The Victorian house on Irving Street was a chamber of horrors — and padlocked, deserted and weed-choked, it has looked the part. For much of this fall, the porch was littered with broken glass. One flier tacked to the front door recently warned that the city of Denver wanted trash hauled away; another informed the owners that they can, if they act fast, head off foreclosure through a government program called HOPE Now.
Nobody offered any hope 15 years ago, when a homeless woman handed over her towheaded 8-year-old twins, Will and Kristen, to the man who ruled this house and everyone in it.
It wasn’t as if no one ever suspected that sexual, physical and emotional abuse was going on inside.
But, ultimately, no one came to the rescue. A staggering collection of adults who could have helped — teachers, neighbors, police, doctors, therapists — tried, but not hard enough, or looked the other way, or just didn’t see what was in front of them.
And over and over, the Denver Department of Human Services, the agency charged with protecting children, failed them.
In the end, it was up to Kristen and Will Stillman to save themselves.
And they did.
In May, 48-year-old Eric Torrez was sentenced to 300 years in prison.
His wife, Linda, who aided and participated in the abuse, was sentenced to a minimum of 20 years on probation. Their son, Patrick, was sentenced to eight years’ probation.
Karen Stillman, the twins’ mother, is serving 16 years in prison for knowing about the abuse and doing nothing to stop it.
“The nature of the abuse to both of these children, the duration of the abuse and the sadistic torture they endured is truly unbelievable,” said Kerri Lombardi, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the Torrezes and Karen Stillman. She called it “one of the most horrific, disturbing cases” she has ever seen.
The Torrezes were caught because Kristen and Will, as young adults, did for Kristen’s four young children — each born out of Eric Torrez’s sexual abuse — what no one did for them: They demanded that her two little girls and her two little boys be protected.
Even before she gave her kids away, Karen Stillman wasn’t much of a mother. The twins never met their father; they have what Kristen called “wonderful memories” of their grandmother and grandfather.
But after Karen Stillman’s parents died when her kids were about 5, she seemed to come unhinged.
Kristen’s and Will’s next memories are of kind people in homeless shelters, where Will had a bed full of stuffed animals, and of living in a car along the South Platte River.
Will can recite his “three happy memories” of his mother: “One time she roller- skated with us. One time she took us to a park. And one time we all rode bikes.”
Those bikes, Kristen reminded him, were stolen from a thrift shop, on their mother’s orders.
The best anyone can figure is that Karen Stillman met Eric Torrez when both worked for a cleaning service, and they somehow reconnected while Stillman was leading her kids up and down Colfax looking for a place to stay.
For a while, “Karen slept on a blanket in the basement,” Will said. Neither of her children refers to her as Mom.
Eventually she got into public housing, but she wasn’t interested in taking her kids with her, and by then Eric Torrez’s hold on Kristen and Will, and their fear of him, was firm.
Will remembers that during the first week at the Torrez house, he was forced to stand for hours in his corner — the same triangle of hallway territory where he slept — shouldering a backpack filled with bricks because he failed to call Eric “uncle.”
“I learned right away Eric was in charge,” Will said.
So when Eric told Kristen and Will to tell their mother they wanted to stay with him, they did.
Will was a mischievous kid, a class clown who got in trouble enough that his teachers sent home daily behavior reports. Will told police that when those reports were bad, Eric filled a bucket with water and held Will’s head in it until he passed out.
In fourth or fifth grade, one teacher took pity on him, he said.
“I remember crying, saying, ‘I know I was bad and goofed off today, but please, please don’t send home a bad report because my dad will beat me.’ “
That teacher believed him enough to do as Will asked, but not enough to question his home life or notify authorities.
But there were many times when someone did try to get help for them.
There was the time Will showed up at school in about third grade with blistered hands. Eric had held them under boiling water to teach him a lesson.
And the time Kristen told a doctor — who was treating her for depression — that Patrick Torrez had raped her.
