Ohio: Sins of the Father
Patty
Dec. 13, 1972: John T. Engle Jr. and Edna Mae Jenkins marry in Pickaway
County.
Sept. 15, 1973: John "Johnny" T. Engle III is born.
Dec. 15, 1974: Robin Engle is born.
Aug. 14, 1975: Escanaba, Mich.,police report says John beat his wife and son
Johnny, put Robin in a refrigerator freezer until she stopped crying, and
left the premises saying he was going to get a gun.
Jan. 9, 1976: 13-month-old Robin dies choking on ground black pepper.
May 12, 1976: Michigan caseworker has home visit with Engles and reports:
"Mrs. Engle is a weak, possibly very frightened person." The report says of
John: "In obtaining psychiatric information from the Army, it appears that
he may very well have a continuing emotional problem which manifested itself
while he was in the service through his alcoholism."
July 5, 1976: Angela Marie Engle is born.
Nov. 10, 1977: Timothy Andrew Engle is born.
May 16, 1979: Rodney Dustin Engle is born.
July 11, 1980: Franklin County Children Services caseworker visits the
Engles at their Grove City apartment and reports: "There have been
allegations of John Engle drinking alcohol excessively and of him beating
Mrs. Engle and Timmy, but Mr. and Mrs. Engle have consistently denied these
allegations.
September 1980: Children Services puts Timmy in a foster home after a
relative notifies agency the boy "had his face smashed in" from abuse. Timmy
is later adopted.
Oct. 20, 1980: Adam Allen Engle is born.
Dec. 16, 1980: Franklin County Children Services caseworker writes to
Fairfield County Children Services: "I have much concern over the children's
safety in this family."
June 15, 1982: Joseph Jacob Engle is born.
Sept. 20, 1983: Daniel Jason Engle is born.
Aug. 1, 1984: Christopher F. Engle is born.
Jan. 4, 1985: Fairfield County Children Services caseworker reports: "Edna
had two black eyes. . . Children appeared adequately dressed and were eating
grapes. John (said) he is planning on getting Edna pregnant next week. He
said it was the right time. Edna (said) she wanted to have her tubes tied.
John said no to it."
April 5, 1985: County caseworker reports: "Easter baskets were delivered to
the Engles' home. Edna Engle had an injured foot that allegedly was caught
in the car door. The (trailer) odor was almost gagging to this case aide.
The two oldest children were acceptably dressed. The remainder were not,
lacking shirts, shoes, etc."
Dec. 10, 1985: County caseworker reports: "Alcohol abuse by father and
possibly mother, also. There have been many bruises, marks and cuts on Edna
Engle throughout the time that Children Services has had contact with this
family."
Feb. 6, 1986: County caseworker reports Edna's "right eye was blackened. She
stated that she had fallen."
July 17, 1986: County caseworker reports: "A quick visit was made to the
Engle home. A large greenish-yellow bruise was noted on Edna's left jaw."
Dec. 9, 1986: County caseworker reports: Danny Engle had arrived at school
with a bruise and abrasion on the front of his throat." The boy told
caseworkers " `Daddy is mean.' Also, `Daddy hurt Christopher.' "
Aug. 11, 1987: County Children Services closes case on the Engle family.
Reports: "Substantial progress has been seen by the Engle family."
May 26, 1988: Aaron L. Engle is born.
March 10, 1989: Christopher Engle dies after being scalded on March 7.
Aug. 11, 1989: Edna and six of the children go to a Lancaster battered
women's shelter after John bloodies Joey with a screwdriver. Edna leaves the
shelter a few days later and returns home.
Oct. 17, 1989: County caseworker visits the Engles after a source says John
is an alcoholic who is misusing food stamps for beer, cigarettes and gas,
and is rumored to have sexually abused his daughter. The caseworker
concludes: "Based on the fact that this caseworker found the children to
have adequate sleeping arrangements and food in the home, this case is ready
to be closed."
May 30, 1990: Fairfield County sheriff's officers find Edna with dried blood
on her face and shirt. She files a domestic-violence charge and officers
take John to jail. She drops the charge, writing that her husband promised
to "change his ways."
