A Hellish Home Life : Women Say Abusive Father Killed Sister He Called Possessed

By the time 4-year-old Lisa Morales disappeared in 1977, the county Department of Children’s Services had a file on her family that was six inches thick.

Officials had checked out repeated complaints that Marcos E. and Beatriz Morales abused their children. But nobody investigated Lisa’s fate until last year, when two of her now-grown sisters came forward with a horror story of abuse and murder.

Beatriz Irene Quintero, 22, and Monica Morales, 19, told the Orange County district attorney’s office that their parents believed that Lisa was possessed by demons and confined her to a dimly lit bathroom. They described a father with a violent temper who held a machete to his wife’s throat, drew a pistol on his eldest son and raped a daughter.

Saying she was breaking a vow of secrecy demanded by her father, Monica Morales told police that one night she saw Lisa floating face down in the bathtub beside her father and that the family later drove to Mexico to bury the child in the sand along a beach.

Though no body has ever been found, the parents, Marcos Morales, 53, and Beatriz Morales, 46, will stand trial on murder charges this summer. According to court transcripts, they have pleaded not guilty and claim that they gave Lisa up for adoption to a Mexican couple.

As part of National Child Abuse Prevention month, a small memorial was held Thursday in honor of the little girl by Quintero, her therapist and two members of Parent Help USA, an outreach program for families considered to be at risk for child abuse.

On the grassy mound of the Good Shepherd Cemetery, where only children are buried, is Lisa’s black and white headstone, which carries the inscription, “In Loving Memory of Our Little Sister.”

Her headstone is unique because no body lies beneath it.

This is one of the unusual aspects of this murder case. According to Deputy Dist. Atty. Lewis R. Rosenblum, only one other murder case in the county in the last 10 or 12 years has lacked a body.

“It is a somewhat complicated case, but we have evidence that the child was never given away,” Rosenblum said. “We have no doubt that the child was killed, and that’s what we intend to prove.”

The shocking story of the Morales family came to light last April when Sally N. Kanarek, director of Parent Help USA, asked Beatriz and Marcos Morales to appear on a television program about child abuse. She had been working with Quintero, her parents and other family members for about four years, providing food, clothing and counseling.

According to Kanarek, Marcos Morales “became livid, insulted. I was amazed at his hostility.” When she asked Quintero about her father’s outburst, Quintero told her the story of her sister’s death.

Quintero went to authorities and told them that she had brought food to Lisa, whom she remembered as often being bruised and naked in the bathtub, which was sometimes filled with water. She frequently heard her parents yelling in the bathroom about demons, she said.

Quintero testified at a preliminary hearing last September that the family drove to Mexico, with her sister’s body wrapped in a plastic bag. After they arrived at a beach south of the border, she told the court, the family took a walk and at one point, she saw her father digging a hole in the sand.

According to Kanarek, the Department of Children’s Services’ file contained child abuse reports issued by schools against the parents. “I saw photographs of the battered children, with bruises on their faces. They were obvious cases of child abuse,” she said.

“They (the Moraleses) were a tremendous priority for me,” said Kanarek, who reported Marcos Morales to county authorities several times in recent years. “I felt their home was at a state of complete dysfunction. He was setting the children’s clothes on fire, just doing completely unacceptable things.”

The Moraleses had 14 children, several of whom have suffered the problems common to child abuse victims--drug abuse, homelessness, prison--according to Dr. Ruth Purdy, a volunteer counselor for Parent Help.

Quintero, who described herself as a survivor, became pregnant with her first child at 14. Now, she is married to a man she described as “supportive.”

Since she reported the disappearance of her sister, she has been shunned by her siblings, she said.

“They are denying this happened. Some are denying that Lisa existed,” she said. “My father asked me why I was ruining our family’s name.”

While she said she had felt doubts and confusion about turning in her own parents, she took comfort at the sight of the headstone. “I feel I’ve done the right thing.”

As Father Bill Kuper of St. Cecilia’s Church in Tustin encouraged Quintero during the memorial service to “continue on this walk to be courageous, to speak the truth as God has revealed it to you,” she wiped tears from her eyes.

She cradled her 2-year-old daughter in her lap, and repeated “Lord, hear our prayer” each time after the priest.

“I feel Lisa’s spirit is finally resting,” she said, afterward. “It feels like she just died. This is really a blessing to be able to come here and be with her.”

Shy about publicly discussing her childhood, which she described as “a living hell,” Quintero said she had an important message for parents who abuse their children.

“You can see what happened to my sister,” Quintero said. “She died of child abuse. There’s a lot of help out there and a lot of advice you can receive.”