S02 Ep05: Tangled

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It comes down to what a good friend of mine who was a judge says: when the state steps in, you have to do it the government way.

And the government is not a good parent.

You know, a lot of the steps they take because they have to, because it's according to the law or or how they interpret the law or whatever, are not necessarily good for the child.

People believe their eyes.

That's something that actually is so central to this whole issue and to people that experience this, is that we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something.

I'm Andrea Dunlop, and this is Nobody Should Believe Me.

These are harrowing times in America, especially for our friends and neighbors in immigrant communities.

So if you're looking for resources or ways to help, we wanted to let you know about a wonderful organization that we're partnering with this month.

The National Immigrant Justice Center has worked for more than 40 years to defend the rights of immigrants.

NIGC blends direct legal services, impact litigation, and policy advocacy to fight for due process for all and to hold the U.S.

government accountable to uphold human rights.

NIGC's experienced legal staff collaborate with a broad network of volunteer lawyers to provide legal counsel to more than 11,000 people each year, including including people seeking asylum, people in ICE detention, LGBTQ immigrants, victims of human trafficking, unaccompanied immigrant children, and community members who are applying for citizenship and permanent residence.

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As ICE continues to abduct people from our communities and the U.S.

government deports thousands of people without a chance to have a judge consider their cases, it is more important than ever that we come together to defend due process.

All people in the United States have rights, regardless of immigration status.

You can donate and learn more about NIJC's work by visiting immigrantjustice.org.

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Hey, it's Andrea.

It's come to my attention that some of you have been served programmatic ads for ICE on my show.

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Immigrants make this country great.

In the last episode, we got to know the Weyburn family, and this is where Alyssa will eventually end up.

But there was a period of time before she could be placed with them where she did spend some time in foster care.

And I want to talk about that today because the decisions that get made around where a child should be during an investigation can have a huge impact on these cases.

We've discussed this before, but for family and juvenile courts, family reunification is the mandate.

And that is mostly as it should be, but there are special circumstances in medical child abuse cases that can make the decisions around custody really impactful for an investigation.

And I wanted to talk about how that played out in Alyssa's case.

Here's Detective Mike Weber to fill us in.

Laura and Bill Weyburn volunteered to take custody of Alyssa initially, but they had to go through a home study, which is required by CPS.

During that time period, Alyssa was in foster care, and thankfully she was placed with a nurse practitioner in foster care.

And this nurse practitioner took daily logs, which is what we do.

We have them write down everything she eats, right?

We're documenting her recovery, her physical activity, everything.

That foster parent called me with a concern after the first visitation between Brittany and Alyssa.

But at this point, we're still very early on in our process of understanding this.

So we let Brittany bring things into the visitation.

Cardinal sin that you do not do.

And this is a prime example why.

She had brought a backpack with some things in it for Alyssa to take home.

The foster parent put the backpack in the car, could not make it a block down the road before she was overcome with the smell of cologne.

She rolled down the windows, got home.

A teddy bear that was in the backpack that Brittany gave Alyssa had been doused with cologne.

You say, why cologne?

Well, I didn't know either until I later went to the allergist office and saw the sign there saying, please do not wear heavy cologne for allergic reactions.

She was attempting to induce an allergic reaction, is my belief.

And had Brittany claimed that Alyssa had some respiratory issues?

Yes.

I mean, it wasn't just gastric.

It was also respiratory.

She had claimed asthma.

She had had her on numerous asthma drugs, which can stunt growth.

And, you know, Alyssa's bone density at that point was a year behind.

So there were numerous, numerous issues.

The foster mom took the bear out, put it in the garage.

gave some of the other stuff to Alyssa.

One of the things she gave her was a picture.

And Alyssa takes the picture and all of of a sudden she's coming up going, look, look, I can jump, I can jump, I can jump.

And the foster mom's like, oh, that's great.

And after about the third or fourth time, she's like, what the heck?

And she's holding, Alyssa's holding the picture.

And the foster mom takes the picture back and looks at it again.

And in that picture is the picture of Brittany and Alyssa, but Alyssa has on leg braces that she doesn't need.

Again, because mom had presented her with those issues also.

And it just shows you the psychological manipulation, right, of the victim.

This is a three-year-old we're talking about.

Interestingly enough, that picture that Brittany gave Alyssa for the first visitation, she posted that picture immediately on her Facebook account after she got out of jail as her profile picture.

And that is a message to Alyssa.

What do you think the message is?

I'm here whenever you're ready.

