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As Jeanne Marie sat in her sunny living room she thought back to what she described as “the happiest time of my life”. It was almost exactly three years ago that she married Tom after nine months of dating.
“He was perfect, I fell in love with him on the first date” she said.
But Jeanne Marie held back her emotions because of her previous marriage.
“My first husband was a bum with a capitol B, a world class bum” she said. He abused everything he got his hands on, drugs, the system, me, his employer, everything and everyone.”
It was because of this pattern of abuse she finally left.
“I didn’t want it extended to our son, so the first time he even raised his voice to the baby because he was crying, I was out of here. I was gone. No way that bum was going to harm my son - no way,” she said.
That was nearly 20 years ago. Jeanne Marie moved back with her parents, got an education, got a job, raised her son and didn’t date.
“ I got asked out a lot,” said the petite brunette, “and I would go to parties or dinners, but no real dating.”
All that changed when she went on a double date with a girlfriend, her husband and the husband’s fishing buddy named Tom. Jeanne Marie described Tom “as a good, good man”.
Tom was also divorced. He had married as a teenager and after a couple of years his wife left for a “singing career” taking her infant daughter with her. He had failed at marriage and wasn’t really looking forward to doing it again until he met Jeanne Marie. True love prevailed over common sense, and Tom and Jeanne Marie were married in the spring of 1999.
“I’ll never forget our honeymoon,” sighed Jeanne Marie, "We went to French Tahiti and Hawaii for four weeks, four bliss-filled weeks. Seriously it really was a paradise, a dream. (Tom) even got to speak his high school French.”
The dream continued right through their first anniversary. Then Tom’s ex-wife returned to the east coast to begin a new job in Atlantic City. With her was their daughter, Nicole, now a young teenager.
“We knew right off (Nicole) has problems,” said Jeanne Marie. And (Tom) blamed himself for a lot of it.”
His ex-wife spent the intervening years either in Los Angles or Nashville, and Tom saw Nicole only about two or three weeks of the year, although he called weekly and was faithful in his child support.
He was thrilled when he learned his daughter was moving back to the area. According to his wife he started to make all sorts of plans. His happiness was doubled with the thought that now he could have a real family with Nicole and the new baby he and Jeanne Marie had. “I never expected to be a mom again after (Tony, her son), but I’m real happy I got a second chance,” said Jeanne Marie.
However, according to Jeanne Marie her stepdaughter’s attitude was “bad from the start.” She said it was more than “regular teenage angst.” Nicole spent weekends from Friday night until Sunday evening with her dad.
“We basically had a stranger living with us who Tom trusted completely. My mom warned us the first time she met her,” said Jeanne Marie.
Trouble began in earnest when Tom placed restrictions on his daughter’s comings and goings.
“As soon as she’d get here on Friday the pack would gather,” remembered Jeanne Marie, a reference to her stepdaughter’s friends.
Tom didn’t like the looks of some of her friends, and besides, he thought the weekends should be used to build the years of father-daughter bonds that he had missed. Nicole did not take the correction well. For several months the weekends were spent in a constant state of family feuding.
"There was no TGIF (thank God its Friday) around here. In fact I dreaded Thursday,” she said.
Through the coaching of one of her friends, Jeanne Marie and Tom believe, Nicole devised a plan to get the freedom she wanted. She would use Jeanne Marie’s son Tony, then 17, and the new baby as means to an end.
“This is how we became involved with DYFS,” said Jeanne Marie.
The state Division of Youth and Family Services receives hundreds of thousands of tips every year from persons with reports of child abuse and neglect, according to the agency’s own numbers. New Jersey laws allow the calls to be made anonymously.
Such a call was placed to DYFS about Jeanne Marie and Tom’s baby, who was a toddler at the time.
According to Jeanne Marie the caller told DYFS that “Jeanne Marie and Tom were not at home and had left the baby with Tony, the teenage son. The caller told the DYFS worker that the baby was crawling around outside naked and unsupervised.”
Jeanne Marie said she was told this by the DYFS worker who showed up at her house with the police half an hour after the call was received.
When the authorities arrived, the DYFS worker identified himself and demanded to see the baby, initially offering no explanation.
Jeanne Marie was home with her mother, stepfather and an uncle visiting from out of state. The baby was asleep in the crib.
She took the DYFS worker and the police officers to the bedroom and tiptoed into the baby’s room.
“It did no good to tiptoe,” she recalled. “This worker demanded that I take the baby from the crib and take every stitch of clothing off for her to examine.”
Jeanne Marie said that one of the younger police officers objected, saying he thought that was a little much. The DYFS worker told him to be quiet. “You’re just the guard.” Jeanne Marie recalled the DYFS worker telling the officer.
