Storro’s parents suspected, but wanted to believe

Visit our web page devoted to coverage of the Storro saga at: http://www.columbian.com/news/bethany-storro.

o Aug. 30, 2010: About 7:15 p.m., bystanders find Storro crying with pain, her face burned, on a sidewalk near West Eighth and Columbia streets in Vancouver. Someone calls 911. Storro says a woman threw acid in her face, and that her rarely worn sunglasses saved her eyes from acid.

o Aug. 31: Vancouver police Detective Wally Stefan visits Storro in the Burn Center of Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland. He notices that her burns are evenly distributed, with no splash patterns as from a tossed liquid.

o Sept. 2: Storro, her face wrapped in bandages, appears before TV cameras at the hospital. She tells reporters a black woman threw acid in her face and fled. In Vancouver, police are searching for the assailant and release a drawing based on Storro’s input.

o Sept. 3: Over the next several days, donations pour in from across the U.S., soon to total more than $27,000.

o Sept. 9: The public learns of plan for Oprah Winfrey to interview Storro on her show. The plan will be dropped as suspicions arise.

o Sept. 10: The Columbian publishes a story asking police if it’s possible Storro injured herself.

o Sept. 17: The public learns police searched the home of Storro’s parents the previous day — and Storro confessed to injuring herself and fabricating

the story someone attacked her.

o Sept. 18-19: Thousands ask why Storro did it. Some ask why Storro chose a black woman as her mythical attacker. Her father, Joe Neuwelt, saying he’s shocked by her confession, says all donations will be returned. Many readers are angry, others sympathetic.

o Sept. 20 Prosecutors charge Storro with three counts of second-degree theft by deception, regarding the donations.

o Sept. 29 News camera crews, including from NBC’s Today show and CBS’s Inside Edition, mob Storro’s first court appearance. She’s receiving medical care, not in police custody.

o Jan. 7, 2011 Attorneys on both sides request mental-health evaluation of Storro. Judge approves.

o Friday, April 8 Storro pleads guilty, receives sentence of fine, repayment and community service.

Bethany Storro’s parents had suspicions she was lying, several days before Vancouver police unmasked her for fabricating her tale that a black woman threw acid in her face.

Her father, Joe Neuwelt, later told police detectives he’d tried a little probing, and asked Storro what her assailant’s voice sounded like: Any accent or dialect?

Neuwelt said he noticed that his daughter didn’t look him in the eyes when she answered, and she said the woman’s voice was kind of high-pitched.

An unlikely story, he told police later.

Storro had spinal meningitis twice as a baby and it damaged her hearing. While she can hear low tones, she can’t hear high or even middle tones.

So how did Storro know the woman’s voice was high, and that she said, “Hey pretty girl. Want something to drink?” before supposedly throwing a cup of acid in Storro’s face on Aug. 30?

But Storro, 28, can read lips, and only she knows exactly what she can hear, so it was no sure indication she lied.

Storro’s mother, Nancy Neuwelt, told police that, when she tried pressing for details, Storro seemed angry and asked her, “How could you not believe me?”

And they just didn’t think their daughter was capable of hatching such an elaborate scheme.

Although she had lied and stolen money from them when she was a teen, she hadn’t tried to harm herself before, Joe Neuwelt told detectives after the truth surfaced.

And above all, Storro’s parents said, they love her and wanted to believe her, according to police investigation reports The Columbian received after a public-records request under state law.

Those reports include the audio file of Storro’s taped confession.

Both parents told police, convincingly, that they didn’t know for sure their daughter lied until the morning of Sept. 16, when veteran police Detective Wally Stefan pounded on the front door of their home on West McLoughlin Boulevard with a search warrant signed by a judge.

Joe Neuwelt, who works at a steel mill, had been home alone. He came outside and chatted with Stefan on the front porch. Stefan told him he couldn’t discuss the case since it was under active investigation, so they spoke of other things.

Inside the home, four more police detectives conducted the search. They seized two of the family’s laptop computers, one of which Storro had used to research acids to burn her face. Storro had also downloaded stories about a young British model who had acid thrown in her face.

Then, about 10:50 a.m., Nancy Neuwelt drove up to the home in a gray car, with Storro in the passenger seat. They’d been visiting relatives in Seattle for two nights.

“What the heck’s going on?” Nancy Neuwelt yelled, seeing the police.

Joe Neuwelt walked up to the front passenger seat and pointed at Storro. He threw his copy of the search warrant into the car and, raising his voice sternly, asked Storro if it was true she made it up.

“She shook her head yes, and I just fell apart,” he said.

Shocked by Storro’s confession that she’s lied, police said, Joe Neuwelt walked away from the car and wept in his driveway.

As Stefan walked to the car Storro was sitting in, the detective said, “She blurted out something to the effect: ‘I deserve to go to jail.’ “

Her lies had caused ramifications that echoed through the community.

After Storro burned her own face with drain cleaner on Aug. 30 and said she’d been attacked, it created a news-media firestorm nationwide and beyond. More than 100 shocked and sympathetic people donated nearly $28,000 toward her medical costs.

Joe Neuwelt’s own co-workers had been among the donors. What would he tell them now?

