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DAY-CARE HOME WASN'T WHAT IT SEEMED BABY SITTER'S "JUNE CLEAVER' IMAGE CRUMBLES IN THE LIGHT OF INVESTIGATION
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Anchorage Daily News (AK)-February 3, 1991
Author/Byline: DUSTY RHODES
Daily News reporter
Staff
Edition: Final
Section: Nation
Page: A1
Janice Knight wasn't your average baby sitter. She was a "professional nanny/governess" that's what her classified ad said.
So the night after Christmas, William and Lee Ann Eissler and their two little boys went to Knight's home at 820 W. 70th St. for an interview.
And sure enough, the Eisslers were impressed by Knight. She had a neat, clean house, a beautiful Christmas tree, toys for the boys and all the right answers for their parents. In fact, she reminded them of a famous television mom.
"We just interviewed June Cleaver!" the Eisslers told each other as they left Knight's house.
A few weeks later, that image shattered.
On Jan. 17, about 1:30 p.m., Anchorage police received a call from Knight reporting an infant not breathing. At her house, police found 15 children, most of whom were less than a year old.
Officer Tony Provost was first on the scene. He arrived to find a man performing CPR on an infant. The man immediately handed the child to Provost, who continued CPR until medics arrived.
As the medics left with the baby, Provost looked around the house and noticed it was tidy. He saw four or five children in the living and dining area. He asked Knight to show him where the ill infant had been, and she took him to a bedroom where two other children were resting on the floor, one in a car seat. Knight told Provost the ill infant had also been in a car seat on the floor.
"There was one point in time when I thought I heard crying from the closet in that room," Provost says. "But she said no, it's coming from the master bedroom. It was shortly after that that Officer (Kevin) Ehm came back and . . . made the discovery of the other children in the closet."
Inside the closed closet, Ehm found two babies lying on a blanket, separated by a table leaf; a third infant "slot" made by another table leaf was empty. In the master bedroom, Provost found five children one sleeping on the bed, one sleeping on the floor, three strapped into car seats on the floor. In the tub in a bathroom, police found two car seats one empty, one holding an infant.
The children, police say, were rather quiet.
"They all seemed very observant. Their eyes would follow you as you moved around the room," Provost says. "But I didn't see anything (unusual) other than the fact that I normally associate babies with crying, and these kids were quiet until later on in the investigation."
Knight, he says, seemed "very much upset."
"My overall impression was that . . . she apparently cared about the kids."
The 4-month-old boy who had been reported not breathing was pronounced dead at Providence Hospital. His father and grandfather say the family isn't ready to talk to the media.
Autopsy results indicate the child died of viral pneumonia, and no charges have been filed against Janice Knight. Tom Johnson, an investigator for Anchorage Police Department's Crimes against children unit, says the case is still under investigation and criminal charges might be filed if evidence points to child abuse. The Division of Family and Youth Services, the agency that regulates day care homes, is examining its legal options regarding Knight, according to Gwen McAlpin, DFYS licensing supervisor.
The man who answered Knight's phone Wednesday night said she "wouldn't care to talk to" a reporter.
In addition to the 15 children found at the home, police say another infant was picked up by parents half an hour before police arrived. And while police were at Knight's home, another parent arrived to leave an infant in day care. Knight apparently planned to supervise at least 17 children that day.
The children's dazed state described by various police officers as "mesmerized," "very lethargic" and "flat affect" prompted Johnson to collect urine samples from all the children to be analyzed for drugs, although the autopsy drug screen on the infant who died showed no evidence of drugs. Johnson expects the FBI Crime Lab to complete the urine analyses within a few weeks.
"The children in the bedrooms appeared to act in a lethargic and unresponsive manner to what would be considered normal stimuli," Johnson said. "I'm not a psychologist, but one possible (explanation) is sensory deprivation."
The Jan. 17 scene at Knight's unlicensed day care home was a stark contrast to the flawless image she had presented to parents and authorities for at least six years: Her house was always spotless, her personal appearance was always charming and there were never more than five or six children in her home.
Or so it seemed.
