Lethal Guardian (16 page)

Why?

“[Kim] took responsibility for her role as a parent.”

Joseph Jebran had been put through the mill since he and Beth Ann had become romantically involved. Handing over his paycheck and letting her take care of his finances turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes Jebran had made. While Beth Ann was cruising around town in her BMW, Jebran brown-bagged it in New York City and lived with four other guys. Ignorant of what Beth Ann was doing with his money, by the end of l991, with about $40,000 in debt, Joseph filed for bankruptcy.

It wasn’t all Beth Ann’s doing, Jebran later said. For his part, Joseph said he “allowed” it to happen.

Jebran must have considered it a contingency of love. He was a young, highly skilled architect who could earn back the money he lost. But love, well…love was something different. One couldn’t just find it anywhere.

By the beginning of December, the battle between the Clintons and the Carpenters was so heated it became the focus of, Jebran later said, about 90 percent of the conversations around the Carpenter home.

“Nothing against…Rebecca,” Joseph recalled later, “the poor kid, but, you know, the conversation was Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca. And I go back to New York—and
still
Rebecca!”

Good or bad times, Beth Ann would call Jebran when he was working in New York and brief him on the situation. “We got custody,” she’d say one day, beaming with excitement. Yet when things went bad, she’d call and spend much of her time sulking, crying and moping.

“She loved Rebecca,” Joseph added. “Beth was very attached to her.”

Beth Ann and Joseph, on his dime, had always gone on elaborate vacations to exotic locations. Jebran spared no expense. But when the custody battle heated up during the latter part of 1992, not only did the vacations stop, but Beth Ann found it hard to discuss anything else. She became obsessed with losing custody to Kim and Buzz, Jebran claimed.

One day near the middle of December, while Beth Ann was in the basement of her parents’ home working at the computer, Joseph approached her. He wanted to talk about their relationship. Their life together. Where it was headed.

Beth Ann ignored the subject, but she said she had something she’d been meaning to ask him about.

“Go ahead.”

“Would you run away if I asked you…[to] take Rebecca and me and go somewhere, leave?”

“No,” he said vehemently. “Absolutely not!”

They began fighting, yelling and screaming, throwing verbal insults back and forth.

“You would do it if you love me,” Beth Ann lashed out.

“This is beyond love, Beth.”

Joseph was correct. It was called kidnapping. A lawyer, if no one else, should have known that.

“Ah,” Beth Ann said, throwing up her hands.

She was looking for any avenue she could find to get Rebecca out of what she sincerely thought to be a dire situation with Buzz.

“Why are you asking
me
? What is her father?” Jebran asked in his broken English. He didn’t know that John Gaul had been brought into the picture by this point. “Why don’t you ask her father?”

“Why don’t you do it?” Beth Ann wanted to know. Then, “You don’t love
me.
”

“This is beyond love,” Jebran said again.

The fight lasted for about a half hour. After that, the subject was rarely brought up again.

Because the visitations were on weekends, and Jebran was only home on weekends, he often found himself being Rebecca’s escort. On December 20, 1992, a Sunday, at about 5:25
P.M
., the Carpenters were so distraught over Rebecca’s having to go back to the Clinton family that, Jebran later said, no one in the house was able to drive a car. They were all huddled up together as if they were never going to see her again, crying hysterically. Beth Ann, especially, was devastated. She just sat there: shaking, trembling and crying softly.

“I mean, they were really destroyed by, you know, Rebecca leaving the house,” Joseph later said.

So someone suggested that Jebran drive Rebecca back because none of them were in any condition to drive.

Jebran obliged.

Rebecca, now two and a half years old, was also upset. She was crying and visibly shaken by the mere thought of just having to leave. “Ba,” Rebecca began to say as Jebran prepared her bag. “Ba. Ba. Ba,” she kept repeating, reaching out for Beth Ann.

“Ba” was what Rebecca called Beth Ann. Rebecca’s speech impediment was never more pronounced than when she was under duress. Clearly, the thought of leaving what amounted to her surrogate family had thrown the child into a fit.

“Ba…”

Beth couldn’t handle it. She had to leave the room.

Jebran took Richard’s Jeep and arrived at the Clinton home about thirty minutes after he left Ledyard. With the exception of Rebecca, Joseph was alone.

Kim was waiting at the door, while Buzz was in the living room.

