1997 New Times Inc.    
Denver Westword

June 12, 1997, Thursday

SECTION: Features  

LENGTH: 7938 words  

HEADLINE: Story Time;
How the bizarre child-abuse investigation of a school counselor 
became a crusade against troublesome parents -- courtesy of the 
Colorado Education Association.  

BYLINE: By Alan Prendergast  

BODY: 

   The town of Laporte sits on the edge of the Roosevelt National 
Forest, its back turned to the interstate a few miles away, and 
that's how it should be. Fewer than ten miles from the heart of 
Fort Collins, Laporte is the kind of nostalgic refuge from the 
big city that has all but vanished from Colorado's Front Range. 
Horses and sheep graze in front yards; children pedal fat-tired 
bicycles along the main road, oblivious to the traffic that 
creeps along at twenty miles an hour past the tidy red-brick 
schoolhouse.  

   Nothing bad, it seems, could happen here. It's not unusual to 
find locals who've lived in Laporte all their lives, venturing 
into booming Fort Collins as little as possible. The insular, 
small-town feel has also lured a wide range of urban refugees, 
from survivalist types (Pastor Pete Peters's notorious "Christian 
Identity" church calls Laporte home) to rush-hour-weary commuters 
looking for a safe, clean place to raise their kids.  

   John and Susan Hellner fall into the latter category. The 
Hellners moved to Laporte in the late 1980s, primarily for the 
sake of their two young daughters. John was a train conductor 
with some flexibility in his work schedule, and Susan had given 
up a job with an oil company to become a full-time homemaker.  

     "We're very conservative people," John Hellner explains. 
"This may sound corny, but we made an agreement that she would 
stay home and help the children be the best they could be at 
everything."  

   For several years the arrangement worked well. The Hellner 
children went to the tidy red-brick school, Cache La Poudre 
Elementary; Susan supervised their homework, volunteered at the 
school and served as assistant leader of a Brownie troop. But in 
the spring of 1992 it all fell apart. Safe, quiet Laporte 
suddenly erupted in accusations of child abuse, and the Hellners' 
lives have never been the same.  

   In May of that year a handful of children at Cache La Poudre 
began to tell strange stories about Jack Shepard, the school 
counselor. They talked about meetings of small groups of kids in 
Shepard's office that many parents hadn't known about, much less 
approved. They talked about "trips" they had gone on with 
Shepard, during which they'd been attacked by alligators or faced 
other dangers. They talked about things Shepard supposedly said 
about having "the power" or being a god. And they talked about 
games they'd played with Shepard, games that seemed to involve 
inappropriate touching. 

   Under frantic questioning by parents, the descriptions of the 
games became more elaborate, increasingly charged with sexual 
overtones--leading the parents to believe that the counselor was 
physically or sexually abusing their children.  

   The stories came out in pieces, but they kept coming--and 
expanding. The Hellners' youngest child, then six, said she had 
seen Shepard play the "trust game" with two other children, which 
seemed to involve placing a hand on their private parts over 
their clothing. Months later the girl would claim that she, too, 
had been touched between her legs; that Shepard had taken a 
photograph of her surrounded by dolls and holding a baby's 
rattle; and that Shepard talked a lot about the devil. Her older 
sister also described weird games and said that kids in her 
first-grade class used to get sick to their stomach or fall 
asleep when Shepard visited the classroom.  

   Within days of hearing the first rumors about Shepard, the 
Hellners and more than a dozen other parents took their children 
out of school. The Larimer County Sheriff's office launched an 
investigation, and Shepard, who was never charged, was placed on 
administrative leave with pay. Before long the alleged victims 
were being probed and questioned by a gauntlet of sheriff's 
officers, social-service caseworkers and private doctors and 
therapists.  

   Shepard, a respected educator who had taught in Poudre School 
District R-1 for more than twenty years, including eight years at 
CLPE, denied that he had done anything wrong. That summer he 
passed a polygraph test. Faced with conflicting stories and no 
clear physical evidence of abuse, the district attorney's office 
declined to file charges in the matter.  

   Much of what the children had to say--which grew, in short 
order, from accounts of "scary" games to accusations of 
molestation and even intercourse--was beyond belief. But what 
happened next was almost as incredible. Reinstated at his job, 
Shepard went to court to seal the records of the abuse 
investigation. He then filed a lawsuit against seventeen parents, 
seeking damages for, among other things, malicious prosecution, 
defamation and interference with his contract. The suit claimed 
that the parents had conspired to spread vicious lies about 
Shepard and had "coached" children into telling wild stories in 
an effort to get him fired and to change the curriculum at CLPE. 
When the official investigation failed to result in charges, he 
claimed, the parents had continued to harass him and had even 
plotted to kill him.  

   The lawsuit stunned the parents. Most of them had never been 
involved in any curriculum disputes at Cache La Poudre and had 
barely heard of Jack Shepard before the case exploded in the 
spring of 1992. Some, like the Hellners, say they are guilty of 
nothing more than taking their concerns about their children to 
the proper authorities. "I thought the lawsuit was a real joke," 
John Hellner recalls. "When you don't do anything but ask for 
your legal rights, you don't expect to be sued for that."  

