Last week, Cincinnati police entered an apartment and found 7-year-old William Evans dead in a closet and bound with duct tape. Prosecutors and the coroner say he had endured more than two months of abuse, including burns, blunt-force injuries, “bruises too numerous to count” and long stretches held underwater.
Read much of the coverage of William’s death and you’ll notice something strange. Reporters are extraordinarily careful about how they describe the adults accused of brutalizing him.
William’s mother, Kaitlin Evans, is charged with murder and endangering children. So are the two men who shared the home with them, Kirby Rankin and Nessa Keaney.
I call them men because jail records confirm it. Yet much of the news coverage incorrectly called them female, likely because the men were masquerading as women. To complicate it further, news reporting shows the boy’s biological father also claims to be a woman. Like the other men in William’s life, he wants to be called “she,” and we can expect some news outlets to indulge him.
That contrast matters. Several of the men in William’s life falsely presented themselves as women, and the press has largely adopted those descriptions. The question is bigger than pronouns: What happens when a society trains people to be afraid to say what they know to be true?
Such misbegotten courtesy sits at the center of everything that follows. A developmentally disabled 7-year-old spent his last two months in a closet in a household infused with a delusion as to who the grown-ups were. In that web of cruel confusion, he breathed his last.
William did not die without warning signs. He was trapped in a sick, dangerous situation that read like an entire flag store of red flags. Because of his developmental disability, William could not reliably tell anyone what was being done to him. But one call to child protective services, one visit that put an investigator inside that apartment, would have exposed the madness of what was happening and saved his life.
Begin with the family situation itself: a father who claims to be a woman, a mother in a relationship with two unrelated men who are also falsely living as women.
Then add Rankin’s criminal record. In July, he pleaded guilty to punching a woman in the face in a parking lot, then pulling a pistol on the good Samaritan who tried to assist. He was awaiting sentencing on that plea, free on bond, and still living with William. The boy was even in the parking lot when the crime occurred.
The assault victim’s husband pushed police and prosecutors to charge a felony and warned them about what was obviously a precarious situation for William.
I’ve prosecuted killers, and in death penalty cases, the state must prove the killer meant to do it. Rankin’s arm bears a tattoo declaring, “This Machine Kills Fascists.” Perhaps little boys, too. Prosecutors should bring the charge, because Ohio’s capital punishment statute was written for precisely this fact pattern: the purposeful, tortured killing of a child under 13.
Whether prosecutors take the path I suggest is less important than preventing the next child atrocity. And that starts with telling the truth, both about the physical impossibility of changing from one sex to another and about the fact that some family arrangements place children at far greater risk than others.
Most men who move into a house with another man’s child do right by that child, and America is full of stepfathers who earn their kids’ trust the slow way. But, in far too many cases, danger lurks. Research puts the rate of serious abuse among children living with two married biological parents at about three per 1,000. But for children living with one parent and that parent’s unmarried live-in partner, the figure was 33 per 1,000 — more than 11 times the risk.
That tracks with the child assaults I’ve prosecuted — only rarely was the biological father the culprit. More typically it was a live-in boyfriend or someone else without a close biological connection to the child.
Killings run the same direction, only steeper. A study in the journal Pediatrics reviewed every Missouri child under five killed by a caregiver across eight years. One in five had an unrelated adult at home, as compared to one in 100 of the children who died naturally.
Note what the studies also rule out: a single mother living alone with her child carried no elevated risk. The danger comes from the unrelated man.
In William’s case, we don’t know yet if the fact that the unrelated men in his home wore dresses contributed to the peril. But the social taboo against questioning how those men presented themselves may have helped keep his abuse hidden.
There may well have been someone who knew something and decided it wasn’t their business. Worse, perhaps someone saw a household where two men were masquerading as women and worried that asking questions or making a report would somehow get them branded a bigot.
Every state requires people like teachers, doctors, and clergy to report suspected abuse. Every state also lets the rest of us make a report. Childhelp’s national line, 800-422-4453, routes to the right agency in any state. Preventing the next child murder doesn’t begin in a courtroom. It begins when somebody sees something wrong and makes a call.
You need no proof or certainty. You only need to be willing to alert the agencies with the authority and expertise to see if a child needs help.
Sometimes telling the truth, even when it makes people angry, is an act of protection. The truth can bring life. Yet, even as he died, William Evans was surrounded by adults telling each other lies and pressuring the rest of us to avert our gaze. Better to offend an adult than fail a child.
