Speaker 1: I listened intently to the podcast, and I thought about
Speaker 1: Matthew and Tracy Raquel, and I thought, had Matthew been
Speaker 1: thrown out of his crib in nineteen seventy four, seventy
Speaker 1: five instead of nineteen seventy one, I would suspect that
Speaker 1: the response would have been different.
Speaker 2: I'm Nancy Glass that this is Burden of Guilt bonus
Speaker 2: episode number one. Let's go back to nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy four, People magazine published its first issue
Speaker 2: with actress Mia Farrow on the cover. It was also
Speaker 2: the first time UPC codes appeared on packaged goods, and
Speaker 2: that summer, a Watergate scandal forced President Richard Nixon to resign.
Speaker 2: But a few months before that, he signed a groundbreaking
Speaker 2: piece of legislation, the Child's Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act,
Speaker 2: known as KEPTA. KAPTA established a national definition of child
Speaker 2: abuse and provided federal funding to each state to prevent, identify,
Speaker 2: and treat abuse and neglect. So the question is why
Speaker 2: did it take so long for the federal government to
Speaker 2: put rules in place. I pose that question to doctor
Speaker 2: Mihail Ross, a physician and professor in public policy and
Speaker 2: health at the University of Rochester.
Speaker 3: I think a lot of people pinpoint the interests in
Speaker 3: the history of child abuse to the nineteen sixty two
Speaker 3: article by c Henry Kemp who described a syndrome what
Speaker 3: he called the battered child syndrome, and this described a
Speaker 3: few cases of children who were intentionally hurt by the
Speaker 3: very people who were supposed to care for them, and
Speaker 3: this helped guide policy.
Speaker 2: Doctor Kemp's revolutionary study was published in the Journal of
Speaker 2: the American Medical Association. It shed light on something that
Speaker 2: had never really been in the public discussion before, child abuse.
Speaker 2: His research showed how parents would switch doctors, falsify medical histories,
Speaker 2: and express concern for injuries that they themselves had caused.
Speaker 2: X rays confirmed what no one wanted to believe. Parents
Speaker 2: and foster parents were beating and sometimes killing their own children,
Speaker 2: often under the age of three.
Speaker 3: And these stories were heartbreaking and kind of shocking the
Speaker 3: idea that people were supposed to care for kids it
Speaker 3: might hurt them.
Speaker 2: After doctor Kemp's nineteen sixty two study recognized child abuse
Speaker 2: as a medical condition, that's when change started to happen.
Speaker 3: By the end of the sixties, every single state had
Speaker 3: passed a mandatory reporting law, which did not exist generally
Speaker 3: prior to that. Georgia, for instance, passed its first line
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty five and state's contravering together who should be
Speaker 3: reporting what situation should be reported.
Speaker 2: The state of Georgia, where Matthew Golder and his family lived,
Speaker 2: require doctors, nurses, and public welfare workers to report suspected
Speaker 2: abuse of children under the age of twelve to the
Speaker 2: police or any child welfare agency, But in Matthew's case,
Speaker 2: no one really questioned the story that he was found
Speaker 2: comatose back.
Speaker 3: In nineteen seventy one. The idea that somebody might think
Speaker 3: that a two year old could throw a baby with
Speaker 3: enough force to cause significant harm is certainly a misunderstanding
Speaker 3: of most things that are known in pdxent trauma, but
Speaker 3: also important to remember that in nineteen seventies we didn't
Speaker 3: have specialists in child abuse who were limited in the
Speaker 3: testing that was done, and perhaps some embrace of this
Speaker 3: lack of knowledge, because sometimes not knowing feels better than
Speaker 3: really looking at what is terribly disturbing and seeing that
Speaker 3: as it is.