   Shepard's suit has dragged through Larimer County District 
Court for more than four years now; a trial date is set for 
September. Nearly half the parents have been dropped from the 
suit or have settled out of court for four- or five-figure sums 
paid by their homeowners' insurance. For the rest--including the 
Hellners, who are paying for their defense out of their own 
pockets--it's been a financially and emotionally draining 
nightmare. None of the children involved still attend Cache La 
Poudre, but the ongoing litigation has dogged their lives, too. 

   Throughout it all, Shepard has been represented by attorneys 
from the Colorado Education Association, the powerful teachers' 
organization that claims 30,000 members statewide. The parents' 
lawyers claim that the CEA is funding the litigation and that the 
group has a broader agenda in the case beyond clearing Shepard's 
name--an agenda that has to do with intimidating and silencing 
parents perceived to be critics of the public-school system.  

   "I believe this lawsuit is pretextual," says Dale Parrish, a 
Denver attorney who represents four parents named in Shepard's 
suit. "The references to curriculum in the complaint are a good 
indicator of the CEA having a completely different ax to grind."  

   "O.J. Simpson's had two trials in the time it's taken us to 
get a trial date," adds John Hellner. "It's obvious that they 
don't want us to go to trial."  

   Jack Shepard did not respond to Westword's requests for 
comment about the case. CEA staff attorneys and boardmembers 
declined to comment as well because of what spokeswoman Deborah 
Fallin calls the "complicated" pending litigation. And there's a 
lot of litigating to be mum about.  

   In addition to Shepard's suit in Fort Collins, seven parents 
have recently filed countersuits in Denver against Shepard, the 
CEA, and various school and county officials, claiming the CEA 
has persisted in trying to punish parents with Shepard's libel 
suit long after it became clear that the suit is essentially 
groundless. One of the countersuits cites a 1997 deposition of 
the lead police investigator in the abuse case, Sergeant Tim 
Palmer, which states that he believed there was enough evidence 
five years ago to recommend charging Shepard with sexual assault 
on a child.  

   These are issues that the CEA, which has apparently spent 
hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing Shepard's case, simply 
won't talk about--not outside of a courtroom, anyway. "We're not 
commenting on the allegations in their complaints at this point 
in time," says Jeffrey Sandman, an attorney representing CEA in 
the countersuits. "We're prepared to vigorously defend against 
those allegations, and the case will be tried in court."  

   Nothing would please the parents more. Despite the credibility 
problems of their children's stories, most of them are still 
convinced that something went seriously wrong in Cache La 
Poudre's counseling office five years ago, something school 
officials have never acknowledged. They have questions about the 
way the investigation was conducted and the CEA's role in the 
affair that no one has answered.  

   "I believe, not just for our sakes but for our children's 
sakes and the community, it needs to be in trial in an open 
courtroom up here so people will know that the children did say 
this," says Ginger Lawrence --who, unlike most of the parents, 
still lives in Laporte. "It wasn't put in their heads or made up 
by parents. It wasn't an attempt to change the Poudre R-1 
curriculum. People have a right to know that was all false."  

   A few weeks ago Shepard's attorneys offered to drop the 
Lawrences and the Hellners from the libel suit for a token 
payment of a dollar each. The settlement fell apart over concerns 
that it would involve an entry of judgment against the parents, 
none of whom want to give up their right to countersue. 

   "I could walk out of this anytime I wanted without paying 
anything," John Hellner says, "but I would have to admit I did 
something wrong, which I didn't do. This is my country, this is 
my Constitution, these are my First Amendment rights--and these 
are my children. It's not their children, to take into a school 
and do whatever they want with them."  

   All he wants, Hellner says, is to know what happened. "If we 
could expose the truth," he says, "what was going on and why--if 
it could be admitted, we would walk away satisfied."  

   According to the mission statement of the Poudre School 
District R-1, "a healthy self-concept is important to overall 
achievement." Building that concept from an early age is the 
whole rationale for having full-time counselors in elementary 
schools--a trend that began as an experiment in the 1960s and has 
become standard procedure in many school districts in the 1990s.  

   At the elementary level, counselors don't spend much time on 
career guidance; nor are they long-term therapists. In Poudre R-
1, most of their work consists of consulting with teachers and 
parents, visiting classrooms to encourage proper school behavior 
and conducting individual or small-group sessions to work on 
particular issues--divorce or other turmoil at home, for example, 
or the grief and anxieties stirred by the death of a relative or 
fellow classmate.  

   Critics of elementary counseling claim that all this attention 
to childhood feelings and perceptions--also known as "affective 
education"--robs students of precious time that could be spent 
learning basic skills. Teach the kid to read and write, the 
argument goes, and self-esteem will follow. But counselors say it 
isn't that simple.  

   "Most of our lifelong behaviors are formed by age ten," says 
Nancy Perry, executive director of the American School Counselors 
Association. "We need to deal with emotional problems before 
cognitive learning can take place, and if we're going to have a 
positive influence, we really need to reach them at early ages 
and reinforce what we hope is being taught in the home."  

