How Could You? Hall of Shame Case Review- Stacy Beckman case

“It had been at least two days since the little girl had eaten, but when she woke up on that early April morning in 1995, she sensed her foster parents were gone, at least for the moment, and she seized the opportunity to cure the ache in her stomach.

She rolled herself out of her cocoon — a section of loose carpet on her bedroom floor — in which she slept to stay warm, and pushed her bare mattress up against her bedroom door.

The girl — just 9 years old and barely 50 pounds — recently discovered she could stand on the doorknob, reach over the top and unlock the latch installed on the outside.

After several months of near constant isolation, the girl noticed a pattern in her foster parents’ comings and goings. She would take advantage of those rare occasions when they weren’t home to break out of her room to steal a couple of handfuls of cereal from the boxes in the pantry and quench her thirst from the toilet or the family’s 20-gallon fish tank.

But the binge was cut short when the girl heard the sound of voices in the driveway. Frantically, she packed up the cupboard and scurried for her bedroom, hoping to avoid another beating at the hands of her foster father.

“I remember thinking this was how it was going to end. Shane and Judy were going to come home, find me stuck in my hole and probably snap my neck.
— Stacy Beckman

She glanced toward the front door and caught a glimpse of her 6-year-old brother through the window. He was climbing into the arms of their foster mother from the back seat of the family van. He looked sick and red, as if he had broken out into a rash.

Her head instinctively spun toward his bedroom, where he too had been confined for the last several months. The door had been uncharacteristically left open. There was nothing inside except a bare mattress and a small, round metal container placed in the middle of his room.

Immediately she knew they were doing the same thing to him that they were doing to her.

It was the first time she felt like she needed to get out of there.

She had to save her brother.

Stacy’s Story

It was a cold, wet and dreary day on Dec. 12, 2014, when Stacy Beckman shared from a corner table in Tommy’s Restaurant in Grand Island, Neb., how she literally clawed her way to freedom.

The weather was not unlike that Sunday in April 1995, she remembered, shuffling through copies of Greeley Tribune articles about her escape from a mobile home park just off 1st Avenue in east Greeley and the subsequent criminal trials of Shane and Judy Huxoll.

But life with the Huxolls didn’t start off so horrifying.

Stacy Beckman was born in 1986 in Holdrege, Neb., to Cindy and Jim. Her father was a chef at the Zephyr Cafe, a family-run restaurant, who also tinkered with cars in his spare time.

Although Jim Beckman took on most of the parenting duties, he also had a powerful thirst. He died in a drag racing crash exactly 29 days before his daughter’s 5th birthday.

Beckman quickly had to learn parenting skills to take care of her brother, Jeremy, who was a toddler.

When Jeremy woke up in the morning, Beckman would cook him breakfast, which usually consisted of cinnamon toast. When there was no food in the house, Beckman remembers her brother would eat butter a spoonful at a time.

Cindy Beckman could barely rouse herself to parent long enough to administer ear infection medicine to her daughter. Beckman had become prone to inner ear infections as a child, which resulted in nerve damage and caused her to become legally deaf.

Eventually the state took notice. Stacy and Jeremy were placed in foster care while the Nebraska courts set guidelines Cindy Beckman had to meet if she wanted to keep her kids, such as parenting classes, scheduling visitations and phone calls.

Cindy was not up to the task.

The state started searching for relatives to serve as foster parents to the two young children. Beckman’s grandparents tried to gain custody, but they were ruled out, possibly because of their age. Her Aunt Gloria and Uncle Frank also expressed interest in the responsibility, but she couldn’t remember them.

Then the Huxolls from Greeley emerged. Beckman was more familiar with them, so the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services made arrangements for the transfer.

At first, Stacy and Jeremy were embraced by the Huxolls, who had their own kids. On the weekends, they took road trips to the mountains, often times going to Estes Park, a favorite family destination.

Judy purchased Beckman her first set of hearing aids and entered her into beauty pageants. Beckman took third place in her first show, followed by back-to-back second-place finishes.

