January 8, 2019 • 28 mins
The trouble starts when a teacher notices a bruise on Hannah Hart's arm. It follows Jen and Sarah Hart across three states, to the blue house in Woodland, Washington, where they're supposed to get a fresh start.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This past. Can I help you? Who are we checking on?
The mothers are Sarah and Jennifer Hart and according to
my intake, they have six children in the home. Six
children okay, the eldest being nineteen, so not technically legally
a child. Okay. The children are in Ragne between nineteen
(00:21):
and twelve according to my intake. Okay. And are you
with CPS or you are the concern c with CPS
in Callot's County, Yes, ma'am, okay, let's see here the
home Monday and Friday. I knocked on the door just
this morning and no one I can get in a response.
Are you there now? No, unfortunately, and you've tried two
(00:42):
times and you can't reach them. Correct. I've knocked on
the door twice. Different cars have been moving in and
now I noticed, so I feel like someone's there. Okay.
And when were you there last? This morning and thirty Okay.
I've got a deputy on the way and he will
call you back when he I have something to tell you. Okay,
thank you so much to appreciate your alrighty today. Thanks
(01:04):
a good dame. Bye. The call you just heard came
in the day the hearts died. You can hear the
operator speaking with a case worker from Clark County Social
Services requesting a wellness check at the Heart family's home
in Woodland, Washington. The case worker was responding to a
call from Dana to Kalb, who lived next door with
her husband Bruce and shared a driveway with the Hearts.
(01:24):
She wasn't the first person to report the Hearts to
the authorities. You may recall that her own dad had
reported them four months earlier. Hi, how can I help you? Yeah,
there's some kids that I feel as being highly abused
in Woodland, Washington and basically my southern laws, like most people,
they don't want to get involved, and so he was
(01:47):
keeping my daughter out of it. But since you told
me about it, I just can't live with it. I'm
very concerned for these kids. So how did these women, adventurous,
tree hugging, free spirited peace necks as Jed called them
on Facebook go from being groovy, idealistic trailblazers to moms
who abused their kids and drove off a cliff? And
(02:09):
when did the abuse begin? From glamour and how stuff works?
This is broken Hearts. I'm Lizzie Agan and I'm Justine Harmon.
Here's Lauren Smiley talking with Amy Olstad Rstad, whose son
(02:29):
went to Woodland Elementary School with the Hearts. Describe what
you did see when they were there going to the
same school as your kids. Just kind of walk me
through what you knew about the Hearts. They just caught
your eye. I can't It's like something you can't really.
They had an aur of you know, just saying these
(02:50):
five and I only saw five of them because Marcuts
must have been at the middle school by them. I
can remember them all getting out and standing in a line,
and us waiting until they were all out in this line,
and then they would just walk right in, just like
little soldiers. And you know, we thought it was. My
(03:10):
husband and I would talk about it and say, well,
I guess you know their well behave. We thought they
were all the same age. That's one thing that I
do remember is, you know, our son was in kindergarten then,
and we thought they were small, so we thought they
had to be in kindergarten. The kids Amy saw from
her car window were the Hearts, Abigail, Hannah, Davante, Jeremiah,
(03:33):
and Sierra. The woman dropping them off would have been Jen.
At this point, Sarah was working full time at her
Burger's while Jen stayed home with the kids. If you've
ever done school drop off, you know the scene, big backpacks,
shuffling sneakers, maybe a little sister waving from the back seat.
For lots of kids, the next seven hours are a
(03:53):
drudgery to be endured. For the hearts, the school day
might have been a welcome respite from what was going
on at home. The abuse started in Alexandria, Minnesota, and
it would follow the family across three states. We'll never
know why Jen and Sarah moved so many times, but
wherever they went, people noticed their kids odd robotic behavior,
their bruises, their hunger. Here's Ian Spurling, Jen and Sarah's
(04:17):
friend who you've heard from before. Looking back on it,
it doesn't look like they were normal kids. They didn't
really have friends. They didn't hang out with other kids
any That's one of those red flags when I had
stated that in my post, like duh, that's one of
the other things looking back, like, why didn't we notice
they didn't have like friends? You know, the kids weren't
allowed to just go hang out with friends. The paper
(04:37):
trail starts. On September nine, two eight. According to a
police report, someone on the staff at Washington Elementary School
noticed a suspicious bruise on Hannah Hart's arm. She was six,
and this was her second week of first grade. Did
a teacher see it first? A cafeteria aid is school nurse.
(05:01):
According to a police report, Hannah told someone at school
that her mother had struck her with a belt. Davante
was nearly six too, most likely adjusting to life in
a different kindergarten class. Marcus was somewhere else in the
same building. He was ten. Did Hannah tell her brothers
what had happened while they waited for Jen to come
(05:22):
pick them up after school? Here's what we know. When
Sarah and Jen were questioned, they told the police that
the bruise on Hannah's arm was probably from a fall
down stairs. Eight stairs to be exact, which is an
odd detail to have on the tip of your tongue.
I've walked from the first floor of my house to
the second one at least a thousand times over the
(05:44):
thirteen years we've lived there, and I couldn't tell you
how many stairs there are. Two months later, a week
before Thanksgiving, break Jen and Sarah Withdrew, Hannah, Davante, and
Marcus from Washington Elementary School to be homeschooled. This must
have been a terrifying moment for the kids, relinquishing their
cubbies and their spots on the rug. What was running
(06:05):
through their minds when they left the classrooms that day
was Marcus, who was in the fifth grade, relieved to
be sprung from the looming specter of long division. Were
they dreading being stuck in the house all day with Jen?
