Death by Therapy
Caldwell, Christopher
Death by Therapy The New Age counselors who killed a little girl —and the "child welfare " regime that enabled them. BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL The death of 10-year-old Candace Newmaker —who was...
...Watkins's practice, like those of a half-dozen other radical attachment-disorder therapists, was based in Evergreen, Colorado...
...She also enlisted for the occasion two other helpers—one male, one female...
...But cults aren't the only parallel...
...We can also blame the it-takes-a-village zeal with which North Carolina's authorities, acting in the name of the public, examine family dynamics, declare parents unsuitable, and separate children from their parents forever...
...Watkins decided to "build on" her supposed receptivity, and attempt a "rebirthing" session the next day...
...The defense wanted to focus on the question of whether the blanket had been porous enough to breathe through, and leave to one side the question whether a 70-pound girl's lungs could open under the 673-pound weight of four bouncing adults...
...There she discovered "reactive attachment disorder," or RAD, the clinical name for a child's inability to bond with new parents...
...It may not surprise the reader to hear that a therapist who'd never met Candace (then at home in North Carolina) diagnosed her with RAD in absentia...
...It blurred further the day before Candace died, when Watkins moved on to "compression therapy...
...If Watkins took seriously the idea that she was going to give "birth" to Candace—and there is every indication that she did—she had no sense that what she was squashing beneath those pillows was already a human being...
...During the trial, Watkins contributed postings in which she warned that a wave of Columbine High School incidents and similar depredations awaited society if she and her colleagues were hindered from bringing future sociopaths like Candace to heel...
...At forty minutes Ponder says, "She's stuck there in her own puke and poop...
...Her adoptive mother witnessed the whole thing...
...So she could have had a congenital heart condition...
...You're a liar and you lie all the time...
...And how...
...Others note that she was fond of animals and particularly kind to special-ed students...
...The quack Watkins is easily enough taken care of...
...Most defenses of RAD take the form of "Outwardly, things appeared fine . . . but behind closed doors . . ." ATTACh referred Jeane Newmaker to 54-year-old Connell Watkins, whose most advanced degree was a master's in social work from Denver University...
...No one will regret this bit of political posturing...
...Deciding whom to blame for Candace Newmaker's death is harder than it looks...
...She was given up for adoption (at age 6) to an unmarried Durham heiress and aspiring single mother named Jeane Newmak-er, who lives in a five-bedroom house and works as a nurse practitioner...
...Clair and Jack McDaniel, the two assistants who helped squash Candace, will face the same charges as Watkins and Ponder...
...Can-dace's very birth was rendered a nullity, through a bit of Zhdanovite airbrushing of the records: Upon Jeane New-maker's adoption of Candace, the state of North Carolina issued a new—and fraudulent—birth certificate, listing the girl's birthplace as Durham and her name as Newmaker...
...Two heads being better than one, a simple but big problem with single parenthood is that it doesn't provide for built-in second (parenting) opinions...
...At twenty-three minutes, Watkins says, "Stay there with the poop and vomit...
...Watkins threatened to shave Candace's head and tattoo it, and asked her if she had ever seen her (natural) mother have sex...
...She could have died from having stopped those medications...
...a temper...
...They even videotaped the entire hour over which Candace was gruesomely killed...
...What [Jeane] did was cuckoo...
...I knew she could...
...Newmaker agreed to pay Watkins $7,000 for a two-week course of treatment...
...At fourteen minutes: "OK, I'm dying...
...Jeane New-maker lay on top of Candace and, on Watkins's instructions, licked her face...
...Go ahead and die right now," Ponder replies...
...She could have died from one of the three medications she had been placed on for her RAD...
...According to a wire report, during one 160-minute session in the last week of her life, Candace "had her face grabbed 90 times, was shaken or bounced 309 times . . . was shouted at 65 times, [and] was threatened 49 times with such consequences as being abandoned or institutionalized...
...You only have one birth," said Elmore...
...Anyone can see the monstrous metaphysical arrogance in Watkins's treatment...
...Anyone who has read the literature of twentieth-century totalitarianism will find political parallels...
...Charm and self-control are the symptoms of secret obstreperousness...
...Candace's "rebirthing" involved wrapping her tightly in a navy flannel blanket, covering her with eight cushions, and having the four adults—who weighed a total of 673 pounds—sit on the 70-pound girl, bounce on her, and squeeze her to "simulate contractions," while taunting Candace about not "wanting" to be born enough...
...This is not the place to describe fully the gruesome contents of the tape...
...Watkins was the most prominent of his disciples to press on with them...
...Those who claim it's impossible to police the fringes of medicine are correct...
...There is sadism involved...
...Jeane started surfing the Internet for information on Candace's "problem...
...When Candace's natural bond with the mother she'd known for her first six years persisted, Newmaker took Candace to Evergreen to be "cured" of it...
