Editor's note: In 1995, Birdie Jo Hoaks showed up in Salt Lake City, claiming to be an abandoned 12-year-old boy seeking help. Her story was revealed to be a hoax, and the woman pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges. Similar tales involving Hoaks and her sister, Becky, have been reported across the nation.
GALENA, Kan. (MCT) — At first glance, this town hardly seems worth a scam artist's effort.
Poverty is widespread. Industry is absent. And the people — well, few remain.
Lead and zinc mining brought riches to Galena, Kan., in the 1870s, but only the miles of abandoned underground tunnels endure.
Over the years, sinkholes have claimed the lives of at least five residents as the tunnels have collapsed. Just last August, the town's last tavern sealed its doors when an 80-foot-deep void appeared next door.
With the mining industry largely gone, many who survive in this Kansas corner find employment across the two nearby state lines, in Joplin, Mo., or the Oklahoma casinos.
Galena, population 3,100 and dwindling, perseveres as the second poorest city in the state's second poorest county.
"They are good, hard-working people," said Galena's Police Chief Larry Delmont, whose office overflows with maps approximating where the abandoned mine shafts snake underneath the town — including beneath his own desk.
"They're pretty strong people."
They're also compassionate, cheerful givers, willing to help someone in need, which means they fit the profile of folks the Hoaks sisters have preyed upon during their 16-year journey of deception and crime. Such widespread goodwill may even be the reason the androgynous twins came to Galena in the first place, although no one knows for sure. In many ways, Galena resembles the sisters' downstate Illinois hometown of Hoopeston: Both places radiated a small-town innocence until the Hoaks sisters appeared.
Birdie Jo arrived in Galena in autumn 2003 and pretended to be a downtrodden, male teenager in need of charity, as she had done in so many other spots. Becky pretended to be the boy's "aunt." Since leaving the Army National Guard in the early 1990s, the sisters had used their small, stout frames to make the scam succeed in nearly every region of the country.
Still, following a couple of years of relative quiet, Becky and Birdie Jo must have found themselves at a crossroads. They were 33 years old. Their past exploits and pictures popped up in news stories across the Internet. Birdie Jo was even raising a son, after giving two other children up for adoption.
Even for a moment, the question must have crossed their minds:
Can we still get away with this?
The Galena Assembly of God church sits on the eastern edge of town, and its 400 or so members are known for their generosity, including food drives and coat donations. Every Sunday, people crowd the gymnasium-like sanctuary to praise God with their hands toward heaven.
It was in the church parking lot that Birdie Jo appeared in October 2003 as "Chris Gomes," saying she was a Joplin boy who had been sleeping in the church van to avoid violent parents.
"We heard the stories that home life was bad, abusive stepdad," said Associate Pastor Randy DePriest. "And he'd show up with a bandaged arm, and we would basically say, 'Chris, what's wrong?"'
"Oh, I just fell down," Gomes would whisper in a high-pitched voice that emanated from beneath a baseball cap.
"Some people came to me and said he sure looks older than 13, and I said he has had a hard life," DePriest remembered. "He's weathered."
The larger church community did its part to embrace Gomes, providing meals and clothes, new glasses and regular haircuts. They even supplied transportation back and forth to his Joplin home when "Aunt Becky" couldn't drive.
The boy became a regular at church and youth services, however he wasn't attending school — a fact the church remedied by enrolling Gomes in the Galena Middle School in January 2004.
Several fellow students, who are now in high school, remember Gomes walking the hallways alone during his first days and using the boys bathroom when few were around. The new student also ate lunch by himself and seemed suspicious of overtures of friendship.
Finally, about two weeks after Gomes began school, the skeptics at the church confronted him, believing it impossible that this boy was only 13 years old. Gomes broke down and admitted that, yes, he was older than that. In fact he was 33.
And further — he was actually a she.
Chief Delmont said the town was more than simply embarrassed.
"It hurt a lot of people," he said.
The Cherokee County attorney criminally charged Birdie Jo with making "false statements and writings" to enroll in the school and for theft of services — all felonies. Sister Becky, who had falsified records so her "nephew Chris" could enroll in school, was charged with a felony count of making a false writing. Yet like so many places before, Galena's Cherokee County authorities decided to drop the charges just months later. In this case, a new county attorney said his predecessor had pursued the case solely for campaign publicity purposes and he saw no reason to extend the affair that had made Galena a laughingstock.
