Let the Chips Fall

Judy rarely assumed the worst when it came to her daughter’s thoughts and actions. Theirs was a relationship built on mutual trust and respect. When Christina needed advice or a compassionate shoulder, Judy was always able to comfort her. If someone threatened Christina at school, Judy played bodyguard. Christina’s friends knew they could ask Judy for a ride to the movies. She was the kind of mom who preferred being involved with her daughter’s activities. Christina didn’t mind.

“We had a very real mom-and-daughter connection,” Judy says. “We were very close. She knew I was a parent, but she never did buck up a lot on me.”

On a stormy Monday in April last year, Judy and Christina had a mother-daughter talk that endangered their relationship. Judy suspected Christina was hiding something from her; she wanted to know about Christina’s relationship with Dan.

When Christina got home from school that day, Judy was waiting. The mother’s heart was pounding in anticipation — and fear — because she had finally added up all the clues of the past few months. Dan had given Christina gifts. Dan had taken Christina to an ‘N Sync concert. Dan and Christina were spending many of their spare moments together in person and on the phone.

Christina was 14 years old.

Dan Harper was 54.

Judy and Christina knew Dan Harper from his place of business, Guy’s Snack Foods, the Liberty company known for the past 60 years as one of the nation’s leading producers of potato chips, nuts, and other snack products. Judy owned a home and corporate cleaning business and had taken her daughter along to help out on the job at Guy’s. Christina emptied trash cans in the offices around the 325,000-square-foot plant, and Harper, the executive vice president of operations, had taken a keen interest in her well-being.

How deep an interest became apparent to Christina’s mother when Victor Sabatino, Guy’s owner and president, showed Judy some company phone records. Sabatino also told Judy that Harper and Christina were alone together for long periods in the Guy’s offices while Judy was preoccupied in other parts of the plant.

But Judy found it hard to suspect any wrongdoing because she had always taken Christina with her for the girl’s protection, as a way of keeping her out of trouble after school. Besides, Judy thought Dan Harper was a decent man. And Christina was a decent girl.

“Unfortunately, I had to lie to her to get her to talk to me,” Judy remembers.

Judy was in her bedroom when she called for Christina. They stood facing each other. Judy began pressuring her daughter for an explanation of her alliance with Dan Harper. The mother concocted a story about a video that showed what was going on behind closed doors at Guy’s. Judy said Sabatino was going to let her watch the tape at the plant. Christina dropped to her knees.

“Please don’t go, please don’t go!” Christina begged, clutching her mother’s waist.

“Tell me what’s on the tape,” the mother demanded. “I want to know.”

“Please, Mom, please don’t watch it!”

“Start telling me. It’s your choice.”

Christina was trapped.

“Is there something on the tape?”

Silence.

Then the girl confessed.

“Yeah, there is. There is stuff.”

“Has he touched you?” Judy asked.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere.”

The mother stared into her daughter’s eyes for more of the truth. Christina gave in, bit by painful bit.

Christina told Judy she and Harper had been having sexual contact in and around the Guy’s offices. Over the past four months. Each time Christina’s mother had taken her into the building.

Christina said Dan Harper had promised to be in her life forever.

Right then, the puzzle pieces slipped together and all the mismatched edges lined up perfectly. Dan Harper had enraptured Christina, using the sound of Judy’s vacuum cleaner to start and stop his trysts with the girl. When the vacuum would shut off, he’d tell Christina: “Your mom’s done.” She’d rush out of the room to pick up more trash.

“I wanted to throw up,” Judy says. “I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He had her so brainwashed it wasn’t funny. He had her convinced he was this wonderful fella.”Daniel K. Harper, of Blue Springs, turned 55 on February 10 this year. He spent his birthday in Clay County court receiving his sentence for pleading guilty to two counts of statutory sodomy. Prosecutors had alleged that Harper had fondled Christina and had oral sex with her on more than 80 occasions in 1998 and 1999 at Guy’s Foods and at a Northland hotel.

Judy and Christina (their names have been changed for this story at the mother’s request) were at the sentencing hearing in Liberty. And both spoke in court before Clay County Judge Michael J. Maloney dealt Harper’s punishment. Judy asked for the maximum sentence of 14 years in prison. Christina followed, quivering and crying as she read a letter she had written many times over on a home computer.

