It's easier than ever for youths to keep secrets, and a slaying case highlights parents' worst fears.
Perfect parents. Perfect home. Perfect kids. Or so it seemed.
Then, unbelievably, two families in agony. A community in shock.
The double-murder case in Lititz - 18-year-old David Ludwig charged with shooting the parents of his secret girlfriend, Kara Beth Borden, a 14-year-old he met in their Christian homeschooling network - has provoked more than speculation about the Nov. 13 incident itself.
It has caused a wave of anxiety among many parents in the region, who wonder if anything ever truly is what it seems with their children.
"It's so frightening," said Kathy Roth, of Lititz, mother of an 18-year-old daughter who has graduated from high school and lives at home.
You monitor them, you stay observant, you lead by example, "but what if it's not enough?" Roth asked. "I guess you just never know. That's the scary part."
The Bordens and Ludwigs were, by all accounts, involved in their children's lives.
Zach Acox, who went to school with the oldest of the five Borden children and has set up a trust fund for the family, said the Bordens were loving, supportive, and "devoted" to their children.
Michael Borden, who worked at a scientific publisher in Ephrata, was an elder and a popular Sunday school teacher at his evangelical Plymouth Brethren church. Cathryn was educating the family's three school-age children, including Kara Beth, who baby-sat, was a fan of Christian rock bands, and loved to play soccer. The parents had laid down the law regarding Kara Beth dating Ludwig, whom they considered too old.
Like the Bordens, the Ludwigs - commercial pilot Gregory and teacher-homemaker Jane - were involved in their church. Their son David, who lived at home, was into dirt-biking, had recently trained as an emergency medical technician, and worked at the local Circuit City, where a coworker said he joked around and read his Bible during breaks.
Hunting, popular in Lancaster County, was a family affair. On Ludwig's Web log, photos labeled "Hunting 2004" showed him proudly standing next to his kill and smiling adults eating dinner in a rustic kitchen.
But what else was going on in Kara Beth Borden's and David Ludwig's lives? As evidence in the Lititz case mounts, disquieting details have surfaced.
Borden, known to Internet buddies as KareBear, was sneaking out at night to engage in a sexual relationship with Ludwig. And Ludwig had access to an extensive array of guns. Police confiscated 54 from his parents' home after the Bordens were slain.
If their parents had no idea, neither did lots of Borden's and Ludwig's peers. Many of the pair's associates say they had no inkling of the dark currents in their friends' lives. Others had hints - an online confidante warned Borden, "things are getting out of hand" - but didn't tell any adults.
Therein lies one of the problems related to youth violence, said James Garbarino, a psychology professor at Loyola University Chicago who investigated the Columbine killings.
Ask youths individually if they would tell an adult whether they knew of a serious problem, and they might say yes.
"Things get around," said Sara Williams, 18, a senior at Warwick High School in Lititz, and someone would probably tell "eventually."
Statistics, however, don't bear that out. Garbarino cited a national post-Columbine survey that asked teens whether they would alert anyone if an acquaintance said he was going to commit a murder. Sixty percent said no.
Teenagers don't even tell on themselves. At Cornell University, where he was head of the Family Life Development Center, Garabarino did a study of female students and found that one-third had been so depressed in high school that they had considered suicide. To his astonishment, he said, 80 percent of the girls said their parents had no idea.
Kids keeping secrets "is one of the biggest ingredients here," Garbarino said. "Until we make progress on that, we're not going to make a dent" in youth violence.
Why don't they tell? Some worry "their parents can't deal with it," Garbarino said.
Every child has a hidden life. It's a normal part of establishing identity, experts say.
"You just hope," said psychologist Roni Cohen-Sandler, author of Stressed-Out Girls, that "whatever they keep secret is benign enough that it's not going to be hurtful."
Kids learn to obfuscate early in life, Garbarino said. Mom goes downstairs to check the laundry, the child feeds the tuna sandwich he doesn't like to the dog, and Mom never knows.
"It dawns on the kid, 'Wow, they can't look inside my brain.' "
The way to have a "self-disclosing" child, Garbarino said, is to convince the child early on that "nothing you could do or say or think would make me stop loving you."
Some wonder whether the Internet and cell phones give children more places to hide. A family acquaintance said the Bordens took away Kara Beth's Internet service when they discovered her relationship with Ludwig months ago. Apparently it had been restored. Friends of Borden's and Ludwig's said the couple stayed in touch via cell-phone text messages and computer instant messages, both difficult to monitor.
"If kids are determined to be secret,... they are able to do so much better than previous generations," said Cohen-Sandler, who maintains a practice in Connecticut. "Parents used to answer the home phone and they knew who their kids were talking to."
Sites such as Xanga, where Borden, Ludwig, and many of their friends spilled their thoughts, present a weird contradiction: The place for private musings is a public forum, yet many parents are unaware their children are participating or lack the passwords to remain vigilant.
Dan Alban, the youth pastor at Hope Community Church in Willow Grove, said members of his youth group have blogs on Xanga, and they "know I read them. It's a window into their minds and what's going on in their lives."
At the same time, "there's stuff they can post that I can't see."
Garbarino attributes children's alternate universes not so much to technology as to popular culture - violent imagery on TV and in movies, an "extremely explicit" level of sexuality, an erosion in adult authority, and more. The norm has become so extreme, he said, that it's hard to know what behavior is an indicator of trouble.
Some see a warning signal in the very existence of a relationship between a 14-year-old girl and an 18-year-old man. And not just experts.
Asked whether he would ever date a 14-year-old, Warwick senior Matthew Hachey, 18, looked baffled. Finally, he offered, "it's kind of odd. That's a pretty big gap."
But Alban thinks it happens more often than it once did. Girls may relate better to older boys because their less mature male peers "are still into cooties," he said.
For an 18-year-old guy, dating a younger girl would be "an ego thing," Alban said. "You've got this girl who adores you and looks up to you."
Cohen-Sandler, however, sees a more sinister motive. Among the reasons for an 18-year-old man being interested in a 14-year-old: "Being able to control someone? Thinking, and correctly so, that he's going to be with a girl who's not going to be able to say no?"
It "sounds very predatory, and I think it is," Cohen-Sandler said. "That's why it's illegal."
Such a relationship, she said, is a sign that the girl "really craves attention... . A girl who feels good, who knows herself, who feels accepted by her peers, doesn't have a need to subject herself to an older boy."
philly.com
