Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 24, 1993 TAG: 9301240097
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DOUGLAS PARDUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: HAYSI LENGTH: Long
`THEY DIDN'T NEED TO SELL THE BABY'
Ira Owens unfolds a letter from his son and spreads it across the kitchen table where they often ate together.There, in childlike printing, are the words that Ira and Ellen Owens want so much to believe, but can't quite.
"No matter what you hear, it's not true," their only son wrote from the Dickenson County Jail. "We wouldn't sell Victoria for love of money."
But that's exactly what Dickenson County authorities say the Owenses' son, James Owens, 21, and his wife, Stephanie Gail Owens, 17, tried to do when they were arrested earlier this month.
The young couple is accused of trying to sell their 9-month-old daughter, Victoria, and their unborn son, who is due at any time and has already been named Ira.
The couple had placed an ad in the Bristol Herald Courier on Dec. 14, offering a baby for adoption. Sheriff's deputies posing as a childless couple say the Owenses were arrested after James Owens offered to sell Victoria for $25,000 and their unborn son for $20,000.
Ira Owens, in whose honor the unborn child is named, looks again at his son's letter from jail. He throws his hands up as if pleading for someone to make sense of what's happened.
"He knows he's hurt me so much," Owens says. He rubs his right hand over his crinkled, age-worn face and gazes at some of the numerous photographs of his son that sit on virtually every shelf and table in the tidy brick house. "I think I done my part. I love him, but I don't know what they were into."
Exactly what James and Stephanie Owens planned may never be known or understood, but Dickenson County Social Services officials had no intention of waiting to find out.
Gerald Gray, an attorney representing the Dickenson County Department of Social Services, says, "It all boils down to an incredibly callous attitude toward children. You can't put parental love in a heart."
Social Service officials took protective custody of Victoria at a juvenile court hearing Jan. 12. And Juvenile Court Judge Susan Bundy made new law by also taking protective custody of the unborn son.
To do that, Bundy ordered Stephanie Owens, who at 17 is technically a juvenile, placed in a foster home until the child is born. The court will then take the baby.
Stephanie Owens appealed the ruling, but even her court-appointed attorney, Charles Bledsoe of Norton, agrees that the judge acted wisely and that Stephanie is in "dire need" of counseling. "This is a strange case," Bledsoe says.
Dickenson County authorities say they believe Stephanie went along with the idea of selling her children because she loved her husband and was immature in her own judgment. A diary she kept was introduced in court. In it, she wrote that she thought about killing herself because James wanted to sell her baby boy. She also wrote that she didn't think she and James were capable of taking care of both children.
Ira and Ellen Owens are a simple, old-fashioned couple, with rock-hard beliefs in honesty, family and paying your own way.
At 67, Ira, a retired coal miner, says he had never been in a jail until he visited his son to take him some clothes.
Their son is now at Southwestern State Hospital in Marion receiving a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation. "I hope they find out what he was thinking," Ellen says. "We don't know."
Ira and Ellen didn't have a child until late in life and were so proud of James that they still have his perfect attendance award from Sandlick Elementary School hanging on their bedroom wall. "It's unbelieveable how sweet he was when he was little. I guess we just spoiled him," Ira says.
He points to a new, pale-yellow three-bedroom trailer home that sits on a lot near the end of the dirt drive behind his own home.
"I bought that for them. It cost $21,000," he says. It's the second trailer home he's bought for James and Stephanie. Ira says he also bought his son the four-wheel-drive pickup truck parked in front of the trailer.
He paid to drill a 300-foot-deep well, signed for $8,000 worth of furniture and appliances, and bought radio broadcasting equipment so his son could dabble at playing disc jockey in a little shed near the trailer. If his son needed money, Ira Owens provided that, too.
"They didn't need to sell the baby," Owens says. "Honey, they didn't need that money. We practically done everything for them."
The Owenses agree that they may have been part of the problem. Since their son and Stephanie ran off to get married two years ago, they've done little on their own except have children.
James had a couple of jobs - as a truck driver and a hospital security guard - but he didn't keep them long.