I’ve been trying to tell the truth about everything that’s happened to me since I went to the police department.

Mr. Harper has lied to me and continues to now. He has not even apologized for what he has done to me. Although I didn’t do a thing wrong, deep down in my heart I’m so sorry for the people’s lives that I’ve hurt. I did not realize all the pain and trouble this would cause and how many different lives this would affect.

I’ve not let myself down, but I’ve let my mother down, the one person who has always been there for me. I want to do the right things. My mom’s always done her best to guide and teach me in the right direction. What Mr. Harper’s done to me is even affecting the relationship with my mother. We’re not even as close as we used to be….

I was wrong to believe anything Mr. Harper told me. He told me so many lies. I got caught up in the things he was telling me. I feel so humiliated and ashamed for these horrible things he did to me…. I believed all these things he was saying.

I look back through the last year of my life and I think about how much Mr. Harper took from me. I have never been with anyone else the way I have been with Mr. Harper. He stole a part of my life, much of my childhood experiences, my teenage years, being able to proudly hold my head up knowing I’m worthy of that.

Mr. Harper told me he planned on having sexual intercourse with me when I turned 15. He wanted to take me to his wife’s house in their bed. My mom found out what was going on about six weeks before my 15th birthday. I had to go through the embarrassment of telling what happened to me so many times. I’ve had to tell the police officer at the police department, then the detective, the prosecuting attorney’s office, Mr. Harper’s attorneys, the sentencing investigator, and my mom.

Mr. Harper has not completely confessed to the crimes he committed to anyone. He only admitted to it once — the day he pled guilty to you, and he never told everything the way he had to, like I did in front of a bunch of strangers.

Your Honor, please give Mr. Harper the maximum sentencing. He doesn’t deserve anything less. I believe he knew exactly what he was doing. He lied about it and tried to hire the best attorneys to get him out of it. He has bragged many times about how his wife, Fran, lived in Fairytale Lane and how easy it was to fool my mom. The only thing worse than the acts of sexual abuse and the terrible stress this has put on me would be for Mr. Harper not to get the maximum sentencing.

In Harper’s corner, defense attorney J.R. Hobbs of Kansas City met Christina’s tears with a textbook counterattack. He argued that his client had pleaded guilty, in part, to keep the girl from having to deal with the emotional rigors of a lengthy trial. He pointed out the numerous letters of support from friends, family, and associates who vouched for Harper’s character and history of civic duty. He said Harper was known to help people with alcohol problems. Hobbs even noted that lawyers who had opposed Harper at the bargaining table during union negotiations still thought he was one of the really nice Guy’s.

In his closing statements, Hobbs fortified Harper’s defense by making two rather startling references. First, he assured Judge Maloney that presentencing investigations into Harper’s past uncovered no criminal activity; second, he refuted what prosecutors had alleged about one of Harper’s acquaintances, a former Kansas City woman named Tanya Endicott.

During his investigation, Clay County prosecuting investigator Phil Wilson had discovered evidence that Endicott, whose last known place of residence was Honduras, had been Harper’s lover over the past 10 years. At least 27 years Harper’s junior, she had benefited financially from the alleged affair, reportedly receiving living expenses and housing, college tuition payments, a car, Florida vacations, and the like, and Harper might have used Guy’s company funds and connections at the local credit union to pay for it. Prosecutors had argued that Harper pledged to give Christina the same treatment as she got older. But Hobbs reminded the court that Endicott had written a letter explaining that her relationship with Harper had been strictly platonic; the divorced mom had even taken a blood test to determine her son’s paternity. Harper was not the father.

In case that defensive gem wasn’t enough, Hobbs made an audacious comparison between Harper and former Los Angeles police officer Stacey C. Koon, one of two cops convicted of using excessive force and violating Rodney King’s civil rights in King’s videotaped 1991 beating. Hobbs noted that a U.S. Supreme Court ruling — which cleared Koon’s path to freedom after he served two years behind bars — had been based on Koon’s “susceptibility to abuse in prison” because he was a police officer. Harper was in the same boat because he too had been a law-abiding citizen — until now. Harper’s susceptibility to abuse in prison concerned the attorney, given Harper’s age and lack of criminal history.

