Patience, a Password Led to Standoff’s End

When five armed and frightened children remained holed up in a remote Idaho house last week, lawyer Bryce Powell knew they didn’t know whom to trust. So when two envoys went up to the house to win their confidence, he gave them a secret password from their mother: “Wooptiedooperbounce!”

That Winnie-the-Pooh phrase, which JoAnn Dunn McGuckin often used with her children, helped win negotiators entry to the house in three days of painstaking efforts that finally brought an end to the standoff. McGuckin, jailed on child neglect charges, also told authorities to take Jiffy-Pop popcorn, a liter bottle of Coke and a boneless ham to her children, and penned a note to assure them her lawyer could be trusted. “I love you!” it said. “Love him as much as I do--bunches! Have a nice picnic. Mama.”

In the end, authorities said Sunday, it wasn’t food or cartoon characters that persuaded the last five McGuckin children--a 15-year-old had left earlier--to walk out of their remote north Idaho property Saturday night. It was patience. It was being willing to walk off the property in defeat--several times, in fact--and then come back.

“Whenever they started getting apprehensive, we backed the hell out of there and brought in someone they trusted,” Sheriff Phil Jarvis said Sunday, recounting an extraordinary case in which a five-day north Idaho standoff involving six fearful children and 27 dogs with known bad attitudes ended without a shot fired.

The extent of the previous hazard to the children also became clear Sunday, as Bonner County Prosecutor Phil Robinson for the first time shared chilling details of an older daughter’s account of life in the increasingly isolated household: mice crawling over the children’s faces at night, driving them to sleep in tents; buckets for toilets; years worth of garbage strewn about by the dogs; having to do laundry in a frozen pond.

Robinson said it was so bad he was willing to file felony charges against McGuckin and risk bucking the backlash from militia groups--even though ending the situation depended on staying quiet while anti-government groups rose to McGuckin’s defense.

“Everybody kept a calm head. Nobody started flexing muscles. In another scenario, I guess, it could have been a total disaster. But we were willing to be flexible,” Robinson said.

All six children, ranging in age from 8 to 16, remained in the hospital for examination Sunday. But, granting the children’s only demand, authorities said they will be allowed to remain together and live temporarily with a family friend. A judge will decide their ultimate fate this week.

The story of how law enforcement officials ended the standoff, officials said in a series of interviews, involved a team approach--police, prosecutors and defense lawyers all working together--of the kind that perhaps only happens in a place like Bonner County, Idaho.

Set in the pine-carpeted mountains and emerald pastures of the Idaho Panhandle, on the shores of Pend Oreille Lake, Bonner County has barely 36,800 people--just 5,900 in the county seat of Sandpoint, where a large number of ex-Southern California police officers have retired in recent years.

Former LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman, who investigated the O.J. Simpson case, is one of them, living with his family just outside Sandpoint. So is Jarvis. He retired to Hope, Idaho, in 1991 after years of high-profile cases as a homicide captain with the San Diego Police Department--including the well-known 1986 case of a 20-year-old San Diego State University student strangled by California Highway Patrol Officer Craig Peyer after he stopped her on the freeway.

“When I retired, I was worn out. I had done it for almost 34 years, and I’d been in very high-profile positions in that latter part of my career, and I was pretty much done with people and violence and responsibility,” Jarvis said. He and his wife moved to north Idaho, he said, “because it was pretty close to paradise. We built a house and kicked back and washed cars and cut grass.”

Persuaded by friends to run for sheriff last year, Jarvis took office only in January. Things were quiet, the way they almost always are in Bonner County--until a few days before Memorial Day. Deputy Bill Tilson, who knew the McGuckins, stopped by their place to check on them. Michael McGuckin, JoAnn’s husband, had recently died of complications from multiple sclerosis. The family had lost title to their property for back taxes the previous summer--how were they doing, Tilson wondered.

Tilson’s visit may have set them on edge, but whatever the reason, a pack of about eight of the McGuckins’ 27 dogs rushed out into the street after a neighbor and her dog, severely injuring the woman’s arm. It was the latest in several reports against the dogs, who were known to roam the area hunting in packs. Once, they took down a small moose. The principal at the local elementary school wouldn’t walk by the place except with a baseball bat. The McGuckins had been known to threaten visitors--even old friends, who used to socialize with them--with a shotgun.

Jarvis started feeling like he ought to do something. Robinson, meanwhile, started talking to 19-year-old Erina McGuckin, who had left the home several months earlier after living there most of her life. She was angry at having been denied a career in the military because her bones were so weak--thanks to malnutrition.