Feb. 11, 1991: Children Services receives report from a neighbor that Angela
had confided her father beats her when he is drinking.
March 4, 1991: John shoots Johnny in the foot. John is too drunk to drive so
Johnny drives himself to the hospital.
April 9, 1991: Children Services receives report that Rodney came to school
with a black eye.
July 9, 1991: John's sister, Carolyn, reports to Fairfield County sheriff
that her brother told her he killed Christopher.
July 18, 1991: Children Services investigates reports of abuse to Rodney and
Angela. The caseworker concludes: "At this time there were no benefits seen
in opening this case for ongoing casework even though there were three
referrals within a four-month period of time. . . . Case closed."
July 23, 1991: John and Edna are arrested. They are later charged with
aggravated murder. One child reports being raped by John in 1988. The other
children report being beaten.
March 9, 1992: The Engle family's rented trailer is burned to the ground in
an arson fire.
May 1, 1992: John pleads guilty to murder in his son's death. He is
sentenced to 15 years to life, plus 37 years for 13 related felonies.
Sept. 9, 1992: Edna is sentenced to 34-and-a-half years to life after she
pleads no contest to murder in her son's death and to 14 other felonies.
Fairfield County Common Pleas Judge Joseph Clark tells Edna she failed in
her obligation to defend her son "to the death."
Feb. 14, 1996: The Ohio Supreme Court reverses Edna's convictions, ruling
she was misled when she pleaded no contest, and orders a new trial.
Dec. 17, 1996: After Edna pleads guilty to involuntary manslaughter and 10
other felonies, visiting Judge Fred Shoemaker sentences her to six to 25
years in prison. He suspends the sentence and orders five years' probation.
July 14, 1999: Judge Shoemaker frees Edna from probation early. He says: "I
don't think she would hurt a soul. She's a meek, mild person."
Patty
http://www.dispatch.com/news/newsfea99/aug99/ENGLE22.html
Sins of the father
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The children of John T. Engle Jr. are dealing with life after years of
abuse; some are doing well, others are not
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By Mary Beth Lane
Aug. 22, 1999
LANCASTER, Ohio -- The young man with stringy blond hair was in the
cellblock at the Fairfield County jail when he spotted a familiar sheriff's
captain.
"Remember me?" he asked. "You came to my house."
Capt. David Mace remembered. The case of Rodney Engle and his family was
seared into his memory.
Years before their recent chance meeting at the jail, Mace had investigated
a death in a mobile home in Rushville in eastern Fairfield County.
The cobbled-together collection of sheet metal and wood was home to seven of
the 10 children born to John and Edna Mae Engle.
What Mace and other investigators learned at the dirty, rented trailer would
confound and disturb them, the courts and the public.
It was there, in July 1991, that they found the secret burial ground for
mildly retarded 4-year-old Christopher Engle. The boy had been scalded in a
bathtub by his father two years before, his body incinerated in a bonfire.
Investigators learned that all the children had been beaten regularly and
savagely. The chief weapons: their drunken father's fists; his belt and
buckle; a metal lighter; and a screwdriver. The children told investigators
that their father beat them the most, but that their mother used a broom and
a mop on their legs to make them obey her.
Both parents drank regularly; the father routinely downed a case of beer a
day.
Investigators also learned that another Engle child had died before the
family moved to Fairfield County.
Now, a decade after Christopher's death, his surviving siblings are coming
of age as the next generation of the Engle family.
And the sins of the father are now laid upon the children.
The next generation
Johnny, 25, and Rodney, 20, both of whom have ninth-grade educations, have
been in and out of jail in Franklin, Fairfield and Perry counties for theft
and alcohol-related offenses. Johnny and his wife, who have two young
children, are divorcing. Four years ago, she had him arrested, charging
domestic violence.
Sometimes, when Johnny and Rodney got drunk and visited their mother, they
hit her and called her a slut and a whore. It is what their father used to
do to her.
Angela, 23, lives with her boyfriend and has a little boy. She filed and
then dropped a lawsuit against her parents for abuse and one against
Fairfield County Children Services for failing to protect her.