But things deteriorated quickly after that third beauty pageant. Although Beckman enjoyed those competitions, she was a tomboy at heart.

One day at school, Beckman was playing football with the boys until she sustained a crushing hit from a classmate who didn’t want her to play in the first place. After the play, Beckman retreated to the monkey bars.

When she got home, Beckman showed Judy the bruise she had on her hip as a result of the tackle. Judy fetched an electronic massager and told Beckman to put it on her injury. When she tried to remove it, Judy took over, a far away look in her eye as she pressed the rotating balls of the massager deeper into Beckman’s skin. The skin would ultimately break and bleed, leaving behind a quarter-sized scar she carries to this day.

Many years later, Beckman would read Judy’s court-ordered psychiatric profile. She came to the conclusion Judy became offended Beckman wouldn’t refer to her as mom.

“We used to call them mom and dad in front of friends, family and at school just because it was easier,” Beckman said. “But back at the house, I would always have to remind Jeremy that they weren’t mom and dad, that they were Aunt Judy and Uncle Shane.

“That (the massager incident) was the beginning of everything. I guess she just snapped.”

Over the course of the next couple weeks, Stacy and Jeremy would be pulled from East Memorial Elementary for home schooling.

Stacy’s room was stripped of everything except a bare mattress, a homemade couch and a full bookcase. Her bedroom window was boarded up and even her clothes were removed from her closet. A latch was installed on the exterior of her bedroom door to prevent any possibility of escape.

The Escape

After seeing her brother in their foster mother’s arms, Beckman set to work on her escape plan. The last time she was allowed to play outside, she noticed there was a hole in the siding of her trailer.

When she wasn’t catching regular beatings from her foster parents, Beckman consumed herself with tearing a hole in the rotted floor underneath her carpet with her bare hands. Once complete, she would escape her room, crawl underneath the trailer to the gap in the siding and run to the fire department for help.

It had only been a few days since she last saw Jeremy and already she had completed the hole. She bided her time, waiting for the perfect opportunity to attempt her escape, but after a particularly savage beating, Beckman decided she had had enough.

It was Sunday, April 9, 1995, when Beckman committed to making a run for her life. She woke up early, waiting to hear the familiar thumping of Judy’s footsteps, as she waddled toward the door to run an errand with Shane.

The sound of the door opening and then closing was followed by the motor of the family van firing up. Beckman listened closely until the crumbling of gravel under the car’s tires faded away, then she peeled back the carpet in her bedroom to reveal a hole roughly 8 inches wide by 18 inches long.

She tried to ease herself through, but her head was too big.

“I remember thinking this was how it was going to end,” Beckman said. “Shane and Judy were going to come home, find me stuck in my hole and probably snap my neck.”

But she wiggled her way through. Once under the trailer, Beckman immediately began crawling around, peeling sticky cobwebs off her face as she looked for the gap in the siding, but there was no daylight to guide her.

She began to panic until a flash of light caught her eye. The Huxolls had repaired the gap at some point after she was locked up, but there was enough room to squeeze her body through to the outside.

But Beckman had taken too long. Just as she made it outside, the family van pulled back into the driveway and parked. She ducked behind a rosebush and froze, hoping her foster parents wouldn’t see her.

They didn’t, but Beckman now had a new challenge on her hands. The rosebush was planted directly below the kitchen window. There was nowhere to run without being seen.

Beckman began rehearsing a new escape route in her head, trying to picture which one of her neighbor’s mobile homes would best conceal her from sight. Just then, her next-door neighbor pulled into his driveway. She froze again as he looked down at her.

Beckman prayed the neighbor wouldn’t recognize her, and he didn’t. The girl shivering before him looked nothing like the Stacy Beckman who had been living next door for the last three years.

This girl looked no more than 6. Beckman’s once long hair had been chopped short. She was dressed in nothing more than a pull-up diaper with a gray, pink and white throw blanket wrapped around her shoulders. The blanket only barely covered her abnormally bony frame, which was covered nearly head to toe with bruises.

“Are you OK?”

“Yes,” Beckman said, speaking deeply trying her best to disguise her voice.

