Broken Harts, Episode 8: Full Transcript

Liz Egan: On November 8, 2018, our field reporter, Lauren Smiley, made the four-hour drive from San Francisco to the Mendocino cliff where the Hart family died.

Lauren Smiley: I'm standing here at the memorial on the edge of the bluff. There is a wooden cross, and on it is "We honor and remember you. Love from your adopted brothers and sisters from around the world. Adoptees deserve better. #adopteevoices." There's six stuffed animals lined up in a row: a lion, a bear, a monkey, another bear, a cow, and a kind of a bedraggled teddy bear there. In front of them are stones that have the kids’ names on them: Devonte, Hannah, Abigail, Markis, Sierra, Jeremiah. It's right on the edge of the bluff here. There's just the sheer straight drop.

Liz Egan: In videos she captured that day, you can see the makeshift memorial she describes. It's a colorful pile of rock formations, fresh flowers, and teddy bears covered in a thin coating of dust. There's a wooden sculpture of a heart with wings bearing the handwritten inscription "Please take care of yourselves and others. Lives are not for the taking. The teal green sea churns below."

Justine Harman: As we sit down to record this final episode, it has been eight months since the crash. In that stretch of time I, Justine, have found out that I'm expecting my second child, and I'm now weeks away from giving birth. It's been surreal to watch the rough sketch of a human life take form while also contemplating the lives of six children who will never get to grow up.

Liz Egan: Some days we feel like we know Markis, Hannah, Devonte, Abigail, Jeremiah, and Sierra. That in telling this story, we are honoring them. At other times we feel dirty, as if recounting the gruesome but incomplete details of their short lives makes us grave robbers. For Lauren, who has spent countless hours reaching out to the people closest to the Hart family and has endured her share of slammed doors, it's been an especially strange journey.

Lauren Smiley: As I was coming up here, I felt like this sense of dread as I got closer and closer to this area. It's been so many months that I've been looking into every last lead that I could find, calling so many people, some who talked to me, many who wouldn't, and requesting all these documents. It's been so much for six months now. To actually come to the spot where the story both began for me and ended for them, I just had so much anxiety about it, honestly, and sort of a feeling of dread about it.

Liz Egan: In April 2019, a full year after the crash, a formal coroner's inquest will be released to the public.

Justine Harman: At that time a jury will convene to decide whether this was a murder by one person, a conspiracy to murder by one than one person, or an accident. And then in so many ways it will be over. From Glamour and HowStuffWorks, this is Broken Harts. I'm Justine Harman.

Liz Egan: And I'm Liz Egan. There are a lot of people whose voices we tried, but were ultimately unable to include in this podcast. In November 2018, over the course of three consecutive days and after several months of outreach, Lauren spoke with Sarah's father, Alan Gengler. He decided not to go on the record. We also reached out to Sarah's brother, Matt, but did not hear back. Jen's parents and her brother, Christopher Hart, declined to speak to us. Her other brother, Jonathan, says his older sister has not been in his life since 2010 and wanted only to make a few things clear.

Justine Harman: In an email to Lauren on September 25, 2018, Jonathan wrote, "One thing I would like to clarify for myself and my family is that Jen was not ousted from the family for being gay. I have been openly gay even in high school, and it never affected me living in my mom or dad's home." He continued. "If anything, all this time my family did nothing but try to help and understand Jen, not work against her."

Liz Egan: Two months after he sent that email, Jonathan spoke with us over the phone. He doesn't want his voice on this podcast, but he gave us permission to relay the following. "Nobody has done anything to warrant this," he says. “All I have seen my whole life is her getting my parents, grandparents, anybody, jumping through hoops to give her what she wanted. And that's all I can say. People loved her. They really stuck up for her. It really hurts me when this stuff gets reflected on my parents. That really hurts my feelings. My mother is wonderful, and she did put up with a lot from my sister. We all did." Sources close to the Genglers told us, "The family had not been in touch with Sarah for a long time, but it was Sarah's choice to cut off contact." "The distance," one says, "had nothing to do with them rejecting Sarah's sexuality."

Justine Harman: Back in August 2018, Lauren connected with Hannah Scott, a professor of criminology at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, who has spent a lot of time studying the psyches of women who commit heinous crimes. In addition to her work as a criminologist-victimologist, Scott is the author of one of the only known studies on female family annihilators, or women who kill their children and/or their spouses. She said she wasn't surprised to hear that Jen and Sarah fiercely controlled who had access to them and the kids. She was, however, surprised by the way Jen used Facebook to maintain a facade of familial bliss.