Danny, 15, was adopted by another family and is in drug-and-alcohol
rehabilitation.
Joey, 17, and Aaron, 11, are living with adoptive families and are reported
to be doing well.
Adam left his foster home after he turned 18 last year and moved in with
Joey and his adoptive parents.
Their father, John T. Engle Jr., 47, is serving 15 years to life in prison
for murdering Christopher and an additional 37 years for 13 related
felonies.
He is in the Ross Correctional Institution in Chillicothe, where he earns 21
cents an hour operating a table saw in the prison's furniture factory. He is
eligible for parole in 2021.
He exchanges letters with some of his sons. He says he loves his children
and misses them.
The children's mother, Edna, 52, served almost five years in prison for
Christopher's death on a murder charge before the Ohio Supreme Court
reversed her 1992 conviction and ordered a new trial. In 1996, she pleaded
guilty to involuntary manslaughter. A judge sentenced her to prison but
suspended that and gave her five years on probation. Last month, he freed
her from probation early, declaring that she had been through enough.
She divorced John T. Jr. and reclaimed her maiden name.
Edna Jenkins now lives with relatives. Her attorney won't allow her to say
where for fear her sons may visit and beat her again. She misses her
children. She weeps easily and often. She attends counseling for battered
women and sees a psychiatrist once a month. And she has a recurring
nightmare of her former husband coming through a door to get her.
"It's the worst damned case of brutality I've ever heard, not just against
Edna, but against the children," said Fred Shoemaker, the visiting judge
from Franklin County who placed her on probation and then gave her clemency.
"You wonder why I lie in bed and don't sleep," Shoemaker said.
A holiday wedding
The story that haunts the Franklin County judge is told through voluminous
court records and interviews with those who lived it.
It began with the wedding of John T. Engle Jr. and Edna Mae Jenkins in the
Pickaway County village of Commercial Point in 1972. They married a couple
of weeks before Christmas.
This was Edna's second trip to the altar. She left her first husband after
two years because he beat her. She left John twice, but returned both times.
Edna, born in Kentucky and reared in Columbus, was one of 14 children. She
started first grade at 8 and was halfway through the eighth grade when she
quit school at 16. As a dropout, she worked in potato chip, clothing and
towel factories.
John, one of six children, was born and reared in Lancaster. He quit high
school to join the Army and served 14 months in Vietnam. The Army gave him a
medical discharge in 1972 and told him to get psychiatric help, but he
didn't. Later that year he and Edna met at a bar, introduced by her brother.
The beatings began about a year into the marriage, Edna recalls. She appears
in court records as a woman afraid to leave her husband because she has
nowhere to go.
She says that for the first seven years or so, her husband apologized
afterward -- just as her grown sons do now after they drunkenly hit her.
Later, though, John stopped apologizing.
"To me, I say, they're just trying to act like their dad," Edna said in an
interview. "They don't mean it, they would apologize the next day."
Then babies were beginning to come along. Johnny was born in 1973 and Robin
in 1974. The family left central Ohio to follow John's parents to Escanaba
in Michigan Upper Peninsula.
There, in 1975, Escanaba police responded to a call. John had put infant
Robin inside the refrigerator freezer until she stopped crying, and he beat
his wife and Johnny. He left, saying he was going to get a gun. A police
officer put up Edna and the children at his house for the night.
The next day, child-welfare workers placed Edna and the children in a motel.
Edna wanted a divorce. John wanted to reconcile. His sister, Carolyn, filed
a complaint accusing both parents of child neglect. A judge told the couple
to get back together and take care of their children.
By the next year, 13-month-old Robin was dead. She choked on ground black
pepper that had been poured down her throat. Escanaba police suspected John
in the baby's death but didn't have enough evidence to charge him.
And the babies kept coming.
Six months after Robin's death, Angela was born. Timothy followed a year
later. The growing family, again following John's parents, returned to
central Ohio in 1978. The Engles moved into a government-subsidized
two-bedroom apartment at Grove City's Urban Hollow.
