Lost In The System Mental Illness, Rape Controversy Complicate Child Custody Case

The teenage girl curled in a ball, sucked on her index finger and wished she were anywhere else.

Dayna Christoph’s adoptive mother and a young counselor were confronting her with a horrific accusation: Tell us about molesting your sister.

“Take responsibility” and confess, she was told over and over. If you do, you can go home, and you won’t get in trouble, Christoph said she was promised.

Going home was all she wanted. At 16, bordering on developmentally disabled, barely able to read and write, she had already been placed in foster homes and mental institutions 64 times.

But she angrily denied the allegation, and was ordered into “time out” - a small, gray room with a deadbolt lock on the door - at a center for troubled kids in Spokane.

Her denials didn’t last.

After three days of intensive questioning, Christoph said she “touched” her toddler sister.

The questions didn’t end. Several weeks later, she confessed to molesting and raping her sister a hundred times over 2-1/2 years with her hands and dolls.

The confession had dire consequences. Her public defender urged her to plead guilty, and in 1995 she was labeled a sex offender. When she became pregnant last year, the conviction was a key reason the baby was seized by Child Protective Services.

Now, four years later, the confession and conviction are being questioned. Her new attorneys are asking that the conviction be tossed out and Christoph be reunited with her 10-month-old daughter, Hannah.

The motion to withdraw the guilty plea, filed by the nonprofit Center for Justice in Spokane, portrays Christoph as a victim of coercion and inept legal help.

There is no medical evidence supporting the conviction in court or police records, nor any corroborating statement from the victim, the center maintains.

Christoph, who turned 21 on Friday, was convicted solely on her own testimony, said Center for Justice attorney Gloria Porter.

“Everyone shakes their head when they read this case,” she said. “They put their head in their hands and say, `My God, my God, how could this happen?”’ A hearing on the legal challenge is still a month away in Spokane County Superior Court, but comparisons are being made to the infamous Wenatchee sex ring case, which was unfolding in the media around the time that Christoph confessed.

In Wenatchee, 43 people were accused of 29,726 counts of sex abuse on 60 children. Five subsequent convictions were overturned. A dozen people remain in prison, three with appeals pending.

A group of lawyers formed to help people unfairly imprisoned in the Wenatchee cases, Innocence Project Northwest, has agreed to help in Christoph’s case, too.

“You can never take back what happened to Dayna, but we’re trying to right a series of wrongs for her,” said Porter.

Others, however, call Christoph a dangerous manipulator. “She represents a high risk to the community at large,” wrote a therapist in a pre-sentence evaluation. “(She) is very likely to be opportunistic with younger children.”

Many records in the case are sealed, but more than a thousand pages of court, child welfare and medical documents paint a picture of a life of misery that began in the womb.

Her mother, an alcoholic Hillyard neighborhood bartender, drank during pregnancy, giving Christoph fetal alcohol syndrome, a disorder linked to mental and behavioral problems.

CPS first visited Christoph when she was 2, removing her and her two brothers from the home. The children, case workers found, slept on a bed peppered with broken glass.

There would be 24 more complaints to CPS. By the time Dayna was removed at age 5, she’d been sexually abused by an uncle, cousins and her mother’s boyfriends, according to CPS records.

Doctors found cigarette burns on her arms, knife scars on her legs and evidence of rape.

A therapist who treated Christoph as a teenager called her “one of the most traumatized victims of sex abuse” he had ever seen.

But within six months, she was back home for Christmas. She was raped again, by another family member according to CPS records.

“They destroyed her,” said a protective uncle, George Autrey of Spokane.

When Christoph was 8, her mother, Rose Bonalie, relinquished parental rights to Dayna. She retained custody of the boys.

Bonalie, a weathered 44-year-old with a rose tatoo on her arm, said recently that most of the cigarette burns and abuse happened in foster homes.

Christoph never again had a permanent home. Shuttled among at least eight foster homes, she became uncontrollable. She was kicked out of school for fighting. She was on psychotropic drugs, and had her first stint in a mental hospital when she was 9.

Case workers and psychologists thought no family would adopt her. They were all surprised when a Fairchild Air Force Base security guard and his wife, Steve and Adele Christoph, adopted her at age 8.

The couple wanted a baby, but took Christoph to help her deal with her traumatic childhood.

The Christophs quickly found themselves in over their heads with Dayna. She was kicked out of Medical Lake’s Blair Elementary School for fighting and stealing. She hoarded food, and kept pins under her bed to stick herself at night. She kicked the family Maltese, Misty.

Within two years of getting Dayna, the Christophs adopted the baby they wanted - what state adoption workers called a “Gerber baby,” 1 day old with no health problems.

Fearful that Dayna would hurt the baby, state workers in 1991 ordered the Christophs to lock bedroom doors at night and allow no unsupervised time between the children.

During puberty, Christoph’s behavior became more erratic. She was hospitalized at a Tacoma mental institution after the couple found her urinating and defecating in a corner of her bedroom.

She would never return to the Christoph home.

In October 1994, she arrived at Tamarack Center, a private, $300-a-day treatment facility located on a pine-dotted bluff overlooking the Spokane River.

There, Christoph was assigned to Melissa Camp, a 22-year-old counselor with a freshly printed bachelor’s degree.

