Eight days later, after moving in with her first foster family, Gabby allegedly made an outcry of her own. According to her foster mother, the girl told her about taking silly pills to make her “dance sexy for the boys.” Combined with the outcries of Shelby, Hunter, and Carly, officials at the Smith County DA’s office felt they had the makings of an extraordinary case. Although all four children had initially denied that anything had happened, their outcries did share certain similarities: they all referenced sexy dancing or dancing for money. Assistant DA Wickel called in the Texas Rangers, and Philip Kemp reported for duty. Kemp, an amiable man with a West Texas accent (he hails from Sonora), was 41 years old. He was an 18-year veteran of DPS, but he’d never interviewed a child under 10; in fact, he had no training interviewing children whatsoever. Cases of alleged child sexual abuse are some of the most difficult to bring to justice. Oftentimes the evidence is long gone by the time allegations are made, and the only witnesses are children. More than one investigation has gone wrong because children were questioned by fearful parents, overzealous police officers, or poorly trained therapists who unwittingly coaxed false stories out of them. “To do a good, high-quality child forensic interview takes a great deal of training,” said Stephen Ceci, a developmental psychology professor at Cornell University. In the eighties, law enforcement and child-protection agencies realized that special skills were needed to interview children, and children’s advocacy centers were established across the country. Soon after Kemp began his investigation in November, he conducted his first interview with Shelby and Hunter at a children’s advocacy center, but he allowed Margie to sit in on the interview, a major violation of protocol. “That is very improper from a forensic standpoint,” said Ceci. “She’s the outcry witness.” (Kemp would not comment for this story, but in 2009 he defended his techniques, explaining, “This was not a forensic interview. I had already been informed of all the information discussed in the interview. I just wanted it documented, and I felt that if the children were at ease with Ms. Cantrell in the room, they would open up and tell me what I had already been told.”) Kemp knew that Hunter, back in July, had made his first allegation, telling a therapist that his mother forced him to “touch his sister’s genitals and the genitals of other children.” But now, sitting in an interview room at a small rectangular table, with Kemp at one end, Margie at the other, and his sister beside him, Hunter denied knowledge of a club or a kindergarten—nine different times. On the video recording of the interview, Margie can be seen holding his hands and caressing his face, trying to draw him out. Eventually he started talking about stripping at the club and taking “silly pills.” Shelby, meanwhile, amplified her original descriptions of the scandal. There were actually eight kids involved, she said. She talked about porn and guards and an emcee who would announce, “Ladies and s-e-x people, here is the movie!” Shelby spoke of the mysterious Booger Red and said that he had choked a woman at the kindergarten. “Was there ever a camera?” Margie asked while nodding her head. The stubborn child shook her head no. Kemp still needed testimonies from the other kids involved, and nine months later, he interviewed Carly. At first, the girl would only say that she’d done “bad stuff” at “Granny’s,” so Kemp called Margie into the room and let her ask questions too. Carly then began talking about “rubbing,” silly pills, and costumes. She would dress up as a witch, she said, and Hunter dressed as a bear, Shelby as a ghost. “I would fly around on a broom,” she added. Gabby was the last to come around, and she was central to the state’s case. The three siblings lived with Margie, but Gabby had only briefly met her, so her corroboration would strengthen their testimony because she was free of Margie’s influence. Kemp first interviewed Gabby on the morning of August 18, 2006. His questioning dragged on for almost an hour, but she shook her head vehemently every time he asked about the kindergarten or dancing in front of an audience. That afternoon he tried again. This time, Margie sat in. “Was there ever a camera?” she asked while nodding her head. The stubborn child shook her head no. Throughout the interview, Kemp posed yes-or-no questions that were loaded with details. “Do you know something about something called silly pills?” he asked at one point. She shook her head. “Did you tell Shelby that you knew about the