"Stone-Cold Narcissist"

It's the part about those kids losing their life that I think of the most, because even though all of it and all the search and rescue and all the people who came here, what I remember is because I'm a father, the most important thing is is that those kids don't go home and they don't have a life. So I don't know what happened, but I know that that's the end result of all of it. That's Valentine Hail,

also known as VOW. He's the owner of VAL's Towing in the Westport Community Store, which is the social hub of the town where the Hearts died. He had a bird's eye view of what happened in the aftermath of the crash. It turns out Justine and I weren't the only ones who couldn't stop thinking about this case. People from as far away as Italy and Australia wondered what had happened to the hearts. And we're worried about Hannah

and Davante, whose whereabouts were still unknown. But in January two th nineteen, almost ten months after the crash, officials announced that a foot discovered near the crash site belonged to Hannah. Davante's body has not been found. From Glamour and How Stuff Works, this is Broken Hearts. I'm Liz Egan and I'm Justine Harmon. Our focus was on finding the kids because we mainstream media did not seem interested and there wasn't a lot of articles about it, and

I thought, how can they just be a race? That's Ami Atlas, who started a Facebook group called Finding the Missing Heart Children and Honoring the Heart Children back in April. The heart story piqued her interest, mostly because she felt there was enough urgency to the search for the missing kids. Amy's group now has two hundred and seventy four members. There are other groups, so many others, Heart Family Case Discussion,

which has one thousand, four hundred and eleven members. Heart Family Case discussion, this time in all caps, with one hundred and seventy members, What happened to the Hearts, their history, the Crash, the Kids four hundred and ninety members, Heart Family Crash Theories on one members, and Let the Heart Shine, a two three member closed group for people who quote loved, knew, or were connected to the Heart Family in some way. In order to get into this one, you have to

explain how you knew the Hearts. Lauren and Liz tried and failed. Apparently it wasn't enough to have examined every photo, read every article, and even taken a virtual tour of their house via an old real estate listing, because no matter how much we felt like we knew the Hearts,

we did and actually know them at all. Last Spring, I joined to Facebook groups at the time they were at peak activity, but conversation in both forums remains busy to this day, with dozens of comments following each picture or post. In both groups, there's a lot of discussion about adoption, about Jen and Sarah's history of child abuse, about whether or not they were racist, and about whether or not the drive over the cliff was premeditated or spontaneous.

Did Sarah know what Jen was planning to do was one of them. Terminally ill members even reached out to the Decalves about organizing a search party. They debated about the hearts financial situation, their clothing, their smiles, their sleeping arrangements, the contents of their refrigerator, their decor, and even why Jen and Sarah let their chickens roam free in the house. For months, I read every post and all the comments

in both groups. I was the quintessential lurk, her never contributing to the conversation myself, but still going numb while I poured over pictures of the Hearts in happier times. There are a lot of disagreements in the Heart Facebook groups. Several women and they're almost all women as far as I can tell. Are members in other groups too, and tensions rise when a member of one group share secrets with another group and word trickles back to the original group.

There's discussion about who's racist and classist and who's not, and who's even entitled to level this charge in the first place. The groups are pretty diverse, both racially and geographically. The most incendiary debate arises again and again and again, and the conversation goes on and on and on. When someone suggests they might feel a shred of sympathy for Jen and Sarah, these people are swiftly attacked, flamed to

the point of being char broiled. The prevailing senses the Heart Moms were monsters, and if you don't agree, you should go start your own discussion group for friends of mass murderers. As much as I wonder why Jen kept her foot on the gas, I also wonder what drives someone to invest so much time interacting with complete strangers online. Seven months after the accident, before Hannah's foot was positively identified, I decided to check in with Amy Atlas to find out.

The group is called Finding the Missing Heart Children and Honoring the Heart Children. The short term goal or to find Sierra, Davonta, and Hannah now Davon, Dan, Hannas and Sierra has been found, and also honoring all the children for the abuse that they endored and though that they did not die in vain through longer term solutions such as, you know, homeschool regulations or adoption reform. I think that at the maximum capacity we probably had, maybe it was

five people. We asked people what their skills were from you know, being the grant writer, a lawyer, somebody who's worked in the legislature, to somebody's who's worked in social services, community, you name it. We asked like what people's skills were, and according to that, we would assign people have different responsibilities. At the peak level, I would absolutely say, you know, myself and a few others who were working on this

twenty hours a day. So we were sleeping four hours and we were doing this full time twenty hours a day. That is a serious commitment for someone with a family, a career, a life. Amy is a mom of two and a cookbook author who happens to have a law degree. There really were only about four of us that were in the core group like standing up twenty hours a day. Yeah, and then there was probably a group of you know, fifteen people that had like a real interest in helping.