   In recent years, much of the uproar over elementary counseling 
has been directed at a couple of tiresomely cute hand puppets 
known as Pumsy the Dragon and Duso the Dolphin. Pumsy is used in 
a storybook program designed to teach children about different 
ways of evaluating a situation--using, in Pumsy lingo, the mud 
mind, clear mind or sparkler mind--and how to make good 
decisions. DUSO (Developing Understanding of Self and Others) 
uses puppets and a variety of relaxation and role-playing 
exercises, also known as "guided imagery," to help children 
develop a positive self-image and gain better communication with 
their peers.  

   Perry says that both programs are "valuable tools" for 
counselors that are "very widely used and very well-researched." 
But they have also drawn complaints, usually from fervent 
Christian parents, in school districts in Florida, Texas, 
Oklahoma, Michigan, Indiana and several other states. To the 
religious right, Pumsy's emphasis on different states of mind and 
self-reliance ("I am me, and I am enough," says one Pumsy poster) 
smacks of godlessness and relativism; protesters also claim that 
DUSO promotes meditation and the conjuring of new-age "spirit 
guides." 

   One of the most strident opponents of the feel-good puppetry 
has been Christian educator Robert Simonds, founder of the 
California-based Citizens for Excellence in Education, a national 
advocacy group for conservative parents. Simonds says DUSO has 
been revised repeatedly over the past two decades and "still has 
a lot of problems."  

   "There's some good things in it, too," he says. "But they get 
into spiritism. It depends on the teacher. We've had teachers go 
off the deep end and actually hypnotize the kids."  

   Defenders of the programs, though, say that Simonds's claims 
are ridiculous. Perry compares the guided imagery of DUSO to the 
way athletes prepare for a race by visualizing it first. One DUSO 
kit even offers ways to prevent childhood sexual abuse. "It's a 
very effective way of helping students face situations in a non-
threatening way, to be able to expand their thinking," she says.  

   "I don't know of any doctor who would say that relaxation 
isn't a good thing," says Tim Reeder, who coordinates elementary-
school counseling for Poudre R-1. Reeder says he's incorporated 
aspects of DUSO and Pumsy in his counseling and has fielded only 
a handful of complaints in ten years.  

   But Reeder adds that he hasn't used either program in recent 
years, and he doubts that other counselors in the district use 
them, either--largely because of past controversies. "DUSO is 
pretty much gone now," he says. "We never said, 'You may not do 
it.' We said, 'There's a lot of concern about it. A lot of risk 
about it.'"  

   How much of that concern may have arisen from the Shepard case 
isn't clear. In court documents, Shepard admits to having used 
some elements of DUSO, which he refers to as "a nationally 
recognized counseling program." But he denies having used guided 
imagery--despite similar accounts by several students of having 
gone with him on fantasy trips to Copper Mountain during which 
children were menaced by alligators or fell into hot lava.  

   "Five, ten years ago, I guess there was a possibility that 
there were counselors doing guided imagery, but it would be a 
very simple kind of thing," says Reeder. "From what I know from 
my conversations with Jack, he never really did that."  

   Reeder describes Shepard as "a man of high integrity. I've 
worked with kids he worked with who transferred over to our 
school," he says. "They remember him fondly. I can't perceive him 
doing anything that would be harmful to a kid. I just don't see 
that in him, and I've worked with the guy a lot."  

   Shepard's lawsuit gives the impression that the accusations of 
abuse leveled at him were fabricated by a small core of fanatical 
Christian parents who were unhappy with the school curriculum, 
including the use of DUSO. But that scenario has problems. For 
one thing, parents who weren't involved in the abuse 
investigation were raising questions about Shepard's counseling 
techniques months before the investigation began. And while it's 
true that a few of the parents he sued had been actively 
protesting the school's curriculum, their focus didn't shift to 
the counseling program until May 1992--right around the time 
children began telling stories about trips to Copper Mountain and 
other games they claimed to have played with Shepard. 

   According to a deposition given by the school's principal, Ron 
Maulsby, several parents had expressed concern about Shepard's 
activities in 1990 and 1991. One questioned Shepard's practice of 
having students come up with a "power name" for themselves, 
evidently as part of a self-esteem exercise. Deeming the practice 
confusing, Maulsby said he asked Shepard to stop using the 
exercise in the fall of 1990 but discovered the counselor was 
still using it a year later. (Maulsby declined Westword's request 
for an interview.)  

   Most of the curriculum complaints at the school, though, had 
to do with the district's thoroughly modern "whole language" 
approach to teaching reading and writing. The most vocal opponent 
was a woman named Del Rae Perkins, who met with Maulsby and 
Shepard several times in the course of the 1991-92 school year to 
demand a return to basics in her children's education. That 
spring, she and another parent, Sharon Coleman, signed a letter 
to the district superintendent objecting to "unproven and 
unsubstantiated curriculum...founded on Eastern religious 
practices, occult practices and the New Age religion." The letter 
didn't make any claims of improper behavior by Shepard, but both 
women would later figure prominently in the abuse allegations 
against him.  

   In fact, until May 1992, few parents knew much about the 
counseling program at Cache La Poudre. At orientation Susan 
Hellner was told that Shepard would be coming into classrooms 
"and reading them stories about behavior problems and that kind 
of thing," she recalls. But she was surprised to later learn that 
her youngest daughter had visited Shepard's office that year for 
four group sessions. No one had informed her in advance about the 
sessions, much less asked her permission. It was just something, 
she was told, that all kindergarten students were required to do.  