How many children?
On Oct. 9, 1986, DFYS received an anonymous complaint that Knight had up to 10 children in her home.
The complainant, a mother who said she had been taking her children to Knight for "a couple of years and has been pleased," told DFYS she thought Knight had four or five infants, three preschoolers and two school-age children part-time in the mornings.
But the mother added she couldn't be sure how many children Knight took care of because Knight was "very tricky" that she "always takes a long time . . . to answer the door." The mother told DFYS she had once returned to Knight's home shortly after picking up her children and "another baby was all of the sudden present that . . . she had not seen before."
The mother went on to tell DFYS about a friend who had a 5-year-old son in Knight's care. The boy had told his parents that Knight "has them hide in the bathroom whenever the door bell rings."
Six days later, a DFYS licensing specialist, Cathy Katsel, and a municipal licensing specialist, Carol Barrier, made an unannounced visit to Knight's home and found three children, ages 3, 3 and 4, in the living room. The report doesn't mention investigators asking to look into other rooms in the house.
Knight told the investigators that she took care of two other children part-time and had Cub Scouts in her house as often as three times a week, but said she had "never had 10 children in care," according to Katsel's report.
The investigators told Knight she couldn't care for more than four unrelated children without a day care license, and Knight promised to reduce the number of children in care by Oct. 20. And in fact, on Oct. 18, Knight called DFYS with the names of children she had taken off her roster.
However, almost a week after the DFYS visit, another mother called the agency and said her 8-month-old daughter had also been present in Knight's home while investigators were there.
Less than a year later, on Sept. 2, 1987, DFYS received a second complaint about Knight. The complainant and his wife, both attorneys, had their 1-year- old child in Knight's day care and were alleging that their child had been abused in Knight's home.
DFYS has no jurisdiction over abuse in day care facilities, but since the couple said they believed Knight had six children in care (two more than the four allowed without a license), DFYS had grounds to investigate Knight once again.
On Sept. 14, Katsel and Barrier, the same two licensing specialists who had visited Knight before, made another surprise appearance at her door. Once again, they found three preschool-age children in the living room area. Knight told the investigators that she occasionally took care of her five nieces and nephews (ages 6 months to 10 years), but said she "never has more than four unrelated children in care," according to the DFYS report.
The licensing workers asked several times to see other rooms in the house, but Knight refused, saying her husband was sleeping. When the investigators insisted, Knight again refused, saying she would need to consult her attorney.
The next day, Knight called DFYS asking what she could do to "resolve" the situation so that investigators would stop coming to her house. She offered to close her day care, and in fact sent DFYS a letter stating the same that day.
DFYS has no record of any further complaints about Knight.
Long-running charade
The appearance that only a few children were being kept in her home was not a charade Janice Knight put on just for DFYS; it is the impression she maintained for parents who entrusted their children to her care, day in and day out, for years.
Rachel Allen, an X-ray technician, had her daughter in Knight's day care home a few days a week for more than two years. Her sister had two children in Knight's home full-time for even longer. The Jan. 17 incident shocked them both.
"You could have knocked us over with a feather," Allen says. "My sister . . . was sick for a week after this happened. She wouldn't come out of the house. She had trusted Janice."
Allen and her sister became Knight's clients when they both had babies about the same time. Knight was a close friend of Allen's other sister, and Knight said she had no other infants in her home. So Allen and her sister had no qualms about leaving their babies with Knight.
"Her house was always so neat and clean, I was actually amazed," Allen says. "Like, how did she keep her own appearance up? She must've gotten up at the crack of dawn. Her makeup was always perfect, everything matched. It just all seemed so normal."
But Allen and her sister never asked to see Knight's bedrooms.
"We really trusted Janice so much that we never forced ourselves into her back rooms and demanded to see everything. Everything seemed OK. I just never felt that I needed to do that," she says.
Over the years, there were tiny incidents that Allen now believes were clues like the way Knight appeared upset and "fidgety" whenever Allen picked up her daughter earlier than scheduled. But Allen thought she had simply disrupted Knight's routine.