Little was said, and Jebran was soon on his way back to the Carpenters’, where Beth Ann was waiting to take him to the train station so he could return to New York City.

When Kim got Rebecca into the house, she immediately noticed that her diaper looked as though it hadn’t been changed in some time. It was waterlogged, yellow in color. This bothered Kim, of course, but then she noticed a gash underneath Rebecca’s right eye. Her left cheek was also bruised.

This bothered her even more.

Buzz was in the living room watching television.

When Kim took Rebecca’s diaper off, she glanced down at her vagina. What she found next would open a Pandora’s box of accusations, insults and threats.

At about 6:00
P.M
., Buzz and Dee were in the living room when Kim shouted for them to come into the bedroom, where she was changing Rebecca’s diaper. “Look,” Kim said, placing one hand over her mouth, the other pointing down.

“What?” Buzz asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Kim, what’s wrong?” Dee wanted to know.

Rebecca’s vaginal walls were swollen and shriveled.

“Take a look, Buzz,” Kim said, breaking down.

When Buzz leaned down and looked, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Ma, look at this!” he shouted.

“Oh. My. God.”

“Should we take a picture?” Buzz asked.

Hearing the chaos, Buck had walked into the room. After quickly discussing it with Dee, he told Kim to take Rebecca straight down to the hospital for a full examination. To everyone in that room—at that moment—it appeared as though Rebecca had been abused sexually.

They were devastated.

Kim and Buzz packed up some of Rebecca’s belongings and hurried off to Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in Waterford. They wanted a complete evaluation done. When they got there, Kim told intake workers that Rebecca had been “sexually molested,” but the alleged perpetrator, Kim added, was “unknown” at that time.

Buzz returned home sometime later and told his parents one of the doctors had said Rebecca’s “liver wasn’t damaged.” Apparently, the hospital had done a complete assessment of the child to see if she had been violated in any way. Because she was so small, if a male had entered her, doctors maintained, there would be some sort of damage done to her internal organs, types of injuries that were common in victims of sexual assault.

But according to what Buzz had heard from the doctors before he left the hospital, Rebecca was okay. She hadn’t been assaulted sexually. In fact, the doctors’ initial assessment failed to find any assault whatsoever. The bumps and bruises on her were normal licks a kid takes during the course of a day.

Were Buzz and Kim merely overreacting?

Rebecca had been in a saturated diaper for quite some time. And because of that, the moisture created an environment that allowed her vagina to become, as Kim and Dee had earlier suggested, “shriveled and swollen.” There was a good chance that nothing sexual had been done to the child. One of the doctors involved had even written in one of his reports that there was “no medical emergency.”

Whenever a report is filed at a hospital involving allegations of abuse of any kind toward a child, however, DCYS is notified by law.

So the following day, December 21, an intake worker from the Middletown office of DCYS was dispatched to investigate the allegations made by Kim and Buzz. It would be the seed from which the disdain the Carpenters already felt for Buzz would blossom into a full-grown tree of hatred.

While working late one night at the New London office, Beth Ann received a call from her mother’s attorney, Barbara Quinn. It was important, Quinn said. “I’ve been unable to reach your parents. I have a message to give them.”

After a bit of small talk, Quinn told Beth Ann about what had happened to Rebecca. There were claims of sexual molestation, Quinn explained.

Beth Ann gasped. “What?”

“The ER checked her out, though, and everything’s fine,” Quinn said before hanging up. “Don’t worry.”

Beth Ann later recalled that she and her family were “very upset,” not only about the allegations, but by the entire ordeal Rebecca had undergone at the hospital and the days that followed. Being checked for sexual abuse is a rigorous set of tests and procedures. For a two-and-a-half-year-old child, it can be life altering. Rebecca had gone through enough trauma in her life already. Now this. She was being treated like a piece of property.

The next day, Beth Ann called Joseph Jebran, who was in New York City working. “Rebecca was admitted to the hospital the other night,” she said. “You are being accused of sexual abuse.”

Jebran became outraged.

“I spoke to Haiman. We both think you should get home right away.”

“I can’t believe what’s happening, Beth,” Jebran said. He was astonished, he later recalled, not only by the allegations, but by the fact that the Carpenters now would see him as someone who had let them down. He was in love with Beth Ann. What would this do to their relationship? Would Dick and Cynthia think differently of him—especially if they lost their bid for custody because of the allegations?

