Third of eight parts By SCOTT FARWELL

Staff Writer

sfarwell@dallasnews.com

Kenneth Atkinson had been mumbling for weeks about “Barbie’s little secret,” but nobody took him seriously.

She wasn’t sure if the creature huddling at her feet was human

Neighbors at the Pebble Creek Mobile Home Park in Hutchins said Atkinson was the kind of guy who talked a lot but didn’t say much.

They figured maybe his wife, Barbara “Barbie” Atkinson, had a couple of pot plants stashed in the back bedroom, a bong, maybe a little meth.

So Jeanie Rivers wasn’t concerned when Kenneth Atkinson told her, “There’s something I need to show you inside the trailer,” while they stood outside in the early evening of June 11, 2001, watching their kids ride bikes in circles.

“He seemed disheveled and stressed,” Rivers said, remembering that night. “He looked like he couldn’t wait to get something off his chest.”

Rivers chatted away as she followed Atkinson down a hallway into the master bedroom. He scooted over a basket overflowing with clothes, took a few hangers off the doorknob and swung open the closet door.

“Hi, Lauren,” he said.

Rivers fell silent. She wasn’t sure if the creature huddling at her feet was human.

“What I pictured was a monster, a little bitty monster,” she would later testify. “She was so frail and without color. Her arms, they appeared to be no bigger than an inch wide to me. She was naked.”

Lauren looked up but did not speak. One eye was crusted shut, weeping yellowish-green goo, and the other one was partially closed. Her skin was pale and lifeless.

“It scared me,” Rivers said. “That makes me feel so bad that I was scared, but that’s why I didn’t reach down and grab her and run like I should have.”

Questions tumbled one over another.

“Why is she naked?” Rivers asked. “Do you hug her? Do you hold her? Do you feed her? Does she know she’s loved?”

Atkinson said, “I do when Barbie lets me.”

He wrapped his arms around Rivers and then closed the closet door.

“It was worse than what I’ve seen for a Holocaust victim,” Rivers said. “It was that devastating. I’d never seen anything that bad on TV, and I just didn’t know what to do.”

"What I pictured was a monster, a little bitty monster"

Then things started to click.

Rivers remembered the first time she’d met Kenneth Atkinson. He introduced her to five of his children and made a vague reference to a girl named Lauren, who he said lived with her father.

And later during a joint family cookout, Rivers jokingly asked the Atkinsons how they managed to feed all their kids.

Kenneth Atkinson replied “food stamps” and launched into a story about Lauren, whom he referred to as “the ghost child.”

Barbara Atkinson shot him a look and took over.

Lauren, she explained, ate compulsively. When she would come to visit, they would have to lock up the cabinets and refrigerator because she would roam the house at night, wolfing down all the family’s food.

Once, she said, “the ghost child” got out of the trailer and into an empty home nearby. They found her sitting on the floor in the dark, eating dry ramen noodles.

The story hung in the air as the couples sat at the Atkinsons’ kitchen table, picking at plates of brisket and potato salad.

On the other side of the wall, Lauren crouched in the dark, starving.

Why did he reveal secret?

Jeanie Rivers and her husband, Joe, lived about a baseball’s throw from the Atkinsons’ place in the modest mobile home park about 12 miles south of Dallas, where people worked on their own cars and in the evenings sat on porches in lawn chairs, drinking beer and telling lies.

The Riverses and Atkinsons had a front-porch friendship, sharing barbecue dinners, swapping baby-sitting and bumming smokes.

No one knows for sure why Kenneth Atkinson led Jeanie Rivers into the master bedroom that night, cracking the door on his family’s secret.

Maybe it was a pang of conscience, as the unemployed carpenter claimed in a statement to police, or maybe he got scared when he went to check on Lauren that day because she was vomiting.

One detective suggested an age-old motive: jealousy, tinged with revenge.

Barbara Atkinson had been taking up with men she met on the Internet, leaving her husband alone with the six children for days at a time. She was in West Texas the night Lauren was rescued.

Maybe Kenneth Atkinson figured the best way to get back at her — and avoid consequences himself — was to pre-emptively blame Lauren’s abuse on his wife.

The “lonely husband” story made sense to Jeanie and Joe Rivers.

Barbara Atkinson was rarely around. When she was, the 30-year-old mother spent most of her time at a nearby honky-tonk, the Texas Rose, dressed in shirts featuring her ample cleavage and feeding quarters into eight-liner video poker machines.

From their perspective, Kenneth Atkinson was a dimwitted but diligent caregiver for the children.

“I honestly saw him 24 hours a day doing something with a child,” said Jeanie Rivers. “Whether it was taking care of a boo-boo, changing a diaper, putting on shoes and socks or walking them around the neighborhood, he was always taking care of those kids.”

It wasn’t until his criminal trial — which included strong circumstantial evidence that Lauren had been sexually abused — that the Riverses condemned their former friend.

“He got what he deserved,” Jeanie Rivers said. “They both did.”

Missed opportunities

Over the years, many people could have — perhaps should have — known about Lauren.

Grandparents held the emaciated child on their laps but accepted Barbara Atkinson’s counterintuitive explanation: Lauren had an eating disorder that caused her to gorge on food.

“When she came over to our house with that family, she was a pig,” said Doris Calhoun, Barbara Atkinson’s adoptive mother. “I mean, she would eat everything in sight.

“She would steal stuff from the refrigerator, like pork chops or a ham bone or anything left over, and take it to her bed and put it under her pillow.”

And even though doctors would later testify that Lauren stopped growing at about age 2½, Calhoun said she never noticed she was starving.

“She would eat everything in sight"

Lauren developed lactose intolerance as a toddler, but Barbara Atkinson continued to give her milk. The resulting vomiting and diarrhea frustrated the young mother, left Lauren undernourished and led to a dysfunctional spiral.