Back at home
John was working sporadically. Over the years, he tended bar, drove trucks,
pumped gas and worked construction. He was an orderly at the old Orient
developmental center for a time. But none of his jobs lasted, and the family
relied on welfare and food stamps to survive.
Relatives and Michigan child-welfare workers told workers at Franklin County
Children Services to keep on eye on the Engles.
Timmy, a developmentally delayed toddler, had become a flash point for
John's rage. He said his son was retarded. A relative, seeing Timmy with
"his whole face smashed in," as she put it, called Children Services. The
agency put Timmy in a foster home; he later was adopted by another family.
John moved the family to Fairfield County in 1980, first to Carroll and then
to the trailer in Rushville.
Edna, who didn't drive, began to lose touch with her parents and siblings in
Franklin County. That's what John wanted, she said. When her father died,
John forbade her to attend the funeral.
Meanwhile, Franklin County Children Services workers wrote to Fairfield
County Children Services workers, warning them of the family now in their
jurisdiction.
The babies continued to arrive: Rodney in 1979. Adam in 1980. Joey in 1982.
Danny in 1983. Christopher in 1984. Aaron was the last, in 1988. Adam and
Christopher were born in the trailer.
When they went out, the parents took the older children to bars with them.
Johnny learned to drive early, and drove when his father was drunk.
Back at home, the $165-a-month trailer was small for the large family. It
had a kitchen, a living room, a bathroom and four small bedrooms. Angela had
one bedroom, the boys shared two bedrooms with bunk beds, and their parents
slept in a bedroom off the kitchen.
The trailer was more cramped when John's older sister, Carolyn, lived there
with her teen-age foster son for about six months in 1989, as Carolyn
recalled. It became even more crowded when Carolyn bore a child by her
foster son in 1990.
Beer and lies aplenty
The trailer had no hot running water. The family heated water in pans and
buckets on the stove for bathing, washing dishes and for John to shave with.
Edna did the laundry in the bathtub.
The parents' bedroom was near two refrigerators. At one time, a third
refrigerator sat on the patio. John stored cases of Old Milwaukee in the
refrigerators, and in his car's trunk. Sometimes he locked the
refrigerators. He drank a case a day, and any missing beer was cause for a
beating.
"Like he'll count his beer and a couple will be gone and he'll go and beat
my mom up," Rodney, then 13, is quoted in court records.
Rodney recalled another time when his father threatened his mother. "One
time he goes, `Angie, give me my gun.' So Johnny went and got the gun for
Dad. He goes, `You better find my beer or I'll shoot her.' And then he just
shoots the ceiling and all that. He didn't shoot her."
Another time, the father was angered when a neighbor told him that Adam had
shot at the Engle family's rooster with a BB gun. Adam tried to hide in a
bedroom.
"He picks him up by his legs and twisted it and then throws him off the bunk
bed," Rodney recalled. "I was going to the kitchen. Dad goes, `Rodney.' I
turned around. . . . I just seen this big fist coming after my eye."
Someone called Children Services when Rodney came to school with a black
eye. Rodney lied and said he had been in a fight on the school bus.
Lies were common.
When Johnny went to the hospital with a gunshot wound in his foot, he told
hospital workers and sheriff's officials that he had accidentally shot
himself. In fact, his father had accidently shot him while aiming at a milk
jug. Johnny drove himself to the hospital because his father was too drunk
to drive.
Angela had denied to caseworkers that her father abused her, although she
later told prosecutors and investigators that he had.
Child lightning rod
Christopher got the worst of it. His father hung him by his shirt from nails
and door knobs and hit him. His mother tried to get him down, "but Dad
wouldn't let her," Angela recalled at 16.
The boy wasn't toilet-trained and sometimes soiled himself. It was after one
of his accidents that his father put him in the tub and scalded him.
The other children saw the blisters on Christopher's body. John forbade Edna
to take their son from the trailer for help, and he beat her bloody with
pliers when she tried.
She put ointment and butter on Christopher's burns and gave him soda and ice
cream. He threw it up and cried.
The child disappeared after a few days. The other children asked about him.
John and Edna told them Christopher had gone to live with relatives.