We were calling all of the counties every single day to all the different county sheriffs to find out what was happening with the search. That was all the counties that Cannifer and Sarah drove through in Washington and Oregon and California. From calling there to having correspondence with the FBI. We also tried to organize peaceful protests and also create

media awareness of the story. Didn't die. We created flyers for them and put them all over everywhere we could on the web, from Facebook pages to emailing different inflorishers and asking them to speak out. We'd also emailed their flyers to a missing Christon organizations or authorities and kind of like missing person investigations. Mostly it was an online effort. We tried to make an effort where we would go to the West Coast when there wasn't enough interest. Unfortunately,

I was ready to go out there. Even when we gave it a tip to the FBI, they didn't reach back out to us, and so we sent an email to the press person for the FBI. I think it was six days for somebody to get back to us, which I thought was rather alarming since it was still very much a case the same like they were looking into, and it was a designated phone line for tips. The FBI still has a site soliciting information about the heart crash, and the messaging on there includes a warning that tips

may not be followed up on. But still Amy was frustrated and when you're putting that kind of time in it just was frankly disgusting because it felt like, Wow, there are lives were erased when they were living, and now it's so easy to erase them when they're not a lot. How would you react if you found out your sister or friend was investing twenty hours a day in trying to solve a crime that happened in a

far away state involving strangers. I asked Amy what people in her life had to say about it and how she knew when it was time to dial back her time in the group. The reaction from the people that

I spoke with that were offline was mick. First of all, some people hadn't even heard about the case, and then I sent them more information about it, and they couldn't believe that it wasn't something that they had heard about or they hadn't recalled seeing a headline of family drives off of a cliff but didn't have all the information. But then the people that did know about the case

a little more. It was a combination of Wow, this is so wonderful that you're doing this, and then there were a few people like, well, why are you doing this? But I would say by a large more people thought, Wow, it's so great that somebody is doing something. Sleuth groups often pop up after an especially grizzly crime, possibly as

a receptacle for all the emotions sparked by tragedy. But there's a certain poetic justice to the hearts immortalization on Facebook, considering it was Jen's preferred mode of communication, and in recent months we've uncovered another world where she was equally entrenched. Jen was an a a video gamer. The name of her game of choice, ironically enough, was Oz Broken Kingdom. She played for hours on end while Sarah was at work.

That may explain why Davante told Dana Decalb that his moms weren't really paying attention to what went on at home. Jen was a guild leader, which is kind of like being a team captain, and she kept meticulous handwritten notes of her players moves. Investigators found pages and pages of them when she died. We're about to hear from Drew, who knew Jen through the gaming world. He asked us not to use his last name. If my employer knew the amount of hours I dedicated to gaming, I would

be fired. Drew met Jen when they were both playing oz and ended up in the same clan. If you're a gaming novice like us, you might be wondering what

in the world this means. Online gaming offers social components, at least the best games do, and to foster this social environment, they've created these entities called clans, and usually clans consist of about fifty people, and you join a clan and then you compete against everyone else, and enjoining a clan, the benefit you gain, of course, is obviously the social component. In order to keep you hooked, gaming

developers understand they have to foster that social environment. So what they'll do is offer you rewards in game for being part of a clan. And so to put it simply, if you're highly competitives and you also happen to like people on any level, then you will definitely join a clan because it's the only way to really win. Jen was a co leader of the clan that I happened upon, and she was good, and by good, I mean she

developed relationships very quickly with people. With all clan members, she got to know them on a personal level, talking to people, making sure everyone's good and Jin really signed when there was a newcomer if someone didn't know how to conquer a particular part of the game. That was her wheelhouse. She loved the the bird with a broken Wing.