Jen painted a colorful picture of homeschooling on Facebook. Lessons
on the beach, meditation on the deck, our class on
the dining room table. But who knows how long the
(06:25):
days were for her six students and how much they
might have missed having classmates who weren't their siblings and
a teacher who wasn't their mom. In September two thousand nine,
the Heart family took a road trip so Jen and
Sarah could get married in a civil ceremony in Connecticut,
where same sex marriage was legal. For the next nine years,
Jen would mark their anniversaries on Facebook, showing the two
(06:49):
of them in front of a waterfall or a thicket
of evergreens. Alongside a flowery ode to her bride, who,
by all accounts, was not a regular user of social media.
When we were finally able to get married, Jen wrote
in two thousand seventeen, the only people present were our children,
simply because our support system was so small. That same fall,
(07:11):
all five school aged Chart kids were re enrolled in
public school. Later, Jen and Sarah would tell a social
worker that this was a requirement of their adoption agency,
So off the older five went. Marcus, Hannah Davante, Abigail,
and Jeremiah Sierra stayed home with Jen. You beautiful thing you,
Jen wrote about her on Facebook, according to a police report.
(07:35):
In November of two thousand ten, Douglas County Social Services
got another call from school. This time the subject was Abigail,
who was in the first grade. She'd been stealing classmates
food and digging through the garbage looking for scraps. Later
that month, Abigail reported AOIS to her teacher. According to
(07:56):
a report compiled three years later by the Oregon Department
of Health and Human Service is and I'm quoting here,
Abigail had bruising on her stomach area from her stern
um to waistband and bruising on her back from mid
back to upper buttocks reportedly caused by Jen Hart according
to Abigail, but in the CPS interview with the couple,
(08:16):
Sarah Hart said she was the one responsible for the marks.
The worker said this incident was over a penny. They
had discovered a penny in Abigail's pocket and asked her
about it. Abigail had said she found it. Jen and
Sarah Hart did not believe her and said she stole
a penny and was lying about it, hence the spanking,
which got out of control. Per Sarah Heart. Abigail also
(08:39):
said they put her head under cold water and Jen
had her two hands on her neck end quote. Investigators
interviewed the other Heart kids, who said they were often grounded, spanked,
or sent to their rooms without food, but when Jen
and Sarah were questioned separately, they told a different story.
(09:01):
Sarah said she'd been the one who had Abigail. Jen
backed her up, and the investigators believed them. Maybe Jen
had more to lose. She was the one who received
monthly assistance checks from the state of Texas for adopting
the kids out of foster care. She also received Social
Security checks for Davante and Jeremiah. All of these checks
(09:23):
were in her name, and she might have believed a
child abuse conviction would put these funds in jeopardy. The
case workers report said, the problem is these women look normal. Remember,
Abby was the first kid Jen held in her arms,
the one who made her a mom. She was the
one who loved dance parties and tried to teach the
(09:43):
chickens how to do yoga. In one of the last
pictures we see of her on Facebook, she's buckled into
a roller coaster at the Oregon State Fair, smiling bravely
by Sarah's side. This is the girl whose neck Jen
held in her hands under cold water. The state file
charges against Sarah in state court for two gross misdemeanors,
(10:04):
malicious punishment of a child and domestic assault. In December
of two thousand ten, Minnesota Child Welfare learned about a
bruise on Hannah's hand. By this time, she was in
third grade, the year of chapter books, when you're not
quite one of the big kids yet, but you know
your way around the school. When she was questioned, Hannah
said Jenn hit her because she lied. She said Jen
(10:27):
hit her all the time. Later, the school nurse called
the Hearts to report that Hannah was asking her classmates
for food. She said she hadn't eaten all day. Sarah's
response was not the one you'd expect of a mother
trying to put her best foot forward for the benefit
of the authorities. She said of Hannah, she's playing the
food card. Just give her water. Hannah was the oldest sister,
(10:51):
the one with the missing front teeth. There aren't many
pictures of her on Facebook, but in the ones we
do see, she appears shy and tentative. She was the
one who would eventually jump out her bedroom window and
run to the neighbors in the middle of the night
to tell them her mom's were abusive, but that wouldn't
happen until later, much later. Ian Sperling says he hadn't
(11:13):
seen much of the family in the year before they died.
There were canceled plans, lots of them. He's been beating
himself up over some of the signs he missed. Obviously,
hindsight is my wife and I are beating ourselves up
daily because you know, why didn't we see this? Well,
you couldn't. There's not a person I know, and even
those the people that said they followed up. I get
(11:34):
the neighbors following up because they probably saw more. But
people are friends or acquaintances of the hearts. There's no
way they knew anything was wrong. There's it's not possible.
Maybe if you really wanted to be a very critical,
judgmental person, you may have said, well, they're too perfect,
I'm going to dive into this, or you know the
kids are skinny, Well we just thought they were eating
organic food in that scene. There's a lot of people
who are skinny, and I think the whole food thing.
(11:57):
You know, Look, if I was not wanting to ulified
himanized Jen, I would say, well, she didn't know how
to punish them, because six kids who have developmental disabilities
are going to be tough to raise, and so maybe
this was her way of trying to find a punishment
that was appropriate. Was you know, well you're going to
bed without dinner tonight type of thing, and they morphed
into a bigger deal with reheards in the neighbors finding
(12:18):
out about and stuff like that. Who knows. That's one
way to look at it. I think the more realistic
way to look at it is she actually was holding
from them for quite a bit. I think another way
to look at it was that's how she controlled them.