In fact, he was dead.
His body was concealed in a hole beneath the kitchen floor until the
decomposing flesh reeked. Edna then buried his body beneath the trailer's
fuel tank outside. She told investigators later that John planned to put the
body out with the trash, but she thought her son deserved a burial.
John then burned his son's body with old furniture and tires.
That was March 1989. In August, Edna and six of the children went to a
battered women's shelter for several days after John struck Joey with a
screwdriver in the head so violently that the boy's pillow was soaked in
blood.
It would be two more years before the Engles' children learned what had
happened to Christopher.
The investigation into his death began when John's sister, Carolyn, told the
sheriff that her brother admitted killing the child. John made the admission
to her late one night outside her Lancaster apartment, crying drunkenly, as
they sat at a picnic table with a 12-pack of beer.
Afterward, a state special prosecutor found that Fairfield County Children
Services had failed to thoroughly investigate earlier reports of abuse in
the family. A charge of dereliction of duty was filed against an agency
supervisor, but he was acquitted.
"I tell you, this was a sordid case," Judge Shoemaker reflected recently.
Love prevails
For all of this family history, Rodney still loves his father. He keeps in
touch with him. He sent him an Elvis tape one recent Christmas.
"What he did, he did," Rodney said in an interview earlier this month at
Southeast Ohio Regional Jail in Athens County. He was finishing a 30-day
sentence for theft. Before that, he had spent 125 days in the Fairfield
County jail for another theft.
"He's my father. He's the only dad I got. I can't hate him for it. But he's
wrong in what he did. He told me he was sorry. I told him I forgived him."
Rodney said his father explained the scalding to him this way: "He told me
he was having a real bad Vietnam flashback. I believe that. He just
triggered off and didn't know what he was doing."
Rodney and Johnny look like their father. They drink like him. And they
punch like him.
"Me and Johnny get in a lot of fights. Bust each other's nose. We always
forgive each other," Rodney said.
Rodney likes the music his father used to play at top volume in the trailer:
Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Conway Twitty, Waylon Jennings, Jim Reeves.
Edna despairingly called it "that loud hillbilly music" and recalled that it
still rang in her head as she lay awake nights when she was in prison.
Her husband used to crank up the music when he beat her and the children.
"She hated Dad's music, man," Rodney said. "She would turn it down. That was
his drinking music. That's my drinking music, too."
Edna misses Rodney and all of her children. "It just feels terrible," she
said. in a recent interview. "I just miss them so bad. Could you tell all my
kids that I love them?"
Even so, she says the younger children are in better hands with adopted
families.
"They're better off where they are now," she said. "I couldn't give them the
things they need. I have nothing. Maybe someday. I'd like to be back with
them more than anything."
Her former husband -- despite his guilty plea -- now says he didn't kill
Christopher.
"I was the abused spouse in that marriage," he said in an interview Friday.
He also denied he had beaten Edna and the children. "I may have slapped her.
I never beat her," he said.
"All my kids are real good kids," he said. "I'd do anything in the world for
them. I just wish I was out so I could help them the best I could. They were
never in trouble. They always listened to their dad."
Those who heard the least from him, the youngest children, have the best
chance now to grow up to lead a normal life, said Kristen Haskins, a
forensic psychologist who evaluated Edna.
"With appropriate treatment and support over a period of time, they have a
chance," she said. "I think the younger kids have a better chance than the
older kids because they've experienced less (abuse) and have more formative
years left to make changes and have support and be kids who live in safety."
Rodney, however, expects to continue following his father's path.
"If I bust probation in Fairfield County, I go to prison for a year," he
said just before being released from jail this month. "I might just go out
and screw up and go to prison."
carriel...@gmail.com
rasch...@gmail.com
candyg...@gmail.com
> I cannot believe that is my family.
aaron...@gmail.com
aaron...@gmail.com
candyg...@gmail.com
smsal...@gmail.com
> What would you like to know
smsal...@gmail.com
rudy...@gmail.com
keith....@gmail.com
shery...@gmail.com
rasch...@gmail.com
Thank you
Rachel