Hannah Scott: In the case of an abusive person, it is clear that either one or both of the parents in this family were abusive. The outward impression management using social media is kind of an interesting twist, although most people now are using social media. But nobody, I think, has really looked at the abusive partner and how they negotiate their identity. We assume that people who are abusive are abusive both in their private lives, but also in their public lives. And we know this now not to be true. Many people who are abusive in their private lives are well respected in their communities and not considered abusive. This is problematic for us. It's inconsistent, and I think as human beings we like to see consistency. If you want to continue to abuse and have access to victims in your family, these acts of private violence have to be managed, because if you do anything outside the house that might alert people to the fact that you're abusive, you may lose your ability to continue to abuse, or in this case I suspect lose the ability to raise the children in a way that they felt was appropriate and not be objected by other people. When we say it that way, certainly we can understand, all parents understand, that they should raise their children in a way that they feel is appropriate.

Liz Egan: Scott says that female annihilators are a vastly understudied demographic. A lot of that has to do with the fact that we as a culture have a hard time believing that a woman or women would kill their own children.

Hannah Scott: As we started to go through the literature, we had discussions, and we pursued this idea, as women in criminology, which is largely a male-dominated discipline with a lot of male focus and patriarchal values, we started to understand that there was something that was missing. One of my first writings was looking at the female serial killer, which at the time when I started my writing way back in the day, didn't exist according to many people. And so I spent a lot of time challenging those values and saying, "Yes, they do exist." And not only do they exist, they exist in large numbers. The monikers that we tend to give to women both in serial and mass homicide—giggling grannies, things like that, murdering moms. These are very sexist when we compare it to the names that the men are given. We tend to make light of the fact that women may engage in these criminal acts. As a result, often we don't take them seriously.

Justine Harman: We don't take them seriously. It's something to keep in mind when considering that cryptic note from a Minnesota child-welfare worker after the first incident of abuse was reported back in 2008. "The problem," it said, "is these women look normal." Though Hannah Scott has never seen a case quite like this one, the continued abuse across several states makes it unique, and there has been little research on same-sex domestic violence. She has seen incidents of women who killed their families with what might sound like a counterintuitive motivator: love.

Hannah Scott: The woman and her children are often separated and living in a separate dwelling or have left the spouse and are living in another place even temporarily. They kill their children because they couldn't see them being raised by the opposite parent, for example, or they couldn't see themselves actually sustaining these children now that they were alone.

Liz Egan: We haven't found convincing evidence that Jen and Sarah were headed toward a breakup or, as we explored in the previous episode, that there was some catastrophic future event on the horizon. But their relationship had been strained. Over the years they had spent months of time apart. Jen would often travel with some or all of the children while Sarah would stay home to work. Sarah was the sole breadwinner, and money was tight. Jen once emailed a friend that she and Sarah expressed themselves in different ways. She wrote, "For quite some time, I have felt very underappreciated and taken for granted in our relationship and at times unloved. While I know deep in my heart how much she loves me, she is just horrible about showing it. We are complete opposites in this regard." The email continued, "I never miss an opportunity to tell someone how much they mean to me and that I love them. As a mom I have felt that I have been raising the kids on my own. She admits this too. While she loves them with all her heart, she has not been fully present with me or the kids." The last known footage of Sarah Hart is of her leaving Kohl's at 5:24 P.M. on March 23, 2018. Three days before the crash and a mere seven minutes before Child Protective Services arrived at their home. She's wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt pulled over her head and is clutching her cell phone. It's impossible to know what was going through her head, or if she knew what was about to happen. It's impossible to know what she and Jen did, or didn't, talk about over the course of the next few days, but Hannah Scott says, "The unimaginable might have seemed, well, logical to these women."

Hannah Scott: People can be overwhelmed without necessarily experiencing mental illness. In some cases, homicide, even though we feel uncomfortable saying it, can be a very rational choice to some people, given their life circumstances.

Justine Harman: When Lauren met with Mendocino County sheriff Tom Allman, he reiterated what he said many times before. He is no longer viewing this incident as an accident. He holds out very little hope that Devonte will be found alive.