Once again, the twins were free to relocate wherever they wanted, able to roam far and wide.
But perhaps for the first time in their lives, someone asked them to stay.
Church leaders encouraged the sisters to remain in Galena because they believed forgiveness was the Christian thing to do, even if the sisters' presence in Sunday services caused snickers around town and led some members to quit in protest.
"The church went through a time there when it had a reputation — 'you're the church with those girls' — but the church continued to love them," said Pastor Rich Graves.
The church family actually extended its charity to the twins in the following months, as the sisters introduced the congregation to their mother, their mother's boyfriend and Birdie Jo's young son.
When the family needed money for an electric bill, the church supplied it. When the twins' mother nearly died of lung disease, church elders surrounded her hospital bed with prayer. And as summer temperatures pushed past 100 degrees, family members essentially moved into the Assembly of God, spending their days roaming its long cool halls.
"The church is a very compassionate church," Graves said.
And then, after nearly three years of everyone's efforts and prayers, it came to an abrupt end.
Last year, on the morning of Nov. 6, DePriest entered his office and discovered that the church safe was missing, along with the pay stubs, credit cards and $2,500 or so in cash believed to be inside of it.
The church staff called police and said they had a good idea who was responsible: Becky had told church leaders that Birdie Jo planned on stealing the safe in the near future, although the leaders had dismissed the claim when she made it.
It seems that in the two years since the twins' true identities had been revealed, the sisters had become known for disparaging each other in attempts to gain favor with the senior church staff.
"They had a real need to find affirmation from different types of leaders in their life," said Graves who, like others, had assumed Becky was simply lying like so many times before.
According to the Galena police report, Birdie Jo broke into the church at night and stole the safe by loading it on a wheelchair, then rolling the safe out of the church and into Becky's waiting car. The twins, police say, then transported the safe to their house, where Birdie Jo smashed it open with a screwdriver and hammer.
Coincidently, police stopped the twins a few hours later for acting suspicious at a truck stop north of Galena. However, officers released the sisters within minutes, seeing nothing illegal in their car. Only after the twins' role in the burglary was alleged the next morning did police return to the truck stop, hoping to find some evidence.
They recovered the safe in the truck stop trash bin. Police arrested the twins later that week.
The Hoaks sisters deny any involvement in the crime and have pleaded not guilty to the felony charges of burglary, theft and criminal damage to property. If convicted, both twins could face serious prison sentences for the first time in their lives.
At a recent court appearance, Birdie Jo sat at the defense table next to Eddie Battitori, her high-profile area attorney who has taken her case pro bono. Dressed like her sister in a flannel jacket and hiking boots, Birdie Jo actively took part in her defense, whispering legal strategy to Battitori in between periods of picking dry skin off her lip.
Becky sat in the row behind them, leaning in to listen. Behind her sat pastors DePriest and Graves and Graves' wife, who had all come to testify about the theft of "God's money," as they call it. The scene marked a reversal from church services — pastors in the back, sisters in the front.
The court proceedings ended abruptly when Battitori filed a motion alleging that Galena police violated Birdie Jo's Miranda rights the evening she was arrested. That case and Becky's separate one continue through the court system with no resolution in sight.
For now, the church is continuing on as well, although without the safe and without the Hoaks sisters in the pews.
"The church kind of feels like this is the last straw," Graves said, realizing this statement means church leaders are no longer turning the other cheek. "We don't know what else to do."
"Some people don't feel safe with them. They don't trust them. They've watched them over a two-, three-year span of time, which is a long period of their life compared to how long they've been other places," he said.
"They closed the door on this church. The church didn't close the door on them."
Graves and DePriest both said they still pray the sisters will claim their salvation. But for now, the ministers have washed their hands of helping that happen.
"I think if true repentance and reformation was to show, and (if) in two years they have trained for an occupation and have become a member of society, and they had a new life, I think people would let them back in," DePriest said.
"They would rejoice that, 'Hey — it worked,"' he said. "'God helped you get better."'
Birdie Jo shrugs at such suggestions and denies the church's claim that she and her sister have begged to return to Sunday services. She said she's too busy raising her son, now 6, with her sister and mother in Tulsa, two hours away.
"I'm going to be buying my son a home, and he's going to stay put," she said in a brief interview during a recent court recess. "I want him to have the same school."
As for her salvation and getting to heaven, she said she's not too worried.
"I'll get there some way," she said, as a grin spread on her face. "Even if I have to con my way in."