COLUMN ONE : Wenatchee: Little Town of Horrors : This bucolic Northwest city seemed to epitomize the innocence of rural America. Then came a plague of grisly crimes, natural disasters and a child sex scandal.

WENATCHEE, Wash. — 

Nobody can say for sure when this sweet town, a place of apple orchards, cafe counters with fresh cherry pie and a slow-moving river, once named the fourth-best little city in the country, lost its innocence.

Maybe it was when two 12-year-old boys, playing on the banks of the Columbia last August, got a rock thrown at them by a migrant farm worker, then leveled their rifles and pumped 18 rounds into his body.

Or was it in March, when the pastor of the Pentecostal Church of God House of Prayer was accused--in a case linked to charges against about two dozen adults--of hosting child sex orgies, some in the church basement?

Or maybe the morning in April when Mandy Huffman, a popular junior high school student, and her mother were found fatally stabbed, bludgeoned and sexually mutilated in their East Wenatchee home.

Hardly anyone could have been surprised when, in what seemed like a biblical event, 1.5 million cubic yards of rock and sand rained down on a highway north of town in May in a quarry accident, killing a man and a 5-year-old boy.

To say there is trouble in paradise doesn’t even come close when you’re talking about this town of 20,000, the geographical center of Washington state and still, to most appearances, the kind of place people think of when they talk about escaping the ills of urban America.

But Wenatchee, town leaders say, is more than the quaint backdrop to a parade of bad luck. It is a place, like most other places these days, that is no longer alone--and no longer disconnected from the violence and despair that once only flickered on the TV news.

“I don’t see it as anything different than what’s happening anywhere else, but when it happens in a small community, when it happens to someone you know or a relative of someone you know, you can’t help feeling emotional about it,” said Dawn Collings, mayor of neighboring East Wenatchee. “These crises are a way of strengthening the community relationship.”

The testing has been vigorous, by any standard. The Wenatchee World, published in a two-story building in the comfortable nest of weathered brick facades that make up the city’s downtown, said it with a headline just before this spring’s annual apple blossom festival: “Bad News Beyond Imagination.”

Jim Huffman, the Rotary Club president who found out about the murders of his daughter and ex-wife when the sheriff intercepted him on the street, saying “something was terribly wrong at the house,” has tried to figure it out.

“In my own mind, I’ve tried to come to grips with why did tragedy strike my family? . . . It happened in Wenatchee, but it could have happened anywhere,” Huffman says, holding back the tears. “There’s no simple answer. There may in fact be no answer.”

Wenatchee, which blossomed along the Great Northern Railway when it pushed through central Washington in 1892, was already coming to grips with the decline of America’s farm towns when the violence began.

Family orchards have been swallowed up by corporate fruit giants, and the Alcoa Aluminum plant that brought hundreds of jobs to the Wenatchee Valley in 1952 had shut down half its production by last year. Transplants from California building houses on the outskirts of town now complain about aerial pesticide spraying. Jim Lynch, mayor for 16 years, lost the last election in the uproar over the new Wal-Mart built atop the remains of an orchard.

Turning Point

“It all could’ve happened any place. It just happened to come together with the right mixture of violence and sex, and it happened at a time when we all think the world’s going to hell in a handbasket,” Lynch said. “We were the ultimate middle-class town . . . a God-fearing community, and all of a sudden 18 shots are fired by two 12-year-olds on a totally innocent person. . . . It’s kind of become the epitome of everything that’s wrong in the country.”

It was in 1990 that Wenatchee was named the fourth-best “micropolitan area” by “The Rating Guide to Life in America’s Small Cities.” Two years later, the town was featured on the cover of USA Weekend magazine as its “Make a Difference Day” winner.

Scores of volunteers spent a day on city improvement projects. Law firms shut down and sent staff out on painting missions. Service clubs picked up trash along the river. A euphoric Chamber of Commerce printed up tourist brochures about “Wenatchee, Land of Dreams.”

But then, the slogan struck a discomfiting note of irony. James Goodwin, the clinical psychologist with offices over the downtown antique mall, went on national TV last year--before the violence began--and proudly proclaimed that about 700 of his patients had taken antidepressants, and were a lot happier for it.

Wenatchee became known as “Happy Valley,” and Goodwin, “the Pied Piper of Prozac.” State licensing authorities launched an investigation to determine whether Goodwin was depressed himself and taking it out on his patients.

The headlines continued when a huge fire last July and August burned 187,000 acres of the Wenatchee National Forest, destroying 39 homes and threatening several ridge tops on the outskirts of town. Later in August, 11 people were killed when two vehicles collided on U.S. 97 two miles north of town.

Then came the slayings. Young John Duncan told officials of going down to the river with his friend Manuel Sanchez. Both were carrying stolen rifles. He said migrant worker Emilio Pruneda threw rocks at them, and Manuel, infuriated, fired his gun. When Pruneda fell unconscious into the bushes, John grabbed Manuel’s gun and aimed his own as well. He fired until both guns were empty and later fainted in the arms of a nearby police officer.

“John thought he was dead. He told me, once Manuel shot that first shot, he just took both guns in his hand and he unloaded ‘em. He had an adrenaline rush going so hard he couldn’t not [do it],” said his mother, Jennifer Duncan. Manuel and John were sentenced to a juvenile detention center until they are 21.

“He did cry. I don’t know how much remorse they can feel before they block it out so it doesn’t kill them. Children by nature get over things and go on,” she said. “Me, I don’t know. As the seasons pass, I get more cognizant of it. That Pruneda didn’t see fall, and then winter came, and he didn’t see spring, and now summer’s here, and he’s still gone. I’m only starting to think about it now.”