   "At that point, nothing more was said," Susan Hellner says. "I 
was a little upset that we hadn't known. The school was always 
very forthright with us about their programs."  

   Yet the district's policy regarding counseling procedures was 
(and still is) quite vague. The policy doesn't require parental 
consent before counseling a six-year-old, although it does state 
that if more than "a few sessions" are required, "a parent 
contact will be made." Nor is there a clear line between 
providing "guidance" and "counseling." Shepard would later insist 
that, despite his title, he wasn't counseling anyone in the 
therapeutic sense; he was teaching.  

   But what was he teaching? In a 1991 letter to two inquisitive 
parents, Shepard explained that the Poudre R-1 guidance services 
at the elementary level "have no specific curriculum at this 
time." Instead, he relied on "my 27 years experience as a 
classroom teacher and counselor along with commercial programs 
approved and used by Poudre R-1 teachers and counselors as the 
basis of my approach with students."  

   On May 15, 1992, Del Rae Perkins and another parent, Kimmy 
Sanderson, met with Shepard and, for the first time, asked 
pointed questions about his counseling methods. Shepard denied 
using Pumsy, meditation, hypnosis or guided imagery. No one said 
anything about the physical or sexual abuse of children.  

   The women's interest had apparently been triggered by stories 
told by Kimmy Sanderson's daughter about her sessions with other 
children in Jack Shepard's office. They were disturbing stories, 
which would become even more explicit in the weeks to come, about 
games like "The Baby and the Blanket," in which (the girl said) 
Shepard would lie on the floor and Sanderson's daughter would lie 
on top of him like a blanket. Whatever their suspicions at that 
point, Perkins and Sanderson didn't share them with Shepard or 
any other school official. Instead, they began to seek out other 
parents, including the parents of the other children the 
Sanderson girl had named.  

   Within days parents began to meet at various homes around 
Laporte to discuss Jack Shepard.  

   Within a week several parents had pulled their kids out of 
school, and Perkins, Sanderson and Sharon Coleman had gone to the 
sheriff's office to file a formal complaint.  

   Within two weeks Shepard was put on administrative leave, and 
Ron Maulsby sent a letter to every parent who had children at 
Cache La Poudre urging them to stay calm.  

   "I have debated with myself a great deal whether or not to 
write this letter," the principal wrote. "My greatest concern is 
that people will jump to inaccurate conclusions before all the 
facts surrounding these accusations are discovered."  

   From the start, the child-abuse investigation of Jack Shepard 
was plagued with difficulties. It wasn't that nobody was talking. 
Too many people were talking, and what they had to say didn't 
make sense.  

   Over the past fifteen years, a series of sensational, 
misguided abuse investigations at schools and daycare centers 
across the country have demonstrated how easily children can be 
led into making the most outrageous and improbable claims, 
particularly when the questioning is conducted by a hysterical 
parent or an overzealous investigator. Studies have shown that 
young children are often quick to adopt scenarios suggested by 
others and can recite vivid, detailed "memories" of events that 
never happened. The situation in Laporte called for extreme 
caution, but the parental rumor mill was already going full blast 
before investigators could begin to check out the children's 
stories.  

   To some extent, officials fanned the flames themselves by 
encouraging parents to exchange information about the case. 
Maulsby's letter invited people to come forward with any evidence 
that would "shed light" on the accusations. A sheriff's deputy 
named John Toppenberg met with a group of parents and encouraged 
them to talk among themselves and find out what happened. Talk 
among themselves they did, and the facts became more and more 
muddled.  

   At the meetings organized by Perkins and other parents, there 
was talk of how Shepard had supposedly been to Russia and had a 
poster of Big Sur on his office wall, leading some to believe 
that he must have some kind of sinister connection with the New 
World Order, California's hedonistic Esalen Institute and other 
bugaboos of the Christian right. There was talk of possible 
touching, fondling and messing with kids' minds. There was talk 
of trips to Copper Mountain and a persistent suggestion that 
Shepard was hypnotizing kids so they wouldn't remember what was 
done to them. 

   Excerpts of these remarks, taken from partial transcripts of 
meetings that were tape-recorded, were later introduced in 
Shepard's lawsuit as evidence of the defamation he had suffered. 
They include these statements:  

   "Jack Shepard is denying that he's seen our kids. He's telling 
our kids not to tell your parents you've seen me."  

   "And us three right here, sitting with three of the girls that 
were abused."  

   "He's using hypnosis or meditation to have his way, to do 
whatever he wants with the kids...I don't want anyone touching my 
kid."  

   "He told kids not to tell the secret, not to trust their 
parents."  

   "He told the kids he was God."  

   Shepard has maintained that such statements were made 
repeatedly and then passed on to investigators. He has also 
pointed out that some of the parents brought their children to 
the meetings; if they didn't have anything bad to say about their 
counselor before, they had plenty of opportunity to pick up ideas 
from others. And he has accused Del Rae Perkins of quizzing other 
people's children and "coaching" them on what to say, planting 
false allegations against him.  