Hobbs and his client Harper asked Judge Maloney for leniency. Harper had lost his job and stock options because of the sodomy case, and his career was ruined, Hobbs said.

“I recognize that one could rightly say: ‘Well, you know what, Mr. Harper put himself in that position.’ And he did, Judge,” Hobbs argued. “We don’t dispute that. But the point is, what do we do now? Do we throw him in prison for 14 years? It’s not a proper sentencing consideration or punishment or objective to destroy or eliminate or eradicate someone. He obviously has a problem that needs to be addressed. As I said earlier, there’s no excuse for it, but he’s trying to get that problem addressed.”

Maloney then gave Harper a reason to celebrate. He handed Harper a 10-year term and a birthday surprise: the possibility of probation. He ordered that Harper be placed in Missouri’s Sexual Offender Assessment Unit, a 120-day incarceration program run by the Department of Corrections that would evaluate Harper’s suitability for early release. Maloney praised the program for being “highly skilled in assessing the level of danger that sexual offenders have for the rest of the community. They are not any kind of rubber-stamp unit.”

As Judy listened to Harper’s sentencing, she seethed and tried to comfort Christina. The girl leaned away.

“I was so irate,” Judy says. “I should have known he was going to get out. Of all the crap he did, he gets slapped on the wrist for four months. I had a lot of faith in Clay County justice, but not anymore.”Christina met Dan Harper in 1997, when she was 13. Judy, who had started her cleaning job at the Guy’s plant two years earlier, usually worked five days a week and brought her daughter along to pick up trash. On Sundays, Judy’s husband (now ex-husband), Christina’s stepfather, helped with the cleaning; Christina went with him on those days too. Sometime in late November or early December in 1998, after Christina had turned 14, the 53-year-old Harper initiated the contact by grabbing Christina as she walked around a corner. He tried to kiss her on the lips, told her he “liked her a lot,” and said, “You’re a nice girl.” Christina walked away.

Christina, who wore braces, was collecting trash about a week later when Harper again tried to kiss her. They were alone in another executive’s office, and Harper succeeded, telling the girl he loved her. After that, on each day Christina worked, Harper and Christina kissed when they were alone, although several employees were working nearby.

Later in December, Harper started touching Christina and penetrating her with his fingers. This went on every day the girl worked, and later in the month, Harper changed his work schedule to include Sundays. He showed up at work about 15 minutes after Christina arrived to help her stepfather. These sexual encounters continued on a daily basis for about two months. A couple of times, Harper attempted to place Christina’s hand on his penis, but she pulled away.

Sometime in February 1999, Harper started performing oral sex on Christina and penetrated her with his tongue. This happened about 25 times through March in various Guy’s offices, including Victor Sabatino’s. Harper also convinced Christina to put her hand inside his underwear and rub his penis until he ejaculated.

Christina thought she was falling in love. Harper gave her money at Christmas. A diamond necklace for Valentine’s Day. A Bulova watch for Easter. One of his shirts. A Guy’s company beeper. A cordless phone with a private number. Judy didn’t know about most of the gifts, but Harper had told her the cordless phone didn’t work in his office, so he was letting Christina have it for her own line — he said he could claim it as a company expense. Christina later told authorities she thought Harper had been using company money to pay for the other gifts.

Harper began making promises to Christina, filling her head with dreams of a paid college education, a Ford Mustang or a Cadillac convertible for her 16th birthday, trips to faraway places, and eternal bliss. He told her he wanted to marry her and devised a way for them to be alone outside of the office.

Twice between January and March last year, Harper and Christina had sexual relations in a room at the old Marriott Residence Inn at 9900 N.W. Prairie View Road in Kansas City (now the Chase Suite Hotel). On those occasions, Harper picked up Christina sometime after midnight from a house where she was spending the night with a friend. Harper drove his wife’s white Cadillac because he didn’t want Christina’s friend to recognize his car, a convertible black Cadillac Allante. At the hotel, Harper and Christina undressed and got into bed. Harper performed oral sex on the girl and, on the second visit, he had her masturbate him to ejaculation. Harper drank Bacardi wine coolers and returned Christina to her friend’s home around 4 a.m. both times.