“Where are your parents?”

“I don’t have any.”

The neighbor scooped Beckman up and carried her several mobile homes away to another neighbor’s house where a single mother and two girls she used to play with lived. The woman immediately poured Beckman a bowl of Corn Pops, which she inhaled while the grownups argued about what they should do.

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. Standing in the window was Shane holding a set of Jeremy’s clothes.

Beckman’s heart sank as he dressed her quickly and stumbled to explain to the neighbors why she had so many bruises. They tried to keep Beckman at the house as they watched Shane pull her away in pants that didn’t reach down to her ankles and a sweatshirt that barely hung down to her waistline.

“They didn’t want me to go and I pleaded with them, but Shane wouldn’t have it,” Beckman said. “As I walked back to the trailer, I felt like the world got flipped upside down; that darkness was coming. I thought Shane was going to kill me.”

Judy was standing on the porch of the trailer, trying to get a sense of what had happened or what might happen. Although they didn’t say a word to each other, Judy could read everything she needed to know from the expression on Shane’s face.

Beckman was too distracted to notice before, but she now realized her neighbors had in fact called the police.

Help was finally on the way.

Daddy’s Girl

One of Beckman’s favorite memories of her father took place shortly before his death.

She, her brother and her mom had just returned home from an errand. Beckman’s dad stood up to get the door, but her mom hadn’t even taken a step inside before starting an argument with him.

Beckman tried to interrupt the fight by asking her dad to get her the packet of Kool-Aid on the counter. He told her she could have it if she figured out how to get it herself.

Beckman pushed a chair into the kitchen and climbed onto the counter to claim her prize. She then climbed into her father’s lap, who had moved to a chair in the living room. He opened the Kool-Aid and she licked her fingers, eating it straight from the packet.

Beckman’s dad put his arm around her as he smiled and watched her eat her Kool-Aid, possibly taking a moment to admire those simple pleasures people lose sight of as an adult.

Beckman’s favorite memory of her dad was soon followed by her worst, when she was staring at him in his coffin at his funeral.

“I remember how disappointed I felt,” Beckman said. “I was going to be Cinderella for him for Halloween because he always called me his princess. I was always daddy’s little girl.”

Beckman’s relationship with her father may have come to a tragically early end, but she maintains the two have always had a strong bond and that he’s protected her during her most desperate moments.

He was there the day Shane Huxoll lifted Beckman up off the ground by her throat, cocked his arm back and delivered a full man-sized punch to her chest. The blow knocked the wind out of Beckman, but she wouldn’t give Shane the satisfaction of knocking her unconscious.

He was there the day the Huxolls installed an addition on their trailer, causing a small gap in Beckman’s bedroom. Workers never nailed the carpet they disturbed in Beckman’s bedroom back down to the floor, giving the young girl something to roll up in at night when she was cold. It would also allow water to drip into the room, rotting the wood that ultimately provided an opportunity to escape.

And he was there in that moment of panic on that April day, providing that brief flash of light that caught Beckman’s eye and directed her to the damaged siding, allowing her to escape to the outside.

The arrests

If the Huxolls sensed the jig was up the day Beckman escaped, they didn’t make any desperate attempts to try to hide their actions of the last several months.

When Greeley police arrived on scene, they found Beckman watching TV, which she was never allowed to do, and still dressed in her brother’s clothes. They asked her a bunch of questions about what had happened that day and then took a look at the children’s rooms.

Beckman’s father made another spiritual appearance that day, giving his daughter the courage to tell police over the course of the next two days about all of the atrocities she had endured the previous three or four months.

They learned about how Beckman was taken out of East Memorial Elementary for home schooling, if you could call it that. Officers learned Beckman’s “education” mostly consisted of crossword puzzles, math problems and learning how to tell time on the analog clock in her room.

They learned that every wrong answer resulted in a beating from Shane. They learned how Shane over time graduated from using his hand to using his belt, leaving behind marks from the flower print of the belt on the girl’s skin.

They learned that Beckman almost never ate breakfast and would sometimes go as long as two days without food. When she was fed, she received a 7-Eleven burrito and was not allowed to eat outside her room.

