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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The parents of the boys were prominent in town but also people of modest means and modest ambitions—Atwood Kenjura’s homey pharmacy, with its authentic soda fountain and thinly stocked shelves, seems decades removed from a big-city Walgreens. Because they were longtime residents, and because Brenham is a small town where everybody knows everybody else, it seemed as if they could settle the incident among themselves. Matt McIntyre’s father, Dee, for example, didn’t learn of his son’s involvement until August, when he got a call from Anson Evans, Susan’s father, who said, “This is really serious. This is about rape.” It was the first time that word had been used, and Dee McIntyre didn’t flinch. He knew his kid—“It didn’t happen like that,” Matt had told him—and Dee took him at his word. Later that night he attended a meeting at Susan Evans’ house with his wife, Atwood Kenjura, and Kenjura’s ex-wife, Cynthia. The meeting was cordial if awkward, with all the parents in agreement that nothing would be served by going to the sheriff and pressing charges. Again, the Evanses wanted only one thing: that the harassment of Sara should stop. Cynthia Robinson agreed to hold a meeting with the parents of the girls who were most responsible.
But even as the parents looked for an amicable solution, trouble arrived in the form of Frank Wade, Susan’s first husband and Sara’s father. Sara had told her friends that if the harassment did not stop, she would call her father. This might have been a meaningless threat to everyone but the girl who made it: Frank Wade is a tall, imposing Vietnam veteran who is at home in the worlds of high-stakes gambling and Central American intelligence operations. If his participation in Sara’s life up to that point had been minimal, her call had offered him a shot at redemption. Barred from the parents’ meeting, Wade went to Brenham the next morning and met with law officers.
Several days later, the district attorney’s office met with Susan and her daughter, and Sara gave a statement. Now that the authorities were involved, what had been a parental problem became a legal problem. If Sara wanted to say simply that she “had been taken advantage of,” if Susan did not want anyone to go to prison, if the parents of the boys wanted to help pay for Sara’s counseling, it mattered not at all. Under the laws of the state of Texas, Sara Evans had been raped, whether she had given her consent or not. It was illegal for a seventeen-year-old boy to have sex with a girl younger than fourteen, even if she, in the words of one person close to the case, “jumped up and down, took off her shirt, and begged for it.” A thirteen-year-old girl cannot give consent. Case closed.
The law-enforcement officers took their findings to Charles Sebesta. Though only Kenjura and McIntyre had had sex with Sara, Sebesta wanted all three seventeen-year-olds indicted for aggravated sexual assault. The grand jury obliged on September 5. Soon after that, the boys were placed in alternative-education classes at another school, according to state law, and banned from all sports. Now the school was forced to look at its students in a new way. Concerned about rumors of senior boys involved in a Young Male Whores Club—a Brenham version of Lakewood, California’s predatory Spur Posse—school officials consulted the president of the school board about their liability.
Brenham’s parents, too, began to look hard at the children living in their midst. Adults on both sides of the case began frantically collecting rumors, class notes (one of Sara’s close friends gave the now-infamous letters to the defense), and high school yearbooks. “I didn’t know my daughter wrote stuff like this,” Susan Evans confessed. “If you knew these kids, you’d never believe they wrote such smut.” The parents of the boys seemed confounded by the inflexibility of the statutory rape law: “This is a whole world that has never been actively addressed,” Cynthia Robinson said.
As time passed and the two sides polarized, all the parents continued to pay lip service to the notion that there was fault on all sides. But often they did things that sent the message that the incident wasn’t their children’s fault. Susan Evans, for instance, plunged Sara headlong into the world of victimology. She enlisted the aid of victims rights groups like Justice for All and the Bryan rape crisis center, whose staffers went before the press and helped shape the story along conventional lines. High-priced lawyers were brought in to help the boys (Matt Kenjura was represented by famed Houston criminal attorney Dick DeGuerin), and Kenjura and Pflughaupt were sent on a Cayman Islands vacation to escape the pressure. Bewildered and angry, Atwood Kenjura wore his son’s jersey to the homecoming game and borrowed a trailer so that Matt could sit on top and watch the proceedings from afar. They would do anything, now, to save their kids.