club?” Again, she shook her head. (“Trained investigators are taught not to ask yes-or-no questions,” said James Wood, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso. “The problem is, it’s hard to ask them without introducing information.”) Kemp also repeatedly asked multiple versions of the same question. “There’s a place in Mineola—it’s sort of a big building that I think you might have been to before. It sits up on a hill. Do you know what I’m talking about?” Gabby stared hard at the table. “No.” Kemp tried again. “A big building, with a porch on the front, sits up on a hill, there’s lots of rooms in there, some of them had water in there, a TV, stuff like that? ’Cause Shelby told me all about it. You remember that?” After a pause, Gabby again said no. Gabby thought Kemp was nice, and she wanted to help. She thought the Texas Rangers were heroes, but she simply couldn’t recall any of the details he wanted. Kemp, meanwhile, was doing little else to investigate the case. He never visited the scene of the supposed sex kindergarten, for example. Perhaps more egregiously, he failed to interview any members of the swingers club about the sex crimes allegedly going on at their parties. He later said that he hadn’t examined the trailer because “a long time had already passed from the time the acts took place and the children were removed to the time I became involved.” He testified that he had knocked on the door of the head swinger several times, but no one answered, so he gave up trying. Regardless, by January 2008, six adults had been arrested (a seventh would get picked up in February). Gabby was living with her second foster family, and Kemp called her in once more. For nearly an hour, he peppered her with questions, and she responded each time with a firm denial. But she didn’t have much resistance left. “If you keep asking the same question,” said Marc Lindberg, an experimental psychologist and professor at Marshall University, in West Virginia, “kids change their answers.” Finally, Kemp asked her, “Have you ever seen Shelby and Hunter do a play or something in a building where there’s water around the stage? And flowers on the wall? A swing in the building?” Gabby later said that she feared Kemp wouldn’t let her leave until she gave him what he wanted. After a long pause, Gabby replied, “I can picture it.” “Okay,” Kemp said, “so you’ve been there before?” “I think so.” Kemp asked what she did there. “I think dance.” With whom? “I think Shelby, Hunter, and Carly.” Though prosecutors had found neither physical evidence nor adult witnesses to back up the allegations, they prepared for trial.

Hunter near Tyler on February 1, 2018.

At first, Gabby was excited about testifying. “I was nine years old,” she said. “I enjoyed being the center of attention.” But when she was called to the witness stand for the first trial, of Jamie Pittman, in March 2008, and looked out over the crowded courtroom, she realized she would have to deal with questions she didn’t necessarily know the answers to. Luckily, some of the questions assistant DA Joe Murphy posed could be answered with a simple yes (Q: “Was there any dancing?” A: “Yes.”). And other questions proved less difficult than she’d feared (Q: “What types of stuff would you do in there?” A: “Sexual stuff.”). She was part of a team of children, a group that had grown to five with the addition of Amanda Montroy, Dennis Pittman’s former stepdaughter, who said that several of the defendants had given her “happy pills” and tried to get her and Shelby to take off their clothes in the back room of a Tyler club. Jamie’s trial lasted three days, and he was found guilty in four minutes. Two months later, Gabby testified again, this time against her sister, Shauntel. She found it harder to remember what to say—as time had passed, she had forgotten more details. Still, Shauntel was found guilty in six minutes. Patrick Kelly, the mysterious Booger Red—that’s what his friends called him—went on trial in August, and Gabby’s answers became even vaguer. She responded more and more with “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember.” Yet Patrick was found guilty too. As assistant DA Murphy explained, “This case is about pure evil.” Margie, meanwhile, emerged as a hero. She was a magnet for cameras and did several interviews with local TV stations. “Wherever there are broken kids,” she told Newsweek after Patrick’s conviction, “John and I have tried to fix them. We have never turned a child away.” For her part, Gabby was eager to get on with her life. She was, in many ways, a typical ten-year-old—she was a good student, she listened to