Two other times Christina wasn’t able to make it to the room after Harper had made reservations there. And two times, Harper paid for the rooms using a credit card that belonged to his friend and longtime business associate Michael T. Kramer, a Guy’s Foods stockholder.

Kramer later told police Harper had used his credit card by mistake. “We went to lunch one day and we were fighting over the check,” Kramer told a detective with the Kansas City police department’s sex crimes unit. “We both threw our cards down, and when the gal gave us the cards back, she gave us the wrong ones. She gave me Dan’s and Dan mine.”

Kramer accompanied Harper to the hotel on two different days, though he never met Christina. Kramer said he had gone to the hotel with Harper because his friend was trying to keep the teenager out of trouble. “Dan told me that a 13- or 14-year-old girl had gone to the car show with her dad and met these guys that were 22 or 23 years old,” Kramer told police. “They owned a tattoo parlor, and she was real interested in their tattoos. Dan was real scared that she was going to get involved with these guys. He told this girl that if she got in trouble with these guys that he would have a safe place for her.

“If she got in trouble she could page him, and he would go up there and she could get away from these guys. She was going to page him. He went up to the Residence Inn during the day to reserve the room, so he was assured a room. When he got up there and pulled out his American Express, he had mine. He couldn’t sign his name because they wouldn’t take it, so he signed mine.”

Later in the day, Kramer said, he and Harper went gambling at Harrah’s Casino and waited for the girl’s page.

The first time she was supposed to meet Harper at the hotel, Christina later told authorities, she couldn’t come up with an excuse to leave her mother’s house.

“If we did get a page, he was going to call her mother and have her meet us there at the Residence Inn,” Kramer said. “He wanted me to go because she was a minor and he didn’t want there to be any problems. On the way up there, I kind of got on him about where he got the room at. He told me that she knew the area and she was the one that picked the Residence Inn because she told Dan she had stayed there before. She never paged, and we checked out and I brought him back to Harrah’s Casino so he could get his car, and we both left.”

Kramer said the same thing happened one other time. Christina had fallen asleep at a friend’s house.

As the relationship between Christina and Harper developed, Harper began confiding to the girl about personal and business matters. He told Christina that he was involved in a “power struggle” with Sabatino for control of Guy’s — that having sex with her in Sabatino’s office was a good way to get revenge on the company president.

Near the end of March last year, Sabatino felt compelled to inform Judy that he suspected her daughter and Harper were getting too intimate on company property.

“The only thing I saw were actions that seemed inappropriate,” Sabatino says, “(but) she (Judy) had her head in the sand, so to speak.”

Sometime around March 31, Sabatino interrupted Judy’s cleaning routine to point out that Harper and Christina were hastily leaving one of Guy’s offices. Harper muttered about “a problem with the chips, a problem with the chips” and walked away. Sabatino left to speak with Harper, and Judy questioned her daughter but got vague answers. “I saw they were getting chummy. I told her to quit going in there,” she says.

More or less convinced of Harper’s sincerity and her harmlessness, Judy allowed Christina to attend a concert with Harper and several others, including the friend with whom Christina had stayed on the nights Harper took her to the hotel. The friend didn’t know Harper and Christina were in a sexual relationship. But during the ‘N Sync concert at Kemper Arena on April 1, 1999, Christina’s friend saw Harper mouth the words “I love you” to the 14-year-old.

Later in the week, Sabatino showed Judy the company phone records. Harper and Christina were talking 45 minutes at a time. Judy was confused, mainly because Sabatino warned her not to tell anyone about the calls. She thought the situation might cost her the Guy’s cleaning contract; at $1,800, it was her best monthly paycheck.

“He said, ‘You repeat anything I say and you’ll wish you hadn’t,'” Judy says of Sabatino. “He handed me a piece of paper with a bunch of highlights. He said, ‘Why would a fifty-something-year-old man be talking to a 14-year-old girl for 45 minutes at a time?'”

Judy didn’t have a response, but she sensed Sabatino and Harper distrusted each other; she now distrusted both of them. Judy decided to find out the truth by confronting Christina.The hardworking, family image of Guy’s Foods — or Family Snacks Inc., Sabatino’s corporate entity — seemed incongruous to some longtime employees; rumors circulated about the top bosses’ freewheeling spending habits. Sabatino and Harper were known to be frequent fliers to Diamond Joe’s strip joint, a few minutes south of Liberty off I-35 and Chouteau Trafficway.

