‘None of Our Business’ : A DEATH IN WHITE BEAR LAKE The True Chronicle of an All-American Town <i> by Barry Siegel (Bantam Books: $19.95</i> ; <i> 439 pp.; 553-05790</i> )

“Everyone knew, but it was none of our business.”

“We all knew something was wrong, but we didn’t know what.”

Such admissions are a recurring refrain in case after case of death by child abuse. Friends, neighbors, relatives--all share the profound, almost instinctive desire not to know. And so too often do doctors, social workers, clergymen, even members of the police force. “Fell through the cracks”--that’s another familiar refrain.

In 1965, in staid, pleasant White Bear Lake, Minn., a 3-year-old child, whom the system had failed, died as the result of a beating by his adoptive mother. For most of his brief life, Dennis Jurgens had been tortured and brutalized by Lois Jurgens--with the full knowledge of her protective and adoring husband, Harold. Early in the morning on Palm Sunday, when Dr. Ray Petersen, a local pediatrician, was summoned by Harold to the Jurgenses’ beautifully decorated home on Gardenette Drive, he found, in an immaculate toy-filled room, a dead baby whose “body and face” as Los Angeles Times reporter Barry Siegel writes, “were covered with bruises radiating in all directions . . . there was a laceration around the base of the penis. The immediate cause of death was peritonitis, due to perforation of the bowel,” which the Jurgenses attributed to a fall down the cellar stairs. Harold was out of town when the accident occurred. Later that day, after the town coroner had examined the body, he wrote “deferred” in in the blank space following “mode of death.” Neither parent was prosecuted for homicide, although Dennis’ 5-year-old brother Robert, another adoptee, was removed from the Jurgenses’ home--and returned to them after three years with foster families.

This case would have vanished from public memory, as most such suspicious deaths do, and would certainly never have come to Siegel’s attention, if there had not been an unusual twist. Twenty years afterwards, Dennis’ 37-year-old natural mother, Jerry Sherwood, decided to search for him. When she discovered how the son she had been forced to give up to the Ramsey County Welfare Department had died, she began a fierce, ultimately successful campaign to have the Dennis Jurgens file reopened. In 1987, Lois Jurgens, by then a woman of 62, was tried and found guilty of third-degree murder. The star witness for the prosecution was Robert Jurgens.

What were the interrelated systemic failures that culminated in the death of one little boy? What part was played by the willed blindness of the White Bear Lake community? Barry Siegel’s greatest service is his exhaustive research into these aspects of the case. With child abuse now a tragic national epidemic (last year there were approximately 2.4 million cases), we can’t be reminded often enough how easily children fall through the cracks. The dynamics of family life are anarchic--especially ungovernable because we value family privacy above the welfare of children. Yet the only hope for the 2.4 million Dennis Jurgenses or Lisa Steinbergs comes from outside the home--from private citizens and professionals willing to take on the risky, uncomfortable responsibility of intervening in the lives of other people’s children.

The Jurgenses were just the kind of couple who create a superficial impression of decency and respectablity: churchgoing, lower-middle-class homeowners with a reliable source of income. Quiet, unassertive Harold had been steadily employed as an electrician since his marriage to Lois in 1944. Lois was pretty, always impeccably groomed, and had a sense of humor and an air of refinement. She often spoke of her passion for children--she had grown up with 15 siblings in a household where her father had frequently used the strap to teach everyone “the right values.”

“We may not have anything else, but we have love,” Lois told Ramsey County caseworker Geranne Rekdahl in 1961, when she came to interview them about adopting Dennis. Rekdahl knew that the couple had obtained Robert through private adoption after they had been turned down by a number of Catholic agencies; she also knew that Lois had had three hospitalizations for mental illness and had been given shock treatment (though she probably did not see a 1951 report by a Mayo Clinic psychiatrist, diagnosing Lois as a potentially paranoid schizophrenic and strongly recommending against her becoming an adoptive parent). Despite real misgivings on Rekdahl’s part, she decided to be “objective and professional.” The Jurgenses “deserved a chance after the anguish of not being able to have their own kids.”

At the time he was turned over to his new family, 1-year-old Dennis was a sunny, outgoing, very active little boy, in contrast to Robert who was shy, quiet, puny and submissive. Lois set out to bring Dennis into line, to extinguish his childishness, his personality. Neighbors were often unsettled by screams from the house on Gardenette Drive. Relatives who observed Lois repeatedly striking Dennis when he insisted on crawling rather than walking, or force-feeding him his vomit when he refused to eat his dinner, were privately upset by her harsh child-rearing methods, although they were impressed that at ages 2 and 3, Dennis and Robert were able to perfectly recite the catechism.

But, as Siegel points out, as early as nine months after the Jurgenses brought Dennis into their home, there was a blatant warning that he was an endangered child, when he was admitted to the Ramsey County hospital with burns on his penis, as well as “a number of bruises tattooing” his small body. Jeranne Rekdahl, Peterson and the hospital staff all accepted Lois Jurgens’ explanation that the child had burned himself with hot water. In February, 1964, after Rekdahl paid a final visit to the Jurgenses and satisfied herself that the couple were “providing very adequately for Dennis’ physical, spiritual and emotional growth,” the adoption was finalized.

Five years after Dennis’ death, Harold and Lois, who had by then moved to a community some distance from White Bear Lake, were able to adopt a family of five more children! This time they made a favorable impression on a Kentucky caseworker, whom they did not apprise of all their history. Their application made no mention that Dennis had ever existed.

Siegel devotes many chapters of his book to investigative reporting on the politics within the White Bear Lake Police Department, where Lois’ brother Jerome Zerwas was a lieutenant with clout enough to protect his sister, to account for the community’s failure to prosecute the Jurgeneses in 1965. He is also fascinated by the question: How could an awful thing like this happen to a child in a nice All-American town like White Bear Lake? He goes into the town’s early history and into minute descriptions of life among the minor characters in the community during the 1960s at far too much length. This research provides no real answers and only skews his focus. Children are abused everywhere in families of every social class--from White Bear Lake to Greenwich Village and Watts. Lois Jurgens’ family was, according to Siegel, shiftless and abusive--her father was an alcoholic; her mother was a battered wife. But even this history does not fully account for her cruelty toward her seven adopted children. Her 15 siblings behaved differently with their offspring--a point that would have been fruitful for Siegel to explore.

Hardly ever permitting himself to comment, analyze or state an opinion, Siegel relies on the density of fact to make his points. It’s only in the conscientious pursuit of verisimilitude that he departs from the journalistic rule book and allows himself to fictionalize--filling in the eye blinks and coffee-stirrings of 25 years ago. But the moral and psychological complexities of this case cry out for a deeper, more thoughtful examination and the courage to take a stand.

How should society judge a Lois Jurgens--as a “sick” person or an evil one? And, an even more difficult question: How should the passively complicit parent, a Harold Jurgens, be judged? Siegel raises these issues but never grapples with them. Minus that effort, this book seems naggingly incomplete.