They learned about the time Beckman was caught drinking from the toilet and how Judy punished her by removing all of her clothes from the closet and making her wear pull-up diapers. They learned Stacy would go so long without a fresh diaper that on those occasions she would try to steal herself some food, she also searched the trash for an empty container or a tea cup that would go unnoticed that she could use later to relieve herself. Beckman hid many of those containers in her closet.

Officers also learned about the one time Beckman became so desperate for water that she tried to drink the contents of one of those teacups.

They learned that although Judy often instigated Shane to carry out the beatings, she took part on occasion, as well. Her favorite form of punishment was to stand on Beckman’s feet and knock her down. She’d then pull the sometimes-concussed child back up onto her feet by her hair, ripping out huge clumps in the process.

Greeley police continued to build its case for several months. Investigators gathered evidence, conducted interviews and had Beckman examined by all types of medical and psychological professionals who specialized in child abuse.

The experts concluded Beckman sustained serious bodily injury because of malnutrition as well as severe physical, mental and emotional abuse.

On Aug. 17, 1995, the courts signed off on a warrant for the Huxolls arrest.

They were in custody that same day.

Closure

After their arrests, the Weld District Attorney’s Office charged Shane and Judy Huxoll each with one count of child abuse causing serous bodily injury, a Class 3 felony punishable by four to 12 years in the Colorado Department of Corrections.

Prosecutors then focused on the business of winning Beckman a conviction while she was immediately placed in foster care and intensive therapy.

Prosecutors and therapists debated whether to put Beckman on the stand. She wasn’t ready to talk about her experiences publicly, but she didn’t give herself much of a choice when shortly before the trial was set to begin, she divulged a bombshell not previously known by investigators.

It took about a year before Shane and Judy’s trials appeared on the district court docket. As the date approached, Beckman began to suffer from nightmares. Her therapist pressed Beckman to talk about what was bothering her. Beckman revealed for the first time that on one occasion Shane had raped her.

The timing of the incident is hazy, but Beckman remembers Shane was testing her on her multiplication tables — giving her a minute to answer 100 questions and whipping her for every one she got wrong.

She missed seven the first round. She did a little better the second. As Shane prepared to time her for the third round, Stacy went back to using her mattress as a desk, as she had during all of her homeschooling. Shane took a seat on the homemade couch behind her.

Halfway through the third round of testing, Beckman saw Shane stand up out of the corner of her eye and unbuckle his belt. She braced for what she knew was coming, but this time he didn’t pull off his belt. He unzipped his fly and let his pants fall down to his ankles.

Beckman’s therapist called the police. Investigators made arrangements to have Beckman tested at the hospital and learned she was telling them the truth.

Intense therapy shifted to rigorous trial preparation. Everyone from the people at the foster care facility to her caseworker to her therapist to prosecutors and even the presiding judge got involved, Beckman said. But she wouldn’t get the chance to tell her story as she had been promised.

The DA’s Office presented the new evidence to the Huxolls’ attorneys. They had to in order to comply with discovery laws. Shane and Judy, knowing they would likely receive the maximum if convicted at trial, quickly made a deal with the District Attorney’s Office. They were sentenced in August 1996 to four years in prison, the statutory minimum for a Class 3 felony conviction.

The District Attorney’s Office stated at the time that it accepted the deal to protect Beckman from reliving the abuse she endured by testifying. But Beckman felt robbed. She still does.

Judy Huxoll would ultimately be released on good behavior before serving out her four-year sentence. Shane wasn’t as lucky and had to comply with the added humiliation of registering as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

“They could have handled it a lot better,” Beckman said. “I didn’t want to testify at first, but at the end I begged them to let me. You don’t prep a child to testify in court about things they’re not ready to talk about and then take that away from them at the last second.

“I think if I had that closure, if I had that opportunity to look them in the eye and say ‘you did this to me,’ I wouldn’t have had so many problems growing up.”

The stars would align many years later when the death of a relative brought Beckman and Judy together at a funeral. Stacy confronted Judy and was able to speak her mind. She has not had the same opportunity with Shane.

