Innocence Lost 
The Accused 
Across The Line
According to the district attorney in Smith County, this building was the site of the most horrific child sex ring in Texas history. Three of the adults convicted of running it have already been sentenced to life in prison. There’s just one problem: The DA in neighboring Wood County, where the building is located, says nothing happened here at all.
Margie Lied Again says: Margie Cantrell, your day is coming. Justice may take a while, but it will come sooner or later. All of your lies will catch up with you. (July 22nd, 2011 at 12:03pm)
(Page 6 of 6)
Since Margie would not speak to me, I spent the next five days in Mineola and Tyler looking for someone who might be able to tell me about her. Most of the dozen people I found would talk only if I assured them that I would not use their names. “Margie is very dramatic,” a reporter who had covered all three trials explained. “People in Mineola kept telling me they didn’t want to talk about her because they say she fabricates stories.” Gary Edwards, who wrote the column about the swingers, was one of the few people willing to let me use his name. “I’m not convinced that what was said to have happened up there really happened,” he said. “It all comes from one person, and I don’t have a lot of faith in her as a human being.” The first time Edwards met Margie was when she came into the Monitor offices alleging that the high school football coaches were abusing the kids. “She thinks a football coach hollering at a kid is child abuse,” he told me. “I’ve been around that program for twelve years—if actual abuse was taking place, I’d hear about it from the parents. I soon learned from people in the community that she has a propensity for stirring things up and getting herself stirred up, flying off in all directions with comments and accusations.”
This picture was at odds with the way Margie had been presented during the trial, but I wondered if the Mineolans simply didn’t know Margie that well, having lived alongside her for only four years. So I also contacted a dozen people in California and other states who had known Margie for decades. The picture that emerged was of a paradoxical, larger-than-life figure. To some she was “supportive” and “awesome,” to others “manipulative” and “controlling.” She had led dozens of children out of neglect and despair—and put others through staggering emotional and physical torment. According to her original three foster children—Sally, now 29, Lorraine, 25, and Bill, 27—Margie kept the kids in line through fear, humiliation, and violence, slapping them in the face, pulling their hair, throwing them against the wall, and slugging them in the stomach. Bill said, “It wasn’t always that way. When I was young, there was genuine love. But the older we got, she started bringing in more and more kids. She got overwhelmed with trying to care for all those kids.” John Cantrell’s son from his first marriage, Aaron Cantrell, now 40, could not speak to the violence but said, “I don’t think she has any business dealing with kids. It’s ironic that she’s in charge of foster children when she has such an extremely volatile temper.”
The kids also told me that Margie used to invent stories. Kelly Cantrell, John’s daughter from his first marriage, said, “Margie convinced all of us kids of whatever crazy idea she needed us to believe or buy into at the time, and you better not contradict her or there would be hell to pay.” Bill described her as “the puppet master.” “She brainwashes the kids to believe the stories she makes up,” he explained. Bill, Lorraine, and Sally all told me about the time when Margie gave their sister Veronica a black eye by punching her in the face—and then blamed it on Veronica’s running into a doorknob. “I saw her do it,” said Lorraine. “Then Margie and Veronica went into a bedroom for thirty minutes and came out laughing. Margie called everybody together and told us that Veronica had run into a doorknob.” Bill told me, “Veronica was too tall to have done that, but Margie convinced all of us kids that she had. Even Veronica was convinced.” California CPS often investigated the Cantrells, though nothing ever came of it. “CPS would talk to us,” Sally recalled, “but we were all brainwashed—too scared to say anything.”
However, I also found children of Margie’s who said the exact opposite. One of them was 29-year-old Laura Parker, who now lives in the Dallas area. She told me she had been a homeless teenager in Vacaville when the Cantrells took her in and became her guardians twelve years ago. “They’re awesome,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to have a normal life if I hadn’t had their example—how to be married, how to show affection.” I asked her about the allegations of brainwashing and physical and emotional abuse. “Absolutely not true,” she said. “There’s a lot of resentment and jealousy from those kids. They’re angry inside, looking for someone to blame. This is a couple who has taken in kids that come from the worst of situations.”
Jon-L Cunha, one of Margie and John’s two biological children, is another avid defender. “My parents are good parents,” she told me. “They’ve always been there for us, always made sure we had everything we needed. We were always happy.” She also didn’t understand why Sally, Bill, and Lorraine were saying those things. “These kids have very psychotic emotional problems.”
In a case that has polarized so many people, it was fitting that the central figure, Margie, would be so divisive. In February, I finally spoke with her myself. Even after all the terrible things I had heard, I found Margie charming. She laughed easily, cried when I brought up what Sally, Lorraine, and Bill had said, and was firm about never having resorted to physical violence with her children. “That’s just talk. I don’t punch kids in the stomach until they can’t breathe. I don’t hit them. I didn’t even spank my kids except a couple of times. Those allegations are absolutely just hate. [Sally] was never hit a day in her life. Lorraine was absolutely cuddled.”