Speaker 2: Jan Berry Sandlin ultimately was responsible for beating little Matthew
Speaker 2: and causing his death. I'm going to play some testimony
Speaker 2: that you didn't hear in the podcast earlier. It comes
Speaker 2: from doctor Joe Burton, who became the medical examiner in
Speaker 2: the county a few years after Matthew died. During Jan's
Speaker 2: second trial in nineteen ninety eight, doctor Burton was asked
Speaker 2: about his training and experience identifying child's abuse back in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 4: First, let me add that I had no exposure that
Speaker 4: I even recall in medical school about specifically child abuse.
Speaker 4: But I did when I was doing my fellowship in
Speaker 4: forensic pathology, because we were asked as pathologists to decide
Speaker 4: how people were injured children, adults, old people. But it
Speaker 4: was very minimal back at that time. So in the
Speaker 4: last two decades a this amount of information has been
Speaker 4: brought forward about all types of child abuse, about radiographic
Speaker 4: changes that are present in child abuse cases, about interpreting
Speaker 4: patterns of injury, and mainly about making health care providers
Speaker 4: more aware of cases where child abuse may exist.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about something else that absolutely floored me. The
Speaker 2: Dacab County Corner listed Matthew's death as accidental. But here's
Speaker 2: the thing that corner in nineteen seventy one had absolutely
Speaker 2: no medical training zero. Here's more testimony from doctor Burton.
Speaker 4: Every county in the state of Georgia has an elected coroner,
Speaker 4: and in nineteen seventy one, the coroner had to be
Speaker 4: eighteen years of age and could never have been convicted
Speaker 4: of a felony. You could be the coroner if you
Speaker 4: ran and were elected, and the coroner had the power
Speaker 4: at least to determine what type of investigation might be
Speaker 4: done in a death. The coroner could write on the
Speaker 4: desertific it and still can a cause of death, a
Speaker 4: manner of death in this case. The Cab County in
Speaker 4: the early nineteen seventies utilized the fulling county medical examiners
Speaker 4: doctors just to do autopsies, so there was no real
Speaker 4: investigation of death.
Speaker 2: Doctor Burton was then asked if he was surprised Matthew's
Speaker 2: death was listed as accidental.
Speaker 4: It's unfortunate, but not surprising. There was no coordinated investigation
Speaker 4: of death in the Cab County at that time.
Speaker 2: It was disjointed, unfortunate, but not surprising. That's tough to hear,
Speaker 2: but that's where things were at in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 2: No one really questioned what happened because no one was
Speaker 2: trained to ask, and there was no coordinated effort to ask.
Speaker 4: There was no correlation of data between the pathologists, police,
Speaker 4: the coroner, physicians in the hospitals. It was a very
Speaker 4: disorganized way to try to arrive at sometimes complex answers
Speaker 4: about what happened to someone.
Speaker 2: It's hard to blame the system failing Matthew because there
Speaker 2: really wasn't a system in place in nineteen seventy one
Speaker 2: to report child abuse.
Speaker 3: Nineteen seventies was a different time. You know, children would
Speaker 3: play on supervised, they wouldn't have a car seat. You
Speaker 3: had paint on the walls that had lead in it.
Speaker 3: You know, the doctors would be smoking on rounds. Some
Speaker 3: of them might be smoking in the operating room. There
Speaker 3: was a lot less attention to safety and the impact
Speaker 3: on children for some of the choices that adults would make.
Speaker 2: As doctor Roz said, it was a different time back then,
Speaker 2: especially when it came to reporting and identifying child's abuse.
Speaker 3: Back in nineteen seventy one, there was only one state
Speaker 3: that had a hotline for reporting child abuse, and that
Speaker 3: was Florida.
Speaker 2: Florida was also the first date to air public service
Speaker 2: announcements on the radio.
Speaker 3: It's kind of similar to today. You know, if you
Speaker 3: see something saying something I really encouraging people that just
Speaker 3: by making this phone call they could help families immensely.
Speaker 2: So that left families to allegations of abuse, and in
Speaker 2: this case, the family was far from functional.
Speaker 5: I think back in that time, I'm sure that people
Speaker 5: were suspicious, but again, what do you do about it?
