Page 60 - Marie Claire Australia (January 2020)

coaching. But it also introduced an
element of doubt into the equation.
What if Hannah was a kid with a
troubled past who lied to get attention?
Plus, Jen had explained everything
with such breezy confidence. “She sold
it well,” Dana recalls. “She was good.”
She still wanted to report what
had happened, but her husband was
reluctant to create drama with the new
neighbours. Eventually, however, she
told her 80-year-old dad about
Hannah’s visit. Two months later
Dana’s dad, Steve Frkovich, called
emergency, telling the dispatcher, “I
just can’t sit with this. I believe those
kids are being highly abused.” The
county sheriff’s office followed up with
Dana but did not investigate further,
citing no new incidents, the lapse of
time and the third-party informant.
“There was nothing [in that call] that
said I better go up there,” says county
sergeant Brent Waddell. “There
wasn’t anything we could have done.”
Eventually, Dana would learn
that Hannah was actually 16. But
by then it was too late.
arah Gengler and Jen Hart
both grew up in small-town
South Dakota and met at
Northern State University in
SAberdeen. Sarah earned her
degree in special education; Jen never
graduated. Later Jen would describe
on Facebook how she purposely called
Sarah her “friend” or her “roommate”
back then. Once they did come out as
a couple, “the Midwestern mindset
was relentlessly unforgiving and
unaccepting,” she said. The pair
eventually moved to Alexandria,
Minnesota, where they worked at
Herberger’s department store.
Jen was the bigger personality of
the two – “kind of abrasive,” recalls
Jordan Smith, then a 19-year-old
working at the Clinique counter, while
60 | marieclaire.com.au
Sarah was more sensitive. It was Jen’s
last name the couple used as their own.
In 2004, in their mid-20s, Sarah
and Jen took in a 15-year-old foster
daughter. According to Smith, the
couple immediately started complaining
about the teen, saying she would pick
food out of the garbage. (“It felt like
mean girl gossip – like, ‘Ugh, she’s the
worst,’” Smith says.) That girl, now in
her late 20s, told The Seattle Times that
she lived with the Harts for less than a
year and never ate out of the garbage.
She said she believed she’d have a home
with the Harts until she turned 18,
but then the women dropped her off at
her therapist’s office and never returned.
Two years later, in 2006, Jen and
Sarah took in three siblings from the
Texas foster system: Markis, seven,
Hannah, four, and Abigail, two.
Statistically speaking, the kids fell
into several categories that might
have made them hard to place with
adoptive families. They were black
(black children are over-represented in
foster care and less likely to be adopted
out of it), and it can be more difficult to
find families willing to take on multiple
siblings. In a Facebook post, Jen
dramatically described her first night
as a mother of three: Abigail “urinated
everywhere”, Hannah smeared faeces
on the wall and “gorged herself with
food until she … needed the Heimlich
[manoeuvre], resulting in episodes of
projectile vomiting”, and Markis, she
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT The Hart
family home in Woodland, Washington; a
Facebook snap of “mini Jackson Pollocks”
Devonte, Sierra and Jeremiah in 2013;
the children, who were pulled out of
school in 2013, get an education in the
great outdoors; Jen (on right) and Sarah
celebrate 18 years together.
said, hit his head on a closet wall and,
“in multiple voices”, claimed to be
possessed by demons. Yet she and Sarah
were committed to healing the kids over
time. “If not us – WHO?” she wrote.
In the spring of 2008, they took in
three more foster kids: five-year-old
Devonte and his younger siblings,
Jermiah, four, and Ciera, three.
From very early on, there were
warning signs of abuse. According to
a police report, in September 2008
six-year-old Hannah showed up at
school with bruising on her arm and told
a teacher that her mother had whipped
her with a belt. Authorities interviewed
Jen and Sarah, who said they weren’t
sure how it happened. Maybe, they said,
it was the result of a fall down eight
steps a few days before. No criminal
charges were filed, and two months
later the women took their three school-
age kids out of school. The following
autumn they were re-enrolled.
In early 2009, even though Priscilla
Celestine – Devonte, Jeremiah, and
Sierra’s aunt – had been fighting for
custody for more than two years,
the women adopted the siblings.
(The Harts changed the spellings
of the younger children’s names.)
Back in Minnesota, Jen stayed home
with the kids while Sarah kept working
in retail, eventually becoming a sales
area manager at Herberger’s. Later
that year the women married in
Connecticut with only their children