"There Were Good Times"

around the world. Adoptees deserve better hashtag adopted Voices. There's six stuffed animals lined up in a row, a lion, a bear, a monkey, another bear, cow, kind of a draggled teddy bear. There and in front of them are stones that have the kids names on them. Davante, Canna, Abigail, Marcus, Sierra, Jeremiah. It's right on the edge of the bluff here whether it's just the sheer straight drop. In video 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 turns below. 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 am 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. Some days we feel like we know Marcus, Hannah, Vante, Abigail, Jeremiah and Sierra. Then in telling this story, we are

honoring them. At other times we feel dirty, as if for counting 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 heart family and has endured her share of slammed doors, It's been an especially strange journey. As I was coming up here, I felt like this sense of dread as

I got closer and closer to this area. Um 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, and to actually come to the spot where the story both began for me and and in for them, it just had so much anxiety about it, honestly, and sort

of feeling to write about it. In April two tho nineteen, a full year after the crash, a formal coroner's inquest will be released to the public. At that time, a jury will convene to decide whether this was a murder by one person, a conspiracy to murder by more than one person, or an accident. And then in so many ways, it will be over from glamour and how stuff works. This is Broken Hearts. I'm Justine Harmon 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 two eighteen, over the course of three consecutive days and after several months of outreach, Lawrence 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 year back. Jen's parents and her brother Christopher Heart

declined to speak to us. Her other brother, Jonathan, says his older sister has not been in his life since two thousand and wanted only to make a few things clear. In an email to Lauren on September eighteen, 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. 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.

Back in August, 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 psyche of women who commit heinous crimes in ad into 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 familiar bliss in the case of an abusive person. And it's 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 didn't think it's 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, and 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. And 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 as appropriate. Scott says that female annihilators are vastly understudied demographic, and 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.

As we started to go through the literature and we discussions and we pursued this idea as women in criminology, which is largely a male dominated discipline with a lot of male focused 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 exist,

they exist in large numbers. The monikers that we tend to give to women, both in serial and mass homicide, giggling grinnies, things like that, murdering moms, these are very sexist when we compared to the names that the men are given. We tend to make light of the fact that women may engage in these criminal acts, and as a result, often we don't take them seriously. 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 report it back in two thousand eight. The problem, it said, is these

women look normal. Though Hannah Scott has never seen a case quite like this, one that 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 kill their families with what might sound like a counterintuitive motivator love. 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 killed their children because they couldn't see them being raised by the opposite parents, for example, or they couldn't see themselves actually sustaining these children now that they were alone. We haven't found convincing evidence that Jen and Sarah were headed towards 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 missed an opportunity to tell someone how much they mean to me and that I love them. As a mom, I have felt that I've 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 Coals at PM on March eighteen, three days before the crash, and a mirror 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. People can be overwhelmed to not necessarily experiencing mental illness. In some cases, homicide, even though we feel comfortable saying it can be a very rational choice to some people

given their life circumstances. When Lauren met with Mendicino 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 DeVante will be found alive. 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 a car.

But I have no problem of someone bringing DeVante into our office today and saying, listen, DeVante is 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. Sheriff Allman and his team have spent the past eight months trawling the coastline for the missing children, examining the evidence they do have, and

preparing for the upcoming Corners inquest. Almond says, an inquest of this nature hasn't happened in Mendocino County in over fifty 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. Over the course of two days in April, a jury of twelve 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. We have a job to do just to find out the truth of what happened. We have gathered a team of experts that will be making sure that what we are going to say at the inquest is true and accurate. And a Corner's Inquest is going to, in my opinion, give evidence that will shock the consciousness of people who

are following this case. What can you give not a bit. I'm not going to talk about any of that. I'm gonna tell you that we're not on a fast timeline to throw this information out right now. But um, this will be a water cooler conversation throughout our nation. For those who were critical of how long it took to positively I d Hannah's remains, Almond says d NA simply isn't something you can match overnight. 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. It I've taken I'm going to guess hundreds, if not thousands, of burglar reports where fingerprints were obtained. But if you don't have anybody to compare them to, Okay, so you have fingerprints and DNA is the same way. If we have DNA, you know, from a foot and we said, 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. He says. The biggest hold up in this case has been trying to get information from the adoption agencies. 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 record, when a death happens, I would have to ask myself, why would an adoption agency or

