TYLER - It's a tale made for tabloids - an East Texas swingers club at a former day-care center, characters with nicknames like "Booger Red" and legal brawling nasty enough to slime local media and Smith County's staid legal community.
But what makes the state criminal trial starting Monday horrific are its star witnesses. Four girls and a boy, now ages 7 to 15, say their parents, grandparents and family friends - seven defendants in all - made them take "silly pills" and learn sex acts in what the adults dubbed "kindergarten." When they got good enough, the children say, they were forced to strip-dance for strangers at a Mineola sex club.
Two of the defendants - including three of the children's cocaine- and meth-using mother - were convicted of sexual abuse last spring and sentenced to life in prison. In each case, the jury took less than five minutes to convict.
The third defendant, a 41-year-old auto-body worker named Patrick "Booger Red" Kelly, goes on trial Monday at the Smith County Courthouse.
All the defendants deny wrongdoing.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys declined interviews about the case, citing a gag order by State District Judge Jack Skeen.
Mr. Kelly's attorney, Thad Davidson of Tyler, contends in court filings that the kids fabricated stories, prompted by foster parents who face their own abuse allegations. He and other defense attorneys have also noted that the case - which has more than 11,000 pages of prosecution documents - includes no physical evidence or adult eyewitnesses.
A foster mom for three of the children, Margie Cantrell of Mineola, first brought the sex-abuse allegations to police and Texas Child Protective Services in 2005.
Ms. Cantrell's husband, John, was arrested in June after being charged in California with felony sex abuse of a child. The charge, which Mr. Cantrell has denied, dates back 18 years and allegedly happened in a Bay Area town where the Cantrells once lived with other foster children. According to Tyler court testimony, the Cantrells have been foster parents for 36 years and have adopted 27 kids, including the three siblings in the sex-ring case.
The couple could not be reached for comment.
The defense team in Tyler case has complained that two defendants tried in March and May could have been wrongly convicted because their attorneys weren't given Texas CPS records documenting complaints about the Cantrells.
At least some of those complaints came from a Mineola neighbor who acknowledges that she's had run-ins with the Cantrells. The neighbor, Diane Keener, said she reported the Cantrells to an abuse hotline for problems such as making little boys carry too-heavy stones in their garden. She also said she's heard of mistreatment from a foster child who left the home.
Ms. Keener said she and the former foster child have been subpoenaed as defense witnesses.
Prosecutors have maintained that they handed over all they had to defense attorneys, adding that whatever happened in California has nothing to do with the Texas case.
"It doesn't have anything to do with the case at hand," Smith County District Attorney Matt Bingham said in a hearing in late June. "None of the children that are victims in this case have ever implicated John or Margie Cantrell."
Prosecutors said in a recent hearing that they don't need Ms. Cantrell's testimony to prove that children were threatened with beatings, hanging and starvation by Mr. Kelly and others if they didn't perform sex acts and lewd dances.
The Texas Ranger who investigated the Tyler case, Ms. Cantrell and three CPS workers all denied in earlier trials that the kids' stories were coached.
"I have seen a lot and never in my wildest dreams imagined this," one CPS worker testified. "They were preyed upon in probably one of the most heinous ways possible."
Bolstering the children's stories is the fact that a swingers club operated in 2004 in a one-time day-care center where the kids said they danced and performed sex acts as strangers watched.
The swingers club lost its lease and closed after Mineola's weekly newspaper, housed next door, ran two front-page exposs titled "Sex and the City." The club's landlord later said she rented the building to the operator only because he claimed to be running a support group to help families bond with mentally disabled children.
The children in the kiddie-sex case first appeared on law enforcement's radar in November 2004, when someone called a state child-abuse hotline to report that Shauntel Mayo's oldest daughter and son were being locked out of their home as late as midnight while adults inside had sex and used drugs. CPS tried to work with Ms. Mayo but in March 2005 removed the two kids, then 5 and 6, from a dingy trailer in Tyler with no electricity, little food and a yard prowled by pit bulls.
CPS workers testified that the sister and brother began hinting of bad family secrets the night they were taken into foster care. The sister also seemed obsessed with getting CPS to take custody of their baby sister, then 4 and living with Ms. Mayo's mother and 5-year-old sister. The two older children behaved strangely after being taken into custody - one attacking a teacher and both acting out sexually. The boy and girl ended up being shuffled through three other foster homes because of behavior problems before being placed with the Cantrells.
The Cantrells took the girl and boy to police in Mineola in August 2005, three months after they joined the family. The Cantrells told police that the kids had just identified the vacant building that once housed the Mineola swingers club as the place where they'd been taken to dance for strangers.
But the children denied being abused when interviewed at Wood County 's Northeast Texas Child Advocacy Center, a facility with trained interviewers who talk to child-abuse victims in a kid-friendly atmosphere.