Karen Hopkins, Sabatino’s former secretary, says she knew Sabatino used a company credit card to pay for entertainment at the club. His code phrase for hitting the club was that he was “going to get some salad.”

“You got me?” Sabatino said when PitchWeekly inquired about his salad days. “I didn’t know they had salads there.”

Hopkins had heard the company was in financial trouble; auditors were prowling through records in 1999. “It would be one thing if they didn’t make a good product or the sales were bad, but they do make an outstanding product,” Hopkins says. “But with my morals and values, I wished I could have gotten away sooner. But I had a mortgage to pay.”

Judy was also worried about paying her bills when she finally coerced Christina into admitting her liaison with Dan Harper. After talking to her daughter on April 5, 1999, Judy drove to the Guy’s plant hoping to meet Sabatino. But Sabatino, along with other company managers, was attending the Kansas City Royals’ opening-day game against the Boston Red Sox. The game had almost been postponed because of a tornado watch, and it had poured rain until shortly before the game — which the Royals lost 5-3.

Sabatino didn’t return to the plant after the game — he was on his way out of town on business. Judy did see Harper’s car in the company parking lot and decided to leave. She also saw the car of the company’s purchasing manager, whose office was next to Harper’s. The purchasing manager was a man whom Judy had befriended, became romantically involved with, and later married.

Judy talked briefly with one of her friends at the plant and angrily drove off to make a call to her future husband’s office. They agreed to meet away from Guy’s because she had some bad news for him.

“I did not go into any detail,” Judy says. “I told him that son of a bitch (Harper) had been doing stuff. I didn’t want him (her boyfriend) to be fired and questioned, because I knew they would. I told him he was better off not knowing.”

The next day, Judy tried to reach Harper by phone, but she was told he was in a meeting. About five minutes later, he called her back, wanting to know if they could talk. Judy said no and hung up. “I think that was the last time I talked to him,” she says.

The rest of the week was a maddening blur for Judy. On Tuesday night, she talked to Sabatino, and he promised to return to Kansas City as quickly as possible. Judy says he pledged to straighten out the Harper situation because he “didn’t want to sweep this under the rug.”

“He told me that night not to go to the police and this would ruin his company and destroy my daughter,” Judy remembers. “He could fix this.”

Judy called her attorney, Gary Collins of Kansas City, and he told her to go to the police immediately. Judy told him she was scared of losing her job and that she wanted to set up a meeting with Sabatino’s lawyer instead. They met on Thursday, but the meeting lasted only a few minutes, Judy says.

“My attorney thought Vic knew a bunch of stuff. My impression was that he had information about Harper he was going to tell us. Vic made some comment and said Christina didn’t look like she was traumatized by anything. My attorney said, ‘We better end this conversation. We’re done with this conversation. We thought you were here to give up information.'”

The next day, Friday, April 9, at 10:22 a.m., Christina and Judy reported Harper’s actions to police at the Liberty station. When the investigating officer asked Christina to describe the sexual acts she had performed on Dan Harper, Christina told the officer she didn’t want her mother in the interview room anymore. Christina was too ashamed. She didn’t want her mother to hear everything.Dan Harper, who holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, started working at Guy’s in 1976 after spending 11 years with Wilson Foods in Kansas City, Kansas. Harper (whose 31-year-old son, Daniel Harper Jr., also worked for Guy’s) became a well-respected civic leader in Liberty. He helped collect scholarship money for William Jewell College. He was a corporate representative for the March of Dimes Walkathon and the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. He has been a member of the Liberty Chamber of Commerce, the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, the Northland Chamber of Commerce, and the Missouri Chamber of Commerce. He has been a trustee on the Liberty Hospital Foundation and a member of the hospital’s advisory council. And he has been involved with the National Conference of Synagogue Youth, the Jaycees of Independence, and the Clay County Sheriff’s Department Kid Fest. (Harper and Hobbs, his attorney, declined PitchWeekly‘s request for an interview.)