Speaker 2: Colleen ghibli Reid is an assistant professor at the Camp
Speaker 2: Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect.
Speaker 5: I imagine there was suspicion that something was going on
Speaker 5: by professionals involved with this family from the family members.
Speaker 5: That was kind of insinuated that family members kind of
Speaker 5: thought that something's just not right here. I think that
Speaker 5: back then people may have had suspicions, but they're like, well,
Speaker 5: what do I do?
Speaker 3: Who do I call?
Speaker 5: What do I do? How do I get involved? Because
Speaker 5: there wasn't the aware of this, There wasn't the programs,
Speaker 5: there wasn't the campaigns. That just wasn't the case.
Speaker 2: Back then, And that leads us back to what her
Speaker 2: colleague Lisa merkel Hogen said at the beginning of this episode.
Speaker 1: I listened intently to the podcast, and I thought about
Speaker 1: Matthew and Tracy Raquel, and I thought, had Matthew been
Speaker 1: thrown out of his crib in nineteen seventy four, seventy
Speaker 1: five instead of nineteen seventy one, I would suspect that
Speaker 1: the response would have been different because there at least
Speaker 1: would have been an agency with a multidisciplinary team that
Speaker 1: would pull in the coroner and the medical doctors and
Speaker 1: social workers and others to really take a deep dive
Speaker 1: into the injury and then ultimately his death.
Speaker 2: If you remember, doctors found a third degree burn on
Speaker 2: Matthew's little foot, he had bruising on his body, and
Speaker 2: even what appeared to be an old fracture to his clavical.
Speaker 6: Now, we have child abuse fatality reviews in all states
Speaker 6: as well, so when severe harm and death occurs, there
Speaker 6: is a a multidisciplinary team of professionals in every state
Speaker 6: slash community that do a deep dive into what happened.
Speaker 6: And I suspect they would have found the burns and
Speaker 6: they would have used radiology to see the severe harm
Speaker 6: and the shattered bones that that young four month old
Speaker 6: jerub had.
Speaker 2: If little Matthew golder had been killed a couple of
Speaker 2: years later, the entire outcome of this story might have
Speaker 2: been different. That is a horrible, shocking and mind numbing thought.
Speaker 2: Jane Barry Sanlin might have been investigated and prosecuted well
Speaker 2: before nineteen ninety eight, and Tracy Raquel wouldn't have lived
Speaker 2: with a burden of guilt that she might have been
Speaker 2: responsible for her brother's death. Stay tuned for Burden of
Speaker 2: Guilt at documentary coming in twenty twenty four and airing
Speaker 2: only on Paramount Plus. If you would like to reach
Speaker 2: out to the Burden of Guilt team, email us at
Speaker 2: burdenofguiltpod at gmail dot com. That's Burden of Guilt pod
Speaker 2: at gmail dot com. If you or someone you know
Speaker 2: is worried about maltreatment or suspect that a child is
Speaker 2: being abused or neglected, call the Child Help National Child
Speaker 2: Abuse Hotline. You can call or text one eight hundred
Speaker 2: four a child. That's one eight hundred four two two
Speaker 2: four four five three. One way to show support is
Speaker 2: by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts and don't
Speaker 2: forget to rate and review Burden of Guilt. Five star
Speaker 2: reviews go a long way, A big thank you for listening,
Speaker 2: and also be sure to check us out and follow
Speaker 2: us on Instagram at Glass Podcasts. Burden of Guilt is
Speaker 2: a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group,
Speaker 2: in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is hosted and
Speaker 2: executive produced by me Nancy Glass. This episode was written
Speaker 2: and produced by Todd Gantz. Our iHeart team is Ali
Speaker 2: Perry and Jessica Crincheck. Special thanks to Tracy Riquel Burns
Speaker 2: and her husband part Audio editing and mixing by Matt
Speaker 2: Delvecchio and Nico Aruca. Burden of Guilt's theme composed by
Speaker 2: Oliver Baines. Music library provided by my Music and For
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