Was there anything else in that bag?

There was.

There was a movie, and the movie was Tangled.

Again, I don't have kids.

I didn't know what that movie was, so it had to be explained to me.

But Tangled is the story of Rapunzel and the wicked stepmother.

And there was particularly disturbing to the foster mom was the song in the movie, which was Mommy Knows Best, Mommy Knows Best, repeated over and over again.

I can't watch that movie as anything other than a Munchausen by Proxy Parable now.

Like my daughter likes that movie, and I'm just like, I think it's a me thing, but I'm having this reaction.

But yeah, it's sort of striking, actually.

If you didn't watch all the way to the end, you could just be like, great, what a good mom.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, people say Brittany's stupid.

Well, is she?

Because she's smart enough to try to manipulate a three-year-old in that manner.

It's sort of a cunning, right?

Right.

I mean, she's not, she probably doesn't have the highest IQ, but she's very, very street smart.

And again, that manipulativeness.

It's a different type in this situation.

Yeah.

So probably not convincing anyone she was a PhD the way Hope was, but nonetheless.

And nonetheless, the ability to get what she wants, especially, she thinks, from Alyssa.

The Weyburns also remember these visitations.

Brittany had visitations with Alyssa for quite a while.

What do you remember about those?

Well, and I remember when and where we cut it off to, is that from 2011 to February of 2013, she had visitation and it was supervised, fortunately.

We kind of got into a groove where I would make sure and have a snack for her because that was something that was so important to her is to be able to eat because she couldn't eat during the visits because, you know, for safety reasons, they weren't supposed to let her bring anything, which was a whole other thing.

They didn't always follow the rules.

She wasn't supposed to bring anything to the visitation.

She was not supposed to bring any toys, any gifts, those kind of things.

She routinely violated that order.

And what happened was, is that on one occasion, Laura and Alyssa were coming home and CPS had gave her all this stuff that she wasn't supposed to bring.

And, you know, how do you take something away from a child that's been given to them?

So Laura was coming home and both her and Alyssa get ill.

ill.

So there was something in the toys.

We don't know what.

We had several tests run, but we don't know what it was.

We don't know what reaction.

But both of them kind of had an allergic reaction to whatever had been put in those toys.

And we handed it over to, I think Weber was the one that processed it and sent it to the ME's office.

And there was...

There was just no way to narrow it down what it was.

But the fact was they did have a reaction.

I made a lot of phone calls and wrote a lot of emails and sometimes, sometimes was able to advocate for her effectively, not for lack of trying more.

But the visits were just really, really difficult.

Sometimes it would be a little bit less than neutral, but usually it was pretty rough for the rest of that day.

Those visitations were bizarre.

Brittany was dramatic was the things.

I never was at them.

You know, Laura was at all of them and it was just awful.

And it was awful for Alyssa because, you know, I mean, I think, I think there was a little bit of PTSD going on.

If she knew that she was going to go and see her, there was often a behavior change and she became more difficult.

I don't want to say she was terrible because she wasn't.

I mean, it was completely understandable.

I mean, I would have lost my mind if I were her too.

And so, but there was a clear behavior change, a clear change in her, you know, her whole affect would just change and be more negative.

And she would be clearly anxious.

And sometimes she would say she didn't want to go.

Sometimes she'd say, oh, whatever.

But it was never, yay, we get to go see mommy.

Never.

It just didn't happen.

I don't remember a story of her being upset when she had to break contact and come home either, which would be normal for a child to do.

So I never saw that.

So there was never any bonding in my mind that went on.

There was times when the visits would stop for a period of time for one reason or another.

There was, I can't remember all of the timelines, but there was a time when she was, Brittany was hospitalized.

There was a time when she was in jail for something.

There was just some legal stuff where we didn't have to bring her.

every single week for the whole time before the CPS case was closed.

So in 2013, when we figured out all this was going on and there was other issues happening and she wasn't living up to the requirements, is uh we went to our attorney basically are you ready to defend us because we're not going back to any visitation saying that's enough and he said let's do it and uh so it was 2013 that was the last time Alyssa saw Brittany until the trial.

When we were able to finally stop the visits, it was a beautiful thing.

What happened was CPS closed the case and left her in the legal status of we were her permanent managing conservators.

And so she wasn't adopted, but she wasn't Brittany's.

You might wonder why Brittany was still allowed to have access to Alyssa during this time.

And the fact is that family and juvenile court do not have a good understanding of this abuse, and yet they play a huge role in these cases.