On Tuesday, April five, two thousand eleven, all six Heart
kids were pulled out of Woodland Elementary School. This time
(12:38):
they never went back. The Heart family was officially off
the grid. The following year, Sarah Hart was discharged from
supervised probation in Minnesota and moved to Oregon to find
a new job. We don't know how often the kids
got to see Sarah during this time, but her absence
must have been hard on them. They already had a
(13:00):
lot of disruption in their lives. They've been removed from
the homes of their biological families, in some cases, families
they would have remembered during this time. On December twelve,
Jen had a car accident with the kids in Missoula, Montana.
The car she was driving was the Yukon, the same
one she was driving when she went off the cliff,
(13:22):
as she described it on Facebook, once, twice, three times.
Finally we crashed into the side of the gently sloping mountain.
In what was most likely seconds, so many inexplicable thoughts
ran through my mind. Was I dead? There was no
way we could have all survived such an incident. I
(13:42):
unclenched my fists from the steering wheel, brushed off the glass,
and turned my head back to see all six kids
hanging upside down? Are you okay? Every single child was
safely secured by their seatbelts. Jen then goes into a
lengthy description of a couple who bent over backwards to
help them, even offering to drive the Hearts the rest
(14:02):
of the way to Portland, where they were going to
see Sarah. We weren't able to find any record of
the accident, Jen describes. However, after the Hearts died, Brian Lee,
the husband from the couple who offered to drive them
that night, was interviewed by The Oregonian. He remembers meeting
(14:22):
the family after they were involved in what he calls
a rollover accident. He says he and his wife rented
a trailer to tow the Hearts car to Spokan and
the Jen talked for the entire three hour drive. She
must have been starved for adult company. Interestingly, Lee says
the accident happened the day after Christmas, not two days before,
(14:45):
as Jen said in her Facebook post when she posted
about the event. Years later, she made the family's survival
sound like a Christmas miracle. The fact that the accident
happened right before Christmas seemed to be the whole point.
Of course, Lee might have been mistaken about the date,
but this discrepancy could be yet another bit of evidence
(15:05):
that Jen had her own interpretation of facts. A few
months later, Jen and the kids reunited with Sarah for
good in their new home in West Lynn, Oregon, about
(15:28):
fifteen miles outside of Portland's. Jen immortalized their goodbye on Facebook,
leaving out the mom's brushes with the law. Here's what
she wrote, Packing the past ten years of my life
into boxes. It's almost surreal walking through the house. Empty walls,
empty drawers, empty cupboards, empty rooms. The kids arn't supplies, instruments, games,
(15:53):
and toys are packed. I was feeling kind of awful
about the lack of things for them to do during
the transition time until this morning. I was taking down
the boy's bunk beds and heard the loudest, silliest, full
on belly laughs and cafaws coming from the other room.
I walk in to see a trio of the kids
sitting slash laying on the bare floor Not a single
thing exists in that room aside from their little bodies.
(16:15):
They were telling stories, making up silly songs, and laughing
themselves into sprawled out piles of utter bliss. Ah. Yes,
simplicity at its finest. What a beautiful reminder that the
things that matter most are not things at all. We
have each other. Our songs are laughter, our love. These
are the magic moments, live, love, laugh. People liked this post.
(16:47):
I headed south of Portland to the suburb of West Lynne.
It's in Clackamus County, the area or Tanya Harding had
grown up. I've recently seen Tanya, so I've been expecting
the scruppy, white working class neighborhoods from the movie. Instead,
on the bluff over the Willamette River and it's mostly
defunct paper Mills, is an upscale main drag filled with
(17:07):
pilate studios, a juice shop, a plastic surgeon offering botox.
The nearby streets are lined with tidy clapboard houses and
picket fences, but two stuck out for being less manicured
than the others. When had been the house that the
Hearts rented when they moved to Oregon and next to
it the house of Bill Groner. Groner is in his sixties,
ruddy cheeks, belly, white goatee. You get the sense he
(17:31):
be a really good mall Santa. Inside his house, an
electric piano sits on his kitchen table, and his fridge
is plastered with pictures of grandkids and a magnet that
reads pray without ceasing. This is Bill. You can hear
baseball games up all the way up here from the
park down below. A lot of water skiing, a lot
(17:52):
of boating. Actually got two neighbors down here across the
street that have have boats, a lot of camping. The
arts love to camp, I know, because they were seemed
like they were often going out on expeditions with their
canoes on the top of their their vehicle. They love
(18:15):
getting away, which is one reason I thought, you know,
they were good parents in the regard they were doing
like fun outdoor stuff with their kids. It seems like
they've been here like maybe for three years. Oh. First
time I talked was at the mailbox, and one of
them was a little though Gallop. I think she worked
(18:37):
up at Cole's and Vancouver. I forget is that Sarah,
And she was kind of the more open friendly one,
and not that the other lady wasn't friendly. But I
talked to Sarah at the mailbox. Conversation came up once
there was something at the mailbox that she thought I
(18:59):
can't remember what it was, whether it was uh, somebody
had written something put in their mailbox, something that that
she talked like she thought that she had gotten away
from that by coming out here. So that was that
was an issue for her again, you know, being uh gay,
I guess, uh, and that that upset her. Basically intimated
(19:26):
that she had the experience that they had experienced that
because she had mentioned that that they had some problems before,
you know, and she didn't go into detail, but she
was just conscious that being gay that you know, in
our society, and uh so I just thought, well, maybe,
(19:47):
you know, I don't want her to think that I'm
being judgmental, and I just want to be a good neighbor.
We'd like to pause here to consider what Bill Groner
is saying. Of course he doesn't want to a bad neighbor.