Months later, a child-abuse prosecutor in Tyler heard about the case from CPS and brought in a Texas Ranger. The Ranger's investigation led to sex-abuse indictments of Mr. Kelly and six other defendants in June 2007.
CPS workers testified that several child victims - Ms. Mayo's sister, now 9, and another defendant's daughter, now 15 - had no contact with the Cantrells or other children involved when they told authorities about the sex ring. Yet all gave similar details, down to the name adults gave Vicodin pain pills doled out to relax the children: silly pills. All said they were taken to several defendants' trailer homes to be taught sex acts and dancing, lessons that their adult tutors always called "kindergarten."
Another prosecution witness, a Baptist church secretary, went to Child Protective Services independent of the Cantrells. She testified that she called CPS after her granddaughter - Ms. Mayo's youngest daughter - talked to her about donning costumes and dancing with other children for money. CPS then took custody of that girl, too, who was placed with the Cantrells, and the child detailed being trained and forced into sexual performances.
Other Tyler attorneys won't talk publicly about the case because of the gag order and the animosity. But some say the ire is unusual for a place that favors collegiality in courthouse combat.
Veteran criminal defense attorney F.R. "Buck" Files Jr. said that Mr. Davidson, "seems to approach things differently than most experienced lawyers would. I heard him talking recently in a legal seminar about how to avoid a gag order and his success in using spies in practice of law. Mr. Davidson appears to be obsessed with trying his cases in the media."
As the latest trial neared, Mr. Davidson went after prosecutors so intensely and publicly that some local lawyers thought he was over the edge. He subpoenaed phone records and e-mails between the case prosecutor, Joe Murphy, and a local newspaper reporter and a TV reporter. And he gave an interview on a competing TV station, contending that the prosecutor's romances with reporters was biasing coverage and preventing a fair trial. The reporters acknowledged once dating the prosecutor. Their news organizations disputed bias claims.
Prosecutors returned fire. They subpoenaed more of the TV reporter's phone and e-mail records and subpoenaed another newspaper reporter, too. In bizarre hearings in late June and early July, Mr. Bingham, the DA, noted that Mr. Davidson had tried to date reporters and so aggressively pursued the TV reporter that her news station kept records of the lawyer's "creepy" messages. The TV reporter once even sought a police escort earlier this year to avoid Mr. Davidson, prompting sheriff's deputies to write an incident report.
Judge Skeen reviewed messages Mr. Davidson had sent to the TV reporter but refused the prosecutors' subpoena, too - saying dryly that the media coverage was fair and wasn't going to be on trial. He also refused to move the kiddie-sex-ring trial out of Tyler.
Mr. Davidson, a former Marine who has practiced law in Tyler since 2000 and briefly worked for the district attorney's office when Judge Skeen was DA, acknowledges he has a grudge.
He tried unsuccessfully last week to delay the trial and get Judge Skeen off the case, contending that the judge conspired with prosecutors and issued a gag order to keep him from defending his client.
"I believe the DA's office has engaged in and is engaging in prosecution of innocent people," Mr. Davidson said Thursday. "I believe Jack Skeen is too closely aligned with the DA's office."
Another wrinkle is where the trial isn't: 28 miles north in Mineola.
Mark Taylor, Wood County's district attorney when the swingers club was in Mineola, says he remains puzzled by it all.
The retired prosecutor said he got a call after the swingers club opened in 2004 but found nothing illegal.
"I didn't hear anything about any kids. If I had, I'd a been on 'em like stink on a skunk," he said. "About two months ago, I was watching the 10 o'clock news, and they were talking about the Mineola sex club with children. And I almost fell out of my chair."
Mr. Taylor, who was DA for 28 years, said he's since found nothing Wood County authorities might have done differently.
"From all appearances, everything really blew up or they really had a case when the kids started talking to the Ranger," Mr. Taylor said. "I don't know what to make of that. It's kind of unusual normally for a Ranger to be interviewing children, but they do it every once in a while. It never happened in my county. If it was a case that I had any knowledge about, I always wanted interviews done by the child advocacy center.
"I just have questions about what actually transpired," he said.
This much is clear: The children endured something terrible.
The youngest regularly masturbated until she bled after being taken into state custody. Her older brother and sister masturbated regularly at school and even in the aisles of Wal-Mart. The boy also defecated on himself when angry or scared and soiled himself the day he first had to testify against his mother in the Tyler trials. Behavior experts say that is common in sexually abused boys.
The case particularly bothers residents of Mineola, a faded railroad town of 5,100 that likes to be known for antiques and tourism.
They say it's not fair to dub another town's trailer-park-gothic trials the "Mineola Swingers Club case." They note that the swingers club operators were from the next county, and the children and most of the defendants were from Tyler. Most of what the children described took place in Tyler trailer parks.
This week's trial won't be the end; four more defendants remain to be tried.
"It's really sad for our town," said Doris Newman, publisher of the Mineola Monitor. "We're kind of wincing from all of this."
