Girl in Trouble

Rebecca Owen says she didn't speak a word to her daughter for almost two months.

"She basically disowned me. She surrendered all parental duties to my dad," Aubrey tells the Pitch.

Rebecca says she wanted to teach Aubrey a lesson, that she had to make logical decisions on her own. Wiglesworth says that's when Aubrey changed. "She kind of stuck to one group of people that were kind of the bad girls, and she started getting into trouble with them."

Wiglesworth remembers that Aubrey was having trouble with a particular girl and bumped into her accidentally one day. "It turned into this big brawl," Wiglesworth says. "Hair was pulled, and people were kicked and hit and slapped. It was the crowd she was hanging out with."

Wiglesworth saw less of Aubrey because she didn't want to be around the other girls. "They all kind of dabbled in drugs, lots of drinking."

Rebecca Owen has trouble forgiving herself. She failed to see how her popular and pretty daughter was deteriorating through years of what she now says was untreated depression. "That's what was the most upsetting for me as a mom, to realize what level of pain and grief she carried inside of her, alone," Rebecca says.

When Aubrey was 16, she broke up with her boyfriend. A week later, she found out she was pregnant.

"I saw him and hung out with him when I was pregnant," Aubrey tells the Pitch. "But he went and got another girlfriend to make it clear he didn't want to have anything to do with the situation of me being pregnant."

Aubrey told Wiglesworth and a couple of other close friends about the pregnancy, but she didn't tell her parents. Then she had her period and figured that she'd miscarried. The gossip died down.

When she should have been at midterm, Aubrey went to the hospital for surgery on her eardrum. During the pre-operation procedure, doctors conducted a routine pregnancy test that came back negative, Rebecca says. Aubrey was further convinced that she'd miscarried.

But a few months later, on May 15, 2000 — her 17th birthday — Aubrey fell to the floor of her bedroom in a grand mal seizure.

Rebecca found her and called 911. A registered nurse at Kansas City Hospice, Rebecca knelt down to help her daughter until an ambulance arrived. "The paramedics got to working on her, and the minute they disrobed her, you could see that belly," Rebecca recalls. "I was like, 'Oh, my God.' Then they told us in the ER that she was pregnant."

Doctors told the Owens that their daughter had gone into a seizure because she hadn't received proper prenatal care. Aubrey delivered a baby, though the frontal lobe in the baby's brain had not developed. Doctors didn't believe the infant would live long, but she survived.

Aubrey named her Samantha and, at the urging of her parents and the doctors, gave her up for adoption.

After she came home from the hospital, Aubrey was never the same.

"In hindsight, she needed to be in counseling," Wiglesworth says. "She didn't understand her own actions, why she was coping the way she was coping. She didn't understand why she would get mad for some reason, mood swings.... There were a series of bad choices and bad things that happened that led to this awful thing."

Wiglesworth says Aubrey felt that her mother had responded to the situation with suspicion, which created a bigger divide between mother and daughter.

"I think Aubrey avoided her mom and I think her mom kind of didn't trust her for that," Wiglesworth says. "If she could hide that, what else was she hiding?"

Rebecca Owen says she never saw any signs of depression until after Aubrey gave up Samantha. She says she wishes that she had forced Aubrey to get therapy.

Instead, Owen enrolled at Kansas State University in the fall of 2001. Owen wanted a career so that she could help Samantha if her daughter one day came looking for her.

She pledged Chi Omega. Rebecca says her daughter loved sorority life — the parties, the sisterhood, decorating floats for homecoming. She felt as though she belonged. But she still struggled with the memory of Samantha from time to time. Before she left for school, Owen had written and received letters from Samantha's adoptive parents. When she went to K-State, she lost touch. "That's when I hit a depression," she says. "Because I no longer knew about her development or how she was doing."

When Owen took psychology during her sophomore year and began to learn about child development, she says, "It just really started opening up wounds that were hard to deal with, with the loss of Samantha."

Overall, though, Owen seemed to have adjusted. Then, in February 2003, she went to a party at the Alpha Tau Omega house.

After her arrest for abandoning Izabella in the Dumpster, Owen gave slightly differing accounts of what happened that night. In the videotaped interrogation with Wall, she claimed that a "one-night stand" took advantage of her because she was drunk. Later in the interview, she called it a "date rape" and said she didn't want to talk about it because she'd known other women on campus who had tried to prosecute date rapes and failed.