Nobody does. But we do think the pains Bill and
others took to give Jen and Sarah a wide birth
(20:08):
might have enabled their mistreatment of the kids. To be clear,
we're not placing the blame on Bill's shoulders or anyone else's,
but we do want to call attention to the very
human tendency not to get involved. We believe it might
have landed the heart moms some free passes. Who wants
to be the person who comes across as being homophobic
(20:29):
or racist, or closed minded, or, as Bill himself said, judgmental.
We're taught if you see something, say something, But we're
also told you can't judge another woman until you walk
in her shoes. If your neighbor's family looks different from yours,
(20:50):
you might check yourself when you're questioning their decisions or
their parenting. And in most cases that's the right thing
to do. But where Jen and Sarah were concerned, political
correctness might have provided them some cover for their double life.
I mean, I'd see the up front once in a while,
(21:10):
I'd see the kids, not very often, though not very often.
I never saw him like walking up the street or
anything like that. They were pretty much stayed in their yard.
They were friendly, smiled, would say hi, but didn't really
care out a conversation. I never saw any kind of
(21:31):
friends or family over there visiting them. They didn't seemed
to come out well that they didn't come outside very
often at all. It was just stayed in the house
a lot. So they were looking for land saving up
that they became evident the reason they were here was
just as a stop off place so they could, you know,
(21:53):
with that many kids. This was a you know, a
large house and kind of a nice kind of area
that you know, not it's not like some places in Portland,
you know, get some land and all that they could
have animals. I know they were working on getting the
financing together, remember when they were talking about that. They
(22:15):
wanted to get back to the garden, as we used
to say in the seventies. The Hearts were in West
Lynne for four years before they moved an hour north
(22:37):
to Woodland, Washington, to the house next door to the Decounts.
They never registered as home schoolers, so for a while
at least, the state of Oregon didn't know about six
of its newest residents, but that would change. In two
thousand thirteen, while Jen's Facebook account was at maximum activity
with near daily post throughout the year, two whistleblowers report
(23:00):
to the family to CPS. The first call came in
on a few weeks after Jen posted a picture of
a painfully thin Davante playing guitar. Me any particular reason
you're naked him in the most matter of factly fashion.
I'm not naked. I'm wearing a guitar. Yep, that's my
(23:22):
string being. According to the CPS report, the first informant,
who was anonymous, said Jen does this thing for her
Facebook page, where the kids pose and are made to
look like one big, happy family, but after the photo
event they go back to looking lifeless. The same whistleblower
said Jen had allowed each kid only a single slice
of pizza for dinner, and when it turned out that
(23:44):
someone had helped themselves to more during the night, she
punished all six kids by making them wear sleeping masks
and line and air mattress for five hours. The whistleblower
noted that the kids would eat freely while Jen wasn't around,
but once she entered the room, they deny that they've
eaten at all. The second whistleblower identified herself as Alexandra
(24:04):
arjiropolis She was a friend the hearts had stayed with
when they traveled to San Francisco that summer. On Facebook,
we see Davante in a zebra unitard again whip it thin,
flashing a hang loose sign in front of the Golden
Gate Bridge the caption good morning, City by the Bay.
In a statement after their deaths Ardiropolis said Jen ran
(24:26):
the family quote like a regimented boot camp, not letting
the kids cry and punishing them for laughing too loudly. Also,
according to Ardiropolis, quote, true kindness, love and respect for
the kids was largely absent. Child Welfare visited the west
Lynn house in August of two thousand and thirteen and
(24:46):
interviewed each of the kids separately, despite their mom's hesitation
about that arrangement. According to a CPS report, Davante volunteered
to go first, and all of the kids answers were
nearly identical, non mentioned pa st episodes of abuse, and
Marcus said he was grateful to the moms for changing
his life. One social worker noted that, with the exception
(25:07):
of Davante quote, the kids appeared very reserved and showed
little emotion or animation end quote. When it was their
turn to speak to case workers. Jen and Sarah said
Abigail had been quote labeled borderline mentally retarded, but they
didn't believe the diagnosis and that Jeremiah was globally delayed,
(25:28):
possibly even autistic. They also explained Hannah's missing front teeth
like this, she had knocked them out while running on
a hardwood floor the year before. Hannah told the CPS
workers she needed to wait until she was seventeen to
get a retainer with teeth. The case workers report noted
that Jen was quote adamant that many of the family's
issues stemmed from others not understanding their alternative lifestyle. Jen
(25:51):
said she only disciplined the kids by talking to them
or making them meditate for five minutes. A doctor who
examined the kids for the Oregon Apartment of Human Services
found all but one of the heart kids, Jeremiah, behind
in their growth to the point of falling off in
some cases, way off the chart for their ages. Still,
a handwritten cover letter atop the report states the doctor
(26:15):
had no concerns whatsoever with any of the children. Even so,
the doctor recommended that a caseworker monitor the family and
request follow up physicals in six months. This never happened.
On October thirteen, the same week her six kids were
examined on behalf of the state. Jen posted a picture
(26:35):
of Davante holding a homemade piggy bank painted like a globe,
with a caption that said he had the whole world
in his hands. Up next time on Broken Hearts moving
that will say a thing and I'm not race. There's
a lot of white savior is symbolic in this story
(26:56):
now that I never understood or knew about. These kids
are being used with a prop. The fact that that
would be utilized as a way to math some of
the abuse in inglect that was happening within the home,
It's just just disturbing. We love those kids so much.
(27:20):
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,
(27:41):
with new episodes dropping every Tuesday. Broken Hearts is co
hosted and co written by Justine Harmon and Elizabeth Egan
and edited by Wendy Knockle. 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.