   Perkins, whose family has since left the state, couldn't be 
reached for comment. But other parents say they took pains to do 
what the investigators asked: Don't interrogate your kids but 
simply listen, without showing any emotional reaction, and leave 
the questioning to the experts. In most cases, that meant hauling 
their children to Social Services and private therapists for 
weeks or months without being able to question what was said in 
those sessions.  

   "They couldn't talk in any detail of anything that made 
sense," says John Hellner. "But if you said anything to them, you 
could be accused of being a radical. We were told by an attorney 
that we could be charged with interference with an investigation. 
What can you do? What rights do you have?"  

   "It's a very gray area, telling people not to talk to their 
children," adds Susan Hellner. "You're supposed to sit there, and 
your child says whatever she says, and you're supposed to go, 
'Uh-huh, yes, dear.' The whole thing has been so frustrating. Not 
being able to be a parent is the most frustrating thing of all."  

   Ken Lawrence says he was as surprised as anyone at the 
accusations against Shepard, whom he'd encountered around town 
for years and had thought of as "a decent guy." But like several 
other parents, he insists his daughter reacted strangely the 
first time he brought up Jack Shepard's name--presumably before 
anyone could have "influenced" her response. Lawrence began to 
suspect something must have happened, even though his daughter 
never made any claims of abuse.  

   "Nobody wanted to believe anything was going on," Lawrence 
says. "But when a parent asks a child if she knows Jack Shepard 
and the kid sits there doing things she's never done before, 
won't look you in the eye--you know there's something there." 

   Ginger Lawrence says her daughter from a previous marriage, 
Ken's stepdaughter, was also reluctant to admit knowing Shepard. 
When the girl later changed her story--saying she'd met with 
Shepard frequently and had been physically and sexually abused by 
him, all of which Shepard denied--that prompted investigators to 
suspect that she must have been coached. But that wasn't the 
case, her mother insists.  

   "At first she completely denied knowing who he was, what he 
was in the school," she says. "That same night she came in and 
said, 'I do know him. I remember talking to him one time in third 
grade.' The next day she started saying she was in with him in 
kindergarten and first grade and second grade...It just went on 
and on."  

   Ginger concedes that the children's age and their shifting 
stories about what happened in Shepard's office worked against 
them. "My daughter would talk about going on a boat and picking 
up seashells," she says. "You know and I know they didn't do 
that. But to her, they did that. This was fantasy, guided 
imagery, whatever it might have been. It made the kids seem 
incredible." (Shepard has denied using guided imagery.)  

   Both the Lawrences and the Hellners reject the notion that Del 
Rae Perkins was some kind of ringleader in a plot to ruin Shepard 
with tainted testimony. "Del Rae was very cautious on anything 
she ever said to me," says Susan Hellner. "She was very guarded. 
She told me that she could not talk to me. A few statements were 
made, but even those statements did not necessarily point to Jack 
Shepard."  

   Perkins attorney Dale Parrish refers to the coaching charge as 
"a may-have-been. There were a lot of children making a lot of 
statements that are extremely similar, if not identical," he 
says. "How do you explain that? Did they all talk to each other? 
Did they all talk to Del Rae? Did they check their stories to get 
them straight? We're not even in the realm of reality. They can 
prove my client had contact with a few of these children, but not 
all."  

   Yet Perkins's role in the case is hard to ignore. According to 
one parent's affidavit, she was "consumed with the DUSO 
program...She made it perfectly clear that her objectives were to 
change the curriculum at the school, and particularly to get the 
counseling programs and Mr. Shepard out of the school."  

   After her meeting with Shepard in May, Perkins borrowed the 
counselor's copy of a DUSO handbook and found what she considered 
to be a significant penciled notation in the margin: "d-god," 
short for "demigod." She brought the book to the attention of 
Social Services investigator Patti Dean, who would later testify 
that the word was "dyad"--a couple, a pair--and didn't appear to 
be any kind of reference to spiritual powers.  

   Shepard's lawsuit claims that Perkins insisted that sheriff's 
officers question her own daughter repeatedly, even though the 
girl had made no claims of abuse.  

   "Del Rae Perkins was asked not to speak to any more children, 
yet she had," Sergeant Tim Palmer of the Larimer County Sheriff's 
office testified in a court hearing in the Shepard libel suit 
last year. "It certainly confused the investigation. It gave less 
credibility to the witnesses." 

   By mid-summer of 1992 the district attorney's office had 
concluded that the children's accusations of abuse didn't hold 
up. Medical exams provided no evidence of physical or sexual 
abuse, and kids who supposedly witnessed or participated in games 
involving improper touching failed to confirm the accusers' 
stories. And those stories--particularly those told by the 
Sanderson children, who'd had considerable contact with Del Rae 
Perkins--were growing more preposterous as the weeks dragged on.  

   At the same time, many of the parents' concerns were echoed 
back to them by officials and therapists who had interviewed 
their children. A psychologist told Sergeant Palmer that, in his 
opinion, Shepard's methods were "harmful to the mental well-being 
of small children." After initial interviews with Kimmy 
Sanderson's son and daughter, Palmer told Sanderson that 
"something definitely has happened to your children." Patti Dean 
told her that "children don't make up these kind of stories" and 
that there may well have been some kind of abuse going on.  