Tom Allman: Do I have any hope? I guess I have hope. Do I have any realistic hope? No, I don't. The fact that there's been no indication that he's alive should cause someone to say, "Well, he was in the car." But I have no problem of someone bringing Devonte into our office today and saying, "Listen, Devonte's alive and well, and he was just hiding out." I'd give the kid a big hug and say, "We've never met. It's very nice to meet you."

Justine Harman: Sheriff Allman and his team have spent the past eight months trolling the coastline for the missing children, examining the evidence they do have, and preparing for the upcoming coroner’s inquest. Allman says an inquest of this nature hasn't happened in Mendocino County in over 50 years, but according to the law, its function is to "inquire into and determine the circumstances, manner, and cause of all violent, sudden, or unusual deaths."

Liz Egan: Over the course of two days in April, a jury of 12 citizens will rule what the cause of death was for all the bodies found at the crash site. Sheriff Allman says he hopes to live-stream the event in order to put the questions to bed once and for all.

Tom Allman: We have a job to do. It's to find out the truth of what happened. We have gathered a team of experts that will be making sure that what we're going to say at the inquest is 100 percent true and accurate. A coroner's inquest is going to, in my opinion, give evidence that will shock the consciousness of people who are following this case.

Lauren Smiley: Can you give—

Tom Allman: Not a bit. I'm not going to talk about any of that. I'm going to tell you that we're not on a fast timeline to throw this information out right now, but this will be a water cooler conversation throughout our nation.

Justine Harman: For those who were critical of how long it took to positively ID Hannah's remains, Allman says DNA simply isn't something you can match overnight.

Tom Allman: I think that TV has presented a false narrative to viewers regarding how easy it is to get DNA, compared to fingerprints. Fingerprints are really good, if you know which fingerprint to compare it to. I've taken, I'm going to guess, hundreds if not thousands of burglary reports where fingerprints were obtained, but if you don't have anybody to compare them to…OK, so you have fingerprints. DNA is the same way. If we have DNA from a foot and we say, "All right, gosh. We have the DNA results," if we don't have anybody to compare them to, then it's the same as a fingerprint. These children were adopted, and we didn't have a lot of information, so it wasn't an easy task to do.

__Liz Egan:__He says the biggest hold up in this case has been trying to get information from the adoption agencies.

Tom Allman: The fact that law enforcement has been stymied at finding out information regarding the adoption records and the accountability of foster parents should concern a lot of people. Whether or not this was a crime or an accident, when it happened, I don't think law enforcement should have been told no by adoption organizations that say, "We're not going to give you that information." Prior to this case happening, I had no idea the amount of confidentiality that adoption agencies focused on. While I don't want to disrupt somebody's life with adoption records, when a death happens, I would have to ask myself, "Why would an adoption agency, or a government agency, be so determined to keep information private?"

Justine Harman: So how much of what happened to the Hart children can be put on the agencies tasked with making sure our youngest citizens are being looked after properly? Dr. Doris Houston, the interim director at the Illinois State University School of Social Work, points to the lack of interstate communication between all parties. She also singles out the state of Texas, from where all six children were adopted, as keen to terminate parental rights and collect placement fees from the government. On average, she says, a family like the Harts could stand to collect $1,200 a month for each adopted child. We have found that over the past decade, the Harts have taken roughly $270,000 from the state of Texas.

Doris Houston: These are taxpayer dollars that are being spent to support children. Why can't we then expect the families would be expected to at least do an annual check-in, maybe go for the first few years, or go to some of the support groups? I was surprised to find that Texas essentially has a standard of automatically preparing the paperwork for adoptions. It makes it difficult to envision the effort is really being put into family reunification if from day one, that is the policy, to begin to prepare children for adoption.

Liz Egan: Doctor Houston says, "Once an interstate adoption is completed, the state of origin is no longer responsible for an adopted child's well-being."

Doris Houston: With Texas allowing the children to be adopted in Minnesota, they essentially are absolved of all of those responsibilities. It now rests at the hands of the receiving state. Frankly, there really has not been movement in any real meaningful way, to do a national adoption protection registry, where information is shared.

Justine Harman: Hannah Scott, the author of the study on annihilators, calls these interstate disconnects “linkage blindness,” a term coined by criminal justice expert Steven Egger.