Harper’s friends and co-workers considered him a community leader, a loyal company man who seldom raised his voice or looked down on his subordinates. Sabatino and other employees referred to him by his nickname: “Spanky.”

“Dan was a swell guy,” says former plant worker Mary Colwell, who retired from the company after 21 years in 1995. “He was nice to me. I never did see the man do anything wrong in his life. Dan was a gentleman.”

But some of Harper’s former co-workers were suspicious of his outward interest in Christina. He always seemed to have extra time for her, to listen to the girl’s favorite CDs when no one else seemed to care.

Shirley Hawthorne, a clerk who is in her second stint with the company, says she warned Harper about his attraction to younger women. “I told him he needed counseling years ago.”

After an investigation into allegations that Harper had sexual contact more than 80 times with Christina over a four-month period, on April 21, 1999, a Clay County grand jury indicted him on four counts of statutory sodomy, a second-degree Class C felony. His bond was set at $100,000 and reduced to $50,000. He posted a cash bond of $5,000 the next day.

Dan Harper faced a maximum sentence of 28 years in prison and $20,000 in fines if he was convicted on all four counts.

At Guy’s, some employees were devasted; Hawthorne says she cried when she found out.

Some employees still don’t think Harper could have been sexually involved with the cleaning woman’s daughter.

“I really never did believe that about Dan Harper,” retired plant worker Jo Perry says. “He was the nicest man you ever knew. I think it was a setup. I really do.”

And other employees focused the blame on Judy, a 41-year-old woman whose marriage to the purchasing manager this summer was her sixth (her first was when she was 15). Although Judy never received any formal complaints about her cleaning, some Guy’s workers thought it was a little peculiar that the mother allowed her daughter to roam around the plant out of her eyesight. Christina usually carried keys to the doors.

Bob Allen, a mechanic in the Guy’s garage since 1975, noticed Judy liked to dress comfortably at work — shorts and tank tops. He says he knew “trouble was going to happen” when he first saw Christina, who resembled her mother in looks and work attire. “I don’t know how old she was, but she didn’t look like it or act like it. She cleaned the office in the garage. She was bending over, and her jeans, cut-off, left nothing to the imagination. It’s hard not to look.”

Allen says Judy would drop Christina off “and there were all men in the garage. I would not have done that; I would have stayed here to supervise. I would not just pull up, drive off, and come back 45 minutes to an hour later. That seems like neglect on somebody’s part being a parent. Even if there was nothing evil on her mind, the way she dressed showed it. Irregardless of what her mother was doing, you don’t leave your child like that.”

Although Harper had been indicted, he remained with the company as a consultant. Sabatino issued at least one company-wide memo to employees, demanding they not talk about the situation. Judy fulfilled her obligations to Guy’s cleaning contract by sending other people to work for her through August 1999, when she terminated the contact.

“I wouldn’t go back on the property for a million dollars. For what happened and where. No thanks,” Judy says. “They had a friend of mine out there that couldn’t speak to me or she would lose her job. That’s not any kind of friend. She was point-blank told to stay away from me.”

In January of this year, the month before Harper’s sentencing, Judy — on her daughter’s behalf — filed a civil suit accusing Harper of molesting Christina. The pending action seeks more than $20 million in damages from four defendants: Guy’s Foods, Harper, Sabatino, and Michael T. Kramer.

The suit alleges Sabatino had prior knowledge of Harper’s activities with Christina; it also accuses Kramer, who owns Kramer Material and Handling Equipment Co. of Kansas City, of helping Harper pay for rooms where Harper and Christina had sexual encounters.

Sabatino and Kramer deny the allegations.

“I’ve known the guy (Harper) for over 20 years, and nobody saw an example of this before,” Sabatino says of Harper’s behavior with Christina. “Just because somebody knows someone doesn’t make them guilty. You’ve got one person who says it went on and one person who says it didn’t. Only three people know. The little girl knows. Harper knows. And God knows. That’s all I know.”

Sabatino says Judy has no grounds for suing Family Snacks Inc. In February, three days after Harper received his sentence, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (see story on page 20).

“What’s in that lawsuit (of Christina’s) is bullshit,” Sabatino says. “There will be countersuits filed against her and it will get ugly. She wants to go after Harper and Kramer; I have nothing to do with this.”

