Woman in Adoption Fraud Blames Unhappy Past : Crime: Leanne Dees says a traumatic childhood in Arkansas and susceptibility to men led her to promise her unborn babies to up to 14 couples.

What Leanne Dees did to the emotions of desperately vulnerable people is so unacceptable it was criminal. She knows that now. “I messed up,” she said from jail.

She promised to give up her unborn children to would-be adoptive parents, several in Southern California, in exchange for living expenses while pregnant. The problem was that she made those promises to different sets of prospective parents at the same time.

In a case that apparently marked the nation’s first use of federal wire and mail fraud laws to prosecute adoption fraud, Dees was convicted of six felony counts. On Monday, a Los Angeles federal judge sentenced her to the maximum term, 30 months behind bars. He said she had brought misery to “so many susceptible women.”

Leniency was out of the question--though Dees herself has endured profound misery and is herself susceptible to men. That susceptibility, she readily volunteered in a two-hour interview from Bakersfield County Jail, where she is being housed pending transfer to a federal prison, seems to be at the core of all the things that have gone bad in her life.

And much has gone wrong, including a traumatic childhood in a small town in Arkansas and bizarre relationships with a parade of men who have drifted in and out of her life. She managed to finish only fifth grade and, at age 28, has borne nine children and given up six for adoption.

The judge made no offer of rehabilitation, education or probation in place of prison. Instead, he sent her away for 2 1/2 years.

“They’re saying those women are vulnerable victims,” Dees said in her first extensive comments since her arrest in December. “Yes, they are vulnerable. I know that. That’s what always captured my heart.

“I wasn’t only making the husband and wife’s lives complete,” Dees continued. “I was making grandparents, aunts, uncles, completing whole family units when someone was adopting one of my babies . . . I wanted to take away their pain. Because if I could take away their pain, it made it easier for me to deal with my pain.”

For Dees, that pain pervades each day. She’s “ashamed” of her six tattoos, especially the one on her left breast, a depiction of two cherries underneath the word “Virgin.” When she looks at herself mornings in the mirror, this is what she sees: “I’m fat and ugly and stupid.”

She added: “I’m scared to wake up in the morning. And I’m scared to go to bed at night. The mind plays tricks on you when you go to sleep at night. That’s when a lot of the memories come back.”

Her childhood, Dees said, was “probably worse than a nightmare.” The details she supplied are confirmed by court documents.

Dees was born in Memphis, Tenn., in May, 1964. Her parents moved her and an older sister to Arkansas shortly afterward.

Her parents divorced. Her mother remarried and again divorced.

Her mother, an alcoholic who was in and out of mental hospitals, was continuously threatening suicide, often with pills, once with a gun, once by lying down in front of the gas stove in the family kitchen, Dees said.

“I would cry myself to sleep at night,” Dees said. “As young as 8 or 9, I would be so scared I would wake up the next morning and I wouldn’t have a mother, that she would kill herself while I was asleep.”

Dees was adopted by her stepfather and moved with him briefly to California, settling in San Jose. At 12, he sent her back to Arkansas and her mother.

At 13, one week into the sixth grade, she left home and moved in with one Wayne Watson, then in his early 20s and a sheet-metal worker, she said. She had her first child by him, a son. She and Watson split up when she was 16--and pregnant again.

The last she saw of her first child, she said, he was with Watson. She hasn’t seen the boy, named David, in 10 years.

In 1981, Dees fell in with a man named Billy New and married him, but the marriage lasted only a few months. She gave birth to her second child and gave it up for adoption.

By then, she had become a heavy drinker--Jack Daniels, gin and tonic, “a lot of Busch and Budweiser.” She also popped pills, mostly Valium and Quaaludes. She smoked dope virtually daily.

After one all-night drinking binge, she met Charles Franklin (Frankie) Dees. He and a friend took her to a house trailer “way out in the country,” she said, and kept her there against her will for three weeks, so she could dry out.

“At first I thought they were going to take me out, rape me and just leave me in the country,” she said. “Then I began to see that he had done me a favor. He had saved my life. He took away something that was controlling my life.

“But then he thought he could control my life,” she said. “I see that now.”

There’s no question, Dees said, that she is vulnerable to control from men.

“Men scare me,” she said. “They say jump, I jump and I don’t come down till they say come down. Yet I have that need--I just want to know that someone really cares about me.”

In 1983, her mother committed suicide. Mother and daughter had spent the previous night together, drinking and singing gospel songs. The next day, Leanne Dees showed up at her mother’s house to be told that she had overdosed on pills.

“I just don’t remember if I told her I loved her before I left that night,” Dees said.

Dees checked herself into an Arkansas mental hospital for 30 days. Eventually, she and Frankie Dees were married. Sometimes, she said, he was physically abusive, hitting her or burning her arms with lit cigarettes and demanding sex. Frequently, he was verbally abusive, she said.