Maybe he tried too hard to keep his son living nearby, Owens says.
"But I don't know . . . There ain't no cause."
But the Owenses have their suspicions. They say James told them he knew someone who manages a Wal-Mart in Alabama. Stephanie would get a job at the store and he would get an $8-an-hour job at an auto shop putting on brake shoes.
In preparation for the trip, the Owenses say, their son was selling everything. Ira Owens says they even sold the $8,000 in furniture, leaving him stuck with the payments.
He says he also has to figure out what to do with the three-bedroom trailer. All that was left in it were boxes of papers and clothes, some photo albums and a portable CD player.
Ellen Owens walks out of the trailer and slowly shakes her head at the thought of the loan payment books they've taken on supporting their son. "We've got five books that we're paying on that young'un. When you've done all you can for them, what else can you do?"
Irene and Brady Boyd wonder the same thing. They're Stephanie Gail's grandparents, and helped rear her.
Irene Boyd says her granddaughter called her about a week before the arrests and cried about James' wanting to sell the baby.
"I didn't really believe her. I thought they were having a fight and saying mean things. But I told her, `Gail, that's your flesh and blood. You can't sell your baby.' . . . I really gave her a good talking to."
She says she's certain James pressured Stephanie into the idea of selling the baby. Stephanie was 15 when she married, Irene Boyd said, adding, "I thought that was awful young."
Stephanie didn't stay happy long. Within weeks after Victoria was born last year, the child became the focus of marital problems.
The problems became so severe, court records show, that for several weeks James and Stephanie gave their daughter to relatives to care for. The two told social workers they gave up the child because "they were afraid they were going to hurt the baby."
There was evidence to support that. Social workers say they learned that Victoria had cigarette burns on her fingers and the bottom of one foot. When they asked what happened, Stephanie told them she had accidentally burned the child while holding her.
Social workers say they also had reports that James Owens abused the child by pressing the soft spot on her head and by repeatedly pushing at her belly button.
When Stephanie and James decided to take Victoria back from the relatives, social workers enrolled them in parenting classes. But social workers say the couple resisted the classes, usually complaining that they didn't have the money to pay for gas. Family members say James and Stephanie didn't like the classes because they felt that social workers pried too much and tried to run their lives.
Despite concern over the couple's resistance, social workers still felt it was best to leave Victoria with them.
That changed Jan. 10, when they learned that sheriff's investigators had arrested James and Stephanie.
Dickenson County Sheriff's investigators Ron Kendrick and Ella Mullins say they went to see the couple after getting complaints that they were trying to sell a child. Kendrick said he and Mullins pretended to be a childless couple from Roanoke who had been married 13 years.
Carrying hidden recorders, they met with James and Stephanie Owens at Bucks Motel in Clintwood.
"They wanted to get to know us, where we worked, how much we made," Kendrick says.
Then, Kendrick says, they negotiated the price. He says James Owens rationalized selling the children as simply sidestepping a more expensive adoption agency. Instead of an agency or attorneys getting the money, James and Stephanie Owens would get it.
Most of the price haggle was done by James, but Stephanie was present when prices were discussed, Kendrick says. He says she even brought along ultrasound pictures that had been taken of her unborn child. Stephanie pointed out his head and legs and said it was a boy.
The price would be $20,000 for the baby when he was born. Kendrick said James Owens told him that, if he didn't want to wait for the birth, "I could have the little girl for $25,000."
In the quiet of their kitchen, Ira and Ellen Owens reread the letter their son sent them after his arrest.
"It was a setup," James wrote. "I only hope I can get out of this one."
He went along with the undercover investigators to play with them, James wrote his parents; he had no intention of selling the children.
When he and Stephanie moved to Alabama, James wrote, they actually planned to leave Victoria with his parents and the baby boy with Stephanie's grandparents.
Ira and Ellen Owens want to believe that, but they say they can't help but wonder why their son put that ad in the paper.
"What did they think they were going to do?" Ellen Owens asks. "Come back and tell us they sold the children?"