middle of this
nightmare. And I wondered why my son would lie about me and say
such things."
Even before her arrest, Hubbard's life had, by her own account, been
one long, hard struggle leavened only by brief stretches of good times.
Infuriating her own mother, Hubbard got pregnant at 16 and ran off
to marry her high school sweetheart. The baby died of pneumonia just
three days after birth. Hubbard and her husband divorced.
At age 21, she married again, and they had a baby boy, Richie. On the
child's first birthday, his father was found dead alongside a road in
the California desert, a victim, apparently, of either suicide or murder.
Hubbard's mother, who had wanted Richie to live with her rather than
his mother since the day he was born, took the boy one day while he
was at a baby sitter's house, touching off a custody battle that lasted
more than eight years.
In February 1984, Hubbard - by then remarried - finally regained
custody of Richie. But the boy didn't want to go. He liked living with
his grandparents. He had a motorbike. He had friends.
Thus it was a vulnerable and emotionally wrought child who found
himself facing sheriff's deputies eager to crack the satanic conspiracy.
"The way they did it was so smooth," Shapard said. "They used the
kids against each other. They would come to each of us and say, Richie
said this, or 'Billy said that happened,' or 'Chris is saying this. We
know it happened to you. Why don't you stop lying and admit it?'
Eventually the boys told investigators what they wanted to hear.
But neither of the other two youngsters involved in the case against
Hubbard could positively identify her or agree on critical details of
what supposedly had happened. The case hinged on 9-year-old Richie's
testimony.
"By the time of my mother's trial, I had been over my testimony so
many times (with investigators) that I didn't even think about what I
was saying. It's so easy to get kids to say what you want them to say."
Among the things Richie said was that his mother helped two men tie
him up, hang him from a three-eighths-inch wall hook used for coffee
mugs and abuse him. He talked of being drugged and shown pictures
of dead babies and headless cadavers.
"The stories got more bizarre as it went along," Hubbard said. "Some
of the words Richie used I had never heard him say before. He
testified that I 'orally copulated' him, and at the time I didn't even
know myself what that meant."
The jury believed it all.
"I didn't realize I was sending her to prison," Shapard said. "I was
only a little kid. And all I knew was that I was not going to have to
live with my mom and her husband anymore, that I could go back to
my grandparents' house and to my friends there."
>> Sober review
The atmosphere in Kern County in the early 1980s was crackling with
rumor, suspicion and fear. Investigators claimed that more than two
dozen babies had been sacrificed by a cult. Lakes were dragged and
yards were dug up.
But when the searches yielded nothing -- and when babies rumored to
be missing turned up at home alive and well - skepticism blossomed. A
Kern County grand jury asked the state Attorney General's office to
examine the sex-ring investigations.
A nine-month review determined that investigators, however
well-intentioned, were improperly trained and poorly supervised. The
report noted that 19 of the supposed victims had been interviewed a
total of 134 times.
The children, according to the agents, were in most instances simply
reciting allegations that had been drilled into them by the
investigators. Evidence corroborating the supposed abuse was virtually
nonexistent.
>> Too late
The report came too late for Donna Hubbard. By the time it was
published -- along with new state guidelines for interviewing children
in molestation cases - she had been in prison for more than a year.
But help came from elsewhere.
In 1986, after taking almost three years off from his criminal defense
practice, attorney Michael R. Snedeker was ready to get back to work.
He called the state Court of Appeal in Fresno seeking appellate Cases
involving indigent inmates.
"They sent me this truckload of cases from Bakersfield. I started
looking at the transcripts and I had never seen anything like it," said
Snedeker, who lives in Portland, Ore.
The Kern County cases - which had drawn triple-digit sentences for
more than a dozen defendants - had already been affirmed on appeal.
So it was left to Snedeker (and various co-counsel) to attack them
through California's demanding writ process.
Five years of work resulted in the reversal of six Kern County
convictions due to gross prosecutorial misconduct.
Four more defendants were set free because the trial court had failed
to allow scientific evidence favorable to the defense.
In all, more than half of the Bakersfield convictions have been
overturned; writs are pending for several others.
Three years ago, Mike Snedeker was working on his challenge to
Hubbard's case. On a hunch, he called Richie Shapard and was
delighted to learn the teenager was ready to recant.
"It had finally sunk in that my own mother was in prison and that I
had put her there," said Shapard.
Just as he was entering high school, the boy had moved in with a
foster family following the death of his grandmother. Social workers
decided his grandfather (who died three years ago) was not well
enough to care for Richie.
