https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-father-a-daughter-and-the-attempt-to-change-the-censusIn 2012, Bayliss, who is a criminal-and-family lawyer, represented Lizon on charges of kidnapping, malicious wounding, and domestic battery. The case garnered national headlines. “Peter Lizon, West Virginia man, kept his wife and tortured her for nearly a decade, sheriff says,” one of those headlines, on the Web site of CBS News, declared. Prosecutors claimed that Hofeller had given birth while in chains, in the couple’s basement, and that Lizon had buried a stillborn child in their back yard. “There was no bizarre basement torture,” Bayliss told me. “It was a simple domestic-violence matter.” Stephanie Hofeller told me that the most salacious aspects of the story, as they were reported in the press, were “beyond absurd.” She attributed them to someone she met at a women’s shelter, where she had gone to get away from Lizon, shortly before the charges were filed. All charges against Lizon were dismissed without prejudice, prior to trial, in August, 2013.
“Stephanie didn’t want to coöperate with the domestic-battery charges, so they didn’t go further than the grand jury,” Dawn Moore, a professor in the department of law and legal studies at Carleton University, in Ottawa, told me. “But I know the abuse was bad, because I’ve seen the photographs of the scars on her body. There was a lot of violence, but not what was described in the papers.” (My attempts to reach Lizon for comment were unsuccessful. Mike Hissam, a lawyer who has represented Lizon, told me, “He fell off the face of the earth. He’s probably in Europe somewhere. I told him to get the hell out of Dodge after everything went down.”)
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“When Stephanie first told me her story, I thought she was full of sh**t,” Moore told me. “It seemed so far-fetched and unbelievable. But, as we started to do background research, I realized that she was, in fact, a hundred per cent accurate.” Moore has examined affidavits, search warrants, and arrest warrants. At the women’s shelter, Hofeller had photographs taken of the bruises and marks on her body. The shelter, Moore said, then released the photographs to Hofeller’s father, and they ended up “in the hands of the sheriff’s office.” Hofeller and Moore maintain that Thomas Hofeller suggested to his daughter that, if she “did not coöperate with the investigation into Peter,” as Moore put it, “he would use the photographs to incriminate her on the grounds of child neglect and then use the photos to challenge Stephanie’s custodial rights in family court. Stephanie did not comply, and everything that Tom threatened came true, except for Peter was never convicted.”
Of course, it seems understandable that a father might want his daughter to leave an abusive husband and could be concerned for the welfare of his grandchildren. But, according to Stephanie Hofeller, Moore, and two other people I spoke with who are familiar with the details of the case, Thomas Hofeller, after receiving custody of his daughter’s first child, placed the child in foster care. Stephanie told me that both of her kids are now almost certainly with adoptive parents and that the adoption would be “nonreversible.” She hasn’t seen her children, she said, in more than five years.
Hofeller says that her father rejected her children “on a lot of levels. But if I had to simplify, it was because of their mixed Slovak and American ethnicity.” (Lizon’s parents were born in Slovakia; the Hofellers, Stephanie said, identified ethnically as American.) “Some of the things he said were pretty shocking,” she went on. She added, “He was a classist more than a bigot. And a stubborn one. He was not able to admit he was ever wrong. I don’t remember a single instance. My mother says that, in fifty-two years, she never won an argument.”
Most parents would want to just get children out of the household and into their own or another relative's, but Hofeller simply wanted them out of his daughter's life and dumped them into the foster system. Father of the year right there!
As his daughter put it, "he reapportioned her family"