Rather, Sabatino says, he should receive credit for alerting Judy to her daughter’s contact with Harper. “What would you do if that was your little girl? I’m in her corner on that. But I am upset with her (Judy), the way she’s handled it and not taking blame.”Clay County assistant prosecutor Janet Sutton no longer eats Guy’s Foods products. The Dan Harper case affected her appetite. Sutton was confident she had a strong case against Harper — with the detective work of Clay County investigator Phil Wilson turning up damaging evidence about Harper’s relationship with Tanya Endicott, whom Harper said was 19 when he befriended the woman a decade ago.

But Sutton was stunned by the court’s probation ruling after she had agreed to a plea bargain with Harper’s attorneys. “These are hard cases to take to trial. It’s the child’s word against the adult. It’s very traumatic for the victim to testify. It’s every bit as traumatic as the original crime. I never make a plea offer unless I talk to the family. In these cases, they are very emotional.”

Sutton had been confident about the plea decision; she expected Harper would have to serve several years in prison, so she convinced Platte County prosecutors to forgo pressing any charges against Harper in connection with the two times he had sex with Christina at the hotel.

“This is a common frustration for a sex-crimes prosecutor,” says Platte County prosecutor Roseanne Ketchmark. “But we agreed to decline charges as long as we were able to guarantee he went to prison in Clay County. I do recall he had no criminal history, was an executive businessman, and had an impressive law-abiding history. The community occasionally has a picture of what a sexual offender looks like, but when you have someone who’s intelligent and nice-looking and has a successful career and success in relationships with friends, co-workers, neighbors, and church, every fiber in you wants you to believe someone like that can’t commit some of these acts. We can’t even visualize in our mind somebody committing these acts. It’s hard for jurors to believe.”

Sutton says Judy was satisfied with the plea arrangement. But the prosecutor never thought Harper would be placed in — much less make it through — the 120-day Sexual Offender Assessment Unit. Harper was evaluated as an unlikely threat to re-offend and was released on June 15.

Sutton says it had been her understanding that “it’s relatively rare that they (sex offenders) get a favorable report and get called back out.”

Actually, Harper’s chances of getting out early were a little better than rare.

Statistics provided by Tim Kniest, public information officer for the Missouri Department of Corrections, says that about 40 percent of sex offenders who went through the 120-day assessment the past year and a half received probation; the other 60 percent were sent to prison to complete their sentences. After Harper was released on June 15, the terms of his five-year probation were set at a final hearing two weeks later. Among the conditions: no consumption or possession of alcholic beverages or frequenting places where drinks are a major item of sale; periodic drug and polygraph testing; no contact with Christina or her family, either directly or indirectly.

Judge Maloney, not speaking specifically about the Harper case, says he thinks the 120-day assessment unit works: “Even if they get a good report, the five-, 10-, 20-year sentence is hanging over their head. The public should know if they do come out on probation and they do mess up, they will go back for longer than their parole. There is protection for the public in the use of the program. The probation officers keep close track of them, and they can’t have the first drink, anything that would lessen a person’s inhibitions. He cannot toast the bride at a wedding.”

Clay County investigator Wilson says his findings lead him to believe Harper might have difficulty on probation. The night before Harper pleaded guilty, Wilson says, he saw Harper’s black Cadillac Allante in the parking lot at Diamond Joe’s.

Judy says Harper’s plea agreement with the Clay County prosecutor left the door too wide open for his release back on the streets. And because she wasn’t satisfied with how the criminal case developed, she and Christina filed the $20 million-plus civil suit against Harper, Sabatino, Kramer, and Guy’s Foods. There has been no settlement, and the case is pending.

“He (Harper) took an innocent child,” Judy says. “You know, all kids are going to do something their mom isn’t going to like; none of them are perfect. But that kid was protected. She was a good kid, and she’s still a good kid.”

Harper just knew how to work his way into Christina’s mind, Judy says. The mother now feels Christina might never open up to her the way she once did.

“She was lacking in the area of a male person caring for her,” Judy says. “He made promises to her and he had her trusting him — believing him — and putting her in a position to be willing to do anything for him. She has been made a fool and she doesn’t like it. I have to be very careful about what I say to her — no talking about anything that’s happened.”