No one, certainly not his grandmother, encouraged Richie to contact
his mother in prison. Other than a time when his grandfather took
him to visit her when he was 10, Richie had not seen, spoken to nor
written his mother since she was first arrested.
In a court hearing in May 1993, Shapard recanted his earlier
testimony.
"I think I had known all along that nothing I had testified to
regarding my mother was true," he said.
It was his word as a responsible young adult against his own words as
a mixed-up child. And then he got an opportunity to meet with his
mother.
And words, again, were all he had.
"I got to speak with her for about 15 minutes in court," he said. "There
was so much to say, I couldn't get it all out."
They began corresponding. But in the years when he was finishing
high school and joining the Navy and getting married and having
children, Richie said he never had a chance to visit his mother in
prison.
>> Recipe for paranoia
In its decision last August overturning Hubbard's conviction, the 5th
District Court of Appeals in Fresno wrote this:
"We conclude that the interrogating techniques used in this case were
suggestive and coercive, and there is a substantial likelihood that the
children's resulting trial testimony was false and thus unreliable in
violation of her constitutional right to due process of law. '
The court told authorities in Kern County to give Donna Hubbard a
new trial or set her free.
They set her free.
But Ed Jagels, who was district attorney when Hubbard was
prosecuted and still is, said that doesn't mean he thinks she is
innocent.
"I give great weight to jury verdicts," Jagels said, claiming that he
doesn't remember many of the specifics of Hubbard's case, even though
his office fought in court last summer to keep her imprisoned.
He conceded, however, that "today, things might have been done
differently. Some mistakes might have been made."
Attorney Mike Snedeker said it has taken American society more than
10 years to recognize the odd alliances and perverse thinking that
brought about cases like McMartin, Akiki and those in Kern County.
"These cases resulted from a unique confluence of different forces," he
said.
"There was a widespread fear for the well-being of children resulting
from women leaving the home and joining the work force in large
numbers."
Snedeker believes that an unlikely alliance of preachers, police
detectives, prosecutors, psychotherapists, ardent feminists,
anti-pornography activists and child-protection workers resulted in,
first, a missing-children scare, and then rumors of a vast underground
satanic conspiracy that preyed on children.
In a newly published book that Snedeker wrote with Texas-based
journalist Debbie Nathan, "Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the
Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt" (Basic Books), these forces
are examined.
"The anomaly was that the police training standards in place then
were good: Don't ask leading questions; approach these types of cases
with an open mind; don't share information among witnesses,"
Snedeker said.
"The trouble was that some detectives in Bakersfield and elsewhere
didn't follow these guidelines. They listened instead to certain
child-saving advocates, supposed experts who had a number of
wrong-headed theories that turned out to be quite dangerous.
"These people believed that children could never lie. And so the only
mistake an investigator could make was not to be aggressive enough,
or caring enough, to pry open the window of disclosure. So they
questioned these kids repeatedly until they finally said what they
wanted to hear."
The more extreme investigators, child advocates and psychotherapists
- those who believed satanic rumors - spawned a nationwide hunt for
ritual abusers.
But 12 years of investigation by the FBI and law-enforcement officers
has produced no credible evidence of satanists abusing children
anywhere in this country.
"The (Kern County) district Attorney's view now is that things may
have gotten out of hand, but that they ultimately knew where to draw
the line and all the people who were convicted should have been,"
Snedeker said. "They have clung to that and they always will.
"Who wants to admit they got caught on a runaway train and ended
up incarcerating people who never did anything?"
>> Catching up
Donna Hubbard lost more than just time in prison.
Her husband divorced her and she hasn't seen the two children they
had together, a boy and a girl, teenagers now, for 11 years.
She fell off a bunk on her second day in prison, and her ankle, which
she says was never properly treated, is permanently crippled.
She was also diagnosed with colon cancer, which had been in
remission for several years until a new mass was found this fall.
One thing has kept the 42-year-old woman alive: "To be able to get out
one day and get home and see my children and grandchildren."
Through it all, she never pointed a finger at the boy who pointed at
her.
"I don't know if I could ever be strong enough to forgive a child who
had put me away for something I didn't do," Richie Shapard said. "She
has never blamed me."
So far, things are going well at the family's home in National City.
Shapard is in the Navy and has to go away at times for long stretches,
so Hubbard will help his wife, Sherry, take care of the two kids,
Skylar, 2, and baby Donna.
"We'll never get back all the lost Thanksgivings and Christmases,"
Shapard said before leaving recently for six months in the Western
Pacific.
"But at least we're finally together again. We have a lot of catching up
to do."
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