Mountain Tragedy: Child-Selling Charge, Suicide : Virginia: James Owens and his wife, Stephanie, wanted a better life. They set out to get it by peddling their valuables--including, prosecutors say, the children.

James Owens was hungry for a new life, a new start, a new place. The forlorn hollows of Appalachia had little to offer the impatient man of 21 or his 17-year-old wife, Stephanie Gail. They were ready to move on.

First, they sold the new furniture James’ parents had bought them on credit--the black leather couch and the full bedroom suite. Then they wrenched out the dishwasher and unscrewed the light fixtures from their double-wide trailer and sold those too.

Finally, authorities say, they tried to sell the last thing holding them back: their children.

They would insist later, after being arrested in a police sting, that it was all a joke, that James was just “playing a game” when he offered strangers their 9-month-old daughter for $25,000 and the son Stephanie was carrying for $20,000.

But it was too late. In his jail cell, James knotted a bedsheet into a noose and hanged himself before he was even arraigned. Stephanie was forced into protective custody after a judge, in an unprecedented move for a Virginia court, placed her unborn child in foster care.

Two months later, James Ira Owens was taken from his mother immediately after his birth. Stephanie remained free on bond, drifting from her grandparents’ home to her mother’s cramped apartment to a place with a new boyfriend now facing robbery charges.

She goes to court Feb. 28--her 19th birthday--to stand trial in a case that offers a troubling look into the emptiness and dull ache of young lives in a place like Dickenson County, where the population dropped 11% in the last decade and the unemployment rate is slightly less than 20%.

After 29 overworked years in this impoverished spit of Southwest Virginia, Roy Rose, the director of county social services, is an expert on the sorrows of the hardscrabble ridges and valleys where James and Stephanie Owens were brought up.

“Anyone who wants to get ahead in life has to leave here,” Rose said recently.

For two years, James Owens dabbled at college. He also pumped gas, drove a truck and worked as a hospital security guard. He talked a lot about becoming a police officer.

But mostly, James counted on welfare checks and gifts from his parents to support his growing family. His wife didn’t work either. She had eloped at 15, and with just an eighth-grade education, a baby underfoot and another on the way, her prospects were bleak.

“She mostly slept or sat around playing with that ol’ Nintendo game,” recalled her mother-in-law, Ellen Owens, 64. “She didn’t have any friends. No one ever came to visit.”

The yellow mobile home Ellen and Ira Owens bought and parked on their land in Haysi, about 30 minutes up the mountain from the county seat of Clintwood, was filled with new furniture and appliances for their only child and his bride. James’ parents speak without rancor or embarrassment about his demands.

“No is something I never did tell the boy,” said Ira Owens, who is 68. “We just went along with everything the boy wanted.”

The father himself was just 15 when he went into the coal mines that scab Appalachia. He wanted a better life for James.

Although Stephanie was unfriendly and a slovenly housekeeper, said her mother-in-law, she “treated the young’un real good. I’ll give her credit for that.”

If people around here know where Stephanie is now, they’re not saying, and her defense attorney did not respond to telephone calls or a letter seeking an interview.

Stephanie’s pregnant mother, who lives in a grim government-subsidized housing complex near Haysi, said she was too ill to talk. The grandfather who helped rear Stephanie allowed that she “does not belong to me. She’d get on me if I was to say anything about her.”

The elder Owenses haven’t heard from her in months. “You can’t get no sense out her anyway,” Ellen Owens said.

County social workers who visited Stephanie and James found both of them to be resentful of the family counseling sessions and parenting classes they were told to attend.

“They could have had a support network,” Rose said. “They didn’t take advantage of it.”

Not that the social services director is surprised. Teen-age marriages are “part of the culture in this area,” he said, and the sad consequences of those unions are reflected in the agency’s bulging files.

Perhaps to avoid having the court take their daughter, Victoria, away, the young couple gave temporary custody to friends, who later testified that the baby had cigarette burns on her hands and a foot. They also said Stephanie was “too rough” with the child during her visits.

As for James, court files quoted him as saying: “I don’t trust myself or my wife not to hurt the baby.”

By December, 1992, the towheaded little girl was back home and Stephanie was pregnant again. James no longer considered the two-bedroom trailer sufficient. His parents sold the land out back, which they always had planned to use as a family cemetery, and bought a three-bedroom trailer for $21,000.

After the nest egg that was supposed to put James through college was gone, the Owenses took out loans to buy James and Stephanie new furniture, a new Ford truck and a new Geo car. When the two began selling off the gifts, the older couple watched in puzzlement from their little brick house.

Stephanie later told investigators that she and James planned to live with relatives in Alabama. They already had leads on jobs: Stephanie would work at a K mart, her husband in an auto shop.

“He had anything he wanted,” his mother said sadly. “Maybe we just give him too much. But there just wasn’t no reason for this to happen. We don’t know why. They didn’t need to sell that baby.”

Much of what did happen is still unexplained. What’s clear, however, is that on Dec. 14, 1992, a classified ad appeared in a local paper seeking people “seriously interested” in adopting a baby.

“They interviewed potential candidates,” said Commonwealth’s Attorney Don Askins. “We have witnesses who will testify that money was discussed.”

Sheriff’s deputies posing as a childless Roanoke couple arranged to meet the Owenses in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant in Clintwood. They said Stephanie, then 17, offered an ultrasound image of the son due in two months.

“We met a couple of times before money was ever mentioned,” said investigator Ron Kendrick. Finally, James took the detective for a ride and made what sounded like a rehearsed sales pitch. “He gave me a whole spiel,” Kendrick said.

Both Owens children now are in foster care and up for adoption. Social workers said Stephanie often misses her supervised visits, though she has petitioned for the return of her children.

The suicide note James left in his cell was neither a confession nor an expression of remorse, according to the prosecutor. It was “more or less a love note,” Askins said, but it was written to both Stephanie and another woman.

A search of the couple’s trailer turned up several spiral notebooks that Stephanie had used as diaries, according to court documents. In excerpts read aloud during preliminary hearings and published in local newspapers, she mentioned her pain over the couple’s decision to give up the unborn baby she already had named after her husband.

“I wish I could get the money to give him so we wouldn’t have to do this,” she wrote three days after the newspaper ad ran.

It is in juvenile court that Stephanie Owens will be judged; if convicted, she could be confined until her 21st birthday.

Charles Bledsoe, the lawyer who handled last year’s custody hearing involving Stephanie’s unborn child, remembers her as “a gullible young girl.”

“I don’t know how many options you think you have at 17,” he added.

James lingered in a coma for a month before dying. His parents remember that Stephanie was at his bedside every day, fierce and dry-eyed, doing word puzzles. “She wouldn’t let hardly anyone go in to see him, and she wouldn’t say why,” Ellen Owens said.

Juvenile probation counselor Greg Cyphers also was perplexed by the young woman who so desperately wanted to have a family but may have been willing to sell her own children.

“I’ve seen a Stephanie that’d break your heart and a Stephanie who’s heartbroken,” Cyphers said. “I’ve seen Stephanie stubborn, streetwise and tough as a pine knot.

“But life’ll do that to you.”