with tight, blond curls and blinking, blue eyes. The girls are proudly holding their new dolls in the old black-and-white photograph. The children’s father was absent that night, but he returned on Christmas morning.
“I remember it because of all the blood flying around,” says Camila. “My father broke my mother’s nose.” Fabian hit his wife because he was enraged that she had given the dolls to the girls without him there. “He left us that day. I heard he already had a new girlfriend, and he had kids with her, too. Sometimes he came around to see my brothers, but he told them he didn’t want to see us girls.”
Ruthie Anne was not even thirty, and she was all alone with her brood of seven with no one to support them. “We were her slaves,” Camila recalls bitterly, alleging that not only did her mother force the kids at a young age to cook all the meals and clean the house, she also beat them. At least one of her children “hated her,” though one daughter seemed to have a good relationship with her. The other siblings claim that that daughter was their mother’s favorite and not treated as badly as they were.
Camila was humiliated when she was a young teen and had a friend over for a visit. “We were laughing about something, and I said, ‘That’s funnier than sin.’ My mother started hitting me, screaming, ‘You think sin is funny? Sin isn’t funny!’” Ruthie Anne was a strict Mormon and took sin and hell very seriously. Camila remembers that they had a record album with a song that mentioned hell. “My mother inked out the word ‘hell’ on the album cover, and when the song played, she pushed the record player’s needle down to scratch the record wherever the singer said ‘hell.’” As a result, the record forever after skipped over that part of the song, and Ruthie Anne’s ears were spared the sound of the offensive word.
Camila confides that her mother whipped her most often with an old electrical cord with copper woven into the cloth coating. “When I was in labor with my first child, they told me to lie on my back, but I couldn’t do it. It hurt too much.” The nurses were shocked to find that Camila’s back was imbedded with little bits of copper, pieces that had broken off during the many whippings with the old cord. “They picked the copper out of my skin while I was in labor.”
While some of her offspring describe Ruthie Anne as sadistic, at least one of her kids is less critical and “marvels at her strength in raising seven children on her own.” While many today view corporal punishment as abusive, when a 1954 Gallup Poll asked Americans about the most effective punishment of their youth, forty percent answered “whippings,” a category that included everything from spankings to beatings with a stick. The fact that corporal punishment of children was common doesn’t mean it was not abusive, but it does mean that some of the abuse discovered in Liz Golyar’s biological family was not so unusual that it could be convincing evidence of a genetic predisposition toward violence.
Horror stories about the Zaragozate family include accusations of incest, rape, and murder. All of Camila’s brothers have rap sheets, and some of their offenses are violent. These are Shanna’s uncles, men she’s never met, and one has been described as an evil genius. He escaped from prison twice, once eluding authorities for five years before he was recaptured when an acquaintance snitched. “His IQ is just two points below Einstein’s” says Camila. “He could have used his brains to accomplish something positive. But he went down a different path.”
Their sister, Dee, however, was a joyful soul. Though her given name was Delores, when she was little, everyone called her Dee Dee. As she matured, she thought it sounded babyish, so the nickname was shortened to Dee. She loved to laugh, remember her sisters. “And she was a fixer. If someone had a problem, she wanted to fix it.” When a pregnant dog in the neighborhood was killed by a vicious dog, a veterinarian delivered the puppies in an emergency cesarean section. “Dee got one of the puppies, and it was so tiny. I remember she stole my doll’s bottle, so she could feed him!” Dee named the puppy Duke, and with her nurturing, he grew to be a big brown dog, resembling a chocolate lab.