”LET ME ASK YOU, WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE?” the district attorney of Washington County asked me on more than one occasion during the course of this case—which by the end of 1996 had threatened to destroy everyone in its path. Charles Sebesta had been the district attorney for more than twenty years, and until this case had come along, he had been confident of his ability to tackle any dispute and find a just solution for the community at large, the mandate of any district attorney. “I took this thing and literally ran with it,” Sebesta said—until Sara Evans’ letters debuted and a winnable case went due south. If the letters had been introduced to the grand jury, he believed, no indictments would have been returned. The O. J. Simpson trial had proved that juries sometimes make decisions in spite of, rather than because of, the law, and he believed Sara’s letters might demonstrate consent, which would put him on the losing side in a trial. “When you deal with juries, they expect a victim to have clean hands in the same manner they expect a defendant to have dirty hands,” Sebesta explained. “When both the victim and the defendant have dirty hands, that jury is gonna look at a case in a different light.” In other words, law or no law, Sara Evans didn’t have much of a chance.
As the months dragged on, in fact, only one thing became clear: If ever there was a case that should have been kept out of the criminal justice system, it was this one. As if the case wasn’t ambiguous enough, the day after the party was Sara’s fourteenth birthday. The law said that if Sara had sex with the boys at 11:59 p.m., she was incompetent to make her own decisions and the boys were child molesters; if she had sex at 12: 01 a.m. with no evidence of force, well, maybe she got what she deserved. Such an absurd situation left the door open for more absurd behavior: Sensing that the community’s sympathy was shifting toward the boys, the defense lawyers adopted a scorched-earth policy, arguing that because sex had occurred “consensually,” the boys were blameless. In response, Sara’s parents demonized not only the boys but their parents and the district attorney. They took their case to the media, among other tactics spinning a conspiracy theory involving prominent families by trying to link Sebesta to Atwood Kenjura.
In spite of the bitterness on both sides, Sebesta had arranged a plea bargain with the two boys who actually had had intercourse with Sara—probation, a $1,000 fine, community service, and a letter of apology drafted by the DA—but that plan has been endangered since attorney Jim James brought the letters into court and put Sara on trial the old-fashioned way, dramatically swaying local attitudes. (Pflughaupt’s indictment has been set aside.) Facing dissatisfaction on all fronts, Sebesta withdrew in favor of a special prosecutor, who was appointed in January. It is possible a new grand jury will be called, and the case will start all over again. Meanwhile, Sebesta has cooled to the issues: “We’re looking at a situation that happens hundreds of times every Saturday night,” he told me in a confidential tone, without realizing that that was precisely the problem. I was tired of Brenham too. Tired of trying to assess blame, to identify a villain, to find a satisfying solution for all concerned—a misguided young girl who saw sex as a route to popularity and a group of boys who had behaved abominably but did not deserve to be treated like career criminals. Things had gone too far; it was too late for answers, and too late for justice.
Long lost in all the name calling and all the rancor was the fact that something had happened the night of June 28, something that may or may not have been illegal but that was surely wrong. The growing acceptance of the defense lawyers’ description of the events of that night as consensual sex had served to bring them into the realm of the norm, where—until recently at least—they certainly did not belong. Sara’s remorse and Matt Kenjura’s apology showed that they knew, on some level, that they had been involved in something inappropriate and ugly. Four older boys and one younger girl engaging in sexual activity was a recipe for disaster, and disaster had struck.
Leaving Brenham, I pictured the scene at the country club golf course. I imagined children grappling in the dark, children who might have liked a grown-up to step in before things went too far. But, of course, no one was there.
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