government agency be so determined to keep information private? So how much of what happened to the heart children can be put on the agency's 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 Hearts could stand to collect twelve hundred dollars a month for each adopted child. We have found that over the past decade, the Hearts have taken roughly two hundred and seventy thousand dollars from the state of Texas. These are taxpayer dollars

that are being spent to support children. Why can we then expect that families would be expected to at least do an annual check in, maybe goes for the first few years ago 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. Dr Houston says, once an interstate adoption is completed, the state of origin is no longer responsible for an adopted child's well being, with Texas allowing the children to be adopted in Minnesota, they essentially are absolved of all of those responsibilities if now rests at the hands of the receivings eight. Frankly, there really has not been movement in in a real meaningful way to do a national adoption protection registry where

information is shared. Hannah Scott, the author of the study on annihilators, calls these interstate disconnects linkage blindness, a term coined by criminal justice expert Steven Egger. 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 time each other, but states certainly have more difficulty talking to each other. Each state has its own

set of laws. We know that there are eight people who reported to the police that there was an use of situation. This happened over ten years in three states, and 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 states that they had moved to. Because the states cannot talk to each other, cases of child abuse like this can go and detected islam As the family continues to

stay moved. Abril Dinwoody, the former executive director of the Donaldson Adoption Institute, agrees that this story should serve as a nationwide wake up call. I was that a camp for families who adopted transractional in 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 and getting the help that we need and getting

the help for ourselves and our children. Um and I talked about it at another sort of gathering of professionals, some were transracial adoptive parents, and and there's a lot of head hanging and a lot of tears, and people are failing it. But I hope that just translate sent us 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 hearts.

I don't I don't know what drove these women to to do, to adopt to whatever, but like there was something clearly wrong there too. And even those people who do such things need to have some kind of care and support as well, Like like they just don't get erased either. There's mental health issues and all of this that need to be addressed that clearly we're not. I've just found, like when I talked to friends and mothers in particular, that everyone has something to say about this case.

Everyone honestly reads something about their own life into this case and feels guilty about that. And even you know, just like 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 just utter power you have over young children and how just 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. There's so many layers.

There's so many layers. 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 understanding our bones. Sometimes when I took 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 to 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 is 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 stay out loud, what if I held him down until it hurts? How long would he stay in there? Would he love me

me less? Or when his devotion to me becomes 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 line 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 And how would he

process that nearly imperceptible shift. Years later, 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 eighteen, almost Marcus his 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 good bye 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 heart. Kids never really had that, not as babies, not when they were adopted,

not even in the moments before they died. You'll remember that back in May, when we first started reporting this story, Lauren went to Woodland, Washington. There, the Hearts neighbor, Dana Decalb, took her to see where the family lived together. Lauren and Dana waited through the knee high prairie grass to get to the blue split level home next door. When I was up at Dana's house in Washington, I asked the Decalbs if we could walk over to the Heart 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 where 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 Davante 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 powered details, which was so eerily spot onto the image of the family projected and the way they died. I wondered if some prankster had hung it, or if the hearts had I turned it over and saw the price tag was still stuck on the bottom. Ross dressed for less. Walking around the huge yard, I couldn't help but question my role as a reporter in all this. Certainly I was trespassing of both their property

and in this family 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 hunting 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 call 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's stuck in my mind. You know, I guess I want to believe that there was good times, but it wasn't constant ugly. 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. The story of the Heart 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 the screen,

and closed their blinds unconcerned 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 any mistakes unforgivable mistakes. Jen and Sarah Hart were in awe of Marcus, Hannah Davante, 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 anti heroes. At worst, they were monsters. But neither is the whole story, because what they actually were

is even harder to accept. They were both. 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 review. 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 Harmon and Elizabeth Egan and edited by Wendy Nogal. Lauren Smiley is our field reporter. Samantha Barry is Glamour's editor in Chief. Ju Leshan 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 Kiebrick and Josh Saine. Special thanks to Jen Lance