He and Nancy Neuwelt had spent a harrowing couple of weeks. On the evening of Aug. 30, they’d been walking to a restaurant near their home for supper when a woman who gave first aid to Storro called the mother, using Storro’s cellphone. She said Storro had been attacked with acid.

The shocked parents rushed by car to West Eighth and Columbia streets, where Storro had been found about 7:15 p.m., burned and crying with pain on the sidewalk around the corner from the Starbucks near Esther Short Park.

Seeing the AMR Northwest ambulance pulling away, the Neuwelts drove to Portland’s Legacy Emanuel Medical Center, getting lost on the way. That night they saw Storro, her face red and her eyes swollen shut.

“She was crying and it looked like she was in shock and terror,” the father told police later, after Storro admitted she lied. “And now that I know the whole story, I mean, she, she had me fooled. I mean, I thought, ‘This is genuine’ and I stroked her head and told (her), ‘OK, baby we’re gonna get you through this.’ “

Storro told her parents her attacker looked enraged or jealous as she flung that acid.

The next day, with the mythical assailant still at large, it was Joe Neuwelt who told his wife they should contact news crews.

The father hoped news coverage could help someone identify the assailant for police, and flush her out.

“I thought, ‘We gotta get this out there. We gotta get this on the air. This is, this is horrific. This is a horrific crime, a young, innocent beautiful handicapped woman. There’s a monster out there runnin’ around somewhere, so Nancy called (a news crew) and set up an interview. And then it, then it just blew out.”

Inside the bandages with only her eyeballs visible over the next several days, police later learned that Storro was worried, even as she enjoyed the attention.

The family set up media interviews and eventually received an invitation from “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

But even then Storro feared the truth would come out, she told police in her confession.

When her doctor, burn surgeon Nick Eshraghi, declined to be interviewed for Oprah due to his own suspicions, Storro wondered why. The Oprah appearance was later canceled.

Haphazard planning

By all indications, according to a lengthy police investigation, Storro planned the incident. But only in short segments and not very well.

It appears she didn’t realize how profoundly her story of her being attacked would affect her parents and the public — and police, who mounted a major investigation with several detectives involved.

“I thought that maybe you guys would just say, ‘We can’t find her, so let’s drop it,’ ” Storro told Stefan and Detective Jane Easter in her taped confession.

She added: “I didn’t know there was going to be a (news) conference, I didn’t know that Oprah was going to call and I didn’t know. … It just kept getting bigger and bigger and I had to keep lying.”

And, “People were giving me money and I didn’t want it … and I go, ‘Oh my goodness, what have I done?’ … I didn’t want to tell anyone that I wanted to end my life.”

She said she also worried that detectives would arrest a woman who fit the description she’d concocted, and who resembled the bogus facial drawing she’d helped police make.

In fact, police got tips about several such women, and detained at least one for questioning.

One prominent black woman told The Columbian she previously liked walking near the park, but avoided walking outside anywhere while police were looking for Storro’s fictitious assailant.

Storro said later: “If you guys thought you found someone, I can, you know, I would stop and say, ‘No it was me.’

“… My mind was you guys coming to the door one night. My family. Lying. So many things. I couldn’t sleep.”

Her worries were well-founded.

Just one evening after Storro was found burned and was taken to the hospital, Stefan visited her there and noticed the burns didn’t show the splash patterns of a tossed liquid. He wrote in his report that Storro’s burns looked to have been evenly applied, as if dabbed on, like a “cosmetic mud mask.”

Stefan compared Storro’s burns to those of two other women, in Mesa, Ariz., and Puyallup, who really had acid thrown in their faces and whose burns showed splash patterns.

Storro’s highly regarded burn surgeon, Dr. Eshraghi, later told Stefan he thought the same, and later agreed to testify for prosecutors if Storro was charged with crimes, as she was.

Also in Stefan’s visit with Storro one day after she burned herself, he noticed that “Storro seemed to be in good spirits and almost seemed giddy at times talking about the assault event.”

Detective Lawrence Zapata made a similar observation. “When Ms. Storro talked about the attack she did so in a storytelling fashion and not in a typical emotional narrative as most victims generally do. She provided explanations instead of details and talked as if she needed to validate herself as a victim.”

The bottom line: As Storro told her lies before TV cameras at the hospital’s Burn Center — and as young black women were viewed with suspicion in downtown Vancouver — Storro hadn’t fooled her doctor — or Stefan, Zapata or their fellow detectives with the Major Crimes Unit.

Truth comes out

As their home was searched on Sept. 16, Storro and her frazzled parents were asked if they would agree to recorded interviews with detectives that same day.

All three agreed. After being read their rights, including the rights to remain silent and have an attorney present, they told their stories that day in separate interviews.

Storro told Stefan she’d hated her face since her early teens, especially its skin, uneven from acne, and her nose, which she wanted to “burn off.” Storro thought she wasn’t pretty. Her years of anguish and depression had morphed into self-destruction.

Her father, in his interview, gave similar comments.

As a preteen, Storro had won hip-hop dance contests, he said, moving her body to the low tones she could hear and feel.