   Ginger Lawrence was told by Palmer and Dean that her 
daughter's allegations "were the most direct that they'd 
had"--but that her evidence had been compromised because Dean had 
done exactly what she'd told parents not to do. "They said that 
in Patti Dean's pursuit of getting at the truth in a hurry, she 
asked a leading question that she shouldn't have asked," Lawrence 
says, "and therefore they were discrediting my daughter for 
answering that question."  

   There were also contradictory accounts about the conditions 
under which the children's meetings with Shepard took place. The 
counseling office at Cache La Poudre is located next to those of 
the principal and the special-education teacher, with a window in 
the door, but various witnesses claimed that the door was 
sometimes locked and the window covered with paper. (Shepard has 
denied this.) And Shepard was unable to produce any substantial 
records of his meetings with students--a lack of paperwork that's 
been particularly troubling to the parents' attorneys.  

   "Here's a guy who's a counselor, and he doesn't keep record 
one of who he has counseled," says Dan Lynch, attorney for the 
Hellners and Lawrences. "There's absolutely no record of any 
counseling of any kid at any time that was ever produced, 
although those were requested. They said they don't have them. I 
don't believe that. That isn't logical."  

   The official confusion about the case is reflected in one memo 
written by a member of the child-protection team of the Larimer 
County Department of Social Services, summarizing the agency's 
findings in the case. The memo notes that sixteen children "gave 
very explicit details about their involvement with J. 
Shepardson," and that while some of the stories were similar, 
most were not credible. Patti Dean had been unable to 
substantiate the charges, the author noted, but she did feel that 
"information given by the children cannot be discredited."  

   In later drafts of the memo, Shepard's name was corrected and 
the word "discredited" was changed to "disproved." Unable to make 
up its collective mind, the agency finally settled on an 
equivocation: "Patti feels that information given by the children 
cannot be disproved/proved."  

   In July a member of the district attorney's office met with 
parents to inform them that no charges would be filed. Several 
parents responded belligerently, accusing officials of botching 
the investigation and covering up for the school. Among the most 
emotional were Kimmy Sanderson and Del Rae Perkins.  

   Sanderson, Sergeant Palmer would later testify, was 
particularly "loud" and "demeaning." "She became very personal 
toward me, that I was covering things up, that I wasn't doing a 
good job," he said.  

   Others, though, were simply bewildered. "I was still very 
confused," recalls Susan Hellner. "I didn't have enough 
information at that point. I knew there was more than I was 
hearing."  

   That fall, attorney Dale Parrish notified the school district 
that several parents were considering a lawsuit against the 
school and Jack Shepard. CEA attorney Cathy Cooper responded on 
Shepard's behalf, arguing that any such suit would be frivolous, 
since "the police and Social Services thoroughly investigated 
these charges and found no evidence whatsoever of criminal 
conduct." But the parents' attorneys don't see it that way.  

   "It's not fair to say there was no evidence," says Lynch. 
"There was a lot of evidence. It just wasn't conclusive enough to 
persuade the district attorney. What they told the parents was 
not that this didn't happen or that they didn't believe them, but 
that they didn't think they could prove the case beyond a 
reasonable doubt. They didn't say that Jack Shepard should be 
given the Croix de Guerre and canonized."  

   If nothing else, Lynch adds, "there was substantial evidence 
that he was abusing the kids' minds with this bizarre ideation he 
was going through--trips to Copper Mountain and alligators eating 
children and that kind of crap."  

   Unfortunately, the bitter feelings over the case weren't 
confined to threats of litigation. In October police officers 
were once again talking to Jack Shepard--this time as the 
potential victim in an alleged murder-for-hire plot.  

   According to police reports, two servicemen on leave, a Navy 
diver and a Marine, happened to share a table in a downtown Fort 
Collins bar with an older couple one evening. The couple seemed 
quite drunk, they reported, and were soon talking a "mile a 
minute" about the New World Order and a school counselor named 
Jack Shepard, who they believed had molested their daughter but 
had been protected by powerful forces, including the KKK and the 
Masons.  

   The servicemen said the couple talked about wanting to torture 
Shepard, pull his fingernails off, "shove glass up his penis" and 
stick pins in him. At one point, they said, the woman, who did 
most of the talking, asked something like, "How much would it 
cost for us to pay you to kill him?"  

   The suspects were soon identified as Del Rae Perkins and her 
husband, Greg. However, the servicemen weren't sure if the 
Perkinses were joking or not, and the police soon decided that 
the conversation was too fantastic--and, perhaps, too 
intoxicated--to warrant the filing of any charges.  

   Parrish says his clients did meet the servicemen, but he 
denies they had any serious intent to engage in criminal 
activity. "The real issue is what was said that evening and how 
it was meant," he says. "This was just people talking in a bar." 

   Jack Shepard, though, had heard enough idle talk. Since his 
return to work at Cache La Poudre in August, he had received 
numerous harassing phone calls, including some he considered to 
be death threats, from angry parents. Now here were the police 
telling him that the Perkinses were talking to total strangers 
about putting a price on his head.  

   With the backing of the Colorado Education Association, he 
went to court and sued his accusers.  

   The CEA is one of 53 state affiliates of the National 
Education Association, the nation's largest professional union. 
It's also one of the most powerful political forces in 
Colorado--and one of the least publicly accountable.  