the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus, and she dreamed of joining the FBI or the Texas Rangers. More than anything, she hoped she wouldn’t have to testify anymore. She hated pretending to remember something that she didn’t. But she was called back once more for the trial of Dennis Pittman, in July 2010. The trial mostly stuck to the scripts from the previous three, though Amanda, who had never previously claimed to have gone to the swingers club, now said she’d been there more than ten times. In addition, defense lawyer Jason Cassel raised the issue of money as a possible motive for Margie, pointing out that over a span of eighteen months, she and John had been paid almost $110,000 by the state for fostering Shelby, Hunter, and Carly. Gabby was the first witness, and with her blond hair pulled back in a black band, she walked sullenly to the stand. She was terse with DA Matt Bingham when he asked if she’d been to the swingers club a few times or many times. “I have no clue,” she replied. He asked what she wore. “I don’t know,” she said, “sexy outfit or something.” Then, when he asked about the kindergarten, she became defiant: “I’ve remembered in my mind that that never happened.” Bingham paused, visibly stunned. “Okay,” he said. “When did you decide in your mind that the kindergarten never happened?” “Last week,” she answered. “The week before that.” “What made you decide in your mind that kindergarten never happened?” “God.” Gabby hadn’t planned this; the words just popped out. Bingham dug in and questioned her relentlessly about previous testimony. “Maybe I had to dance,” she shot back, “maybe I hadn’t, okay? You try being up here for once, huh?” When it was defense attorney Cassel’s turn, he questioned Gabby about the contradictions in her initial outcry. Though her foster mother claimed Gabby had told her she was forced to take pills to dance sexy for the boys, in the same statement she also admitted that Gabby told her the story “was all a lie” made up by Carly’s paternal grandmother—the woman who reported Carly’s outcry. Reluctantly, Gabby confessed that she had indeed told her foster mother that the whole thing was a lie. After her testimony, the girl—exhausted, angry, confused—retreated to the victim’s room on the fourth floor and gazed out the window, crying. She contemplated throwing herself out. Instead she made herself a promise: she would never testify again. After the guilty verdict, when Bingham approached her about testifying at the next trial, she told him, “You can call me, but I’m done talking.”

Shauntel Bradford at her home in Tyler.

A few weeks later, Jimmy was sitting in his cell in the Smith County jail when several officials from CPS and the prosecutor’s office showed up with a letter Gabby had written to her counselor threatening to kill herself if she had to testify again. Jimmy pored over his daughter’s words. It had been four years since he was charged, and he was still awaiting trial. From the beginning, he, like the rest of the defendants, had been offered plea deals from the DA’s office. All he had to do was testify against the others and he could walk free. He repeatedly turned down the offer for one reason: he refused to lie. The others felt the same. Sheila told her lawyer that if she had to lie to go free, she would stay in prison for the rest of her life. When the prosecution came to Shauntel, she told them to kiss her ass. But Gabby’s letter changed everything. Jimmy asked his lawyer to go to the DA and see what kind of deal they could make. The lawyer came back with what sounded like reasonable terms: plead guilty to injury to a child, a felony that did not require registering as a sex offender, and go free. Jimmy signed and the remaining defendants followed. And so, in the summer of 2011, one of the most law-and-order prosecutors in the state set free the purported masterminds of a notorious child sex ring. To date, Bingham has refused to explain his reasoning (or comment for this story), though in 2009 he told me, “I have and will continue to stand by the conclusions reached by these Smith County jurors.” One night when Jimmy was still in jail, he had dreamed of a weeping angel who visited him in his cell. “Keep your heart open,” the angel said, “because she loves you and still needs you.” Jimmy knew whom the angel meant. After his release, he was forbidden to try to contact his only child, but just in case she wanted to find him, he joined Facebook and created a page with photos of Gabby as a young girl. In one, taken at a father-daughter dance when she was six, she sat in Jimmy’s lap, clasping her hands and smiling shyly. Every day he