The more Lauren cried and spit up, the harder Atkinson’s feelings became.

Psychologically speaking, what happened to Lauren is called “scapegoating.” Parents single out one child to blame for all the family’s troubles and enlist others in the taunting and physical abuse.

In 1995, Atkinson began occasionally locking her daughter in a bathroom. Over the next six years, the confinement and starvation got progressively worse.

“The last time I saw Lauren,” Calhoun said, “she was fat.”

That was around Thanksgiving 1999, when Lauren was about 61/2.

After that, when Calhoun would visit her daughter, she was always told Lauren was at a friend’s house.

“It was suspicious and it should have been suspicious,” Calhoun said. “But it wasn’t, because in my mind, I already had the answer. She gave Lauren away at birth, and in my mind, she had let Lauren go to these other people’s houses until someone finally decided to take her.”

Calhoun said parents try hard to believe their children, even when the stories don’t quite make sense.

“In my creed, a mother would take a bullet for her kid,” she said. “You never in a million years think, ‘Maybe she’s got the child locked in a closet somewhere.’”

“The failure was really on everyone else in these kids’ lives"

Even so, there were signs of trouble.

Child Protective Services investigated twice, and Lauren said a police officer twice came to the trailer to check on her welfare.

Both times, she said, her parents sat her at the kitchen table with food in front of her, but told her not to eat.

When the officer showed up, he stood on their front porch casually chatting with Barbara and Kenneth Atkinson.

“He just stood there to check out the surroundings,” Lauren said. “I guess I was 6 or so. After he left, I’d go back in the closet like nothing happened.”

In June 1995, Barbara Atkinson’s high school friend and roommate Stacy Wilson complained that 2-year-old Lauren was being tied spread-eagle to a bed in Jasper. By the time a caseworker arrived, the family had moved.

Nearly 18 months later, a complaint was filed in Wood County about children eating moldy food out of the trash. The mother’s name was listed as Barbara Calhoun.

No one answered when a CPS investigator knocked on the trailer door.

But moments later, Kenneth and Barbara Atkinson walked up and offered to help: “Who are you looking for?”

The caseworker said, “Barbara Calhoun.”

“We don’t know her,” one of them said. “We live down the road.”

The report was closed with the footnote, “Unable to make contact.”

The neighbors were listed as “Mr. and Mrs. Atkinson.”

Kim Higgins, a CPS caseworker who guided Lauren and her siblings through the legal system, described the incident as a “missed opportunity” but stopped short of saying a mistake was made.

“There was never a time we went out and saw the kids and saw the home and talked to them and failed to do something,” Higgins said. “The failure was really on everyone else in these kids’ lives.”

"Here to take care of you"

Her bottom and legs were red and peeling from sitting in urine and feces

Kenneth Atkinson knew the police were coming that night in June 2001.

He called his mother for advice, sent five of the children — who ranged in age from 1 to 10 — to the Riverses’ house and let Lauren out of the closet.

He dressed her in jeans and a striped, long-sleeve polo shirt.

It was about 6 p.m. when Hutchins police Officer Gary McClain and Joe Rivers pulled up to the trailer at 16 Moon Beam.

Rivers went in first. The plan was to keep Atkinson calm, with the hope he would invite the officer inside without a search warrant.

It worked.

“I walk in and I’m looking for an 8-year-old, except I saw what looked like a 3-year-old sitting there,” said McClain, now an officer for the Galveston Independent School District. “So, I immediately ask, ‘Where’s Lauren?’”

Atkinson motioned to a bedraggled child sitting at the kitchen table. Her hair was matted and her eyes were sunken. She was eating a plate of SpaghettiOs.

“I’m Officer McClain,” he said. “I’m here to take care of you.”

Lauren smiled.

Firefighters, EMTs and Dallas County sheriff’s Detective Robert Allwardt arrived next.

Lauren’s vital signs were normal. She complained of a backache and bugs in her hair — lice.

Allwardt asked Lauren her age.

She held up two fingers and said, “Two.”

Later, when asked why she believed she was 2, Lauren said, “Because that’s how many birthday parties I’ve had.”

Lauren then turned to Allwardt and dropped her voice.

“Can I go to the potty?” she asked. “They don’t let me go.”

The Atkinsons had lived at the mobile home park a year. Nearly all that time, Lauren was locked in a closet about 4 feet wide and 9 feet deep. She slept and went to the bathroom there.

When rescued, her bottom and legs were red and peeling from sitting in urine and feces. She was also covered in a downy layer of hair, called lanugo, a sign of starvation.

Video

After looking over Lauren, Hutchins fire Capt. Ryan Woolever walked up to Atkinson, who was sitting on the couch, shoulders slumped.

“It doesn’t make any difference what your answer is,” he said, “but tell me, what kind of justification did you and your wife have for doing this to her?”

“My wife said she was bad,” Atkinson said.

Woolever, who had a 4-year-old son at home, shook his head and walked away.

Moments later, he wrapped Lauren in his fireman’s coat and carried her out to the ambulance.

“The thing that surprised me most about the whole thing is I expected a kid who had been barred up that long to be shellshocked or timid or sitting there holding her arms,” he said.

“She was really bright and was just looking around. She didn’t have that separation anxiety like kids who grow up with parents. I guess that was probably a sign she didn’t have those people.”

“She was really bright and was just looking around"

Nurses were waiting for Lauren when the ambulance pulled into Children’s Medical Center Dallas. She was taken to an exam room.

Doctors were listening to her lungs and taking blood when Hutchins Assistant Police Chief David Landers arrived.

He could tell from the look on people’s faces that it was serious.

One of the nurses pulled him aside.

“She’s got some internal problems,” she explained. “We think her body is trying to shut down and die.”