In both cases, the Department of Human Services was called. And both times, investigators called the Torrez house before they showed up.
That gave Eric time to direct a massive cleanup of the filthy house and drill into everyone’s head the stories they would tell: Will was clumsy, and Kristen’s accusations were a misunderstanding.
Eric’s direction worked. The child-abuse investigators never talked to Kristen or Will without Eric hovering.
The Department of Human Services declined to comment on the Stillmans’ case specifically. But spokeswoman Revekka Balancier said agency investigators “make every attempt to make visits without an appointment.”
If several such attempts fail, there may be a phone call and a meeting scheduled, she said.
It is now required that interviews take place away from abuse suspects, Balancier said. Less certain is whether that would have been a requirement in the late 1990s, when the department was getting calls about Kristen and Will.
When Will was in sixth grade, teachers noticed he looked malnourished and was covered with bruises.
The bruises weren’t from abuse; Will was hurting himself.
But when a teacher saw them and asked him if everything was OK, he saw his chance.
“That was my ‘cry-for-help opportunity,’ ” he said.
He told the school counselor about the beatings, the near-drownings, all of it. The counselor reassured him and sent him back to class.
Later, he was summoned to the principal’s office. He remembers he was walking down the hall when he spotted Eric coming out of the principal’s office with a police officer. They were laughing.
Will knew he had made a terrible mistake.
Eric Torrez was a sometime janitor and full-time junk dealer from Del Norte. At some point, Karen Stillman made the Torrezes her children’s legal guardians, and outwardly, Eric made sure they appeared to be one big, blended family.
Inside the house, though, he ruled with absolute, cruel authority. He decided what everyone ate, where they went. He forced Kristen and Will to attend different schools. And he soon learned that the most effective way to keep the twins in line was to hurt one to torture the other. When Will was bad, he would punish him by holding Kristen’s head underwater, and vice versa.
“People were afraid of Eric. I was afraid of Eric,” said one woman who lived on the same block for decades and asked not to be identified.
“There was a sense of smoldering violence there,” she said.
There were always too many people in the squat, dank three-bedroom house, people coming and going, so neighbors didn’t notice at first when the twins arrived, the woman said.
In addition to Eric and Linda Torrez and their three children, Linda’s parents lived there; it was their house.
Eric Torrez’s father, Andres, moved in too, and Eric assigned his oldest child, a daughter, to be Andres’ caretaker.
The neighbor said she used overcrowding as a reason to summon the Department of Human Services. “I called, oh, six, eight or 10 times,” she said. “But I never had anything specific to give them. Just a feeling that something was not right over there.”
Balancier said the department, charged with investigating child abuse and neglect, maintains a record of calls about a certain address, or a certain family, and has for many years. That is true even when the suspicions that prompted the calls are ruled “unsubstantiated.”
Balancier said there is no magic number that would trigger a second look or additional investigation into a particular household.
In the past year, the state has instituted a three-pronged, standardized template for investigating alleged abuse and neglect of children, and Denver is using those guidelines, Balancier said.
Those tools resulted from a statewide examination of child-protection practices after a rash of children’s deaths in 2007.
Determining whether a child is in danger will never be a precise science, Balancier said. But these tools are designed to take a lot of the guesswork out of the process.
“Over the past several years, we’ve made great strides, with extensive training on risk and safety assessment and ensuring all workers are well-trained,” she said. “There may still be times when we can visit over and over and just not get the information we need in order to intervene.
“Unfortunately, we can’t prevent all abuse.”
Will dreaded summers, when Eric would lock him in the basement for weeks at a time. Even now, holes are visible where Eric nailed shut the weather-beaten wooden door down to the dark room, which is more crawl space than basement.
One of the concrete steps has deep gashes where Will said he passed summer days smashing the step with a hammer, trying to escape.
Once, when he was about 11 or 12, Linda’s mother, Delores Sena, found Will handcuffed and hanging by his wrists from a beam in the basement.
