also revealed her husband had long-term drug problems and had been using his position as a security guard to procure a regular supply of cocaine. The criminal trial that followed was ugly and rancorous and made worse because it required testimony not only from his wife but also Magdalena. Mr. Ventura was jailed for eighteen months.
Mrs. Ventura rebuilt her life with rather disconcerting speed. All within the space of time her husband was in jail, she managed to file for divorce; meet and move in with another man, whose name was David Navarro; relocate to a new community about an hour’s drive from the city; and give birth to a third daughter, Mona.
Cassandra had been three at the time of her father’s imprisonment. Two years later, when she was in kindergarten, she came out of school to find a car waiting for her. When the man in the driver’s seat said he was Daddy, she hesitated. She didn’t actually remember her natural father well, so she didn’t know if this was him or not. When he tried to call her over, she replied that she needed to wait until Magdalena came out. He said, “I have some of your old toys here. I thought you might want them.” So she went to see.
When Magdalena came out from her third-grade class, there was no sign of her younger sister. Her mother was called. The police were called. Nothing. No trace. Cassandra had disappeared.
The Navarros’ efforts to find Cassandra were unrelenting. Police bulletins, news reports, searches over several states, posters in the local grocery store, on the side of milk cartons, efforts through Mr. Ventura’s parole officer – everything anyone could think of was tried in an effort to find out what happened that afternoon – but nothing turned up. It was as if Cassandra and her father had, as the old cliché goes, simply vanished into thin air.
Twenty-six months passed without any word of Cassandra’s whereabouts. Then three states away, a young man working in a 7-Eleven convenience store discovered a small girl in the alley behind the store going through their garbage. Suspicious that she was there to steal something, he gave chase when she tried to run away, and caught her. When she wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t answer his questions about her name or where she lived, he called the manager. The manager realized immediately that the girl was too young to be alone in such a place at that time of day, and he was concerned about her unkempt appearance; so he called the police. It was Cassandra.
No one ever knew precisely what had happened to her during those twenty-six months. Cassandra was totally mute for the first weeks after her return. Her father, when found, was in a drug-addled stupor, and he seemed incapable of giving much information beyond indicating the motive behind the abduction had been revenge against his ex-wife. “I wanted to make her suffer for what she’d done” was his only real explanation.
Cassandra had been not quite six when she was abducted and was now approaching eight. She was very dirty and suffering from malnutrition, giving the impression she had spent at least part of the time living rough or in very poor conditions. No one knew whether this was in the company of her father or others, because her father gave a muddled, inconsistent picture and Cassandra said nothing. Even when she did begin to speak again, she usually refused to talk about the abduction. The few things she did say turned out to be mostly lies.
The longed-for homecoming proved to be nothing like Cassandra’s mother had dreamt about for so long. In place of the cheerful, loving daughter who had been abducted that autumn afternoon, she welcomed home a wary, mute stranger.
Cassandra found it impossible to settle back into her former life, which, in fact, was not her “old life” at all, but rather a completely different one from what she’d been living before the abduction. She hated her stepfather and wouldn’t tolerate him in the room. She refused to talk to him or even look at him. She fought constantly with Magdalena and did many small, nasty vengeful things to her. With her new sister, Mona, she was so spiteful and short-tempered that her mother didn’t dare leave the two of them alone together.
Cassandra startled easily, was prone to unexpected tantrums, suffered horrific nightmares, and alternated between shouting at everyone and not speaking at all. She lied constantly, stole from everyone in the family, and had chaotic eating problems, tending to hoard and hide food, or else taking too much, consuming it too fast, and vomiting it back up, occasionally while still at the table. She also had digestive problems and was plagued by many other minor illnesses associated with a compromised immune system.
In addition, it appeared Cassandra had not attended school at all during the time she was gone. Indications when she was in kindergarten were that Cassandra, like her elder sister, would be an able student. Old enough to be in second grade when she returned, she was now behind in everything and could neither read nor do basic adding and subtracting.
Cassandra’s mother and stepfather attempted to deal with the situation as appropriately as they could. Her parents decided to restart Cassandra’s education from the beginning, so she was placed in first grade, a year below where she should have been for her age. This still left plenty of catching up, as the academic year was well under way when she returned, so she was also given extensive resource help. To deal with the psychological trauma of the abduction, Cassandra had individual therapy with a child psychologist for twelve weeks, which was the length of time covered by the Navarros’ insurance.
And Cassandra did start to recover. She began to speak reliably again. First it was at home and then, more slowly, at school, although she could still be oddly unpredictable and sometimes went silent for hours and occasionally even days. She was making reasonable academic progress and generally keeping up with her class. At home she was still difficult and prone to tantrums, but the family felt this was improving, too.
Yet …
It was Cassandra’s third-grade teacher, Earlene Baker, who kept pressure on the Navarro family to seek further help for their daughter. Mrs. Baker found Cassandra’s behavior disconcerting and difficult to cope with in the classroom. She was most concerned about the amount of very manipulative behavior Cassandra engaged in, which mostly took the form of lying and “storytelling.” A number of the lies, she said, seemed completely pointless, such as coming to school in a pair of running shoes she wore almost every day and insisting they were new. Many others were malicious, such as on one occasion when Cassandra had purposely hidden her schoolwork and then told the school staff that another child had stolen it from her. The only thing that had saved the other child from serious trouble was a playground aide who had happened to notice Cassandra placing something carefully into a trash bin outside the school and had later gone to investigate. Most of the lies, however, were about hideous but outlandish things, like her little sister falling in the canal and being swept under the culvert but then being rescued by an unidentified boy who just happened to be passing.
Mrs. Baker said she was aware that in all likelihood Cassandra had suffered terribly during her abduction and she tried to take this into account, but even so, why would a nine-year-old spend recess cheerfully helping the school janitor sweep leaves and then come in and say he had tried to push her down the stairs?
Mrs. Baker also wondered if Cassandra could be suffering petit mal seizures. It was a bit of joke with everyone at school, even Cassandra, that she “should have been born blond” because she could be very “ditzy” – not paying attention to what was going on around her, not remembering obvious details about ordinary things. Mrs. Baker didn’t always find the behavior funny. She felt the forgetfulness, which could be very abrupt and out of the blue, was often manipulative in nature and just a further extension of the lying. Occasionally, however, she said Cassandra did genuinely seem not to remember things that had just happened, and this occurred often enough for it to interfere with learning and social interactions. This led Mrs. Baker to wonder if there could be a neurological underpinning for such behavior.
Cassandra’s erratic speech also bothered her. Most of the time, Mrs. Baker said, Cassandra was chatty to a point of being verbose; however, every
