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Friday, February 27, 1998
An angry reaction Almost instantly Lowry encountered a political firestorm. Twenty prosecutors gathered to demand that the governor and House Speaker Clyde Ballard, R-Wenatchee, not interfere with the Wenatchee cases. "There was an amazingly angry reaction from the prosecutors to my calling for an outside investigation," Lowry says. "They kept saying that anything that was done could damage their cases, could cause reversals. "I remember telling Clyde, 'Thank God, we've finally found people who are completely infallible.' They just knew they could do no wrong." As it turned out, the prosecutors had little to worry about from the nation's top cop. On Feb. 2, 1996, Reno wrote to the governor and said, "Based on a thorough review of the available material . . . these complaints do not present evidence of prosecutable violations of federal civil rights law." In Wenatchee, the defenders of Perez and CPS were elated. At news conferences, everyone -- including the Wenatchee Chamber of Commerce -- boasted that the Justice Department had investigated and found nothing wrong. The Post-Intelligencer has found, however, that federal agents did not question the children, the accused, the prosecutors, defense lawyers, nor even Perez. In fact, FBI agents, two of whom say they would have eagerly examined the allegations, questioned no one. "We were told not to," says Jon Eyer, former FBI senior supervisory agent, who headed the agency's review. "Our orders were to gather copies of court documents and ship them back to Washington. That's what we did," says Eyer, an expert in civil rights issues. Lowry says he was surprised when he learned that federal investigators questioned no one. "That's not what we believed was supposed to happen," he says. More than once in her career, Reno has taken action based on unproven allegations of child sex abuse. Reno has admitted her 1993 decision to send armored vehicles into the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, was motivated by reports that children there were being raped and molested. As state attorney in Miami, she pursued several cases that shared features of the Wenatchee investigations. In 1990, Reno prosecuted 14-year-old Bobby Finje as an adult on charges of sexually assaulting several girls at his church. The boy's 4- and 5-year-old accusers insisted the boy, the son of a Presbyterian church elder, danced nude on graves, ate babies, played with witches and could change the color of his skin. In that case, as in Wenatchee, the lead detective destroyed his notes of the interviews and the confession. Unlike many of those accused in Wenatchee, however, Finje was acquitted.
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