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Lack of Facts Leads to Confusion Surrounding Girl's Death

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Penny Owen

The Daily Oklahoman

In a town like Hooker, where patients share doctors and hospitals across state lines, information can get sketchy - if it gets there at all.

That's why it took Dr. Darrell Stout nearly five years to learn that Vicky Dawn Louise Rinkel died of a blow to the head, even though he signed her death certificate saying otherwise.

Stout, the Rinkel family physician and the Panhandle town's only doctor, was vacationing Oct. 15, 1993, when Vicky's adoptive parents drove her to a Liberal, Kan., hospital with a head injury and more than 100 bruises on her body.

The 9-year-old girl was flown to a Wichita hospital and died that day.

Stout got her Kansas death certificate in the mail, with a request that he sign off as the attending physician.

"I had no idea as to what to do with it and I sent it back to them, and they sent it back to me, saying the child originated here," Stout said.

"We had zero information other than she had died from an internal hemorrhage. Period. They wouldn't let me talk to the doctors. Nobody that took care of the kid would return my call or answer my calls when I called them."

More than a month passed and Stout knew the certificate needed to be signed. He had known the Rinkel family for eight years and considered them good, caring parents who attended church twice a week and kept their children healthy with herbs and regular checkups.

They had adopted Vicky and her younger, mentally retarded brother just months before Vicky died. Stout remembered the condition the pair arrived in.

"He was still in diapers and he was maybe 5 or 6 years old. And she was not much better developmentally than he was. They were both still eating baby food; they were totally neglected," Stout said.

"The Rinkels got them eating, taught them how to use silverware. They were gaining weight. The child, in just a few months, was out of diapers."

When Vicky died, Nellie Rinkel told Stout her adoptive daughter had been injured in a tag football game.

"These were not neglectful, mean people that I could see," Stout said. "And because of that, there was absolutely no reason to suspect anything, especially when I got no reports back from Wichita."

Stout also said he sent Vicky to an Oklahoma City hematologist who said she had symptoms of von Willebrand disease, a blood disorder that causes bruising and excessive bleeding.

Stout saw the symptoms himself - Vicky and her brother often had bruises. Vicky was never diagnosed with that disease, however, and other doctors say the disease still wouldn't explain how she got a massive blow to the head.

But it could explain why Vicky might bleed to death after an injury, Stout said.

"Finally, I just said, 'Obviously, there's nothing bad here or they would've contacted me.'"

Stout put his signature under Vicky's official cause of death: Intercranial hemorrhage due to trauma, due to von Willebrand disease.

Had he known then what he learned by reading The Oklahoman last week - that Vicky died from a blow to the head - that death certificate would have left his desk with a blank line.

"I would have refused to sign off on it. I would've made them do it, that way they would've had to determine whether or not it was neglect or homicide," said Stout, who now practices medicine in Norman.

"And then they would have had to set the investigation in motion to find out what was going on; to see if something happened in the home."

In 1994, the Kansas coroner amended the death certificate to list the cause of death as an acute subdural hematoma, which is a head injury. Gone was any mention of von Willebrand disease.

In 1997, at the urging of the Oklahoma Child Death Review Board and state medical examiner, Vicky's death certificate was amended again, to homicide.

With that, and the testimony of the chief medical examiner and at least three physicians who agree the girl was intentionally killed, review board members want someone to answer in court for her death.

So does Hooker Police Chief Larry Hinds and former Liberal police officer Ray Petty, who both say they called the death a homicide from the start.

Hinds said he questioned why the mother didn't call an ambulance for Vicky, choosing instead to drive Vicky herself and pick her husband up at work along the way.

"To me, it's like this little girl is speaking from heaven and that's why this thing hasn't died," Hinds said. "I hope it gets prosecuted. It needs it ... It should have been done back when we filed our report."

An early police report indicated several family members were questioned. The mother admitted spanking Vicky with a fly swatter.

"One of the family members was definitely a suspect," said Petty, who is now a deputy sheriff in Seward County, Kan. "We were all really surprised that charges were never brought forth."

But District Attorney Richard Dugger of Elk City and officials with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation say the evidence just isn't there to prosecute anyone. And they're not going to take a case into court if they don't believe they can prove it.

"Our office is very experienced and I've been here doing this work for 25 years," Dugger said.

"If there is a homicide that I can prove ... I file the case and get on with it."

There are at least two problems with charging someone in Rinkel's death, Dugger's first assistant, Jan Warren, said.

First, prosecutors must overcome prior death certificates and an autopsy report that list the death as an intercranial hemorrhage, as undetermined - anything but homicide.

"Just because four years later, they talk somebody into changing a death certificate doesn't mean that issue will go away. A good defense attorney will jump all over that with both feet," Warren said.

"That means every doctor that touched that kid is going to have to be saying the same thing... Any reasonable person is going to go, 'Wait a minute, do these guys know what they're talking about?'"

Warren also said a jury would be hard-pressed to convict someone when it didn't know how the injury happened.

"As a juror, if I'm going to stand before you and I'm going to ask you to convict a person... aren't you going to say, 'Madam prosecutor, can you tell me how this happened?'" Warren said. "Assuming it was a homicide... it's real nice if you know how they did it."

Knowing how it occurred is handy but not necessary, said Dr. John Stuemky, a review board member and head of the child protection team at Children's Hospital.

"The fact that she can't explain exactly and specifically how it happened has not prevented other successful child abuse prosecutions in the past," Stuemky said.

"The issue is that the medical people can, in fact, say that this was due to blows on the head and that the blows on the head are of sufficient magnitude and force that it could not have happened in an accidental manner."

Stuemky also said the physicians can narrow down the timing of the head blow, which also narrows down possible perpetrators. And he believes their testimony can adequately explain the changes in the death certificate and autopsy report.

Dugger pointed out there is no statute of limitations on filing murder charges. The case remains open for new evidence, if any should come.

"Once you charge someone with a crime in the state of Oklahoma and there's no guilty verdict, then that is it... you get one shot," Dugger said. "There is no immediacy that it's got to be done today."

The Child Death Review Board is taking no chances.

They have asked the Commission on Children and Youth to request that Gov. Frank Keating appoint a committee to study Vicky's death, as he has in two previous child abuse deaths.

In Stout's view, the death is a sad ending to a once-hopeful beginning.

"Here's a little girl getting a chance on life, that came from conditions you and I can't even imagine, and finally getting to see light at the end of the tunnel, and then all of a sudden getting snuffed out," Stout said.

"It's also sad to think that the person who did that has had this guilt and is unable to purge that guilt," Stout said.

"Whoever delivered that blow, I'm sure has that haunting them."

1998 Aug 8