Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 31, 1994 TAG: 9401310079
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: CLINTWOOD LENGTH: Long
First, they sold the new furniture James's parents had bought them on credit - the black leather couch and the full bedroom suite. Then they wrenched out the dishwasher and unscrewed the light fixtures from their double-wide trailer and sold those too.
And finally, authorities say, they tried to sell the last thing holding them back: their children.
They would insist later, after being arrested in a police sting, that it was all a joke, that James was just "playing a game" when he offered strangers their 9-month-old daughter for $25,000 and the son Stephanie was carrying for $20,000.
But it was too late. In his jail cell, James knotted a bedsheet into a noose and hanged himself before he was even arraigned. Stephanie was forced into protective custody after a judge, in an unprecedented move for a Virginia court, placed her unborn child in foster care.
Two months later, James Ira Owens was taken from his mother immediately after his birth. Stephanie remained free on bond, drifting from her grandparents' home to her mother's cramped apartment to a place with a new boyfriend now facing robbery charges.
She goes to court today, one month shy of her 19th birthday, to stand trial in a case that offers a troubling look into the emptiness and dull ache of young lives in a place such as Dickenson County, where the population dropped 11 percent in the last decade and the unemployment rate is slightly less than 20 percent.
After 29 overworked years in this impoverished spit of Southwest Virginia, Roy Rose, the director of county social services, is an expert on the sorrows of the hardscrabble ridges and valleys where James and Stephanie Owens were brought up.
"Anyone who wants to get ahead in life," Rose said recently, "has to leave here."
For two years, James Owens dabbled at college. He also pumped gas, drove a truck and worked as a hospital security guard. He talked a lot about becoming a police officer.
But mostly, James counted on welfare checks and gifts from his parents to support his growing family. His wife didn't work either. She had eloped at 15, and with just an eighth-grade education, a baby underfoot and another on the way, her prospects were bleak.
"She mostly slept or sat around playing with that ol' Nintendo game," recalled her mother-in-law, Ellen Owens, 64. "She didn't have any friends. No one ever came to visit."
Although Stephanie was unfriendly and a slovenly housekeeper, said her mother-in-law, she "treated the young'un real good. I'll give her credit for that."
If people around here know where Stephanie is now, they're not saying, and her defense attorney did not respond to telephone calls or a letter seeking an interview.
Stephanie's pregnant mother, who lives in a grim government-subsidized housing complex near Haysi, said she was too ill to talk. The grandfather who helped raise Stephanie allowed that she "does not belong to me. She'd get on me if I was to say anything about her."
The elder Owenses haven't heard from her in months. "You can't get no sense out her, anyway," Ellen Owens said.
County social workers who visited Stephanie and James found both of them to be resentful of the family counseling sessions and parenting classes they were told to attend.
"They could have had a support network," Rose said. "They didn't take advantage of it."
Stephanie later told investigators that she and James planned to live with relatives in Alabama. They already had leads on jobs: Stephanie would work at a Kmart, her husband in an auto shop.
"He had anything he wanted," his mother said sadly. "Maybe we just give him too much. But there just wasn't no reason for this to happen. We don't know why. They didn't need to sell that baby."
Much of what did happen is still unexplained. What's clear, however, is that on Dec. 14, 1992, a classified ad appeared in a local paper seeking people "seriously interested" in adopting a baby.
"They interviewed potential candidates," said Commonwealth's Attorney Don Askins. "We have witnesses who will testify that money was discussed."
Sheriff's deputies posing as a childless Roanoke couple arranged to meet the Owenses in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant in Clintwood. They said Stephanie, then 17, offered an ultrasound image of the son due in two months.
"We met a couple of times before money was ever mentioned," said investigator Ron Kendrick. Finally, James took the detective for a ride and made what sounded like a rehearsed sales pitch.
Both Owens children now are in foster care and up for adoption. Social workers said Stephanie often misses her supervised visits, though she has petitioned for the return of her children.
The suicide note James left behind in his jail cell was neither a confession nor an expression of remorse, according to the prosecutor. It was "more or less a love note," Askins said, but it was written to both James's wife and another woman.
A search of the couple's trailer turned up several spiral notebooks that Stephanie used as diaries, according to court documents. In excerpts read aloud during preliminary hearings and published in local newspapers, she mentioned her pain over the couple's decision to give up the unborn baby she already had named after her husband.
"I wish I could get the money to give him so we wouldn't have to do this," she wrote three days after the newspaper ad ran.
It is in juvenile court here that Stephanie Owens will be judged; if convicted, she could be confined until her 21st birthday.
James lingered in a coma for a month before dying. His parents remember that Stephanie was at his bedside every day, fierce and dry-eyed, doing word puzzles.
"She wouldn't let hardly anyone go in to see him, and she wouldn't say why," Ellen Owens said.
Juvenile probation counselor Greg Cyphers was perplexed by the young woman who so desperately wanted to have a family yet may have been willing to sell her own children.
"I've seen a Stephanie that'd break your heart and a Stephanie who's heartbroken," Cyphers said. "I've seen Stephanie stubborn, streetwise and tough as a pine knot.
"But life'll do that to you."
by CNB