Hell House Revisited

Latest News: Vanessa and Ray Jackson are being prosecuted for starving their adoptive sons. But the kids may have starved themselves—as the state of New Jersey looked on and did nothing.

A few weeks ago, Raymond and Vanessa Jackson—the New Jersey couple accused of starving their four adoptive sons—received a plump envelope from the state’s Division of Youth and Family Services. The Jacksons are used to such communiqués. The state is seeking to terminate their adoption rights over the four boys; it has also removed two adopted girls and a foster daughter from their large home in Collingswood, a comfortable village near Camden. But the envelope contained none of the now-familiar legal notices or court filings. Instead, the Jacksons found four handmade greeting cards forwarded from Keziah, 13, one of their adopted girls now living with a foster family. The cards marked events long past: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, an anniversary, and a birthday. It’s been more than a year since the Jacksons have seen Keziah, whom they adopted when she was less than a week old. As a condition of bail, a judge ordered them not to communicate with any of the children or come within 500 yards. It had taken the state this long to forward Keziah’s greetings.

“We couldn’t answer the letters, because of the restraining order,” Raymond Jackson told me earlier this month, going public for the first time since the couple’s legal odyssey began. “She has no idea how much these meant to us.” He reached for the envelopes, which were festooned with heart-shaped stickers and girlish affirmations like MISS YOU! and SUPER PARENTS!

“She wrote, ‘Have a good Father’s Day without me. Don’t worry too much about me, I’m doing great,’ ” Jackson read out loud, his voice breaking noticeably. “ ‘I still love you very much. Sometimes I cry about you. Hugs and kisses, Keziah.’ ” He reached for another card, on which Keziah had written, “I still love you very much, no matter what happens—I love you till the day I die.”

Keziah’s package has arrived at an especially charged moment. Indeed, in the next few weeks, a family-court judge is expected to sever parental rights over the adopted children. And sometime next year, the Jacksons will stand trial on 28 counts of assault and child endangerment. They could spend the rest of their lives in prison.

The star witness against them will be their oldest adopted boy, Bruce, who launched the Jacksons into tabloid infamy last year when he slipped out of the family home on a late-night mission to scavenge food from neighborhood trash bins. He was disoriented, shoeless, cold, and extremely malnourished. At the time, Bruce Jackson was 19 years old, but no one knew it to look at him. When Collingswood police officers arrived on the scene, they estimated he was 7 years old; he stood only four feet tall, and once they took him to a local hospital, they learned he weighed all of 45 pounds. Later, when police arrived at the Jackson household, they found three other stunted and scrawny boys. The combined weight of all four—Bruce; Keith, 14; Tyrone, 10; and Michael, 9—was just 136 pounds, about as much as a full-grown Rottweiler. Some had head lice and badly rotting teeth.

Original Story