The next morning, Beth Ann picked Joseph up at his cousin’s house in Norwich. She had already made plans with Clein and her parents to meet at Clein’s Old Saybrook office to discuss what to do next.

Beth Ann didn’t believe for one minute that Joseph was capable of what Buzz and Kim were saying. She had dated him now for nearly four-and-a-half years and couldn’t see how anyone could accuse him of such a violent and evil act against a child. It just wasn’t possible. At the same time, however, she was also scared—mostly, that they would now have little chance of ever gaining custody of Rebecca.

As they talked in Clein’s office, Clein told everyone to reserve judgment until he received the police reports, which he had sent someone from the office to retrieve. The police reports would spell everything out clearly. Only then, Clein added, would he know what to do.

“If anyone,” Beth Ann said at one point, “had abused Rebecca, it was
Buzz.
”

While they waited, Clein spoke with an old friend, a local child custody lawyer, and was convinced that Jebran should write up some sort of affidavit. Clein’s lawyer friend said he could have it typed up and certified later, but Jebran, while everything was still fresh in his mind, should write out his version of the events.

“Since prior to August 12, 1990,” Joseph Jebran wrote, “I have resided weekends, holidays and vacations at the Carpenter residence. I also spent almost every evening at the same residence during the summer of 1992.”

The remainder of the affidavit seemed to back up what Cynthia had written in hers. Joseph said Kim would leave Rebecca with her parents and just take off. When she was there, “she would isolate herself from her daughter.”

Ending the two-page statement, Jebran made a point to say that Rebecca hadn’t been harmed “in any manner whatsoever” when he dropped her off at the Clintons on December 20. “At the time of such delivery, Rebecca had no marks or bruises of any kind or nature on her body….”

This was in total contrast to what Cynthia would lay claim to just days later when she met with Kim, however.

Kim asked Cynthia about Rebecca’s lip and the mark she found on her cheek.

“Her cheek was like that when we got her, Kim. Do you think we’d do something like that to Rebecca?”

After two additional physical examinations and subsequent meetings with the doctors involved, the social worker who had been working on the case for DCYS couldn’t validate any of Kim and Buzz’s allegations. As far as the state of Connecticut was concerned, Rebecca hadn’t been abused in any way. With that, no charges were filed. Sometime later, DCYS closed the case at the intake level and took it no further.

Regardless of what DCYS thought, Kim and Buzz decided they would not allow the Carpenters to visit with Rebecca unless it was supervised at a centralized location. They were afraid to let anyone at the Carpenter home go near Rebecca. It hadn’t mattered what the evidence showed. Kim and Buzz were there. They had seen Rebecca’s vagina. They had seen her eye and the bruises on her cheek.

Of course, this didn’t sit well with the Carpenters. With everything that had gone on during the past few months, now they were being looked at as if they were child predators. It was an outrage. Kim had completely lost it. Buzz was controlling her every move. The Carpenters weren’t about to lie down like scorned animals and forget about everything. They, too, were fighters, and they believed they were doing the right thing for Rebecca.

Beth Ann’s continuing complaints regarding Rebecca and the custody battle had dominated nearly every hour she logged at Clein’s law firm. During work, Beth Ann was having trouble staying focused on even the most basic tasks. Whenever she and Clein got together in the office to discuss work, the conversation always turned to Kim, Buzz and Rebecca.

“Kim shouldn’t have custody,” she told Clein one day before the incident involving Joseph Jebran. “Rebecca should be with her family. My sister can’t take care of her. I’m afraid of Buzz’s influence on my sister. My sister won’t be able to stand up to Buzz. She won’t be able to be a proper mother for Rebecca.”

The same song and dance, over and over and over. Clein had known Beth Ann for only a brief spell, and he couldn’t remember a day where she hadn’t mentioned the custody fight. He decided he was going to have to face facts and deal with the custody issue himself, tell Beth Ann to drop it altogether and concentrate on her work, or find another job.

“I’m shaken. My whole family is shaken,” Beth Ann said one day.

“She was very upset,” Clein recalled years later. “She cried all the time.”

They couldn’t have a normal conversation about the issue of custody without, Clein added later, Beth Ann’s breaking down in tears. The entire situation began to disrupt not only her work, but everyone else’s work in the office.

“There were flurries of phone calls back and forth between her and her family,” Clein recalled.

