Solace With Strings : Sympathy for a Molested Boy Turns to Resentment of His Mother’s Use of a Trust Fund

It’s the American way of atoning for random violence--bestowing economic solace on victims.

When a 7-year-old Tacoma, Wash., boy was sexually mutilated, his community donated more than $600,000, one of the largest trust funds ever amassed for a crime victim.

But the Tacoma boy’s family would find that community sympathy and generosity can give way to resentment. The victim or the family that was loved can be scorned; all the gifts given freely at first--teddy bears, dollars and kind words--can turn out to have strings attached.

It’s happened in other well-publicized cases. In 1986, after New York model Marla Hanson had her face slashed by razor-wielding assailants, the public rallied to her cause. A philanthropist contributed $20,000 for her medical bills. But, once she was on her feet again, a backlash began. Fashion magazines started casting aspersions on her personal history. Models approached Hanson on the street and, remarking on the money she’d received, said things like: “This is the best thing that ever happened to you,” or “For $20,000, I’d get my face cut too.”

“People only have so much sympathy,” said Hanson. “As soon as they think you are successful and you’re doing well, they hate you.”

Even the family of Jessica McClure, the girl who was rescued from an abandoned well in Midland, Tex., in 1987, experienced a backlash, according to Julie Hillrichs, a reporter for the Midland Reporter-Telegram. “There (were) a lot of rumors about the family spending significant amounts (of the trust fund) on cars and jewelry. People talked about Sissy (Jessica’s mother) and her diamond rings.” Hillrich added that the rumors were never substantiated.

In the Tacoma case, too, the backlash has been aimed not at the victim but at a family member--the victim’s mother. But the results of the vitriol can sometimes end up further traumatizing victims as well as their families.

The boy’s mother, Helen Harlow, initially gained prominence as a victims’ rights advocate in Washington state, only to subsequently be accused publicly of shiftlessness and abuse of her son’s trust account, charges that upset the boy.

“I tried really hard to be objective about it, but the reality is people were saying these things about me ,” Harlow said. “That made me angry and it made me frustrated.”

Most crime victims, of course, receive little public attention at all. But in these days of victim’s rights activism, more are finding themselves thrust into a spotlight--even elevated to star status. And when that happens, said Linda Barker-Lowrance, director of program services for the National Victim Center in Fort Worth, Tex., there is the chance of an eventual backlash in which the victim’s character is attacked.

Barker-Lowrance said of the Tacoma case, “You had people from all over the world throwing money at the family. And then you had people who wanted to sit in judgment on how that money was spent.”

One day last May, a family strolling in the woods near their Tacoma home came upon a naked 7-year-old boy plastered with mud.

When the cowering child allowed them to come closer, they saw that he had been attacked.

In the days that followed, the case received widespread publicity, partly because the boy’s injuries were particularly shocking. He had been raped, stabbed and strangled. His penis had been amputated, an injury which has since been partially repaired through reconstructive surgery.

The case also inflamed the public because the suspect, Earl Shriner, was a sex offender out on bail who had been expected to attack again. Now locked up, Shriner is awaiting a trial later this month on charges of attempted first-degree murder, first-degree child rape and first-degree assault.

More than 100 people a day began calling the boy’s hospital room.

“Gifts began arriving. The first batch of gifts filled his hospital room,” said Helen Harlow. “Then we were taking two and three carloads of stuff home every day.” (The boy, whose last name is different than his mother’s, has not been publicly identified.)

Harlow was perceived as a sympathetic figure. A single parent struggling to support her only child, she was unemployed at the time of the crime. She had recently moved from San Diego to Tacoma, so the local community saw her as a newcomer in need of their help at a time of crisis.

Once the case captured public attention, everyone with a microphone, a notepad or a get-well message felt they were entitled to access to Helen Harlow.

She bought an answering machine to ward off the onslaught, and even considered moving.

“People started calling me and offering me jobs because they heard I was unemployed,” she said, adding, “I wanted to tell them I didn’t want their jobs.”

Harlow was proud of being able to take care of herself. It was difficult for her to accept charity without feeling a degree of insult. But the public interpreted Harlow’s pride as lack of gratitude, a misunderstanding that would contribute to the coming backlash.

The gifts and donations that continued to arrive became a burden. It seemed to Harlow that strangers were trying to dictate how she should react to their generosity.

“The public made it very clear to me that they expected some sort of individual acknowledgment for the gifts,” she said.

She finally told her son he couldn’t open any more of the packages until she found time to write thank-you notes for the dozens of gifts they had already received.

Seven months after the attack, unopened packages still crowd Harlow’s closets. “I can’t integrate all this into our lives,” she said.

Harlow’s new-found influence began to grow as she traveled the state talking to groups about the need to keep dangerous offenders out of circulation. It was a novel sensation for her to draw a crowd simply by showing up someplace.

Whereas before she had been just another anonymous “post-card sender” for causes like Greenpeace and the ERA, now, she said, “people had designated me as a spokesperson. I was having people react to things I was saying when I wasn’t even thinking I was saying anything special.”