Bill, she said, had “a personal vendetta” against her and her natural son Jacob. But why? “They’re bipolar,” she explained. “Their mother’s a schizophrenic. They were broken in the beginning. Their dad used to stand Bill up against the wall and shoot guns at him and drown and revive him. The stories they’ve told are unmerciful.”
All three children deny being bipolar. “Everyone that’s against her is bipolar,” Lorraine told me. They also deny telling Margie horror stories about their birth parents. Bill told me that he has seen the county records explaining why he and his sisters were removed from their home. “It was for neglect,” he said. “There was no evidence of guns or drowning.”
As this story was going to press, Margie called with some news. “Everyone’s trying to figure out what’s really going on with [Sally], Billy, the whole bunch of them,” she told me. “Why do so many people hate Margie?” Now she knew. She said that a friend had forwarded her a few e-mails between various people, including Bill; Lorraine’s husband, Paul; and someone named John Johnson who Margie said had been making false claims to CPS about the Cantrells since 2007. “I can’t let you see them,” Margie said, “but it’s all spelled out so perfectly. Oh, my gosh! You can’t even begin to understand the hate of man! These people made us live in hell, they called me Satan, they called me monster, they called me everything.” She began to cry. “But I understand now why they did it.”
She couldn’t tell me any more, though she said she had already called Murphy’s office and left a message and that next she was going to the feds. “Just like I marched into that dadgum police department when I found out they hurt those babies,” she told me, “I’m marching into the FBI today.”
Booger
On February 9, 2009, Solano County district judge Peter Foor dismissed the sexual abuse charges Sally had made against John Cantrell because they fell outside the statute of limitations; she had waited too long to make a formal complaint. Shortly after the verdict, I asked John if he felt vindicated. “Oh, yeah,” he told me. “The judge read the whole thing, every statement.” He and Margie now have permanent conservatorship of their five Texas children (Sheryl, now 11; Harlan, 10; Callie, 8; and two others), a fact that still bothers Wood County DA Jim Wheeler. “When it comes to who is going to be a foster parent in Texas,” he said, “from a DA’s point of view, it is not appropriate for a person who has been investigated for a sex crime to be a foster parent.”
That same week I paid a visit to Booger Red at the Clements Unit, in Amarillo. Except for the time he drove his mother to visit his sister in El Paso, the prison is the farthest from Smith County he’s ever been. “It’s a long way from home,” he told me from the other side of the glass in the prison visiting room. His eyes were wary and his red hair thinning and fading. I told him that Willie Nelson was also known to his childhood friends as “Booger Red.” “I didn’t know that,” he said, smiling for one of the few times in our visit.
He described his old life, working a series of jobs like cleaning floors, hauling scrap iron, welding, and sandblasting. In his off-hours he liked to drink beer and talk about cars. He knew Jamie Pittman because they had grown up along the same rural road. They weren’t best friends, but they did hang out a couple of times a month. “I got drug into this real deep, all because they knew my name, all because of ‘Booger Red,’” he said bitterly. As for the other defendants, he insisted that he had met Sheila and Jimmy Sones only once or twice and that prior to his arrest he’d never met Dennis Pittman.
I told him that a few months earlier, around Thanksgiving, I had gone to see his trailer. The brushy plot of land where it sits, which has been in the family for three generations, is also home to his mother, Linda, and a niece and nephew of his. Linda had given me a tour, and I recounted to Booger Red the conversation we’d had. “I tell you,” Linda had said, “if there was something fishy going on, I’d have known. I used to work at Brookshire’s, now I work at Wal-Mart, different shifts, different times. The thing is, if he wasn’t working, he was home. Every weekend night he would be out here, barbecuing, drinking beer.”
It made Booger Red happy to hear about my visit. I said that I’d met some other members of his family, and that they had all been perplexed that anyone could think that their Booger had been the mastermind behind a child sex ring. “He’s a hillbilly,” his sister-in-law had told me. “I’d get ready to take his picture and he’d bend over and show the crack of his butt. He’d come home from work, hang out outside for a bit and talk to people. At a certain point he’d go inside, grab a beer, get in his recliner, take off his boots, and watch Deal or No Deal. That’s how he was.”
Booger Red smiled at this description. “That was me,” he said. “That was my day.”
He sat behind the glass in his prison whites, rubbing his hand over his forehead. How he got from that life to this is still a mystery to him: “At first I thought, ‘I ain’t done nothing, I ain’t got nothing to worry about.’ I was forty, had never been arrested. Why would a man my age all of a sudden start doing something like that? It makes no sense. I feel the same way most people do about those kinds of allegations. I just wish people would stop and look at what was said.”
My Library
