Anonymous Tip: Questioning Officers and Selective Terror

A Review Series of Anonymous Tip, by Michael Farris

Pp. 97-99

At long last, it is now Thursday. As you will remember, the hearing at which Gwen lost custody of Casey took place on Tuesday morning. Gwen got a new lawyer, Peter, at midday, and Peter spent the rest of the day running around learning about the case. On Wednesday Peter called an ex parte hearing asking to have Casey examined by a second psychologist, one of his choice. This hearing was successful. And now it is Thursday.

On Thursday morning, Peter left his home on Liberty Lake at seven. As soon as he hit I-90 West toward town, he punched in the audio tape of the hearing from just two days before. It proved to be cut-and-dried with no real surprises, just as he expected. He made some mental notes, which he would translate to paper as soon as his interview with Officer Mark Donahue was complete.

Corporal Donahue arrived at the Perkins Pancake House on Division and Second precisely at 8:00 Thursday morning. Peter had arranged an interview with him through negotiations with his Lieutenant.

Peter waited in the lot for about twenty minutes for the officer to arrive at the appointed time. He had deliberately arrived early so he would have time to finish listening to the hearing. The tape was near the end when the officer pulled up. Peter turned off the ignition and stepped from his car to join Officer Donahue.

If you will remember, Officer Mark Donahue accompanied Donna and Rita, the two social workers, on their second visit to Gwen’s home—the visit that involved entry of the home and a strip search of Casey. Peter noticed earlier that Mark’s report of the incident contained no mention of bruises, and he is presumably following up on that here.

The interview itself is fairly routine and boring (out of curiosity, is it customary for this sort of thing to occur in a restaurant rather than in the attorney’s office). Mark says he remembers the visit, but that he “was there to make sure that the CPS workers could come in and do their job” and that’s it. He says Gwen (whom he calls “the lady”) didn’t want to let them in, and that Gwen was “crying” and “really upset” when the social workers strip searched a screaming Casey in the other room.

When the social workers came out, Mark says, they asked some questions and then left. “It wasn’t my investigation,” he explains. “I was just there for protection.” Mark mentions that “the lady asked some questions about spanking” and that “Corliss said she shouldn’t spank or anything.” He mentions that Gwen called Donna and Rita “Nazis and witches” but adds that “I felt sorry for the lady; she was so upset and everything.”  Farris definitely wants us to see Mark as sympathetic.

And then we get to the part that most interests Peter:

“Did the CPS workers say anything about any bruises?”

“Not that I heard. Nothing one way or the other. Again, they weren’t consulting with me. They just wanted me to stand there with my gun.”

“Are you sure you heard nothing about bruises?”

“Well, at the time I didn’t think they had found any . . . . ” he said, pausing to think. “But I don’t remember them saying anything directly. There must be some reason I thought that.”

Peter just let him ponder in silence.

After tearing at his coffee for a few more moments, the officer continued, “Oh yeah, I remember. Corliss said that they would probably dismiss this case if the lady would just answer some questions. I guess I thought there was no bruises because of that.”

Peter didn’t want to highlight the answer to this question. He knew that Willet would be interviewing him later. It was standard operating procedure for the prosecutor’s office. They always debriefed officers after an interview with private counsel.

After reading Donna, Rita, and Mark’s reports, Peter came away with two main questions: Why didn’t Mark’s report mention bruises, and why didn’t Donna and Rita’s report describe the bruises or contain pictures? He hasn’t stated it outright, but he is presumably wondering if Donna and Rita are lying about the existence of bruises—which of course they are. Farris tells us that Peter had to work “to conceal his pleasure” at Mark’s statement. He believes Mark’s statement Donna told Gwen she would probably dismiss the case after a few more questions adds weight to his suspicion that there were no bruises. This is because if Donna had just found bruises she would not have told Gwen that she would probably dismiss the case.

I don’t know enough about social services and this sort of work in general to know whether or not this is the smoking gun Peter sees it as. Are social services workers allowed to lie to parents in situations like this? Granted, I’m not saying they should be. I’m just curious whether it is considered ethical in the field for social workers to tell the parent they’ll probably dismiss the case in hopes that the parent they have just discovered is abusive will be more forthcoming in answering questions. Are cops allowed to lie to people to get information if situations are considered dire enough?

I don’t know what is considered ethical here, and the idea that authority figures vested with power by the government might be allowed to lie to the public or to those individual citizens (or non-citizens) they are interacting with makes me nervous. But it seems like this is Donna’s best line of defense here—that she Gwen had already proven herself uncooperative and that she said what she had to to get her questions answered, which could dampen the powder in Peter’s smoking gun, and Farris has yet to address this. But hey, we have 300+ pages to go, so there’s still time!

On Thursday morning, Dr. Randall McGuire asked Casey to draw pictures, play in a room with a one-way mirror, look at pictures, and make up a story about the characters depicted. And he did a routine interview. Casey’s answers were pretty normal. The only discovery of note was that he was dealing with one terrified little girl. There were two alternative reasons for her fear. He knew how he would spin the report.

And that’s all we get. In a few pages, Farris gives us Gwen’s entire interview with Dr. McGuire (whom you may remember is the psychologist who was bribed by Donna’s boss), so why do we only get a short paragraph on Casey’s interview? We heard Casey speak briefly on the phone with her mother in last week’s installment. Perhaps Farris thinks that’s all we need to hear from her?

One regular complaint voiced by commenters on these posts has been that Casey hardly exists as a character. I’ve seen some note that Farris treats her more like an impounded car than a person. I can’t say that I disagree. Farris’s focus is soundly on Gwen, and on her pain at losing Casey. Casey is a mere plot point. She exists to make the reader feel sorry for Gwen. Even in detailing Casey’s short conversation with Gwen last week, Farris focused on the pain the conversation caused Gwen, and not what pain it may have caused Casey.

And so I am unsurprised that Farris fails to tell us what Casey did, or said, during her time with Dr. McGuire, but I’m still annoyed.

As the longtime reader of this series will know, Casey is “one terrified little girl” because of the strip search she experienced exactly two weeks before. Casey was taken into her bedroom alone by two strangers, which confused and scared her, and then held down and forcibly stripped of her clothing while writhing and screaming. Readers with more familiarity with the field of social work have noted that what Donna and Rita did was completely against best practices and that that strip search should not have happened the way it did.

I do want to call attention to one thing, though. When Farris described Casey’s visit to Dr. Stratton, a medical doctor, several pages ago, there was no mention of Casey’s terror. She was described as “timid” but that was it. Casey allowed him to remove her clothing and examine her without putting up any fuss at all. To me that seems odd. If Casey’s terror is related to the traumatic strip search, wouldn’t she associate yet another stranger telling her to strip with that terror? I would have expected her to completely freak out. Farris does not seem very consistent about Casey’s terror.

Next week we get to hear another conversation between Peter and Gwen, and go along with Gwen to Dr. McGuire’s office.