“I will go and confront Shane someday,” Beckman said. “The one and only thing I would need to say, the only thing I think I could say before losing control is, why are you going to lie?

“You don’t lie about something like that. You do not get to tell people that I was the one who came onto you because I didn’t know anything about how to do that at 9 years old.”

Lessons Learned

Stacy Beckman still finds herself becoming uncomfortable in public places when men give her what she calls the “Superman stare” — the X-Ray vision that allows them to see through to all of her deepest insecurities.

She even admits some days she has difficulty hugging her boys, now that they’re at the age she was when she was abused.

But as she closes in on the age of 30, she also recognizes she’s making progress. She can walk down the street with confidence and by all accounts she is an attentive mother. She believes in being a good parent, not her son’s best friend, and believes at times in tough love, but she never shies away from helping them with their homework, although she still has a mental block for math.

The most important lesson she hopes to pass on to her kids is the importance of education.

“They see how much I struggle and how many hours I work with two jobs,” Beckman said. “I tell them they can’t even get a job today without a high school diploma. By the time they enter the workforce, they may not even be able to get a job without going to college.”

Beckman also learned the value of forgiveness and second chances. She credits those lessons to her second set of foster parents, Jim and Michelle Stifle, who still reside in Weld County. Although she thinks her parents could have been stricter with her, she credits Michelle for instilling values to be a good mother.

“All of the lessons she was trying to teach me I’m now trying to pass on to my boys,” Beckman said. “She really molded me into the person I am today, the mother I am today.”

Beckman also has learned how to accept people’s help. She admits she rebelled against state-mandated therapy, at least until right before her 18th birthday when she met her last therapist, Kay Day.

“I basically walked into her office and told her that I had been in therapy for years and that I didn’t think I needed to be there,” Beckman said. “Kay said fine, turned around and started working on something at her desk.

“I broke down. I spilled everything.”

Day piggybacked off of Stifle’s lessons about forgiveness and second chances by adding not to give anyone the benefit of the doubt without making them earn it.

“Do you think your perpetrator thinks about you? Do you think he loses sleep over what he did to you?” Beckman remembers Day asking. “He doesn’t think about you, so why are you going to let him continue to destroy you and keep you from reaching your potential?”

It was a valuable lesson, Beckman said. For the first time, she recognized she was avoiding people’s help because they wanted to erase her past. A past she thought defined who she was as a person. If there’s one thing she hopes to leave as a legacy, it’s to convince people who have been abused to let their guards down and accept the help people are offering.

“There’s nothing wrong with accepting help,” Beckman said. “They’re not doing it because they think you’re broken, they’re doing it because they recognize your potential.

“I am heading in the right direction because of the support I’m receiving and that’s what people should focus on. What happened to me is not who I am. It’s not even who I was.”

Statistics also play an important role in how Beckman reflects on how she has coped with her abuse in the past and the strides she is taking now to grow as an adult and as a parent.

Compared to those who are raised in loving and supporting households, children of abuse tend to turn to drugs and alcohol to cope with their experiences as they age. They’re also more likely to drop out of high school or get pregnant before they’re ready to raise a child. They’re also much more likely to find themselves in intimate relationships with abusive partners.

Beckman doesn’t shy away from the fact that she’s personally proven every one of those statistics to be true.

Yes, she turned to marijuana, methamphetamine and alcohol to cope as a teenager.

Yes, she dropped out of high school.

Yes, she first got pregnant at 18.

And yes, she married and is now divorced from two abusive spouses.

But there is one statistic she is determined to prove will end with her — that abused children are more likely to abuse their own kids when they become parents.

“That is one statistic that will never be me,” Beckman said. “Your priorities change when you have a child. You realize you have this gift you’re responsible for, to take care of and to show them the ways of the world.

“The cycle of abuse in my family ends with one generation. It ends with me.””

Almost 20 years after escaping abusive foster parents, Stacy Beckman has found support and a different path[Greeley Tribune 1/4/15 by Joe Molyan]

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