Hannah Scott: We still do have trouble in the United States finding individuals who both move frequently and kill or commit serial crime. Sometimes cities don’t even talk to each other, but states certainly have more difficulty talking to each other. Each state has its own set of laws. We know that there were eight people who reported to the police that there was an abusive situation. This happened over 10 years in three states. Once the family became detected, they moved to another state. This stopped the process of investigation in one state and allowed them a reprieve to some degree in the new state that they had moved to. Because the states cannot talk to each other, cases of child abuse like this can go undetected as long as the family continues to stay mobile.

Justine Harman: April Dinwoodie, the former executive of the Donaldson Adoption Institute, agrees that this story should serve as a nationwide wake-up call.

April Dinwoodie: I was at a camp for families who adopted a transracial [child], and I talked about that case being a cautionary tale of how broken the system can be and how important it is for us all to be taking care of ourselves and doing well, and getting the help that we need, and getting the help for ourselves and our children. I talked about it at another gathering of professionals. Some were transracially adoptive parents. There's a lot of head banging and a lot of tears, and people are feeling it, but I hope that this translates into some more action and more eyes wide open with some of the real challenges that the system faces, and quite frankly that people face. Look, I didn't know the Harts. I don't know what drove these women to do, to adopt, to whatever, but there was something clearly wrong there too. Even those people who do such things need to have some kind of care and support as well. They just don't get erased either. There's mental health issues in all of this that need to be addressed that clearly were not.

Lauren Smiley: I've just found when I've talked to friends, and mothers in particular, everyone has something to say about this case. Everyone honestly reads something about their own life into this case and feels guilty about that. Even, you know, a mom. She has a biological child and she was just like, "Yeah, that case just made me look in the mirror and realize how much utter power you have over young children and how guileless they are. You're all they have in those early years, and it made me almost scared of my own power that I have, being a parent.”

April Dinwoodie: There's so many layers.

Justine Harman: The power of being a parent is something we rarely talk about in our daily lives, but it's something most of us with kids understand in our bones. Sometimes, when I tuck my two-year-old in at night—he recently graduated from sleeping in a crib to a twin size—he gives me this look like, "I'm going get out of this bed." And I give him another one that says, "Don't you dare." And he doesn't. He doesn't dare. What a strange influence to have over another person, but what if I pushed it a little further? What if I told him that something bad would happen to him if he got out of bed? What if, and this is honestly hard for me to say out loud, what if I held him down until it hurt? How long would he stay in there? Would he love me any less, or would his devotion to me become stronger, more desperate? Would he wonder what he could do to make it go back to the way it used to be, back to when I would lie in his little bed without a blanket and cuddle him until he fell asleep, even though I'm impossibly pregnant, and it hurts my back? How much would his mind go into overdrive trying to get that feeling and that dynamic back? How would he process that nearly imperceptible shift years later?

Liz Egan: As Justine has been transitioning her sweet flaxen-haired two-year-old from a crib to a twin bed, I've spent the past eight months wrapping my mind around the fact that I'm moving closer to the opposite end of the parenting spectrum. My oldest is almost 18, almost Markis' age. If all goes according to plan, she'll be attending college next fall. I think she's ready. Whether or not I'm ready is another story. But I'll say goodbye to her knowing that my husband and I did our best to give her the tools she'll need to be successful on her own. She has a strong moral compass. She knows what she deserves and how to ask for it. She knows more about the Battle of Gettysburg than I ever did. And she also knows not to stick a fork in a toaster. I share this because I suspect Jen and/or Sarah knew their kids weren't as well equipped for adulthood as they should have been. At the very least, they had hardly any experience interacting with other people their own age. This must have scared Jen and Sarah, even though they were the ones who put their kids in this position in the first place. Who held them down in a way similar to the one Justine just described. I think the best thing you can do is give your kids firm ground under their feet, and the Hart kids never really had that, not as babies, not when they were adopted, not even in the moments before they died.

Justine Harman: You'll remember that back in May, when we first started reporting this story, Lauren went to Woodland, Washington. There the Harts' neighbor Dana DeKalb took her to see where the family lived. Together Lauren and Dana waded through the knee-high prairie grass to get to the blue split-level home next door.