Frankie Dees, 39, denied any abuse. “It was just like anyone else’s marriage--we’ve had our ups and downs,” he said by phone from Paragould, Ark., a town of about 20,000 people in the northeastern corner of the state. “We always work through them. We never had any big, big problems.”

He added: “Over the last 10 years that we’ve been together, she’s been on the drugs three or four times. She gets on them, I get her off of them. Whenever she gets on them, she does crazy things.”

Leanne and Frankie Dees have produced seven children. Five have gone to adoptive parents. He has custody of the other two, a 3-year-old boy, Frankie, born with Down’s syndrome, and a 4-month-old girl, Ava Sherrice.

Birth control, Leanne Dees said, just hasn’t worked. Twice she’s gotten pregnant while on the pill.

Abortion was out of the question. “That is a baby from the moment of conception and I could never have an abortion,” she said.

Never, she said, did she ever have any intent to get pregnant as a means of support. She conceded, though, that it became routine during her pregnancies to receive rent or other money from would-be adoptive parents.

“I don’t want people to think I’ve done this on purpose, that I intentionally get pregnant to get my expenses paid,” Dees said.

“I can work,” she said, usually motel work and odd jobs. “There’s nothing wrong with me working, but I just get pregnant so much I just haven’t had the chance. Look, it wasn’t like I was living good. In fact, if I hadn’t been pregnant and I’d been working, I’d have been living a whole lot better than by these couples helping me.”

In 1988, Leanne Dees wrote dozens of bad checks worth a few thousand dollars. The next spring, an Arkansas judge sentenced her to probation. The check cases account for her only prior convictions.

In 1989 and 1990, she responded to ads in newspapers placed by California women seeking to adopt a baby. She was pregnant in both years.

Such ads are routinely placed in the classified sections of some newspapers--the start of what can be a completely legal alternative to the frequently bureaucratic and time-consuming process of adoption through government agencies.

California law explicitly allows someone to pay for a woman’s living expenses during pregnancy. That payment does not, however, guarantee any legal right to adoption because any such guarantee would be a crime under state law.

In practice, what that means is that a birth mother always has the right to walk away from any such arrangement.

In no way, however, does it give the birth mother the legal right to contract with two separate sets of adoptive parents at the same time.

During her 1989 pregnancy, according to U.S. prosecutors, Dees made her way to Sherman Oaks and, in 1990, to Van Nuys. From those two towns, she called prospective parents in Granada Hills, Los Angeles and Diamond Bar and in New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New York, offering her unborn children for adoption in exchange for living expenses.

Prosecutors later estimated that 12 to 14 people believed they would adopt a Dees baby.

The baby born in 1989 was Frankie Jr., who has Down’s syndrome. Leanne Dees said the would-be adoptive mother backed out of the deal upon learning of the child’s condition. The 1990 baby, born in a Las Vegas hospital, was ultimately adopted in Arkansas by her brother-in-law.

Leanne and Frankie Dees came to the attention of Los Angeles police in November, 1990, after Debbie Freeman, a West Los Angeles therapist, reported she had paid nearly $10,000 to support the couple and their 1-year-old son for six months in a Van Nuys apartment.

Alerted by the police search, television news shows aired features on Leanne Dees. The FBI joined the investigation.

Dees was arrested last December in Arkansas. She had given birth a week before to her daughter, Ava Sherrice.

Dees was convicted Feb. 12 of six of 14 felony fraud charges, one count of mail fraud and five counts of wire fraud. The jury acquitted her of two fraud charges and deadlocked on six others.

The wire and mail fraud counts alleged she used the U.S. mail and telephone systems to defraud prospective parents.

On Monday, besides sentencing her to the maximum 30-month term, Chief U.S. District Judge Manuel L. Real ordered her to repay a total of $20,511 to prospective parents, lawyers, doctors and the Las Vegas hospital.

He also took the unusual step of ordering her to report to federal authorities if she ever gets pregnant again, saying that prospective parents must be on guard. And he said of the children Leanne Dees had given up for adoption, “She was selling her inventory.”

That comment “cut through me,” Leanne Dees said. “Everything just went numb after that.”

The only thing keeping her going, she said, have been the conversations she had a few weeks ago through the air vents of the federal jail in downtown Los Angeles--chats with a male inmate.

It’s not about romance, she said. It’s about a man--in particular, a suspected bank robber--who told her straight-out to go along and get along with jailers, who “made me straighten up.” That’s “the kind of guy I need in my life,” she said.

Dees’ defense attorney, Hermosa Beach lawyer Jerry L. Newton, plans to appeal her conviction, contending she merely exercised a birth mother’s right under California law to change her mind.

“The thing about that is, I will have most of my time done by the time the appeal comes up,” Leanne Dees said. “So what do I actually win? Maybe I get found innocent. So what? My life is already taken away.

“I’m tired of life,” she said. “I don’t now how much longer I can go on. I don’t think I would kill myself. But I’m exhausted. I can’t stop crying. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I pray every night that God will go ahead and take me on his own.”