Girl in Trouble

Jay Owen was convinced that his daughter had been raped. She could hold her liquor, he says; it would have taken a lot more than a few beers for someone to lead her into a bedroom. "She can hang," he says. "We've been down tailgating with her, and she can go all day long."

But there was no proof. Jay Owen figures that investigating the fraternity would have been a hopeless cause. "Who are you going to get?" he asks. "Are you going to wipe out the whole house?"

In the months that followed, Owen knew that she needed help, says one sorority sister who asked not to be named. It was the fall of 2003, and Owen was secretly pregnant, living off-campus in an apartment.

"We went to lunch sometime in September, and she was kind of explaining some of the depression she went through," the sorority sister says. "I didn't want to pry, though, because I didn't really know of some of the problems she'd had in the past and how every now and then it snuck up on her."

She says Owen was a great and caring friend but didn't seem herself — the outgoing girl who liked a good party. "She just seemed a little bit like a loner fall semester.... I thought that was a little bit of a red flag."

By the end of the next month, Owen had given birth and Johnson County prosecutors had charged her with unintentional second-degree murder. The autopsy revealed a twist in the evidence — Owen had taken cocaine in the 48 hours before the birth. Though Handler said at a preliminary hearing that the amount of cocaine in Izabella's bloodstream probably wouldn't have caused the baby's death, it didn't help during the unassisted childbirth.

Owen's defense attorney, Carl Cornwell, knew the state's case was strong enough to potentially send Owen to prison for 20 years.

"Carl prepared us," Rebecca says. "They were going to make Aubrey out to be a slut, a drug addict, a party girl who cared only about partying and playing, who had the potential of going to Spain for a semester and didn't want this baby because it would interfere with that."

Owen had made no police reports after the frat party at Kansas State, so it was virtually impossible to prove that she'd been raped.

Cornwell says he was never able to fully understand his client's state of mind. If Owen didn't want the baby, he wonders, why didn't she have an abortion? "What am I going to do, let it go full-term, kill it, hide it? It doesn't make sense," he says. Cornwell says he thought that Owen's cocaine use and failure to seek prenatal care would cause prosecutors to question whether Owen really wanted the baby.

"Aubrey told me that she was going to have the baby and then she would take this beautiful little girl downstairs and her parents would have to accept it. That was her rationale. That's Aubrey. She has a puzzling affect. It's kinda like she's not all there."

Psychological evaluations paid for by the family attempted to explain Owen's behavior. In the months after her arrest, she was diagnosed as suicidal, with major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Owen, according to the evaluation, had been "disassociating" herself from the alleged assault in the frat house and the pregnancy, which allowed her to maintain good grades and go on with her life as if Izabella wasn't growing inside her. In a conversation with the Pitch from prison on May 5, Owen said that she used cocaine only a couple of times, hoping to numb the memory of the pregnancy when it surfaced. "It didn't," she said.

While Cornwell worked on her legal case, Owen's behavior continued in a destructive pattern. She was arrested twice for drunken driving while out on bail. Each time, she blew higher than a 0.2 on a Breathalyzer. (The legal limit in Kansas is 0.08.) Her case was slipping away. "I told Aubrey, 'Maybe you really need to be on your best behavior here,'" Cornwell says.

Cornwell declined the prosecutor's offer of four years in prison if Owen pleaded no contest. He hoped that the Johnson County District Attorney's Office would consider Owen's situation — the possibility that she needed mental help rather than hard time — and come back with a softer plea agreement, such as 120-day shock time in prison or probation.

But Assistant District Attorney Chris McMullin wanted her sent to prison.

"When you talk about a harsh sentence, that's 20 years," McMullin tells the Pitch. "Nobody was there in support of the baby, that's for sure, other than myself and the people with me.... I would have slept at night if she had gotten 10 years in prison."

As Cornwell weighed the evidence against Owen, she walked into his office to report a surprise.

She was pregnant again.

Six months after Izabella was born, Owen met Mark Huston at a barbecue in Lawrence. They fell in love.

"I could tell she was kind of in despair and needed somebody to understand her and be in her corner that wasn't already tied to everything," Huston says. "It all just kind of grew from there."