   As a professional organization of public employees, the CEA 
doesn't have to make the kind of financial disclosures required 
of labor unions and other trade groups. But its lobbying and 
campaign contributions--$554,000 spent to influence 1992 Colorado 
elections, for example, and another half-million on a TV campaign 
last year to improve the image of public education--have been 
formidable.  

   The group's staff attorneys routinely defend teachers in a 
variety of disputes with school boards over employment issues. 
The Shepard case, however, is hardly routine. The parents' 
attorneys say it's unusual, if not unique, for an NEA affiliate 
to be so directly involved in suing parents on behalf of a 
teacher who's been accused of child abuse.  

   "I have never heard, nor has any lawyer I've talked to, of any 
case where the CEA has represented teachers as plaintiffs suing 
parents for money," says Lynch. "I don't know why they would."  

   In court documents, Dick Waltz, attorney for the Sandersons, 
points out that the CEA's own bylaws state that the group shall 
not act for the "pecuniary gain or profit" of any individual 
member. That raises several questions about how Shepard's suit 
has been funded and who stands to benefit from the reported 
$50,000 in settlements that have already been paid or any future 
damages he might collect. But so far the CEA has been tight-
lipped about the nature of its arrangement with Shepard; in fact, 
the group's attorneys have only grudgingly fessed up to any 
official role in the case.  

   Two years ago Waltz wrote to attorney Jeffrey Sandman, whose 
firm had been retained to represent the CEA board in the matter, 
to inquire whether the board was fully informed about the Shepard 
lawsuit and the actions of Shepard's lead attorney, CEA employee 
Cathy Cooper. "It is somewhat disconcerting that an organization 
committed to the rights of teachers," Waltz wrote, "and certainly 
the well-being of students, might be embroiled in tort litigation 
where there is significant evidence that its client might well 
have engaged in completely unacceptable conduct with his 
students."  

   Sandman replied that he didn't represent Cooper and that the 
CEA, even though it was paying Cooper's salary, wasn't 
representing Shepard: "Notwithstanding Ms. Cooper's employment by 
the Colorado Education Association, the Colorado Education 
Association as an organization has no involvement with such 
representation, and Ms. Cooper acts independently as counsel to 
Mr. Shepard."  

   The parents' attorneys found Sandman's explanation baffling. 
How could the CEA not be involved? A private investigator hired 
by the CEA had visited Laporte in the wake of the abuse 
investigation and interviewed witnesses. Sandman's firm had 
represented Shepard in his efforts to seal the records of the 
abuse investigation, a service that Waltz claims was paid for by 
the CEA. Within 24 hours of the records' being sealed, Cooper 
filed the lawsuit on Shepard's behalf, and he has continued to be 
represented by a team of CEA attorneys ever since. And when 
depositions were taken of parents who had relocated to Minnesota 
and Wisconsin, attorneys for the NEA affiliates in those states 
appeared on behalf of Shepard--adding to parents' fears that they 
were fighting not simply Jack Shepard but a huge, well-connected 
organization.  

   "Every pleading, including the original complaint, has the 
CEA's name on it," notes Arthur Kutzer, attorney for parents Tim 
and Chris Kannenberg. When Shepard was deposed, Kutzer adds, "he 
said he doesn't have any information as to who said what about 
him. He's relying completely on the CEA to tell him who to sue 
and for what. It was the CEA that gathered the information and 
told him, 'We believe you have a claim against these people.'"  

   Several parents and attorneys involved in the lawsuit argue 
that the CEA was eager to make examples of Shepard's accusers in 
order to discourage other uppity parents from raising a stink 
over teachers or curriculum they believed were harming their 
kids. Shepard's complaint devotes considerable attention to the 
curriculum objections raised by some of the defendants, even 
though those objections, extreme as they may have been, were 
perfectly legal. A later filing even accuses Del Rae Perkins of 
being "affiliated" with Robert Simonds's Christian parent 
advocacy group, Citizens for Excellence in Education, which 
Shepard's attorneys describe ominously as "a religious-based 
organization dedicated to attempting to pressure public schools 
into adoption of a particular religious educational philosophy."  

   Simonds says his group has no record that the Perkinses were 
ever members of CEE, but he adds that he's not surprised the CEA 
is taking the offensive against outspoken parents. He's heard of 
NEA affiliates filing suits in curriculum disputes elsewhere, he 
says. "That's the new thing now--threaten the parents, and that 
will have a chilling effect on parents across the country," he 
says. "Christians are literally being persecuted from every 
side."  

   But if protecting the school's curriculum from Christian 
conspirators was the real issue, then there's little logic in the 
list of people Shepard chose to sue. Many of them hadn't even 
known each other before the abuse investigation and hadn't raised 
any objections to their kids' education. Some, including the 
Hellners, say they didn't even attend the parent meetings where 
most of the rumor-mongering occurred. What they had in common was 
that most of them had been represented by Dale Parrish at the 
time he filed his "immunity notice" with the school district--a 
necessary step in preserving the parents' right to sue but not a 
formal lawsuit.  

