A Free Man 
Brenham’s Paradise Lost
A once-idylic town finds itself in the middle of a controversial rape case involving your four older boys and an eighth-grade girl, but the greatest crimes may have been abdication of responsibility by adults and a total absence of values in their teenagers.
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“WE’RE REALLY KNOWN FOR BLUE BELL, baseball, and bluebonnets,” one resident said to me, bemoaning the devastation this case has brought to his hometown. “We don’t want to be known for rape—we’ll let Houston be known for that.” Indeed, Brenham is one of the prettiest and friendliest of all Texas towns, with rolling hills, lovingly restored turn-of-the-century bed and breakfasts, a central square full of antiques shops, and near the outskirts of town, an 89-year-old ice cream factory. The names of many of the businesses are still those of the original German settlers from four or five generations back. The town has no mall. It is populated by families who are proud that they have never left and escapees from the city who also feel blessed to be there. Nestled in a bucolic area between Austin and Houston, Brenham seems to hold out the promise of a gentle life, a wonderful place to raise kids. “I guess people have the idea that nothing happens here,” says Washington County sheriff’s investigator Billy Ruemke, who, with an office full of recovered stolen merchandise that includes high-powered rifles and handguns, knows otherwise.
What Brenham has become, perhaps without its citizens’ even noticing, is something entirely different from the romantic small town of memory. It is less a rural community than a suburb. Many of its residents work in Houston,
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and many of the amenities available in Houston are now available in Brenham: the same movies, the same videos, the same cable channels, the same magazines. The social ills that afflict big cities afflict Brenham too: divorce, child abuse, crime. A once-pristine statue of a white horse near a ranch gate on the outskirts of town has been defiled with graffiti, a near perfect symbol for the passage from rural past to urban present. And sometimes, what’s left of the small-town isolation can make the social problems worse. Drinking is a way of life in this German community: In 1995 and again in 1996, the joy of high school graduation was muted by mourning as the town lost a child to an alcohol-related accident. But Brenham’s parents looked the other way and held their collective breath. Just like big-city parents.
“I DIDN’T WANT TO ACCEPT that it had happened,” Sara Evans said from a chair on the back porch of her home last December, in a soft, lilting voice that belied her X-rated prose. “I about blamed myself because I had been drinking. But I was thirteen, and these guys should have had more common sense.” Looking at this unusually calm child in her ponytail and hip clunky shoes, it was almost impossible to think of her as only fourteen; she was physically mature, her style and manner were those of a much older girl, and here we sat, discussing a very grown-up thing. Only the frequent trips to the refrigerator for Snickers bars, which she devoured defiantly in front of her mother, revealed her anxiety. Sara didn’t resemble at all the scheming vixen described at the hearing; rather, she seemed utterly dependent on prevailing winds to tell her which way to move.
Anyone with some distance from the facts of this case could see that Sara was a social casualty long before she arrived at the graduation party last June. Brenham had been home to her mother’s family for several generations; Susan Evans’ father, Anson, was well regarded there. But Susan’s talents in sales had few applications in a small town, and she moved to Houston to work. At 24 she married a man named Frank Wade, who left her soon after Sara was born, giving up all parental rights. There followed for Sara the kind of life increasingly common in America: She was raised by a well-meaning, overburdened single parent. Later, after opportunity took Susan to Dallas, she married a man who adored Sara until Susan gave birth to his own daughter. Sara grew up hungry, no doubt, for male attention while being clueless as to its proper form. She was athletic and pretty; not surprisingly, she was drawn to modeling, big-city work that can result in big-time attention. (Sara’s goal, written on the application form for a modeling school, was “to be more confident in myself. I wasn’t sure in trying out for cheerleader but to make myself more confident I did.”) But in August 1995 Susan, now divorced, moved the family back home to Brenham in search of a simpler life. For Sara, the move would be a difficult new beginning.
On the night of June 28, she had gone to the graduation party at a place called Bilski’s Camphouse with a senior boy and his father, but they had to leave early. They allowed Sara to stay on after she assured them that she had called her mother and had found another ride home from the party. She had one drink and then another—the adults responsible for the party left or looked the other way as the kids started bringing out Jell-O shots and a watermelon soaked in 190 proof Everclear. The next thing Sara knew, her fantasies were coming true, though not quite as she had imagined: She found herself in Bryce Pflughaupt’s Ford Explorer, headed for the country club golf course with the four boys. “I asked them where we were going,” Sara told me, “and they told me just lay back and don’t worry.” She remembered sitting on the grass later. “And,” she said, “I remember them laughing.”
”I JUST REALLY SEE THIS CASE AS ILLUSTRATING a moral and spiritual failure on the part of our society,” Scot Stolz, a youth minister at Brenham’s First Baptist church, told me. “This one happens to be one that everyone knows about, but I don’t think it’s unique to this community.” So he was not entirely surprised when, at church camp last July, his wife told him that Sara Evans had something she needed to talk about. Stolz had grown up in Brenham and believed that parents these days, in Brenham as in big cities, were unable or unwilling to provide boundaries for their children. The result had been a growing tide of sexual confusion that his church’s True Love Waits program could do little about. Too often, the kids were already damaged by their experiences by the time they arrived on his doorstep.
And now here was another one. Stolz didn’t know Sara well—she was new to the community—but her mother had warned him that something had been wrong with Sara ever since she had come home from a party a few nights before. She had been anxious and evasive, spending long periods in her room. (Stolz revealed Sara’s confidences with her permission and that of her mother.) In front of Stolz, Sara stammered through an account of that night: She told the minister that she had been a virgin, she had been drinking, she had had sex with some boys, and she had not enjoyed it. Stolz tried to provide some comfort while also trying to figure out what, exactly, had occurred. Gently, he persuaded Sara to tell her mother what had happened. Then he called Susan and asked her to come to the Lake Travis camp the next morning. At that meeting Susan hugged her daughter and cried with her and then allowed her to stay on at camp as she had requested. Sara felt safe there. During share night on the last evening, she stood before her friends and took responsibility for her drinking at the party. She did not say she had had sex. She said only that she regretted her behavior and warned others to learn from her experience. Sara was young enough and optimistic enough to think that her hard times were over.
In fact, of course, they were just beginning. Within days of returning home from camp, Sara’s answering machine was filled with obscene messages, mostly from girls in the senior class. “Are you pregnant, Sara?” “Who’s the father?” Kids drove by the Evans house and shouted obscenities; they came at night and wrapped the place in toilet paper and planted hundreds of plastic forks in the ground, a bit of vandalism that is hell on a lawn mower and might have been of interest to Sigmund Freud.
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