I became part of the leadership board for for that clan with Jin, and we would have conference calls on a fairly regular basis where we would just touch upon gaming concepts on a weekly basis, you know, we would strategize. Jen's clan was called Dropping Houses and her screen name was simply Heart. There were a bunch of different characters you could choose from. Hers was the tin Man. Remember, the tin Man was the one who went down the

Yellow Brick Road in search of a heart juice. As it isn't unusual for a player to spend twelve to fourteen hours a day building a character, there's opportunities in these games where you could have hours, endless hours of intense concentration. There would definitely be weeks where I mean, just judging by her rank, it was clear that she had spent a ridiculous number of hours. Drew describes Jen

as highly competitive. Another gamer we spoke to called her a stone cold narcissist because she kept her clan members on such a tight leash, bossing them around at all hours of the day. It was common for Jen to sit near the top of the rankings, not just the clan rankings, but the individual ones, which is a bigger deal. Team members teased her about how she was the first to crack a really complex part of the game. Drew told her she must have developed a diagram to figure

it out. In fact, she had. Sometime in the summer of two thousand seventeen, Jen abruptly left the game, claiming she wanted to spend more time with her kids. Drew believes her hasty departure was because of a conflict with a fellow gamer who she believed was cheating. Jen refused to continue on if he stayed in the clan, and when he didn't leave, she signed off the chat with

a picture of her kids at the beach. She would consistently show photos of her with her kids you know in the woods, are all at the beach or wherever in clan chat and talk about these escapades that they've gone on or that they are planning. She taught and nauseam about the fact that they were adopted. But far more than that, even just the amount of oppression that she experiences because she is the mother of black children.

Jen and Drew spent hours chatting about everything, the game, politics, their families, but he says there was one subject that never came up. S Aaron. She never once and I'm talking like six months of consistent talking. She never once mentioned her wife Sarah in personal communication with me or in the clan chat. She never mentioned her sexual orientation to me um For whatever reason, Drew happened to check in with Jen shortly before she died. We had both

left the game. I hadn't talked to her in several months, and I just reached out to say, hey, see how things were going. And in that conversation and we got around to uh talking about our real life personas a little more. She once again sided a scenario where she was oppressed. She had been grocery shopping with the kids and a person in Lyne, you know, gave her a nasty look because of what she believes. She believes it

was because of the color of her kid's skin. Yeah, she illustrated that in far more words, but that was the basic gist of it. And I really did sympathize with her like I wanted. It was clear that because she talked about these scenarios so often, Like it was pretty clear that she was being hyperbolic, but Jim was just such a fun personality you couldn't help but give her the benefit of a doubt. So I'm like, this

is absurd. I can't believe you're enduring this. Again. In retrospect, I'm convinced that almost none of it actually happened, and that I guess I should preface this by saying, I've never met anyone like Jim. I think she became so fixated on this persona that she really did become convinced of it herself. And you know, when she's following these statements up with these these photos of her precious children like it, I mean, it just it pulls the dart strings.

Drew has five young kids, so he and Jen bonded about the challenges of living in a crowded house. Her message to him enjoy it while it lasts. He says he got the impression that she missed being able to control her kids. Who doesn't when they have teenagers. We wondered, did she ever talk about her kids being delayed? The way she communicated it to me was more focused on the idea that they were developmentally delayed when she adopted them, but thanks to her efforts, they've come so far. They're

different people, they're better people. Of course, the bird with the broken wing, this sounds like the Jen we've come

to know. We wondered if Jen talked about the kids futures Withdrew never never once to read now that she was reportedly depriving them of food, like it is in oriating, like not just to me, but to all of us who spent so much time online with her, because we can't help but think that the hours that she was devoting to us and to our clan and to our game, the money that she was devoting to the game, it

should have it should have gone to the children. When I realized that she was a home school mom, I'm like, there's no way in hell those kids are learning. I mean, really, it's impossible with the amount of time she spending on this game, and with the with the gaming community there, it's impossible that six kids could be learning. Like many people who thought they knew jenn Hart, Drew has really struggled to figure out why she did what she did.