She found a key, unlocked the handcuffs, brought him upstairs and gave him something to eat.
Will was finishing his meal when Eric came home.
He was beaten for eating and beaten some more for coming upstairs. Will said when Delores Sena tried to intervene, Eric knocked her to the ground.
The next morning, Sena left the home she had lived in for decades.
“She hugged me and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ ” Will said. “Then she held me for a little while and left. She never came back.”
Eric Torrez began raping Kristen when she was 12. She first got pregnant when she was 14.
The first time Kristen suspected she was pregnant, she told Eric. He bought a home- pregnancy test.
When the test read positive, Torrez “started hugging my stomach and crying. He thanked me. It was the only time I ever saw him show happiness.”
When Will learned his sister was pregnant, the two of them ran away to Karen Stillman’s house. She let them sleep there but, sometime during the night, called Eric Torrez to come and get them.
From the beginning, Torrez had a scapegoat to cover his crimes: his son.
Patrick, a year older than Kristen, would be the designated father.
Kristen found a program for pregnant teens at North High School, where she was a freshman. She learned the basics of baby care and brought home donated baby clothes.
Her first baby, a girl, was born at Rose Medical Center. Kristen was 15. The birth certificate said Patrick Torrez was the father.
According to Kristen, a hospital social worker talked to her. The staffer asked Kristen about her “support system” and whether she could take care of the baby.
Either Eric or Linda — or both — was always at her side.
Rose spokeswoman Cara Harshberger said a case manager visits every patient under 18, but how such visits are handled “depends on the case manager and the patient’s background. There is not a policy in place that requires the case manager to talk one-on-one with the patient.”
There are red flags that would trigger a one-on-one visit, Harshberger said. But the mother’s age isn’t automatically one of them.
When she thought she was pregnant a second time, Kristen kept it secret.
She tried to starve herself. She volunteered to help Eric lift his heaviest junk.
“I tried really hard for it not to happen,” she said. “I didn’t want my child to go through what I was going through.”
None of it worked, though, and the pregnancy continued.
This time, she dropped out of school. “I was too embarrassed (to stay),” she said.
She plotted an escape.
Kristen thought a shelter for teenagers and pregnant girls might help her, so she called several.
The people on the phone were encouraging, until Kristen said she’d be bringing along her baby girl.
Kristen doesn’t remember which agencies she called. But Kendall Rames, deputy director of programs for Urban Peak, the city’s largest, best-known shelter for teens, said Kristen would have struggled finding shelter. Most agencies such as Urban Peak are not licensed to house young children.
“At that age and with a child she’s trying to keep safe . . . no,” Rames said.
If Kristen had disclosed what was happening to her, Rames said, Urban Peak would have reported it. By law, it has to.
And if she had heard about the situation, Rames said, “I would have done everything in my power to find this young lady somewhere to be safe.”
Soon afterward, Eric announced they were going to get Kristen an ID card.
Linda and Patrick came along, and they went somewhere that sold photo identification and passport photos. “I didn’t know what was happening,” Kristen said. “I thought maybe I was going somewhere, because I knew that’s what a passport was for.”
Where they were going was city hall.
When they arrived, Kristen’s mother was there too. They waited in line behind a counter where a sign read “Marriage licenses,” and eventually a clerk handed Eric forms to fill out.
Eric signed the forms, then Linda did. Karen Stillman signed them, as did Kristen and Patrick.
When they left, Kristen and Patrick Torrez were legally married.
Now the cover story for the babies — the one she already had, the one in her belly and the two more to come — was set, signed on the dotted line, nice and legal.
Eric seldom offered explanations for his actions, but on this occasion, Kristen remembers, he did. “He told me it was because he loved me.”
At the time, Karen Stillman may have believed the babies were Patrick’s, Kristen said. Eventually, though, Kristen told her mother, who still visited from time to time, the truth.