“She began to tell us about what it was really like over there the last several years, and the officer who went over there saw the children suffering terribly. He ended up seeing the kids eating grass, he saw the attack of the dogs, and also the total lack of cooperation and any kind of reasonable activity by Mrs. McGuckin,” Robinson said.

Erina McGuckin complained that she was trying to get food for the family, but her mother refused to seek food stamps or other aid because of her anti-government views. Indeed, a former county commissioner who lived down the road had gone to the county a few months before to get forms to help forgive the back property taxes due, filled them out, and took them to the house, but McGuckin refused to sign them--precipitating the tax sale. McGuckin, meanwhile, was said to be using a lot of what money the family had to buy alcohol.

“We got a lot of information from Erina: about the lack of heat, no bathing of the children for months,” Robinson said. “She said a couple years ago they had 20 or 30 cats living with them. They got rid of the cats, but there was so much garbage and food particles around the mice moved in. There were so many mice in there you couldn’t sleep at night, they’d run over your face and arm, and that’s when the children began sleeping outdoors.”

The family used plastic buckets for toilets and buried the waste, Erina McGuckin told the prosecutor. She would take clothes down to the small lake to wash, but in the winter the water would freeze and she’d have to wash the clothes through holes in the ice “until her hands would freeze up and she couldn’t stand it any more.”

Robinson felt he had to act. He filed the felony charges and obtained a court order giving the state Department of Health and Welfare jurisdiction over the children. Now it was just a matter of getting them out.

Deputies set up a ruse to lure McGuckin away, telling her she could get her dead husband’s Social Security benefits if she left the house to make a phone call. With McGuckin in jail, Tilson returned to round up the children--only to find a quick refusal from 15-year-old Benjamin, a fan of Zane Grey novels--and said to be an ace shot. “Get the guns,” Benjamin yelled. And someone let the dogs out.

Within two days, the picturesque lakeside community of Sagle and nearby Garfield Bay were the scenes of a veritable invasion from the national and international media. Just the description--”Armed Children With Vicious Dogs in Standoff With Police”--was enough.

Jarvis, facing his first major incident with a staff of deputies with whom he had yet to come under fire, faced hundreds of inquiries a day, with a single question: When are they coming out?

“One of the things I told my people was we need to be entirely professional and do our job well and have a great deal of patience, because time is our ally, and we cannot be driven by artificial deadlines just because the press, every day they have a deadline, some of them three times a day,” Jarvis said. “We have to do our job in the best way possible, and never lose sight of the fact that the children come first. And that they’re children.”

Jarvis pulled his deputies out, leaving just two to guard either end of the blocked-off road in front of the house. Deputies called in with a loudspeaker, assuring the children they were only trying to help them. They had just gotten their first response from a young girl Wednesday afternoon when a news helicopter swooped down, drowning out whatever she said and, as they learned later, terrifying the children.

After that, the children didn’t respond to the bullhorns, and sheriff’s officials were stymied until the first big break in the case when 15-year-old Benjamin--the boy who had first ordered his siblings to “get the guns”--showed up at a neighbor’s house.

At that point, Jarvis decided to begin sending envoys in, people the children would know and trust. Powell, who had been appointed as McGuckin’s criminal lawyer, spent hours with her at the jail.

Powell got the note from McGuckin advising the children to trust the intermediaries and the advice about what kind of food they would like.

“The plan was this: They [the envoys] were to go into the house, make contact with the children and deliver a written message authorizing them to cooperate with me,” he said. “I was on the outside of the property hoping they would clear the way, and then I would go in.”

Over several days, the first two emissaries--reportedly including a family doctor, a priest and a woman who had befriended McGuckin in recent years, though authorities have refused to name them--went in Thursday with the note while Powell and the others waited outside on the perimeter.

“The obvious indicators from everything I’ve heard was that they were scared and confused,” Powell said. The children didn’t let the visitors see them, but instead talked to them from down a hallway. Kathryn McGuckin, 16, “did most of the talking,” Powell said.

Benjamin was also sent in to talk to his siblings, Jarvis said. By Friday, the visitors were allowed to get closer, and on Saturday, they had full face-to-face contact all afternoon.

What the children wanted was clear: assurances that their mother was well, that they could remain together, and that they would be placed in the home of a friend they trusted. Jarvis and Robinson agreed. The children walked out and got into a sport-utility vehicle driven by two female officers.

“It was an inch-by-inch process: up the driveway, to the front of the house, inside the living room talking through doorways, and finally face-to-face,” Jarvis said. “It was a process of absolutely applying no psychological pressure of any type on the children.”