Her life had become wrapped up in this image that she so carefully crafted this image of her as this doting mom and champion of racial reconciliation. Her life had become so identified, she had identified herself by this cause, if you will, that when she came to grips with the fact that it was all going to fall apart, strangely enough, I think she took the same approach that she took with that guy in the game. It was like, Okay, it's either him or me, but in this case it's

it's all of us. Either I get to maintain my image, my my preferred image, or none of us get to maintain anything at all. Drew also points a finger at video games which give players a quick hit of dopamine they come to crave. He describes this phenomenon as quote an endless rewards based experience. I think about the Vegas shooter, and his motive has been so elusive. He was spending even more absurd hours and money pulling this random number generator,

seeking these flashing lights, this dopamine it. And I think in my experience, the more I played, the less impressive real the real world proved to be. I have been described, I hope, in some sense justifiably as of like a pretty great dad, like a very involved dad, like I really do take my kids. Uh, my wife and I both are very active with our children. We love to go high team, we love to play sports. We I mean,

the list goes on and on. But it's strange, Like the more I played, the more in depth I got into the game, the gaming experience, the less interested I was in playing catch with my son, the less interested I was in spending time with my wife. And I really like her, like I really do, She's great. But it's just I was addicted, truly addicted to these the highs that the game provided. And then on top of that, I didn't want to let my clanmates down, and like I wanted to win, and I didn't want to let

gen down. When real life gets more stressful is when the temptation to escape and to this alternative life becomes stronger. The game is not the cause. I think the game just creates conditions that perhaps contribute to acts like the heart crash or the Vegas shooting. So maybe Jen was running away from her real life, from her six growing kids, who had little to no education and uncertain futures, into the arms of Facebook and video games. It's sad if

you think about it. Of course you wish someone had heeded the cause of the kids, but you also wish Jen had gotten some help, let someone come into the house and keep her company, taking a walk with a friend, talked to a therapist, joined to support group for adoptive parents. Would any of this have made a difference. The source

close to the family agrees that Jen needed help. This person says, I think that this whole thing comes down to she was always trying to fix everybody else and make herself look good, when in fact she was the one who needed the help. Of course, all of this begs the question where was Sarah. Of all the people we've spoken to, her coals colleague Cheryl Hart is the one who knew Sarah best. She had said that they used to just always go out and go to concerts.

They would go to shows and and Jen was always really happy all the time and stuff, and and now Jen was just really closed off, and she was tired all the time when she had migraines. When Cheryl would press for details about medications Jen might try, or whether or not she was seeing a doctor, Sarah shut down the conversation. She'd get personal, but only to an extent. And while Sarah was willing to acknowledge that Jen might be suffering from depression, she definitely didn't want to get

into specifics other details sharel remembers. The Hearts had a family library, but the kids were only allowed to check out two books at a time. Jen never slept in a bed. She always fell asleep on the couch in front of the TV. She also wouldn't let Sarah wear her hair in a ponytail. None of this paints and portrait of the happiest marriage. Jen had some sort of online game that she ran through Facebook. That was her escape ever since, kind of like the whole thing went

viral with Davante. Yeah, she didn't want to do the trips or the concerts or any of that stuff, so she kind of did the virtual world. Because she did

call the store one morning. It was before we had opened, so the call came to my desk, so I had answered the phone and it was a woman on the other end, and they had asked to speak with Sarah Hart and my place her on hold, and I told Sarah was for her, and Sarah had gone into a complete panic, and she had gone into an office and shut the door, and she came out about her about ten to twelve minutes later, and she had told us that it was Jen that was on the phone and

she was upset with her because Sarah had not done her part of that game for the day, setting up something. And Jen was really upset because it was really important that Sarah do whatever it was that she was supposed to do for that game. She was really upset. She had told Sarah that that was her only out, that was her only reason for living, and there was no If she wasn't gonna help her through that, then there

was no reason for her to exist anymore. He just kind of gave me this look like of kind of like fear. And I remember making this comment like you're like an abused wife, and she just kind of gave me this look like no kidding, and it just kind of kind of like the whole tone kind of changed after that. It was just like, Okay, something's not right. Would Cheryl have responded differently if Sarah had described this kind of controlling behavior coming from a man. Now, it's like, oh, well,

you're lesbians. You guys can do whatever you want, and then you try not to delve into their personal relationship, and you don't know what boundaries you can cross. Cheryl says, Sarah was very open about her marriage to Jen. She didn't try to hide the fact that she was married to a woman. In fact, she says, Sarah probably used the word wife a hundred times a day, to the point where other colleagues teased her about it. She could