As a young teen, though, she became obsessed that something was wrong with her face, and would look at it in the mirror for hours, picking at it and applying creams.

Storro said she was married to Travis Storro for seven years, with no children, and she had an affair. She later divorced him, thinking she’d be happier.

She said she later regretted that and came to live with her parents in Vancouver in November 2009. She told police she couldn’t get her marriage back and lapsed at times into the depression that had plagued her for years.

Her parents, she said, had offered professional counseling and a doctor to prescribe antidepressants, but she told them, “I’m OK. I’ll be fine.”

Joe Neuwelt told police Storro had her ups and downs, but her general mind-set showed in the way she dressed, “the same old sweatpants, dirty T-shirts, hair pulled back, no makeup.”

“It was some sort of self-destructive-type composure about her,” he said. “She wouldn’t dress up. It was more on a depressed state of mind, the way she looked. I mean … she can be a really beautiful girl when she’s dressed up and everything.”

Her motive? “Probably to seek attention,” the father said. “I don’t think she could have tabulated and formulated and calculated the money or the monetary response that she’d get from this. Who can calculate that?”

Storro’s version

Here’s what Storro said really happened. Detectives confirmed many of her statements independently; the rest of her story, given only after police confronted her with evidence, may or may not be true.

In Storro’s interview, she laughed nervously at times. She sobbed when she told Stefan she’d lost her parents’ love. But she understood what was being said and, considering her emotional state, responded thoughtfully.

In the audio of her confession, she doesn’t sound like a hardened schemer or crook, aiming to collect thousands from public donations. She seems a timid person, self-absorbed but loving her parents — and tortured by worries about her appearance, worries she can’t shake off.

Her parents said she didn’t use drugs or alcohol and hadn’t been in trouble with the police before.

Storro said she’d researched acids on the Internet and thought, when she inhaled the vapors while applying the drain cleaner to her face, they might kill her instantly. In what seems an odd, naive reasoning, she said that, if she survived, she figured the burns would cause her to get “new skin” and doctors would give her “a completely different face.”

She said she bought corrosive drain cleaner and rubber gloves at a local hardware store. Detectives confirmed she bought them on Aug. 28, two days before she burned herself, using her debit card and paying $17.29.

On the morning of Aug. 30, police said, Storro finished the night shift at the Safeway in Washougal and slept in her car because noisy repair work was going on at her parents’ home.

She said she then went to a local park and, in a restroom, applied the drain cleaner to her face repeatedly with washcloths.

“When I first touched (it) I almost passed out, it was so painful. Then I thought, ‘I’m not … I’m not dead yet.’ “

Crying as she told detectives what happened, she said, “I thought I might as well keep going. I don’t know. I kept going and going and going.”

She added, “Then my face was turning … it was eating through my skin and turning white, and my heart was pounding really fast, and I thought that was the end of it right there.”

And, “I know it’s hard for you to believe, but I’m Christian, so I know that I was hoping for God to tell me I needed to stop.”

Up to that point, Storro told police, “I didn’t have it in my mind to blame someone, to say someone did it.”

Next, she said, she splashed water on her face to stop the pain but it was too late. The drain cleaner was disintegrating the washcloths and gloves. She said she gathered the stuff up, got in her car and dumped it in a container.

Police later found it in a cardboard-recycling bin.

Suffering the worst pain of her life, she said, she thought up the next step in her plan while driving.

“That was when I started to go … I’ve got to say, get out of my car screaming, saying I got acid thrown on me.”

Then she parked her car at Ninth and Columbia streets and got out.

“But then I thought, ‘I’ve got to get … somebody to help me.’ Then I ran down (Columbia toward Eighth Street). And I went down and it was so unbearable I fell to the ground again.”

The woman who first helped Storro told police she described her attacker as a male.

Storro apparently made up the rest as she went along.

She said she invented the tale that she’d just bought sunglasses at a nearby Fred Meyer that same evening, and was wearing them when attacked, to explain why her eyes weren’t burned.

Detectives worked with the store employees, purchase records and surveillance photos — and determined Storro hadn’t been there and no one bought sunglasses there that day.

In fact, Storro’s story that she normally didn’t wear sunglasses but had a divine message to buy some just before the “attack” sounded bogus from the start.

Asked why she chose a black woman as her fictional attacker, Storro said it was because “it’s very rare to see a black woman (there).” She said she figured it was unlikely police would come up with a suspect.

Her scapegoating of a mythical black woman, when the truth came out, offended many people and seemed coarse.

The police investigation generated a 9-inch-high stack of police reports and supporting documents. It consumed many hours of taxpayer-paid time as detectives and other officers chased tips. Storro’s confession transcript alone fills 88 pages.

One question that hasn’t been answered is what first prompted her to start believing she wasn’t pretty enough to pass muster.

The Columbian recently was told that Storro is diagnosed with depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and body dysmorphic disorder. The last condition, the Mayo Clinic says, is when people can’t stop obsessing about “imagined ugliness.”

Several people, seeing photos taken of her earlier, commented that she’d been attractive.

John Branton: 360-735-4513 or john.branton@columbian.com.