It was not until Jeanne Marie’s uncle threatened to call his lawyer that any sort of explanation was offered. Next the worker demanded: “Where is your teenage son? Was he watching the baby earlier?
Luckily for the entire family, Tony was in Florida on a school trip, and had been for the previous few days. Jeanne Marie provided proof to the worker of this. All the people present in the house sent in affidavits.
However, that didn’t put an end to their envolvment with DYFS. In fact it was just the beginning.
“I guess it was a mistake to tell them that I thought my stepdaughter was (behind) all this,” said Jeanne Marie “because the next thing I knew we were being told to go to family services.”
This newspaper spoke to Licensed Clinical Social Worker Carlyn Graham-Conover, of Focused Solutions Counseling center in Rio Grande, about the behavior of a 15 year-old calling authorities to get revenge.
“It’s not unusual for adolescents to make phone calls or complaints to outside agencies about something going on at home. Adolescents are not always aware of the ramification of making false reports. What is very important (for the authorities) is to take a look at the information in light of family background, past history and contacting any other professional or agencies that may have been involved in the past with them such as the family doctor, clergy, police department and the like,” said Graham.
Tom a usually easygoing guy, took umbrage at DYFS’s involvement, and went to see an attorney.
“ He felt that his constitutional rights had been violated. He didn’t do anything and now he had government agents roaming through his life. What happened to privacy?” Jeanne Marie said.
The lawyer told Tom that he should just cooperate with DYFS because “the way the law is set up you can’t win.” According to Tom, the lawyer said it did not matter about right or wrong, only about who had the power.
“And in New Jersey” said Jeanne Marie, “parents have no power.”
Besides the loss of privacy, the thing that bothered Jeanne Marie the most was that no one seemed concerned with finding out who made the initial accusations.
“How could this happen here? It’s like a witch-hunt or something,” she observed.
A Cape May County Prosecutor’s office worker said there were 13 allegations made against nine defendants in 2001 for making false accusations.
Lower Township Police Chief John Maher said it has been his experience that the few arrests his department has made regarding false reports have originated from either accidents or car-related incidents such as false reports of a stolen car.
“There are times, say during neighborhood disputes for example, that people are tempted (to accuse someone of something they didn’t do), but we try to make them aware that every time you sign or make a complaint you are personally liable, so we try to make them conscious that they are doing wrong. They think twice, especially when they learn they can be charged with malicious prosecution. Personal accountability deters people from lying.”
He would be in favor of an official protocol that would keep identification of complaints confidential but require that they put their name on it.
“If you put your name on something you really mean it. People think twice before they take steps that they know will bring attention to them and their allegations.” He said, “If it can be shown that your intent was malicious, that’s malicious intent. Over the years we’ve had a couple.”
Other municipalities had similar findings.
Middle Township’s Lt. Scott Webster said that he remembered “only one this year”.
Cape May's Lt. Robert Sheehan said, “ The problem is the difficulty in proving that they are not true. For example if someone says ‘so and so is dealing drugs’ or ‘the dog is barking’ and when the police get there the dog is not barking and there are no drug dealings in sight. These are tricky cases.” He couldn't remember any arrests for filing false reports.
North Wildwood’s Carol Gannett, the record keeper for police department, said, "I can’t even remember one in the last seven years. It would be zero.”
State Police spokesman Sgt. First Class Wayne Shelton said that most of the time false reporting was the result of an accident or car related. “In the past year there has only been one and it was recently,” said Shelton. “The charge is out there, it’s just not used.”
This newspaper contacted DYFS spokesman Joe Delmar and asked about the anonymity policy. “The most recent numbers I have are for 2000. There were 6,781 anonymous ones, of which 710 were substantiated. That is 10.5 percent substantiated. The most referrals are from police and state sources, 39,176 referrals of which 8,715 were substantiated. That is 22.2 percent.”
According to Delmar every call is investigated, anonymous or not, outlandish or not, no questions asked. He described the investigation to substantiate the claim. “There is a whole series of things we do, interviews of everyone involved, medical evidence of physical injury. For example if a child falls a certain way the doctors can figure out the resulting injury and if the injury presented is not consistent then that is evidence. After an initial investigation there are a variety of things we can do,” he said.
In the mean time Jeanne Marie and Tom are going to the counseling as required by DYFS.
“Maybe we can get something out of it,” said Jeanne Marie, who then corrected herself. “Maybe I can get something out of it. Tom has just shut down. It’s like he’s in shock.”
She said Tom does not understand how strangers could be allowed to get into all of his business, from finances to his sex life because of one anonymous phone call that was proven to be unfounded.
“He says he knows how the people in Palestine or China feel about losing their dignity,” his wife said. “We used to be very private people. DYFS ended that.”
Helen McCaffrey can be e-mailed at news@catamaranmedia.com or you can comment on this story by calling (609-522-0708, ext.250.)
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