So I wanted to get a better idea of how all of this works behind the scenes, because as you'll see, family court also plays a huge part in my family's story.

My name is Leah McGowan and I am a family law attorney in California.

Due process is a, I mean it's a safeguard, but it's when it comes to child abuse, it has to happen before the court can protect the child.

So due process, the concept is, you know, you can't take away someone's rights unless there's been this process where it's been proven with evidence that they've done something wrong.

And in a child abuse context, that means the child has to have been abused first before protective measures can be taken.

And the abuse needs to be evident enough that it's going to make a judge feel comfortable restricting a parent's access or terminating a parent's right.

It's a high bar.

I mean, keeping families together, it is, it's a priority.

And each judge kind of carries out that mandate differently.

But the evidence of child abuse has to be proven at a pretty high level in order for something to happen, which basically means a child is going to have to be abused before it could be protected from that abuse.

And if that isn't all frustrating and confusing enough, there are also issues on the CPS level.

I spoke some more with Tarrant County CPS supervisor Susan Ryle to explain that side of things.

They have a category that they can check off for medical neglect, right?

Which describes someone who's not taking their child to do it.

Exactly.

And it's really hard to say she's medically neglecting her daughter when she's seeing umpteen gazillion doctors.

How are you going to get there?

Right.

She's seeing all these doctors.

And this is really a different thing.

Medical abuse is a different

using the medical to abuse the child as opposed to not getting medical care and neglect.

And is that an official category that CPS looks for?

No.

There is no such thing as medical abuse in the state of Texas.

No such thing.

We've had to manufacture dispositions to meet the categories that we have.

So you're trying to shoehorn it into a category that

does not describe what's really happening.

Yes, and that makes it very difficult when you're going to court, civil court or criminal court, to say,

you know, we want to do X, Y, and Z because, but you ruled it out, or but you didn't, it's not reason to believe.

So it just makes it difficult, depending on who you're dealing with.

If we're dealing with some of the people we've worked with, judges, ADAs, et cetera, that we can work with and talk to and explain.

That's one thing.

But most places in the state of Texas, as well as if we get a family court judge that knows nothing about it.

You're really having to start from scratch, trying to explain the existence of a type of abuse that they may never have heard of.

Exactly.

Rather than, and not that it's all about paperwork, but you don't even have a box for this.

If it's real,

why isn't there a category for it?

Right.

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It is true what they say.

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As we've discussed, this form of abuse is widely misunderstood.

So I talked to one of the top experts in the country to discuss the difficulty around the idea of diagnosing a perpetrator with a mental health condition as a way of determining whether or not abuse is happening.

I'm Beatrice Yorker.

I'm a child and adolescent psychiatric nurse

and I also have a law degree and I've spent my career mostly teaching nursing and also doing research to become a nursing professor.

I don't know how you can describe someone who would almost kill their child for the purposes of getting their own emotional needs met as a caring parent.

I believe someone who could do that could appear for a small period of time spent with a psychological evaluator to be a caring parent.

But I think that that sort of speaks to the problem with bringing in like the idea that you could diagnose factitious disorder imposed on another in the course of a psychological evaluation rather than with a full investigation of the records.

Again and again, I have encountered in particularly the family and dependency courts where the entire system really does not understand munchas and biproxy.

Very often they have been intimidated, threatened, or reversed.

When they try to see it for what it is, they're intimidated, and so they defer to the psychological evaluators.

And a psychological evaluator is no better than the average Joe Blow on the street at detecting lying.

So the psychological evaluations are notoriously unable.

Sometimes they'll say something like, yeah, we saw a little bit of psychopathy, or yeah, we saw a high score on the need to look good index, but this person is not crazy.

This person doesn't have a disorder that would cause them to be a child abuser.

So that is a real problem.

It's the medical record review.

Every time I interview a new case and a new mother, I am just snuckered.

I believe them.

I feel their sense of concern.

I feel how they haven't been heard by the medical system.

I believe that, yes, other people are missing these signs and symptoms.

Then I do a record review and then I talk to other people.

That is when I start going, oh my gosh, I was completely snookered.

Even you, with all of your decades of experience, even you sitting in a room with one of these women, you're fooled, essentially, snookered?

Very many times.

If they really are doing this for the medical attention, if they are meeting their psychological need to be in the healthcare arena and create crises, then I don't think I've ever done an interview with one of these folks where

it was obvious that they weren't really genuinely caring for their child.