"You can always justify it in your mind," Allen says. "You see what you want to see. You keep overlooking little things you don't like because you like what you see."
Her 4-year-old nephew was fond of Knight and still asks about her, Allen says. But a child's affection for Knight doesn't convince Allen that Knight was a good caregiver.
"He doesn't know that 15 kids in a room is not the way you do baby- sitting," she says.
Looking back which has become a near obsession for Allen she finds herself feeling guilty and foolish.
"She was a friend of our family's, but that still isn't an excuse," Allen says. "Why did it take a death for us to figure out what was going on over there?"
Knight was not a friend of Marilu Perry's family. Perry, a dental hygienist who describes herself as "a cautious person," checked the day-care home thoroughly she thought before leaving her children with Knight.
Although Perry needed only part-time care for her son and daughter, she interviewed Knight four times on the phone and three times in person. She even spent about an hour and a half with her children in Knight's home between 10:30 a.m. and noon the morning of Sept. 4, 1990.
For the next three months, she left her children with Knight three days a week, dropping them off around 8:15 in the morning and picking them up at 4 or 5 p.m. She never saw more than three other children in Knight's house.
Now, Perry wonders how she could have spent all that time there especially that 90-minute morning visit without once hearing a baby cry.
"I've gone over and over it in my mind, trying to think did I hear something? I don't see how I didn't," she says, "except her TV was always on."
That was one of the reasons Perry took her children out of Knight's day care in November that, and the strange behavior of her 3-year-old son. Each time she picked him up from Knight's house, he seemed "lifeless," Perry says.
"I thought he was just parked in front of the TV and bored out of his mind," she says.
But Perry recalls other small signs that perhaps something wasn't quite right at Knight's house: The first day she left her children there, Perry phoned in the middle of the day and Knight "sounded . . . annoyed." Knight also requested payment in cash, saying she didn't take in enough children to make her business profitable enough to pay taxes.
And there was that chronically long lapse of time between ringing the door bell and having it answered, Perry says.
"The first time my husband picked up the children, it was so long he almost left, thinking he had the wrong house," she says.
Still, the Jan. 17 discovery of 15 children in Knight's house came as a surprise to Perry.
"I'm extremely shocked," she says. "I guess I'm just really happy my kids weren't there very long."
"Hard to imagine . . .'
That's exactly what William and Lee Ann Eissler say as they sit watching their 2-year-old, Alex, run around their living room.
They interviewed Knight on the evening of Dec. 26 and found her home attractive, her price a bargain and her stated philosophy in line with their own.
"She had a Christmas tree trimmed in baby's breath and pink-and-cream Victorian ornaments," Lee Ann says. "I had never seen such a beautiful tree."
"And the house was immaculate," William says.
Knight offered a list of references and assured the Eisslers that, besides their two boys, she would have only two other children in her home.
When they asked to see where the children would take naps, Knight said she couldn't show them that bedroom because her own sons were getting dressed to go out. Since they had spotted a boy changing his shirt through a window as they arrived at the house, the Eisslers accepted her explanation.
Of the three potential caregivers they interviewed, Knight was the one who made the best impression on the couple. And that favorable impression held up through the next few weeks.
"I didn't know anyone actually wore aprons," William says, "but every day, she had on a different apron."
Like Perry, the Eisslers never saw more than three other children at Knight's home, except for the day two girls Knight said were her nieces were there. Lee Ann's sister picked the boys up two hours early one day, and said she also saw only two other children in the house.
Alex seemed to enjoy his days at Knight's house, and the Eisslers liked the fact that Knight had both boys bundled and ready to go every evening at 6:30.
"It looked like we were the last ones to pick up our kids," William says. "But now we don't know."
They noticed that Alex began refusing to go to bed with his door closed, but attributed the change to the fact that he's a typical 2-year-old.
"We can't pinpoint it to (Knight), but the timeline fits and it's a heck of a coincidence," William says.
"When you're dealing with June Cleaver," Lee Ann says, "it's hard to imagine anything could be wrong."
Record Number: 181603
Copyright (c) 1991, Anchorage Daily News