HERMON, N.Y. -- For two years Jamie and Kimberly Matthews watched their neighbor bring the ramshackle homestead next door back to life.

The neighbor brought in llamas, horses and chickens. He cut and split firewood and planted a garden, from which he'd bring the Matthews tomatoes, onions and cucumbers. In return, Jamie Matthews would plow his driveway in the winter.

Matthews' young kids played with his kids, and their neighbor built a wooden footbridge across a brook between the properties so they more easily could go back and forth.

In August their neighbor, Stephen Howells II, and his girlfriend Nicole Vaisey, were arrested and accused of abducting two Amish girls from a farm stand in the St. Lawrence County town of Heuvelton, 16 miles away.

Within weeks came more charges. Vaisey has been indicted on 10 counts and Howells on 21 counts of federal child pornography charges involving six children.

Seemingly overnight, the homestead next door to Matthews became a festering sore on the landscape, an ugly reminder of unspeakable secrets and the exploitation of childhood innocence.

Passing drivers would slow and stop to gawk at the Howells' house and barn and old mobile home, which were shrouded by a line of trees and overgrowth along the road.

So the Matthewses did something they had never considered before. They bought the homestead, burned and buried it.

"My kids still have problems at night," said Jamie Matthews, a corrections officer at Gouverneur Correctional Facility. "They've each waken up three or four times with nightmares thinking about things. We didn't want to be sitting on our deck looking over at all of it."

Matthews' children were not victims, said Jamie and Kimberly Matthews, who works as a child support claims investigator for St. Lawrence County.

Once the couple had the idea to buy and clear the property, they moved decisively, Jamie Matthews said.

A week or so after Howells' and Vaisey's arrests, Jamie Matthews saw Stephen Howells' older brother, Carl Howells, on the property and asked to buy it.

Carl Howells is a career military officer, now stationed in Japan.

The property had been owned by Carl Howells' family for more than a century and was in Carl Howells' name. It had sat vacant for several years until Stephen Howells moved in about three years ago.

By September, Matthews and Carl Howells struck a deal -- $10,000 cash for six acres and the buildings, another $1,000 to pay the school taxes.

The Matthewses discussed with a lot of people their plans to clear the property. They would have a fire. They considered whether to make the fire a community event, whether to invite Amish to witness it.

In the end, the couple worked with the Hermon Volunteer Fire Department and the state Department of Environmental Conservation to arrange a controlled burn, which was started before dawn Nov. 23.

The only witnesses to it were the Matthewses and a dozen firefighters.

Hermon Fire Chief Christopher Stransky declined to comment.

Related story: After kidnapping of Amish girls stuns community, a trial nears

Matthews borrowed a bulldozer and excavator from his father, who owns Grasse

River Asphalt & Paving in Canton. He and his brother, Dan, dug a pit and buried the charred rubble. They uprooted the trees and shrubs that had shielded the Howells house from the road and, to a lesser degree, from the Matthews house.

No one has to slow down to see the property now.

In the spring, a friend plans to donate 20 loads of topsoil and seed the raw ground.

"Everybody worked with me," Matthews said. "Because everybody knew why I

was doing what I was doing."

A quarter mile away on County Route 21, Rachel White says the Matthewses'

act "brought wholesome back to our little, tiny town."

"We don't have to be reminded of tragedy every day," she said. "We were

sick to our stomachs for quite a while."

At the Hermon-Dekalb Central School District's elementary school

Christmas concert in December, Stephen Howells' wife, Mary Ann Howells,

approached Jamie Matthews with a request:

Could she walk the cleared property with her three children?

The following Sunday, Mary Ann Howells, who declined comment, came by. Snow covered the ground.

"It looked so good with the snow on it," Matthews said. "All smoothed out. All the same color. It looked really nice."

Matthews led the Howells family on a short walk. No one said much. It's been hard for everyone to understand what happened there. But on that day, on some level, they all knew why the buildings had to be buried.

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