checked his page. In the spring of 2014, nearly three years after the plea deal, he finally received the message he was hoping for: “Is this the Jimmy Sones whose daughter was taken away?” He wrote back with his phone number. When Gabby called, he burst into tears, and when they finally met two weeks later in a Love’s parking lot in Van, he cried again as he hugged her. They didn’t talk much about the past that night. He didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, she didn’t know what to say, and soon she had to return to her adoptive family. A month after that, in early August, she ran away from her adoptive family and called Jimmy again. This time he picked her up in his big rig at a Walmart in Tyler and took her home. Two days later, she finally opened up and began asking questions, trying to figure out what was behind the big blank in her memory. Did you do it? Why did they say you did it? What happened to Shelby, Hunter, and Carly? Her father answered as best he could: No. I don’t know. They’re in foster care. Gabby knew that he was telling the truth. “I’m sorry for lying,” she said. “You don’t need to apologize,” he told her. “It wasn’t your fault. You were a little girl.” A week later, she told him she wanted to try to make things right. She wanted to go public. Jimmy had read two stories I had done on the cases in Texas Monthly, so he contacted me. When he said that Gabby wanted to explain what actually happened, I wasn’t surprised. Gabby had always seemed the most fearless of the kids, and I suspected it was just a matter of time before one of them started telling the truth. The stories were too kooky, too fantastical. And it wasn’t just what the kids said that had triggered my skepticism, it was the way their testimonies came about: every single child initially said nothing happened to him or her. This, the UTEP psychologist Wood said, was a red flag. “The large majority of sexually abused children—between 80 and 90 percent—will actually report the abuse if questioned by police or social services.” In the spring of 2014, he finally received the message he was hoping for: “Is this the Jimmy Sones whose daughter was taken away?” I wasn’t the only skeptical one. During the first trial, Wood County DA Jim Wheeler felt compelled to do his own investigation, so he launched an extensive grand jury probe, which included interviewing a dozen swingers, all of whom said they had never seen any children in the club. “There was a total lack of corroboration for what those kids said happened,” Wheeler told me in 2009. Other law enforcement officials were also troubled by the cases, and in June 2010, the Fourteenth Court of Appeals overturned the convictions of Jamie and Patrick because of “numerous evidentiary errors” committed by Judge Jack Skeen; the court noted that “the believability of the children’s testimony is at the heart of this case.” The bottom line was, if you believed Gabby, Shelby, Hunter, and Carly, you thought justice had been done. If you didn’t believe them, you tended to agree with longtime local defense lawyer Bobby Mims. “In my thirty years of practice,” he told me nine years ago, “I’ve never seen anything like that—an absolute, honest-to-God frame-up.” (At the time, Smith County assistant DA Murphy denied this claim. “There was no type of frame-up in these cases,” he wrote me.) Jimmy and I set up a meeting at a Subway in a Jarrell truck stop, just north of Austin, part of his route from Tyler to San Antonio. The morning of August 30, 2014, I watched his eighteen-wheeler creep into the parking lot of the Flying J Travel Plaza. He and Gabby crawled out of the cab and stepped slowly across the pavement. Gabby wore black jeans and a black shirt. She’d just turned sixteen, was a high-school dropout, and looked beset by the world. She and her father weren’t supposed to be anywhere near each other, yet she sat down in a booth next to him. Jimmy wore jeans and an Awesome Jack Duck Dynasty shirt. His teeth were in bad shape, and he kept his lips together when speaking. But Gabby did most of the talking. It was all a lie, she told me, her legs shaking nervously. The sex kindergarten, dancing at the swingers club—none of it was true. Her parents and the other adults were innocent. “They literally blew up my mind and planted stuff in it,” she said, her voice quivering. “I’m furious about it. They lied to me. They used me. They screwed up my life.” I asked her about the other kids involved. She said she didn’t know how they felt, and she didn’t care. “My ultimate goal is for this to be overturned. My goal for myself is just to tell the truth.”

Sheila Sones in Lindale.