   Over the past four years Shepard's libel case has taken a 
tortuous path through Judge William Dressel's Larimer County 
courtroom. Defense attorneys have complained bitterly that 
Shepard's attorneys were allowed access to sealed records and to 
county officials involved in the abuse investigation while a 
court order prohibited similar access for the parents. They have 
expressed outrage at an incident that occurred during one 
deposition, when Shepard was observed massaging attorney Cooper's 
neck and shoulders, to the dismay of parents already worked up 
over his alleged "touching" of children. At one point last year 
they even filed a petition with the Colorado Supreme Court to do 
something about the failure of Judge Dressel, who'd been ill for 
months, to rule on several crucial motions, but the petition was 
denied.  

   Kutzer says he has no idea why the case has been so bogged 
down in delays. "I've always found Judge Dressler to be a very 
good judge--very strict, moves cases along," he says. "This case 
is an anomaly. There's something seriously wrong."  

   The defense seemed to have scored an important victory early 
last year, though, when Shepard was required to present at a 
hearing evidence of "the manner, time, place and context" in 
which the allegedly defamatory statements were made. His side 
presented two live witnesses, sheriff's officer Tim Palmer and 
Social Services employee Patti Dean, as well as several 
affidavits and transcripts of meetings. But statements to 
official investigators are usually considered privileged--indeed, 
their attorneys argue that the parents had a duty to report any 
legitimate suspicions of child abuse to the authorities--and 
Dressler ruled that the overwhelming majority of the statements 
the parents supposedly made dealt with "matters of public 
interest" and were constitutionally protected.  

   In other words, Shepard would have to prove malice--that the 
parents knew their accusations were false when they made them or 
acted with "reckless disregard" for the truth. That's a tall 
order, defense attorneys say, in light of the explicit 
accusations of abuse several of the children made to Dean and 
Palmer.  

   In spite of that ruling, defense attorneys have found it 
difficult to extract their clients from the case. Court documents 
indicate that Shepard's attorneys wanted not only releases from 
the parents but guarantees that the defendants would indemnify 
Shepard against any future claims by their children, a 
proposition the parents refused to consider. Several parents did 
manage to buy their way out with cash settlements, but others 
have had little choice but to watch their legal bills mount as 
the case crawls slowly toward trial.  

   Kutzer notes that his clients, the Kannenbergs, never made any 
formal charges of child abuse. In fact, Shepard has presented no 
evidence that Tim Kannenberg ("a hardworking plumber," Kutzer 
says) made any statements about him whatsoever. Yet the couple 
was dragged through the litigation for years until Shepard's 
attorneys voluntarily withdrew his claims against them earlier 
this year. Now Tim Kannenberg has filed a countersuit against the 
CEA, Cooper and Shepard, charging malicious prosecution, abuse of 
process and civil conspiracy.  

   "I'm convinced they never saw this as a damage case," Kutzer 
says of the CEA. "That raises the question of motive."  

   The Hellners, Lawrences and Sandersons have filed countersuits 
naming the CEA, too. Ironically, their countersuits claim that 
the CEA has defamed the parents by, among other things, linking 
them to an alleged plot to kill Shepard. His original complaint, 
signed by Cooper, claims that all the defendants were involved in 
a solicitation of murder--an allegation apparently based on the 
off-the-wall encounter between the Perkinses and the servicemen 
in a Fort Collins bar.  

   It may be months or even years before the legal brawling 
concludes, but it's already left its mark on the litigants. Jack 
Shepard is now the special-education teacher at Cache La Poudre 
Elementary, which has added more windows to its counseling 
office. Some of the children who were his accusers are now nearly 
twice the age they were when the case began, and none of them 
attend CLPE any more. Three families have left the state, while 
others have moved to other cities in Colorado, places not at all 
like Laporte.  

   "The people sued by Jack Shepard have been scattered every 
which way," says Dale Parrish. "The effect this lawsuit has had 
on them has been absolutely devastating. It has impoverished 
them. It has traumatized them. It has strained their marriages. 
It has given them issues in their families, educational and the 
like, that exist to this day."  

   "It's just atrocious," says Susan Hellner. "The time. The 
stress. We talk about it every day."  

   Parrish says he has a difficult time understanding how the 
litigation has benefited Shepard, either. "If the purpose of this 
complaint was to exonerate Jack Shepard," he says, "can you 
imagine the effect of a trial? We know that a bunch of different 
children said a bunch of the same things about Mr. Shepard. We 
can prove that. And we can prove that the sheriff's office 
recommended the filing of criminal charges against Mr. Shepard. 
On those two items of proof alone, you tell me how that evidence 
presented to a jury in that community will serve to clear his 
name."  

   Of course, it's entirely possible that Jack Shepard has stuck 
to his guns because he didn't do anything wrong--just as he's 
always insisted, just as his longtime friends and supporters have 
always believed. But that doesn't explain the equivocal way the 
case was handled by authorities, who first encouraged parents to 
believe their children had been abused and then decided nothing 
could be proved. And it doesn't explain the actions of the CEA, 
which has tenaciously pursued Shepard's accusers as if they were 
all conspirators in a right-wing plot to overthrow the public 
education system rather than concerned, fearful parents, stirred 
to outrage by the inexplicable words and behavior of their own 
children.  

   "The hardest question for the union to answer," attorney 
Kutzer says, "is when Mr. Shepard asks them, 'Why am I being sued 
now?' How do they explain that to him?"