A month after the boys were sentenced, Wenatchee headlines were already full of the widening child sex abuse investigation, much of it centered on the ramshackle Church of God House of Prayer, less than a block from an East Wenatchee junior high school.

It started, investigators say, when Cherie Town, a 36-year-old mother of two, phoned a rape crisis center and claimed her husband had been molesting their two sons for years. The boys, interviewed by police, confirmed the story, but accused their mother as well. Under interrogation, Town admitted she started having sex with her younger boy when he was 9, then began “having fun” with her older son, who is mentally disabled.

Town said later that the confession had been coerced, but she and her husband entered no-contest pleas in which they maintained their innocence but acknowledged they would be found guilty at trial. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison and her husband, Meredith, to 18 years and 4 months.

Child Sex Abuse

It was the beginning of the unraveling of a child sex abuse case of nearly unimaginable proportions, involving allegations that couples all over Wenatchee were engaging in sex with their children and sharing them with other couples in group sex.

Detective Bob Perez listened as his foster daughter, now 10, led him to a dozen or so locations where she said she had been molested by her parents and groups of other adults, including the Church of God House of Prayer.

Pastor Robert Roberson and his wife, Connie, were arrested in March and accused of holding Friday night orgies with children in the church basement. According to one woman’s confession, Roberson’s wife would instruct the children to get undressed, then pair them up and instruct them what to do to each other. The adults then allegedly took off their clothes and began to have sex with the children and each other.

In all, about two dozen adults have been charged, 11 of them with some connection to the church. At least 11 have pleaded guilty, at least two others have been convicted by juries and imprisoned and the rest are still awaiting trial.

Law enforcement and prosecution agencies from two counties have backed up the investigations, but there remains in Wenatchee, among some, a sense that the case is somehow too awful to be real.

Critics say Perez should not be relying on information from his own foster daughter, who was taken away from her parents after a family acquaintance was convicted of molesting her. They complain that interviews with children have not been recorded and allegations could be embellished or manufactured by investigators too eager to uncover wrongdoing.

“My parents . . . sex abuse? I couldn’t imagine how anyone could even think that my parents could be capable of such a disgusting thing! It was simply preposterous!” said Sarah Marie Doggett, 16, whose parents were convicted on her younger sister’s testimony.

“We’ve had 4-year-old children who said nothing happened to them examined [vaginally] . . . while they lay there screaming and crying and saying how much [the examination] hurts. That’s sexual abuse, in my book,” said Cherie Santos-Greenfield, a former rape crisis worker who has formed Concerned Citizens for Legal Accountability to demand an outside investigation of law enforcement techniques in the case. The group has gathered 2,000 signatures.

“The Doggett case bothered me,” she said. “These people were accused of such horrendous crimes, but they were just ideal parents and churchgoers, and it wasn’t until they took their son to counseling that they started having problems. It all kind of pulled together into something weird. Both of them passed lie detector tests, their own children said they were harassed into making statements by Perez. . . . We’ve seen enough of the legal system, now we want some justice.”

The Wenatchee Police Department has completed a review of the child abuse probe and has backed Perez’s investigation. Prosecutors and state counselors also have praised the detective and Child Protective Services investigators, who they say have suffered criticism, hostility and threats but have persisted to see the case through.

Left in the lurch, social services workers say, are the children--who no matter what has happened have been removed from their homes, separated from siblings and subjected to repeated interrogations and humiliation at school.

“When we had the forest fire last year, help came in from everywhere, they circled the fire and they put it out. But when the child abuse thing happened, we said . . . let’s circle the problem, let’s take care of it. But where was the response? It seems we’re set up to handle natural disasters and emergencies, but we’re not set up to handle social disasters,” said Walt Gearhart, head of the Douglas-Chelan Regional Support Network, who has not been able to get either state or community funding to set up a comprehensive treatment program for child victims.

“We thought there would be a kind of outpouring, here were these suffering kids. But I guess in people’s minds if they promote this [intervention], they’re saying ‘Yes, this did happen.’ . . . And Wenatchee has been looked at in the past as a kind of place where these kinds of things don’t happen.”

The Aftermath

The Chamber of Commerce has formed a task force to promote the idea that these incidents could easily have happened anywhere. Melanie Shaw, the chamber director, says things like learning how to help the children are part of the community’s healing process.

“I think a lot of people just don’t know what to do for the kids,” she said. “Americans have a very specific way of dealing with grief. You bake cookies, you send flowers, you bring over banana bread. If those children were injured and in the hospital, if there was an accident and both parents were dead, we would know what to do. But I think people in this case don’t know. This is a wounding that’s so grievous, what do you do?”

Shaw says the real story about Wenatchee’s horrors lies in what came after: The 1,500 people, many of them strangers, who turned out for the memorial service for Huffman’s ex-wife and daughter; the fact that the suspect in those murders, a drifter who’d been living in Wenatchee about six months, was caught when the police found his pickup truck in a parking lot late at night and it looked somehow out of place.

Huffman says he searched his daughter’s locker after the killing and found a copy of the book she had been reading, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Somehow, that story of a lawyer in a small town trying to explain injustice to his daughter fit just right, he said.

“If you know the story, it was a small town, things had gone on, things that could only have happened the way they did because it was a small town, and in the end justice was finally served. I talked a lot with Mandy, as I don’t know how many fathers in this town have, about how you can have hope and faith in the system. It [the book] was a renewal for me too, of how ultimately justice can be served,” Huffman said.

Goodwin, the Prozac doctor, has had time to meditate on Wenatchee’s diagnosis:

“What you will find in this marvelous small town will be no different from that which is going on all across this wide country of ours. Watch Wenatchee very closely as we deal with our issues [including natural disasters, man-made disasters and clinical depression] and then readjust your vision to the wider country as a whole. Wenatchee . . . will appear no different than the one looking in the mirror.”