never say Jen. It was always my wife, my wife, my wife, and it was like she rarely ever called her by name. We just always thought it was funny because it's like I didn't go around saying, well, my husband and my husband that Cheryl says, Sarah talked about what it was like to work long hours and then go home and take over from Jen, who had been alone with the kids all day. Cheryl got the impression that Sarah did most of the cooking. Sarah was also

open about the pressure of being the breadwinner. She carried most of the credit card debt, which Cheryl says was the result of everyday expenses and home renovations. Sarah's unpaid balance was over fourteen thousand dollars as of March two, eighteen,

and Jen's was about two thousand dollars. According to a report released after their death, not astronomical, but enough to keep you up at night if you're supporting a family of eight on forty five thousand a year and you're about to lose your monthly stipends for adopting kids out of foster care. Sarah made a payment to her Discover card early on the morning of the crash, which suggests she didn't know what was going to happen later. The

payment also could have been an automatic one. Some Facebook's loose speculate that the Hearts decided to end it all because of their debt, But while fourteen thousand dollars is no joke, the bank wasn't foreclosing on their home, and it doesn't seem so in surmountable that Jen would kill the whole family. Another persistent theory that one of the

Heart moms was terminally ill. In a Facebook status update, Jen vaguely blames health issues for a month long hiatus, but nothing in our interviews and the Hearts emails and paperwork points to any kind of physical illness. It doesn't seem like such a big lead to say Jen suffered from depression, she was isolated, she had removed herself from real life. She didn't have a strong support network, no family nearby or in the flesh friends she saw it regularly.

Seven months after the Hearts died, Lauren Smiley made a trip to Mendocino County to talk with Sheriff Tom Allman, who has been leading the investigation since day one. He was at the scene of the crash hours after it happened and has returned countless time since. Here's Lauren. I stopped by the Mendocino County Sheriff's office on my drive up from San Francisco to the cliff. The office is on edge of the county seat town of Yukayah, right next to the jail. Mendicino County is known for redwoods,

marijuana farms, and a inspiring coastline. Alman has been the sheriff coroner here for more than a decade. He looks like the sheriff from the movies, white fisherman, mustache, really ruddy skin. A bust of George Washington sits behind his desk. His start helmet from his time as a civilian peacekeeper in late nineties. Kast of Oh sits on a shelf. My name is Tom Almond, I'm the sheriff of Mendicino County and I've been sheriff three terms. I'm about to

start my fourth term, and I've worked for the county. Listen, I'm not going to downplay the super slouths because we've gotten good information from people who have found good information, and so law enforcement would be full party to say, oh no, this is our job, go away. We're actually sleuth too, you know. We can think of these things, and we we work with chemists and the forensic labs and the old fashioned police work of saying, you know,

who done it? How can we solve this crime. We are following up leads and we're not putting out press releases of of new shocking information that we find to satisfy some sluice curiosity. Sheriff Allman told us something we hadn't heard before, that there was a group of friends and acquaintances of the Hearts who came from as far away as Minnesota to help the search efforts. They used the bluff where the family died as their home base. There was a half dozen of them that were camped

at that pullout for three months, four months. They would walk the beach. That's how the one gentleman from back east was walking the beach each morning he found the one body, and and then the people who found the foot and pants leg hernded over to him, and he turned over to High Patrol, and High Patrol gave it to us. The body Sheriff Allman is referring to is Sierra Hart, who was found two weeks after the accident. You remember she was the twelve year old baby of

the family. She was small and spunky and loved music and animals. The foot, Sheriff Allman mentions was Hannah's. She was the one who jumped out of her bedroom window in the middle of the night. One of the friends who came out to help with the search was a man named A J. He drove all the way from Minnesota shortly after the family died and stayed until the beginning of June. We weren't able to connect with a