(28:03):
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 Thaine.
Special thanks to Jen Lance
This past. Can I help you? Who are we checking on?
The mothers are Sarah and Jennifer Hart and according to
my intake, they have six children in the home. Six
children okay, the eldest being nineteen, so not technically legally
a child. Okay. The children are in Ragne between nineteen
(00:21):
and twelve according to my intake. Okay. And are you
with CPS or you are the concern c with CPS
in Callot's County, Yes, ma'am, okay, let's see here the
home Monday and Friday. I knocked on the door just
this morning and no one I can get in a response.
Are you there now? No, unfortunately, and you've tried two
(00:42):
times and you can't reach them. Correct. I've knocked on
the door twice. Different cars have been moving in and
now I noticed, so I feel like someone's there. Okay.
And when were you there last? This morning and thirty Okay.
I've got a deputy on the way and he will
call you back when he I have something to tell you. Okay,
thank you so much to appreciate your alrighty today. Thanks
(01:04):
a good dame. Bye. The call you just heard came
in the day the hearts died. You can hear the
operator speaking with a case worker from Clark County Social
Services requesting a wellness check at the Heart family's home
in Woodland, Washington. The case worker was responding to a
call from Dana to Kalb, who lived next door with
her husband Bruce and shared a driveway with the Hearts.
(01:24):
She wasn't the first person to report the Hearts to
the authorities. You may recall that her own dad had
reported them four months earlier. Hi, how can I help you? Yeah,
there's some kids that I feel as being highly abused
in Woodland, Washington and basically my southern laws, like most people,
they don't want to get involved, and so he was
(01:47):
keeping my daughter out of it. But since you told
me about it, I just can't live with it. I'm
very concerned for these kids. So how did these women, adventurous,
tree hugging, free spirited peace necks as Jed called them
on Facebook go from being groovy, idealistic trailblazers to moms
who abused their kids and drove off a cliff? And
(02:09):
when did the abuse begin? From glamour and how stuff works?
This is broken Hearts. I'm Lizzie Agan and I'm Justine Harmon.
Here's Lauren Smiley talking with Amy Olstad Rstad, whose son
(02:29):
went to Woodland Elementary School with the Hearts. Describe what
you did see when they were there going to the
same school as your kids. Just kind of walk me
through what you knew about the Hearts. They just caught
your eye. I can't It's like something you can't really.
They had an aur of you know, just saying these
(02:50):
five and I only saw five of them because Marcuts
must have been at the middle school by them. I
can remember them all getting out and standing in a line,
and us waiting until they were all out in this line,
and then they would just walk right in, just like
little soldiers. And you know, we thought it was. My
(03:10):
husband and I would talk about it and say, well,
I guess you know their well behave. We thought they
were all the same age. That's one thing that I
do remember is, you know, our son was in kindergarten then,
and we thought they were small, so we thought they
had to be in kindergarten. The kids Amy saw from
her car window were the Hearts, Abigail, Hannah, Davante, Jeremiah,
(03:33):
and Sierra. The woman dropping them off would have been Jen.
At this point, Sarah was working full time at her
Burger's while Jen stayed home with the kids. If you've
ever done school drop off, you know the scene, big backpacks,
shuffling sneakers, maybe a little sister waving from the back seat.
For lots of kids, the next seven hours are a
(03:53):
drudgery to be endured. For the hearts, the school day
might have been a welcome respite from what was going
on at home. The abuse started in Alexandria, Minnesota, and
it would follow the family across three states. We'll never
know why Jen and Sarah moved so many times, but
wherever they went, people noticed their kids odd robotic behavior,
their bruises, their hunger. Here's Ian Spurling, Jen and Sarah's
(04:17):
friend who you've heard from before. Looking back on it,
it doesn't look like they were normal kids. They didn't
really have friends. They didn't hang out with other kids
any That's one of those red flags when I had
stated that in my post, like duh, that's one of
the other things looking back, like, why didn't we notice
they didn't have like friends? You know, the kids weren't
allowed to just go hang out with friends. The paper
(04:37):
trail starts. On September nine, two eight. According to a
police report, someone on the staff at Washington Elementary School
noticed a suspicious bruise on Hannah Hart's arm. She was six,
and this was her second week of first grade. Did
a teacher see it first? A cafeteria aid is school nurse.
(05:01):
According to a police report, Hannah told someone at school
that her mother had struck her with a belt. Davante
was nearly six too, most likely adjusting to life in
a different kindergarten class. Marcus was somewhere else in the
same building. He was ten. Did Hannah tell her brothers
what had happened while they waited for Jen to come
(05:22):
pick them up after school? Here's what we know. When
Sarah and Jen were questioned, they told the police that
the bruise on Hannah's arm was probably from a fall
down stairs. Eight stairs to be exact, which is an
odd detail to have on the tip of your tongue.
I've walked from the first floor of my house to
the second one at least a thousand times over the
(05:44):
thirteen years we've lived there, and I couldn't tell you
how many stairs there are. Two months later, a week
before Thanksgiving, break Jen and Sarah Withdrew, Hannah, Davante, and
Marcus from Washington Elementary School to be homeschooled. This must
have been a terrifying moment for the kids, relinquishing their
cubbies and their spots on the rug. What was running
(06:05):
through their minds when they left the classrooms that day
was Marcus, who was in the fifth grade, relieved to
be sprung from the looming specter of long division. Were
they dreading being stuck in the house all day with Jen?