Karen Stillman wasted no time confronting Eric Torrez with her outrage — and her demands.
In exchange for her silence about the ongoing rapes of her daughter, Karen Stillman wanted money, and the occasional gift.
Will recalled being with Eric when his mother phoned in demands. “She’d want him to run errands for her, get her cigarettes, a TV Guide,” Will said. “It was ‘I want my cigarettes or I’ll call the police.’ “
Kristen was 16 when her second daughter was born at Denver Health Medical Center. Either Eric or Linda was always at her side. Not that it would have mattered, Kristen said.
By then she had given up. “I would always just say everything was OK.”
Eventually, Will grew big enough that Eric couldn’t physically control him.
About that time, Eric started being nice to him. When Will was 18, Eric even asked him to call him Dad.
Despite all the years of abuse, Will was moved enough to comply. But not enough to become Eric’s ally.
A couple of years later, Will left for Kansas with his girlfriend. He got a job at Mr. Goodcents Subs and Pasta and planned to stay there.
“It was really just that easy. But it wasn’t easy emotionally,” Will said. “Here I am enjoying life somewhat. But I know the routine over there.”
So, eventually, he came back. For Kristen.
In June 2008, Will was living on the Torrezes’ plywood porch and Kristen was in the hospital having her fourth child. He remembers her 5-year-old daughter coming out of the bedroom and saying, “I have to tell you something, uncle.”
What she told him was that Eric’s father, Andres, had molested her.
Will recalled there was a fish tank nearby, and he put his fist through it.
Now, he can’t believe what he did next. “I called Eric. I told him we had to take her to the hospital. I told him he’d better get over here or I’m going to kill someone.”
As teenagers, Kristen and Will were expected to work.
Will helped Eric with the junk hauling and storage; Kristen had a job at Taco Bell.
She had to hand over every paycheck to Eric, who hid them.
In the fall of 2008, not long after her fourth child was born, Kristen found the checks, stashed in a paper bag in a closet.
It took her a few minutes to register what, exactly, she was seeing: the way out.
She put the checks back as she found them. Then she got Will, and with Will’s girlfriend, they plotted their escape.
They would return to Kansas, where Will was sure he could get back his job at Mr. Goodcents. Just to make sure, though, he called and asked.
His old boss agreed, and they set a date for Will to start.
When every detail was in place, they cashed the checks.
Kristen doesn’t remember how much money there was, exactly. But she remembers that after Will’s girlfriend bought an old Jeep Cherokee, they had $2,000 left.
The plan was for Kristen to say she was taking her kids for checkups. That was the only way Eric would let her out of the house alone, she said.
She was all set, and Will was at the designated meeting spot, when Eric insisted he would take her and the kids to the clinic.
She spent the drive over there feeling sick to her stomach. If Eric came in with her and found out there was no appointment, it would all be over.
He didn’t. He had an errand, Kristen said, so he dropped her and the kids off in the parking lot.
They started walking to where Will was waiting. But they hadn’t gotten far when Patrick spotted her. He ordered Kristen and the kids into his car and took them back to Irving Street. Hours went by, and Will got frantic. He called 911, saying he was worried about his sister. But when they pressed for details — Where is she? What has happened to her? — he got flustered and hung up.
Eventually, Will and his girlfriend found Kristen at the house. They made up a story that Will’s girlfriend had bought a new car — the Jeep — and wanted to take everybody for a ride, starting with Kristen and the four kids. Will would go along, of course.
Kristen, her kids, Will and his girlfriend piled into her car — stocked with diapers, detailed baby books that Kristen kept for each child, and not much else — and hoped never to return.
The next day, Will’s boss in Kansas called the Irving Street house to confirm his start date.
Eric Torrez knew exactly where they had gone.
Karen Augé: 303-954-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com
Clarification. This article has been corrected in this online archive. The online headline for this story originally misstated the relationship of the Stillman children with Denver’s Foster Care system.