A positive aspect to the notoriety was that Harlow was helping to change public policy. In reaction to lobbying by Harlow and others, the Washington state legislature is considering legislation under which sex offenders could be sentenced to life in prison, and would be required to register their whereabouts with police.

The downside to the fame was that Harlow had no privacy. “Everything I did was public,” she said. “It didn’t matter what I did. It was public.”

Commenting on this excess of renown, Barker-Lowrance of the National Victim Center said, “Victims enter into this process not understanding what’s happening to them. They get swallowed up.”

Up to this point, Harlow had elicited mostly compassion from the public. That attitude began to shift when she started to have differences with the three trustees in charge of her son’s trust fund.

Tacoma police Sgt. Stan Mowre, who established the account, said he and the other trustees specifically set out to avert problems that have arisen in other cases where parents took advantage of trust funds intended for their children.

For example, a Florida mother came under criminal investigation in 1988 when she purchased jewelry, clothing and a BMW with money donated by the public for her son’s multiple liver transplants.

Her son, 7-year-old Ronnie DeSillers, died in 1987 while awaiting a fourth transplant. The investigation of his mother was eventually dropped, but the much-publicized case served to raise public suspicions about the potential abuse of charitable funds.

Harlow’s son’s account is meant to cover medical and educational expenses for the child, Mowre said, and not the family’s daily living expenses.

“The money can be used for anything that has to do with the young boy,” he said. “We (the trustees) hope to do right by him.”

Some Harlow supporters, including her neighbor, Candy Mansfield, say the trustees’ careful hold on the fund is “a power issue. The trustees think they’re the only ones who can decide what’s good enough for the boy,” she said.

And Harlow wonders why, if she has managed to raise her son on her own since he was a year old, must she now answer to a board of trustees before making decisions that involve him?

“The one person who really knows what’s best for my son is me,” she said. “But they (the trustees) want to be so involved in our life that they know whether I’m buying a teapot for me or a toy for him. Does it really matter to them?”

Harlow said she has received no money from the trust account and has been living on “a few thousand” in donations that were given directly to her. She recently finished classes in tax accounting and plans to begin a new job in that field later this month.

Public sentiment toward Harlow continued to sour when she asked the trustees if she could junk her broken-down ’68 Buick Wildcat and replace it with a more dependable vehicle to transport her son to his doctors’ appointments.

The trustees gave their approval to the request and Harlow asked for a $26,000 Saab, because--as she would later explain in defense of her actions--it’s considered to be a safe and reliable vehicle.

But some people interpreted the move as simple greed.

“You know how it is when someone in the family wins the lottery--everyone in the family wants a new car too,” said Mowre, one of the trustees.

“I think she (Harlow) misjudged the public,” Mowre added. “She thought they’d come down on her side.”

The Saab incident inspired several weeks of critical letters to the editor of the Morning News Tribune in Tacoma. The public that had nothing but empathy for Helen Harlow weeks before was now telling her she should get a job and stop trying to sap the trust fund.

To Harlow’s dismay, her son became aware that people were unhappy with him and his mother. “I didn’t ask for all that stuff,” he said one day.

Morning News Tribune reporter Dan Voelpel, who covered the trust fund controversy, said the public might have “misunderstood and made more out of the incident than it needed to be.”

By that time, he said, victims of other violent crimes were becoming jealous over the attention heaped on Harlow.

In addition, he said, the Tacoma area had been in an economic slump and many of those who contributed to the trust fund were poor or unemployed. When they heard Helen Harlow wanted a Saab, they felt they’d been duped.

To this day, Voelpel said, the name Helen Harlow evokes conflicting emotions among local people--sympathy and distrust.

For her part, Harlow is reminded of the trustees’ unwanted influence in her life every time she gets behind the wheel of the minivan that was presented to her in lieu of the Saab. “Someday I’m going to give the damn car back to them,” she said bitterly.

Harlow also feels betrayed by her treatment at the hands of the community who offered her a lifeline, only to withdraw it. “Don’t go telling us you’re going to take care of us if you’re not going to,” she said.

Jane Kendall, the psychotherapist who has treated Harlow and her son in the wake of the attack, said such a backlash is especially traumatic because it’s an unforseeable complication of victimization. While emotional and physical pain can be expected following such a trauma, no one expects their neighbors to turn on them.

Kendall said she believes the backlash had little to do with Harlow or her behavior. “It took on a life of its own,” she said, adding that the hostile reaction was the public’s way of working out its own rage at the rape and mutilation. Harlow became the target of anger really meant for her son’s assailant, Kendall said.

Barker-Lowrance said such clashes often occur because the public identifies with victims of heavily publicized crimes and begins to feel that, because of this perceived connection to the victims, they have a right to judge them.

“We build up a victim and then tear them down. Why do we as a society have to do that?” Barker-Lowrance asked. “Does that family represent a fear within society that it could be our child next?”