Jen painted a colorful picture of homeschooling on Facebook. Lessons
on the beach, meditation on the deck, our class on
the dining room table. But who knows how long the
(06:25):
days were for her six students and how much they
might have missed having classmates who weren't their siblings and
a teacher who wasn't their mom. In September two thousand nine,
the Heart family took a road trip so Jen and
Sarah could get married in a civil ceremony in Connecticut,
where same sex marriage was legal. For the next nine years,
Jen would mark their anniversaries on Facebook, showing the two
(06:49):
of them in front of a waterfall or a thicket
of evergreens. Alongside a flowery ode to her bride, who,
by all accounts, was not a regular user of social media.
When we were finally able to get married, Jen wrote
in two thousand seventeen, the only people present were our children,
simply because our support system was so small. That same fall,
(07:11):
all five school aged Chart kids were re enrolled in
public school. Later, Jen and Sarah would tell a social
worker that this was a requirement of their adoption agency,
So off the older five went. Marcus, Hannah Davante, Abigail,
and Jeremiah Sierra stayed home with Jen. You beautiful thing you,
Jen wrote about her on Facebook, according to a police report.
(07:35):
In November of two thousand ten, Douglas County Social Services
got another call from school. This time the subject was Abigail,
who was in the first grade. She'd been stealing classmates
food and digging through the garbage looking for scraps. Later
that month, Abigail reported AOIS to her teacher. According to
(07:56):
a report compiled three years later by the Oregon Department
of Health and Human Service is and I'm quoting here,
Abigail had bruising on her stomach area from her stern
um to waistband and bruising on her back from mid
back to upper buttocks reportedly caused by Jen Hart according
to Abigail, but in the CPS interview with the couple,
(08:16):
Sarah Hart said she was the one responsible for the marks.
The worker said this incident was over a penny. They
had discovered a penny in Abigail's pocket and asked her
about it. Abigail had said she found it. Jen and
Sarah Hart did not believe her and said she stole
a penny and was lying about it, hence the spanking,
which got out of control. Per Sarah Heart. Abigail also
(08:39):
said they put her head under cold water and Jen
had her two hands on her neck end quote. Investigators
interviewed the other Heart kids, who said they were often grounded, spanked,
or sent to their rooms without food, but when Jen
and Sarah were questioned separately, they told a different story.
(09:01):
Sarah said she'd been the one who had Abigail. Jen
backed her up, and the investigators believed them. Maybe Jen
had more to lose. She was the one who received
monthly assistance checks from the state of Texas for adopting
the kids out of foster care. She also received Social
Security checks for Davante and Jeremiah. All of these checks
(09:23):
were in her name, and she might have believed a
child abuse conviction would put these funds in jeopardy. The
case workers report said, the problem is these women look normal. Remember,
Abby was the first kid Jen held in her arms,
the one who made her a mom. She was the
one who loved dance parties and tried to teach the
(09:43):
chickens how to do yoga. In one of the last
pictures we see of her on Facebook, she's buckled into
a roller coaster at the Oregon State Fair, smiling bravely
by Sarah's side. This is the girl whose neck Jen
held in her hands under cold water. The state file
charges against Sarah in state court for two gross misdemeanors,
(10:04):
malicious punishment of a child and domestic assault. In December
of two thousand ten, Minnesota Child Welfare learned about a
bruise on Hannah's hand. By this time, she was in
third grade, the year of chapter books, when you're not
quite one of the big kids yet, but you know
your way around the school. When she was questioned, Hannah
said Jenn hit her because she lied. She said Jen
(10:27):
hit her all the time. Later, the school nurse called
the Hearts to report that Hannah was asking her classmates
for food. She said she hadn't eaten all day. Sarah's
response was not the one you'd expect of a mother
trying to put her best foot forward for the benefit
of the authorities. She said of Hannah, she's playing the
food card. Just give her water. Hannah was the oldest sister,
(10:51):
the one with the missing front teeth. There aren't many
pictures of her on Facebook, but in the ones we
do see, she appears shy and tentative. She was the
one who would eventually jump out her bedroom window and
run to the neighbors in the middle of the night
to tell them her mom's were abusive, but that wouldn't
happen until later, much later. Ian Sperling says he hadn't
(11:13):
seen much of the family in the year before they died.
There were canceled plans, lots of them. He's been beating
himself up over some of the signs he missed. Obviously,
hindsight is my wife and I are beating ourselves up
daily because you know, why didn't we see this? Well,
you couldn't. There's not a person I know, and even
those the people that said they followed up. I get
(11:34):
the neighbors following up because they probably saw more. But
people are friends or acquaintances of the hearts. There's no
way they knew anything was wrong. There's it's not possible.
Maybe if you really wanted to be a very critical,
judgmental person, you may have said, well, they're too perfect,
I'm going to dive into this, or you know the
kids are skinny, Well we just thought they were eating
organic food in that scene. There's a lot of people
who are skinny, and I think the whole food thing.
(11:57):
You know, Look, if I was not wanting to ulified
himanized Jen, I would say, well, she didn't know how
to punish them, because six kids who have developmental disabilities
are going to be tough to raise, and so maybe
this was her way of trying to find a punishment
that was appropriate. Was you know, well you're going to
bed without dinner tonight type of thing, and they morphed
into a bigger deal with reheards in the neighbors finding
(12:18):
out about and stuff like that. Who knows. That's one
way to look at it. I think the more realistic
way to look at it is she actually was holding
from them for quite a bit. I think another way
to look at it was that's how she controlled them.