...The main charge, on which the two will be sentenced in June, was "reckless child abuse resulting in death," which carries a penalty of 16 to 48 years imprisonment...
...Newmaker will stand trial on charges of criminally negligent child abuse in September (and Brita St...
...So proud was Watkins of her novel treatment that she videotaped it from start to finish...
...In the aftermath of the trial, the state's governor Bill Owens signed "Candace's Law," to ban rebirthing therapy...
...It is Orwellian, and wholly unaccountable...
...Her original certificate, which records her birth in Lincolnton on November 19, 1989, and her name as Elmore, has been removed from the records...
...Gosney would become one of Watkins's most vocal public defenders during her trial...
...For real...
...Said Watkins, "It could look to the superficial observer of the tape that she couldn't breathe...
...By contrast, the intimidation of her therapists is blunt and scatological...
...her mother...
...Jeane Newmaker claims she killed her goldfish...
...It's impossible, because this is really not a medical case at all...
...One parent's mistaking his child's temper for a "problem" requiring treatment may happen from time to time, but it's much less likely that two parents will be thus deluded...
...As Cline himself explained to a journalist, "You have to use some sort of strength to get the kids to allow touch...
...Ponder says: "Uh huh...
...It's also that her thera-pists-cum-captors, throughout the Denver trial that ended in their conviction on April 20, showed every outward sign of unrepentant evil...
...As Watkins put it, "Somehow the 10-year-old inexplicably stopped breathing...
...She always says please, and frequently says sorry...
...It was there, in the 1970s, that psychiatrist Foster Cline founded "rage reduction therapy"—one of those euphemisms, like "re-education," that bundle together several kinds of sadism that would get a person arrested were they inflicted on a non-consenting adult...
...As Watkins described it, "I establish that I am in control and that I am the boss at that time...
...Peggy Lowe's excellent reporting on the case in the Denver Rocky Mountain News never got the national attention it deserved...
...At nineteen minutes: "Please, you said you would give me some oxygen...
...As one juror put it, "I was waiting for at least any glimpse of remorse or sorrow or regret that they had ignored Can-dace, and I was quite shocked that that just never happened...
...Candace's early home life may have been dysfunctional enough to imperil her...
...I'm her mama...
...This rebirthing took even more planning and muscle than the usual Watkins therapies...
...It's not just that Candace was a particularly charming girl, although she appears to have been...
...But the next time such a thing happens, the therapy involved will be slightly different...
...On April 20, a jury deliberated five hours before pronouncing Watkins and Ponder guilty on all counts...
...She knocked down a bookcase...
...Candace Newmaker's story is a grisly one, but the media's inability to make sense of it may have another explanation— that it tells ordinary Americans something they don't want to hear about the plight of a lot of their own children...
...Yet the New York Times gave the case only a brief story in the waning days of the trial, the Washington Post honored the guilty verdict with just a wire-service snippet deep inside the paper, and the networks were largely silent...
...After all, no vomit was found in Candace's lungs...
...That's exactly the way Watkins and Ponder saw things...
...Watkins sent this observation to an Internet site set up by her defenders in the attachment-therapy profession...
...A half-hour later they unwrapped the blankets...
...Cline settled in court with the state of Colorado and moved to Idaho...
...Quit, quit, quit, quit...
...Since by definition "attachment" involves two people, there's something odd about the way reactive attachment disorder is identified as an illness of only one of them—the one who's not paying the bills...
...And the state will go to any lengths to make sure they're never reasserted...
...As one Evergreen attachment guru approvingly explained to the Los Angeles Times, "You need to use 'paradoxical intention.' When they say, 'I'm going to die' you say, 'Go ahead and die.' That way, you defuse the opposi-tional element...
...Watkins's treatments have less in common with medicine and therapy than they do with cult rituals...
...In the end, Watkins's lawyers tried to claim Candace's death had had nothing to do with the "treatment" whatsoever...
...Candace was dead...
...Simpson-esque cause célèbre...
...She found out from two journalists who showed up one morning at the door to her trailer home...
...She wasn't a behavior problem at all," says Candace's first-grade teacher...
...A major part of it was the "holding therapy" invented by Cline...
...This was part of a strategy to confuse jurors about what asphyxia is...
...That Candace submitted to this was thought a breakthrough...
...Defenders of the RAD concept (there are many of them, and they have grown in number since the wave of adoptions of troubled Eastern European children that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall) are quick to say that that's exactly the problem...
...Since Candace proved (to use Watkins's word) "resistive," Watkins and her assistant resorted to insults: "You act pretty stupid...
...But we can't know, because the never-look-back Lincoln County child welfare authorities who ordered her removed will neither speak to the press about the criteria they used to do so, nor unseal any of their records...
...BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL The death of 10-year-old Candace Newmaker —who was asphyxiated last year during a bizarre New Age therapy for a dubious disorder—had all the ingredients of an O.J...
...What I did was God's will...
...Certainly not their mother, Angela Elmore, for under the state's laws, once a child is removed from a home, all parental rights cease...