Lauren Smiley: When I was up at Dana's house in Washington, I asked the DeKalbs if we could walk over to the Hart property. They agreed, and we walked down the gravel driveway and then cut into the knee-high grass up to the light-blue house. A FedEx delivery notice was still stuck on the front door, dated a month after the crash. Dana and I peeked through slits in the blinds. The living room was sparse, except for a few chairs. Inside the garage were a Christmas tree box, an electric piano, some Star Wars puzzles. In some ways, I felt like I was walking onto the set of a play after the production had wrapped. All around I recognized things from Jen's Facebook posts. There, in a shed, was the lawnmower Devonte had ridden with a stalk of grass in his mouth, like the image of Farmer Joe. There was the temporary greenhouse, now in a heap, that Abigail had stood in front of, smiling with a chicken on her shoulder. I spotted an ornament hanging from a tree and walked over to look at it. It was a ceramic Volkswagen hippie van with flower-power details, which was so eerily spot-on to the image the family projected and the way they died. I wondered if some prankster had hung it, or if the Harts had. I turned it over and saw the price tag was still stuck on the bottom: “Ross Dress for Less, $7.99.” Walking around the huge yard, I couldn't help but question my role as a reporter in all of this. Certainly, I was trespassing on both the property and in this family's story. I hope that it was right to be here, looking for any clues as to why those six kids were no longer here. The haunting feeling was nothing compared to Dana's. She's stuck in an unwinnable loop. Should she have called CPS sooner? Wasn't it that very phone call that set into motion the events that ended with a Yukon over a cliff? Each time the conversation turns to the subject, Dana's voice grows thick with grief. If she'd called earlier, she wonders, would the outcome be the same? “Who knows?” she says. Who could have guessed that. Dana and I both had a question. Just what did it look like, on a daily basis, inside that house. Dana said something that stuck in my mind.

Dana DeKalb: You know, I guess I want to believe that there were good times, that it wasn't constant ugly.

Justine Harman: After all of our research, after so many months of digging for certain facts, this remains one of the hardest things to come to terms with. There were good times. It wasn't constant ugly. Jen Hart loved her kids and she killed them. These realities coexist. We know this because we've seen the pictures. We've watched joy-filled videos Zippy Lomax doesn't want to share with the public, at least, not yet. We've read hundreds of emails, texts, and direct messages. We've spoken to their friends and families for hours on end. We also know this, because this story has made us excavate the darkest part of our own minds, and to address issues, thoughts, and behaviors we've neatly packed away as unfit or not for public consumption.

Liz Egan: The story of the Hart family was never going to end well. As one person close to them put it, "I've always known. I've always felt something. It's unfortunate that it happened, but I don't think that there's anybody out there that could have stopped it from happening." They had no support system. They had no contingency plan. They distanced themselves from their families, kept friends at an arm's length, preferably on the other side of a screen, and closed their blinds on concerned neighbors. When schools, social services, the medical community, and the festival community asked questions, they were able to use their white privilege to foster doubt and convince people they were normal parents. When anybody got too close, Jen and Sarah withdrew. They canceled plans, or relocated, or moved the conversation to Facebook, where Jen could control the narrative. This was their choice. In the end, they were alone, and they made so many mistakes, unforgivable mistakes. Jen and Sarah Hart were in awe of Markis, Hannah, Devonte, Abigail, Jeremiah, and Sierra. They also, each in her own way, stripped their six adopted children of their agency, their dignity, and the futures they deserved. At best, you might call these women antiheroes. At worst, they were monsters. But neither is the whole story, because what they actually were is even harder to accept. They were both.

Liz Egan: If you suspect a child is being abused, call 1-800-4-A-Child, that's 1-800-4-A-C-H-I-L-D, or visit childhelp.org to find out how to report your concerns. For access to exclusive photos and videos, and documents about the case, visit glamour.com/brokenharts. Have questions for us about this podcast? Reach us on Twitter @glamourmag, or @brokenhartspod. If you like what you heard, leave us a review. Broken Harts is a joint production between Glamour and HowStuffWorks, with new episodes dropping every Tuesday. Broken Harts is cohosted and cowritten by Justine Harman and Elisabeth Egan, and edited by Wendy Naugle. Lauren Smiley is our field reporter. Samantha Barry is Glamour's editor-in-chief. Julie Shen and Deanna Buckman head up the business side of this partnership. Joyce Pendola, Pat Singer, and Luke Zaleski are our research team. Jason Hoch is executive producer on behalf of HowStuffWorks, along with producers Julian Weller, Ben Kuebrich and Josh Thane. Special thanks to Jenn Lance.

Top photo courtesy of AP images.

To view a transcript of episode seven, click here.