Realizing something had to be done, Clein had sent his new protégée a memo sometime before the incident involving Joseph Jebran. In writing, he explained that she was going to have to begin taking her responsibility as a lawyer more seriously, or there would be consequences.

“Explain to me what’s going on in your personal life that’s keeping you from completing assignments?” Clein asked in the memo.

Clein expected Beth Ann, as a young lawyer, to stay up nights and, if necessary, take work home with her until it was completed. That wasn’t happening. She was focused exclusively on Rebecca, Buzz, Kim and gaining custody of the child. It became, Clein thought, an obsession. Her entire life revolved around Rebecca.

After Beth Ann received the memo, she went into Clein’s office. “It’s distracting me,” she pleaded through tears.

“Well, then, I’ll work more closely with you. How’s that sound?”

Beth Ann nodded.

“Everything will be okay. Don’t worry.”

As they talked, Clein was shocked to learn that the Carpenters hadn’t really hired an attorney who specialized in child custody matters and had been, basically, doing everything themselves. Barbara Quinn was the Carpenter family attorney. Beth Ann, of course, also acted as the “family” lawyer and helped out wherever she could, but Clein worried that there was no third-party attorney involved who knew child custody matters.

“It’s time you guys hired a lawyer. Someone who knows this type of litigation,” Clein suggested.

Clein surmised that referring the matter out of the office might free Beth Ann up to do the things she was supposed to be doing. As Clein saw it, it was a win-win situation.

Shortly after the allegations were made against Joseph Jebran, Haiman Clein suggested Thomas Cloutier, a rather well-known and highly respected family attorney, who was also a board-certified trial lawyer. Clein had known Cloutier for years. They were friends. Cloutier was a fine lawyer, Clein said.

For Kim and Buzz, once word spread that the Carpenters had hired counsel, they immediately applied for a public defender, which, being on public assistance already, they were entitled to. Carolyn Brotherton, a partner in a local New London law firm of Mariani, Brotherton and LeClair, was assigned the Clinton case. Soon after, a second attorney, Linda Kidder, became involved.

Thomas Cloutier didn’t waste any time. On January 4, 1993, he sent a letter to Brotherton and Kidder, noting that the Carpenters had made several attempts to seek visitation with Rebecca, but Kim and Buzz had routinely denied them.

What sparked the letter was a phone call made by Cynthia the previous week. She had called the Clinton house to set up visitation for the coming weekend. While she was discussing the matter with Kim, Buzz had grabbed the phone from Kim’s hand, Cloutier wrote, and “monopolized the conversation….”

“The judge,” Buzz shouted at Cynthia, “had no authority to issue any order regarding visitation!”

Then Kim got back on the phone.

“My attorney, Ma, indicated that I have the right to deny visitation.”

This was a different side of Kim. She had been with Buzz now for about six months. His resolve was, obviously, rubbing off on her, and she was finally beginning to tell her mother how she felt.

Thomas Cloutier, however, wasn’t concerned with Kim’s recent foray into building self-esteem, vis-à-vis using Buzz as her mentor. Instead, Cloutier was overwhelmed—maybe even outraged, too—by Kim’s suggestion that she could deny the Carpenters visitation.

In the same letter, Cloutier wrote that he “certainly [did] not think that any attorney would give that type of advice[,] given the outstanding Court order,” which had clearly spelled out the Carpenters’ right to visit Rebecca. Essentially, Buzz and Kim were defying that order and breaking the law. There hadn’t been any proof of sexual molestation. They had no right to deny Rebecca’s family the chance to see her.

It didn’t matter that he’d just taken the case; Cloutier decided to take action immediately. The law was the law. Buzz and Kim, despite what they
thought
they knew, would have to follow the law or be subject to a contempt order. He also thought it was important that both of Kim’s attorneys knew “what Kim had been saying.” After all, the probate court order “was clearly [being] violated.” He wanted to establish a new visitation schedule, and by doing so, he had hoped the “level of hostility would decrease….”

By the end of the letter, Cloutier urged both attorneys to consult with Kim on the matter right away. Then he made an idle threat: if something wasn’t done immediately, he would have “no hesitation whatsoever in bringing the matter to the Superior Court.”

Along with sending a copy of the letter to the Carpenters, Cloutier indicated that he had copied “Attorney Beth Carpenter” on the letter, too. Why? Well, it was anybody’s guess.