This morass of CPS, family court, the legal system, and all of the confusion about this form of abuse is what the Wayburns were up against, but they were not giving up.

You hadn't officially adopted Alyssa, but Brittany's parental rights had been terminated?

No, her rights had not gotten terminated yet.

When CPS closed the case, they left her rights intact.

And for lack of a better term, the only way I can describe this is that they just decided that it was going to be too hard for them to terminate.

And so they just decided to close the case and leave her with us.

And so then it was up to us to terminate, which we did.

So then that's incumbent upon you to pursue a legal case and take it to family court, I'm assuming.

Okay.

Yes.

Did Brittany ever fight you on this process and try to get custody of Alyssa back?

What Brittany did during the entire CPS case was follow their plans,

sort of, as far as doing a little bit of the service plan, a little bit of what they asked her to do, and then not all of it.

So the official answer would be no, she didn't.

Like, for example, she had been ordered to see a psychiatrist.

She wouldn't, she had said she didn't want want to be on meds.

And so she wouldn't follow all of the plans.

And so officially, that's how CPS was able to say, well, we can't give her back to you because you haven't, you know, you haven't done what you're supposed to do.

But at the point where we terminated on her, she didn't fight it, interestingly enough, because that's when the criminal case was getting really hot at that point.

I mean, the criminal case had been going on all along, but it, you know, it just took forever because it did.

So many records, so many everything.

Of course, it feels like it was 150 years, even though I understand what happened and why, and I respect it.

It just still was, oh, it was so long.

What happened was, I'm not a lawyer, but the best I can explain it is in order for her to fight us on terminating her, she would have had to answer a lot of questions, even previous to a court hearing in the family court part.

So I think they're called interrogatories.

I'm not even positive about that.

But she would have had to fill out documents and answer questions, which would have incriminated her in her criminal case.

And so then she just didn't, she didn't respond.

And so it actually turned out to be kind of a nothing simple thing, even though it was heart-wrenching and forever in the process, to actually terminate her because she didn't fight.

And we believe that's why, because I mean, any, I can't imagine that a lawyer would have told her that she should have answered those questions because it would have incriminated her.

And if we'd have known then what we know now, we would have done some things different.

The biggest thing we would have done is hire a lawyer early on because we didn't have a voice in court, but we didn't, we didn't know, we knew a lot, but we didn't know that.

And that's important.

We sort of trusted the system more than what I wish we would have.

But what ended up happening is whenever the case was closed and CPS was no longer involved, we had a set of guidelines.

It was a legal document, so it wasn't, you know, we didn't have a choice about it, but it was the outline of visitation and such.

And it was written in such a way, thankfully we did consult an attorney.

It was written in such a way that if Brittany didn't do this or this, then we could stop the visits.

which we were able to do pretty soon thereafter.

But the neatest thing that happened from that is, let's see, she was removed in 2011.

And so then it would have been 2012 that the case was closed.

The CPS case was closed.

Yes, that the CPS case was closed in July of 2012.

And one of the biggest things about that court document that was the coolest thing was her name got changed to Weyburn.

And so we sat her down.

I remember we sat her down in the backyard.

And because how weird is it to have, at this time she's four to have a four-year-old saying

we're not teaching her how to say her name we're not teaching her her whole name and we were just staying away from it because we knew that it was going to change and so you know we we just didn't and so then whenever we sat her down you know we told her that we had gone and talked to some really important people and and they found out that they agreed with us that she should stay with us forever.

And I asked her, I said, and what is your name?

And she said, Alyssa Wayburn.

She just said it right then.

She already felt it, and which is great because all of the court documents didn't mean anything to her at that time.

It just, you know, that's who she was.

That was precious.

Even with all the complications, this process went about as well as possible under the circumstances.

Here again is Detective Mike Weber.

This was the case that the most things went right on.

I mean, this is the best example of what should happen in these cases that I have.

It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.

She shouldn't have had visitation.

We shouldn't have let Brittany bring things in to Ciao Lissa.

Sheriff and Laura shouldn't have had to pay $30,000 to family court.

It's the same story over and over, but a lot of things went right.

It felt like justice wasn't served at all.

Like nobody was protecting this child that we were all fighting so hard to protect.

And they let her down.

They let our whole family down, really.

That's next time on Nobody Should Believe Me.

Nobody Should Believe Me is produced by Large Media.

Our music is by Johnny Nicholson and Joel Schupak.

Special thanks to our lead producer, Tina Knoll, and our editor, Travis Clark.

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