On Tuesday, April five, two thousand eleven, all six Heart
kids were pulled out of Woodland Elementary School. This time
(12:38):
they never went back. The Heart family was officially off
the grid. The following year, Sarah Hart was discharged from
supervised probation in Minnesota and moved to Oregon to find
a new job. We don't know how often the kids
got to see Sarah during this time, but her absence
must have been hard on them. They already had a
(13:00):
lot of disruption in their lives. They've been removed from
the homes of their biological families, in some cases, families
they would have remembered during this time. On December twelve,
Jen had a car accident with the kids in Missoula, Montana.
The car she was driving was the Yukon, the same
one she was driving when she went off the cliff,
(13:22):
as she described it on Facebook, once, twice, three times.
Finally we crashed into the side of the gently sloping mountain.
In what was most likely seconds, so many inexplicable thoughts
ran through my mind. Was I dead? There was no
way we could have all survived such an incident. I
(13:42):
unclenched my fists from the steering wheel, brushed off the glass,
and turned my head back to see all six kids
hanging upside down? Are you okay? Every single child was
safely secured by their seatbelts. Jen then goes into a
lengthy description of a couple who bent over backwards to
help them, even offering to drive the Hearts the rest
(14:02):
of the way to Portland, where they were going to
see Sarah. We weren't able to find any record of
the accident, Jen describes. However, after the Hearts died, Brian Lee,
the husband from the couple who offered to drive them
that night, was interviewed by The Oregonian. He remembers meeting
(14:22):
the family after they were involved in what he calls
a rollover accident. He says he and his wife rented
a trailer to tow the Hearts car to Spokan and
the Jen talked for the entire three hour drive. She
must have been starved for adult company. Interestingly, Lee says
the accident happened the day after Christmas, not two days before,
(14:45):
as Jen said in her Facebook post when she posted
about the event. Years later, she made the family's survival
sound like a Christmas miracle. The fact that the accident
happened right before Christmas seemed to be the whole point.
Of course, Lee might have been mistaken about the date,
but this discrepancy could be yet another bit of evidence
(15:05):
that Jen had her own interpretation of facts. A few
months later, Jen and the kids reunited with Sarah for
good in their new home in West Lynn, Oregon, about
(15:28):
fifteen miles outside of Portland's. Jen immortalized their goodbye on Facebook,
leaving out the mom's brushes with the law. Here's what
she wrote, Packing the past ten years of my life
into boxes. It's almost surreal walking through the house. Empty walls,
empty drawers, empty cupboards, empty rooms. The kids arn't supplies, instruments, games,
(15:53):
and toys are packed. I was feeling kind of awful
about the lack of things for them to do during
the transition time until this morning. I was taking down
the boy's bunk beds and heard the loudest, silliest, full
on belly laughs and cafaws coming from the other room.
I walk in to see a trio of the kids
sitting slash laying on the bare floor Not a single
thing exists in that room aside from their little bodies.
(16:15):
They were telling stories, making up silly songs, and laughing
themselves into sprawled out piles of utter bliss. Ah. Yes,
simplicity at its finest. What a beautiful reminder that the
things that matter most are not things at all. We
have each other. Our songs are laughter, our love. These
are the magic moments, live, love, laugh. People liked this post.
(16:47):
I headed south of Portland to the suburb of West Lynne.
It's in Clackamus County, the area or Tanya Harding had
grown up. I've recently seen Tanya, so I've been expecting
the scruppy, white working class neighborhoods from the movie. Instead,
on the bluff over the Willamette River and it's mostly
defunct paper Mills, is an upscale main drag filled with
(17:07):
pilate studios, a juice shop, a plastic surgeon offering botox.
The nearby streets are lined with tidy clapboard houses and
picket fences, but two stuck out for being less manicured
than the others. When had been the house that the
Hearts rented when they moved to Oregon and next to
it the house of Bill Groner. Groner is in his sixties,
ruddy cheeks, belly, white goatee. You get the sense he
(17:31):
be a really good mall Santa. Inside his house, an
electric piano sits on his kitchen table, and his fridge
is plastered with pictures of grandkids and a magnet that
reads pray without ceasing. This is Bill. You can hear
baseball games up all the way up here from the
park down below. A lot of water skiing, a lot
(17:52):
of boating. Actually got two neighbors down here across the
street that have have boats, a lot of camping. The
arts love to camp, I know, because they were seemed
like they were often going out on expeditions with their
canoes on the top of their their vehicle. They love
(18:15):
getting away, which is one reason I thought, you know,
they were good parents in the regard they were doing
like fun outdoor stuff with their kids. It seems like
they've been here like maybe for three years. Oh. First
time I talked was at the mailbox, and one of
them was a little though Gallop. I think she worked
(18:37):
up at Cole's and Vancouver. I forget is that Sarah,
And she was kind of the more open friendly one,
and not that the other lady wasn't friendly. But I
talked to Sarah at the mailbox. Conversation came up once
there was something at the mailbox that she thought I
(18:59):
can't remember what it was, whether it was uh, somebody
had written something put in their mailbox, something that that
she talked like she thought that she had gotten away
from that by coming out here. So that was that
was an issue for her again, you know, being uh gay,
I guess, uh, and that that upset her. Basically intimated
(19:26):
that she had the experience that they had experienced that
because she had mentioned that that they had some problems before,
you know, and she didn't go into detail, but she
was just conscious that being gay that you know, in
our society, and uh so I just thought, well, maybe,
(19:47):
you know, I don't want her to think that I'm
being judgmental, and I just want to be a good neighbor.
We'd like to pause here to consider what Bill Groner
is saying. Of course he doesn't want to a bad neighbor.