Six months into her stay at Tamarack, in April 1995, Adele Christoph became convinced that Dayna had abused her younger sister when the 4-year-old girl had nightmares, wet the bed and tore at her skin.

With Camp present, Adele confronted Dayna.

Today, Christoph maintains she drew her confession from memory. “I thought of what happened to me, and substituted my sister’s name” for her own name, she said.

The Center for Justice believes Camp, who has since married and changed her name to Fielding, had no training in interrogation or analyzing sexual abuse.

Several experts who’ve reviewed the case say Fielding may have planted the seed of confession through repetition.

Clay Jorgensen, a Spokane psychologist and expert on treating child abuse, said children under duress don’t consider the consequences of a false confession.

“You need to recognize the child’s perception of the power of the interviewer and how coercive that can be,” Jorgensen said, declining to speak specifically about Christoph. “A child also knows if they are asked a question and answers and it’s asked again, they gave the wrong answer.”

A consultant who trains police on interview and interrogation techniques said confirmation of the confession - including medical evidence - is vital in such a case.

“If you’re dealing with a person who is emotionally or psychologically unstable, you have to be cautious,” said Joseph Buckley, president of John E. Reid & Associates in Chicago. “You have to assess the mental limitation that might affect the confession.”

Statements from other witnesses cast doubt on Christoph’s confession.

Steve Christoph was home during the day after being laid off and told attorneys that he kept close watch over the children. He said he rarely left the children alone and never saw Christoph molest her sister.

And therapist Rita Zorrozua, who saw Christoph weekly for four years, was surprised by the confession.

“Any of us who knew her at that time I think would rule it out because we never saw such behavior,” Zorrozua said at the time.

Fielding’s former boss, Tamarack Center director Tim Davis, said he’s “99 percent confident” the center handled the Christoph case correctly.

Citing concerns over possible lawsuits, the Christophs declined to comment. Fielding asked for questions in writing, then declined to respond.

Attorney Philip Buri of Bellingham represented the Christophs in a lawsuit after the conviction, arguing the state failed to warn the Christophs of the extent of Dayna’s problems. The state settled in 1997 for $42,500.

“There is no question in my mind that Dayna posed and poses a real risk to children,” Buri said.

Christoph’s stay at Tamarack ended after she confessed to Spokane County sheriff’s detective D.A. Routt.

Routt interviewed Fielding and Adele Christoph, who told him that she suspected Dayna had abused her 4-year-old sister.

A first-degree child rape charge was filed July 10, 1995.

Routt, now retired, said he didn’t recall the case and declined comment.

There is no evidence that Christoph’s public defender, Priscilla Vaagen, investigated the felony charges, according to Porter. Christoph doesn’t recall meeting Vaagen before pleading guilty.

“If I had been the attorney at the time, and had seen these documents at this time, I would have been raising hell all over the place,” said Porter, a former public defender.

Porter asked for Vaagen’s file on Christoph in June. Instead of complying, Vaagen got an attorney and is fighting the request. A hearing is scheduled for Aug. 24.

Vaagen referred inquiries about the case to her attorney, Mike Beyer, who did not return calls.

Christoph pleaded guilty Aug. 2, 1995, signing a one-page, handwritten confession as Fielding and Adele Christoph watched from the gallery in Spokane County Juvenile Court.

“I didn’t realize anything that was going on,” Christoph said in an interview last week. “I just wanted to go home.”

Instead, Christoph’s troubles mounted.

Terry Anderson, a therapist who analyzed Christoph before sentencing, decided she was a poor candidate for sex offender treatment, based in part on a lack of remorse.

“The offense was deliberate and well-planned,” Anderson wrote. “Ms. Christoph chose a victim who was pre-verbal, helpless and unable to alert anyone to the abuse.”

Christoph spent more than six months in the Echo Glen juvenile detention center in Snoqualmie and was released in Vancouver, Wash.

She was living in a foster home there and finishing high school when she got pregnant. She thought the state was more likely to take a baby from a single mother, so she married Thomas Luomanen, a truck driver nicknamed “Frog Man” she met on the streets of Vancouver.

The union was short; Christoph soon fled to the YWCA battered women’s shelter.

That stay was also short. Staff there learned that Christoph was a sex offender. They put her on a Spokane-bound bus and called CPS officials here to warn them.

In one of the strange twists of the case, the call was routed to Fielding, who had been hired by CPS as a social worker.

Fielding tracked down Christoph at her aunt’s home in Mead. Citing risk of “imminent harm,” state workers seized 3-week-old Hannah as Christoph was giving her a nighttime feeding.

Roy Harrington, CPS regional administrator in Spokane, said the agency handled the case appropriately.

“I cannot fault in any way Melissa Fielding’s work on this,” he said. “She’s a good social worker.”

If Christoph’s conviction is overturned, Harrington pledged to review the case.

But Christoph’s fitness as a mother is a separate issue. Her history of mental problems and being physically abusive are liabilities.

Christoph is going to drug and alcohol treatment classes at CPS’ insistence because of past abuses. Christoph’s attorneys say she hasn’t failed a drug test in two years.

In preparation for Hannah’s return, she rented a basement apartment in the East Central neighborhood. Christoph sleeps on the couch, leaving the apartment’s only bedroom empty for Hannah. It’s a stuffed animal zoo, full of lions and bears and dogs.

“All my life I wanted a family,” Christoph said. “Then I got one … and then she went away. It ripped my heart out.”