J directly. He didn't respond to messages, but Lauren chatted with thal Hale, a local resident who got to know him pretty well. Here she is to set the scene. As you drive through the tiny town of Westport on Highway one, you'll see an all wood building with a Pepsi sign and one gas pump that's VAL's store. The highway sign of announcing the town says there's two residents, but locals say only fifty actually live here full time, and all seemed to know Val. People kept telling me

to go there. Inside there's a small delhi with the menu written on chalkboards and rows of groceries like wine, cookine, oil, and toilet paper to spare residents the half hour trip so south to the bigger town Fort Brag. Locals pin notices on an announcement board outside handyman for hire, a support group for people with depression. Val has lived in the Westport since he took over the store from his mom last year. Everybody knows a j very nice man,

was super dedicated. Even law enforcement was worried about how he was going above and beyond, and uh, you know, he's just a real nice spell on And he gave you a different perspective to all the rumors and all the speculation and all the stuff. You know, because you you basically have a tragic incident that looks almost like a crime scene. No one's guilty until you're proven guilty.

But there's all these speculations so it's really hard, and then you get a face to some leaked a friend of the family, and that it helped put a normal everyday thing for us, especially in this real small town. And a J brought that to us. And he was also very polite, very honest, and just really wanted to get to the bottom of things. It wasn't really one way or the other. It was just wanting to find

and he did. Now he did make a difference. Val talked about how a J walked out on the cliffs so far out the fire chief was concerned he wouldn't make it back before dark. I can't even imagine how many miles he walked on those beaches and bluffs and drove around and sat on the cliff with his binoculars day after day after day after day after day. I mean, he was just a figure of our town for months.

And you know, once you become a part of a little community like this, it's not like Fox News where they come up and set up their stuff and then you know, go home. This was a whole different thing, and it was interesting. It was definitely nice to have, like I said, a human connection to something that seemed hard to put words with. Would he come into your

store about every day? Not every day in the beginning, yes, every day and look for um, you know, have questions on what might be the word out on the street, so to speak. And then it came down to where would be a few times a week towards the end, and what sort of tips did you share with him? Just the tips of the weather on what to look for.

The big tip for him was was when one of my guys that I grew up with, it was on the fire department, said, you know, there's a certain way that the water, um, the currents work and even though the winds blowing south um where that particular incident happened, we need to look north in the bay north and and he did, and he did, and he did, and that he found stuff. He learned the tricks of the

trade very quickly. He adopted himself. He hadn't been to the ocean, you know, he didn't know about the civic and you know, he adopted and he stayed dedicated. And that was the key to everything. I mean, that was the key to making the difference. Maybe A j had it right. The key to making a difference is about actually showing up, lacing up a pair of boots and walking along the cliffs rain or shine alone or with

other heart friends. A j did that he was at the place where his friends died and looked for them in real life. He didn't just click through pictures of them or sit in front of a computer a thousand miles away. He didn't try to piece together the clues from afar then bounce ideas and hypotheses off strangers. Maybe the key to real friendship is being there in the flesh for better or worse, in sickness and in health. As Val said, some people look for crowds and some

people look for lonely places. If we've learned one thing from The Hearts, it's this there are lots of lonely places in the world, too many, and once you've lost yourself in one of them, or several, as we believe Gen did, it's really hard to find your way back next time. On Broken Hearts, 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. Because I was coming up here, I felt like this sense of dread, a corner of inquest, is going to, in my opinion, give evidence that will shock the consciousness of people who are following this case. This will be a water cooler conversation throughout our nation. If you suspect a child as being abused, call one eight hundred for a child that's one eight hundred numeral four A C H I L D. Or visit child help dot org to find out how to report your concerns.

For access to exclusive photos and videos and documents about the case, visit glamour dot com slash Broken Hearts. Have questions for us about this podcast, reach us on Twitter at Glamour mag or at Broken Hearts Pod. If you like what you heard, leave us a view. Broken Hearts is a joint production between Glamour and How Stuff Works, with new episodes dropping every Tuesday. Broken Hearts is co hosted and co written by Justine Harman and Elizabeth Egan

and edited by Wendy Nogal. Lauren Smiley is our field reporter, Samantha Barry is Glamour's editor in chief. Julie Sheen and Dianna Buckman head up the business side of this partnership. Joyce Pandola, Pat Singer and Luke Zeleski are a research team. Jason Hope is executive producer on behalf of How Stuff Works, along with producers Julian Weller, ben Kie Brick and Josh Sane. Special thanks to Jen Lance