Nobody does. But we do think the pains Bill and
others took to give Jen and Sarah a wide birth
(20:08):
might have enabled their mistreatment of the kids. To be clear,
we're not placing the blame on Bill's shoulders or anyone else's,
but we do want to call attention to the very
human tendency not to get involved. We believe it might
have landed the heart moms some free passes. Who wants
to be the person who comes across as being homophobic
(20:29):
or racist, or closed minded, or, as Bill himself said, judgmental.
We're taught if you see something, say something, But we're
also told you can't judge another woman until you walk
in her shoes. If your neighbor's family looks different from yours,
(20:50):
you might check yourself when you're questioning their decisions or
their parenting. And in most cases that's the right thing
to do. But where Jen and Sarah were concerned, political
correctness might have provided them some cover for their double life.
I mean, I'd see the up front once in a while,
(21:10):
I'd see the kids, not very often, though not very often.
I never saw him like walking up the street or
anything like that. They were pretty much stayed in their yard.
They were friendly, smiled, would say hi, but didn't really
care out a conversation. I never saw any kind of
(21:31):
friends or family over there visiting them. They didn't seemed
to come out well that they didn't come outside very
often at all. It was just stayed in the house
a lot. So they were looking for land saving up
that they became evident the reason they were here was
just as a stop off place so they could, you know,
(21:53):
with that many kids. This was a you know, a
large house and kind of a nice kind of area
that you know, not it's not like some places in Portland,
you know, get some land and all that they could
have animals. I know they were working on getting the
financing together, remember when they were talking about that. They
(22:15):
wanted to get back to the garden, as we used
to say in the seventies. The Hearts were in West
Lynne for four years before they moved an hour north
(22:37):
to Woodland, Washington, to the house next door to the Decounts.
They never registered as home schoolers, so for a while
at least, the state of Oregon didn't know about six
of its newest residents, but that would change. In two
thousand thirteen, while Jen's Facebook account was at maximum activity
with near daily post throughout the year, two whistleblowers report
(23:00):
to the family to CPS. The first call came in
on a few weeks after Jen posted a picture of
a painfully thin Davante playing guitar. Me any particular reason
you're naked him in the most matter of factly fashion.
I'm not naked. I'm wearing a guitar. Yep, that's my
(23:22):
string being. According to the CPS report, the first informant,
who was anonymous, said Jen does this thing for her
Facebook page, where the kids pose and are made to
look like one big, happy family, but after the photo
event they go back to looking lifeless. The same whistleblower
said Jen had allowed each kid only a single slice
of pizza for dinner, and when it turned out that
(23:44):
someone had helped themselves to more during the night, she
punished all six kids by making them wear sleeping masks
and line and air mattress for five hours. The whistleblower
noted that the kids would eat freely while Jen wasn't around,
but once she entered the room, they deny that they've
eaten at all. The second whistleblower identified herself as Alexandra
(24:04):
arjiropolis She was a friend the hearts had stayed with
when they traveled to San Francisco that summer. On Facebook,
we see Davante in a zebra unitard again whip it thin,
flashing a hang loose sign in front of the Golden
Gate Bridge the caption good morning, City by the Bay.
In a statement after their deaths Ardiropolis said Jen ran
(24:26):
the family quote like a regimented boot camp, not letting
the kids cry and punishing them for laughing too loudly. Also,
according to Ardiropolis, quote, true kindness, love and respect for
the kids was largely absent. Child Welfare visited the west
Lynn house in August of two thousand and thirteen and
(24:46):
interviewed each of the kids separately, despite their mom's hesitation
about that arrangement. According to a CPS report, Davante volunteered
to go first, and all of the kids answers were
nearly identical, non mentioned pa st episodes of abuse, and
Marcus said he was grateful to the moms for changing
his life. One social worker noted that, with the exception
(25:07):
of Davante quote, the kids appeared very reserved and showed
little emotion or animation end quote. When it was their
turn to speak to case workers. Jen and Sarah said
Abigail had been quote labeled borderline mentally retarded, but they
didn't believe the diagnosis and that Jeremiah was globally delayed,
(25:28):
possibly even autistic. They also explained Hannah's missing front teeth
like this, she had knocked them out while running on
a hardwood floor the year before. Hannah told the CPS
workers she needed to wait until she was seventeen to
get a retainer with teeth. The case workers report noted
that Jen was quote adamant that many of the family's
issues stemmed from others not understanding their alternative lifestyle. Jen
(25:51):
said she only disciplined the kids by talking to them
or making them meditate for five minutes. A doctor who
examined the kids for the Oregon Apartment of Human Services
found all but one of the heart kids, Jeremiah, behind
in their growth to the point of falling off in
some cases, way off the chart for their ages. Still,
a handwritten cover letter atop the report states the doctor
(26:15):
had no concerns whatsoever with any of the children. Even so,
the doctor recommended that a caseworker monitor the family and
request follow up physicals in six months. This never happened.
On October thirteen, the same week her six kids were
examined on behalf of the state. Jen posted a picture
(26:35):
of Davante holding a homemade piggy bank painted like a globe,
with a caption that said he had the whole world
in his hands. Up next time on Broken Hearts moving
that will say a thing and I'm not race. There's
a lot of white savior is symbolic in this story
(26:56):
now that I never understood or knew about. These kids
are being used with a prop. The fact that that
would be utilized as a way to math some of
the abuse in inglect that was happening within the home,
It's just just disturbing. We love those kids so much.
(27:20):
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,
(27:41):
with new episodes dropping every Tuesday. Broken Hearts is co
hosted and co written by Justine Harmon and Elizabeth Egan
and edited by Wendy Knockle. 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.
(28:03):
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 Thaine.
Special thanks to Jen Lance
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