Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 1, 1994 TAG: 9403010111
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CLINTWOOD LENGTH: Medium
Owens admitted that she and her husband agreed to sell either the boy due to be born in a month for $20,000 or her infant daughter for $25,000.
The couple ran a newspaper advertisement in December 1992 asking anyone interested in adopting a baby to contact them. A person who responded to the ad tipped off police, who set up an undercover operation.
Dickenson County Sheriff's Office investigators Ron Kendrick and Ella Mullins, who posed as a childless couple, said James Owens made the sales pitch. They said Stephanie Owens showed them an ultrasound picture of the unborn boy, already named Ira James.
After their arrests, James Owens hanged himself in his jail cell and Stephanie Owens' children were given to foster parents.
After accepting the plea agreement, Dickenson County Commonwealth's Attorney Donald Askins said Owens "has lost her husband and has lost her children. I don't know if she'll ever get her children back; it's very doubtful. In those terms she's suffered some for this."
Askins said Owens' husband instigated the sale. "If it had not been for her husband, she would not have come up with this herself. She was emotionally dependent on him and subjugated to him."
In her diary, Owens wrote that she thought about killing herself because her husband wanted to sell their 9-month-old daughter. But she also wrote that she and her husband perhaps were incapable of taking care of the girl and the second child she was carrying.
In a letter to his father, Owens said he had lost his job as a hospital security guard and wanted to go to Alabama, where Stephanie Owens' aunt promised to line up jobs for both of them. They were selling everything, he wrote, but said he was just "playing a game" with the strangers who said they wanted to buy a baby.
Owens was tried in juvenile court because she was 17 at the time of the offense, but she faced a maximum sentence of 12 months in jail because she is now an adult.
Judge Susan Bundy gave her the maximum sentence but suspended it as long as Owens complies with the plea agreement's terms. She is to see a psychiatrist 52 times, complete substance abuse counseling, take parenting classes, get the equivalent of a high school diploma and keep a job.
Askins said rehabilitation is more likely with Owens on probation than it would have been had she been sent to jail.
Gerald Gray, an attorney for the county Department of Social Services, said he planned to ask the judge to take away Owens' parental rights and arrange the adoption of Victoria and Ira by their foster parents.
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.