...By simulating for Candace a trip through the birth canal, therapists would symbolically "deliver" her to Jeane Newmaker, and erase the inconvenient natural birth Candace had gone through ten years before...
...In keeping with this official obliteration of Candace Elmore, the state of North Carolina never told Angela Elmore of her own daughter's fate...
...In this respect, Candace Newmaker was like the children carried off to Jonestown...
...Watkins had been taught the method by the California-licensed New Age marriage therapist Douglas Gosney during a barnstorming tour he made through Evergreen in 1999...
...At one point Ponder was even bracing her feet against a fireplace in order to heave more force into her...
...Newmaker showered her daughter with gifts and affection, but was troubled to find the two weren't "bonding...
...Candace continued to miss her siblings Michael and Chelsea and (go figure...
...She played God with my child...
...She acted not like a mother but an outraged consumer...
...One has the sense that both Watkins and Ponder were actually getting a perverted thrill out of their treatment of Candace Newmaker, and to procure that thrill they had first to dehumanize their "patient...
...Prosecutors alleged that Gosney had been fired from a hospital for "inappropriate contact with a patient," and that he claims to be able to remember his own birth...
...Whereas none of Gosney's "rebirthings" had lasted more than six minutes, Candace's went on for seventy...
...At that point, Candace had been dead for five months...
...Things started going wrong almost immediately...
...Cline stopped practicing in 1988 after a gutsy 11-year-old ran away following a session and described to authorities the abuse he had been made to undergo...
...At twelve minutes in: "Please quit pushing on me...
...Die right now and go to heaven...
...The most hard-line view of Candace comes from an attention-deficit-disorder specialist who compared Candace's behavior to "having the average 18-year-old adolescent in your house...
...Lesser charges against Watkins include criminal impersonation, obtaining a signature by deception, and unlawful practice of psychotherapy...
...She seems to have thought that when she adopted Candace she had a right to a "normal" parent-child relationship...
...She discovered ATTACh, the Association for Treatment and Training in the Attachment of Children...
...It was shown to the jury in its entirety...
...She had Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Sixteen minutes in, after her sobs and her pleas to be released have been ignored, Candace says, "You mean, like you want me to die for real...
...Watkins not only needed her 40-year-old assistant Julie Ponder (who stood trial alongside her this spring...
...This involves touching the child in intimate ways in order to render him vulnerable and break his sense of mastery over his environment...
...North Carolina's practice in this regard is chilling in a way that goes beyond merely raiding poor families for upper-middle-class adoption prospects...
...If you respond to it, you buy into it...
...Cline's methods crossed the line in any case...
...In Candace Newmak-er's case, the oddest thing about her reac-i tive attachment disorder is that it had no | symptoms discernible to anyone except her ! adoptive mother...
...Watkins and Ponder were not only remorseless but defiant...
...A transcript is available at the Rocky Mountain News website under "Candace's Final Hour...
...She attended one of their conventions in Alexandria, Virginia...
...That was when Candace spoke her last word ("No"), at which point Ponder went into a nyah-nyah taunt—"Quitter, quitter, quitter, quitter...
...Kids at school taunted her for constantly drawing pictures of Michael and Chelsea, the brother and sister they assumed were figments of her imagination...
...I'm sorry...
...But leave that aside...
...Ten minutes into the procedure, Candace was begging to be let out, warning that she was dying, that she couldn't breathe...
...She's a quitter...
...But that was just a symptom of her sickness, part of her "denial...
...Candace's biggest problem seemed to be missing her birth family...
...Certainly Newmaker's role is a haunting aspect of the case...
...Candace Newmaker (born Candace Elmore) was removed by social service authorities from her home in Lincoln County, North Carolina, in 1995...
...One notices the line blurring between therapy and rape...
...She, personally, will be put away for a long time, and her therapies will be, too, at least in Colorado...
...North Carolina's social workers rebirthed Candace before Connell Watkins did...
...Many of his protégés stopped using Cline's therapies at that point...
...For real...
...Among the most poignant elements in the video are the deference and exquisite good manners that this supposedly rude and cantankerous child shows throughout...
...Or something...
...All such therapies take not just planning but adult muscle...
...Candace Newmaker was killed by something that goes much deeper than medical malpractice or rough trade or ideology—by a mentality...
...Jeane Newmaker's terrible parental judgment should make us ask whether placing children in single-parent households is generally wise...
...The Los Angeles Times interviewed the father of her best friend, who says not only that he "never saw the two girls argue," but also that he "never saw any indications of a problem...
...No one outside of North Carolina's family-welfare bureaucracy knows where Candace's siblings Michael and Chelsea are now...
...Both defendants were wholly emotionless throughout the trial...
...The person who understood best what had been done to Candace was her own birth mother, Angela Elmore, who raged at Jeane Newmaker for putting the child in that position...
Vol. 6 • May 2001 • No. 35
