In her televised appearances, the 25-year-old mother of three confirmed that she is a member of the Irish Travelers, nomadic descendents of immigrants who fled to the United States during the mid-19th century to escape the potato famine. Until now, few Americans had even heard of the group; those who had associated the Travelers with home-repair scams reported in their local press.
Toogood’s sudden entrance onto the national stage has not helped the Travelers’ image. She first showed up in a video broadcast around the world beating her daughter in a store parking lot. Toogood appeared later on TV, apologized for her behavior, and spoke candidly about being an Irish Traveler. Since then, both Toogood’s lawyer and Irish Traveler advocates have been trying to play down her Traveler ties, arguing that her ethnicity is unrelated to this case. But they are having a tough time convincing the public.
Toogood herself has done little to enhance either her public image or that of the Travelers. On Friday, she was arrested a second time for giving false addresses to authorities. Toogood–who is also known as Madelyne Lark and Madeline Gorman–has had at least four addresses over the past three years in Texas, California, and Indianapolis. According to news reports, she lived most recently in New Jersey before coming to Mishawaka, Ind., where she says she and her family have been living for about six months. While Indiana authorities said they knew of no previous charges of child abuse against Toogood, they said she did face shoplifting charges in Texas. “The case is not yet adjudicated, but [Toogood] has certainly adjudicated herself in the court of public opinion,” says Joe Livingston, a senior agent with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division who has investigated cases involving Travelers for nearly two decades.
But Toogood’s attorney, Steven “Rocket” Rosen, says prosecutors have overplayed his client’s false information charge as well as her Traveler background. Prosecutors “are trying to make her seem less than a person now,” says Rosen, who once represented two Branch Davidians and draws parallels between the cases. “There are good people in each group, but they are often only represented from a very one-sided view. The Travelers are a very tight-knit, quiet, religious people.”
That is how advocates describe the Travelers. Others call them scam artists. That’s in part because the only publicity the reclusive ramblers get in the United States is the occasional story about some members’ involvement in petty crimes. Livingston has worked on dozens of cases from forgery to grand theft that involved Travelers, but he says child-abuse cases are rare. “It is an aberration of the normal Traveler behavior as far as hitting children and such; they really hold their children in high esteem and family has a high importance in their lives,” he adds.
Advocates fear that the focus on Toogood’s heritage has not only reinforced existing negative stereotypes about the group, but could hurt Toodgood’s chances at a fair trial as well. “Everyone is supposed to be entitled to a fair trial in America, but I don’t think that Traveler woman will get one. She has been seriously prejudiced,” says Martin Collins, an Irish Traveler himself and the assistant director at Pavee Point, a Traveler advocacy group in Ireland, which has received several racist emails since Toogood first appeared on television.
Alan Katruska, a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh who created a Website about Travelers to try and dispel some of the myths about the group [http://www.pitt.edu/~alkst3/USA.html], says that many Travelers have legitimate occupations, including roofing, painting, scrap-metal dealing, horse trading, and recycling–jobs that are convenient to the traveling way of life. “The No. 1 misconception is that all Travelers are criminals,” he says. “It’s just one of the aspects of stereotype creation where people are all viewed as being the same because they are part of a group, and when news of a person behaving in a certain way comes out, people think everyone is like that.”
About 40,000 Travelers still live in England and Ireland , where they have been recognized as an ethnic minority but still complain of being discriminated against. Estimates of Travelers living in the United States range from 10,000 to more than 40,000–many of them in South Carolina or in Texas, where Toogood grew up. But since Travelers rarely stay in one place long enough to develop ties to the outside community, it is difficult to get an accurate estimate of their numbers. They maintain their own traditions and language (known as Shelta and derived from Irish Gaelic).
“That this woman and the people involved happen to be of Irish Traveler descent is totally irrelevant to the case and we fail to understand why such an issue is being made about her ethnicity,” says Collins. " Nobody mentioned the ethnicity of the Houston mother [Andrea Yates] when she was on trial for killing her five children. Nobody seems to make an issue of someone’s ethnic origin unless it’s an Irish Traveler involved."
Toogood raised the issue herself, though, in arguments before the court on her daughter’s fate.
While she awaits her Oct. 7 court hearing for the abuse charge, her daughter, Martha, has been placed in foster care with a non-Traveler family, despite Toogood’s repeated pleas that Martha be placed with a member of her extended Traveler family. About 40 Travelers showed up at the courthouse last week to support her, according to those close to the family. Advocates say children like Martha are typically taken in by extended family members or other Travelers if a parent is unable to care for them. Rosen says Martha feels “traumatized” after being removed from her home and placed into a non-Traveler family with other children. “She’s being treated like the criminal now,” he adds.
The prosecutor’s office rebuffed Rosen’s attempts to secure a plea deal that might allow the child to return to her mother or extended family members now. But Toogood has been allowed supervised visits while authorities determine the fate of her daughter.
It is not an easy choice. If authorities return Martha to her mother’s care, it is unlikely they will be able to track her, given the Toogoods’ past record. Yet, if they choose to leave the girl in foster care with non-Travelers, it will not only break up the Toogood family but could tear the child’s ties to her ethnic community as well. “The immediate and extended family are crucial to the Traveler culture and way of life,” says Collins, adding that Traveler children who are adopted by non-Travelers often have difficulty coming to terms with their heritage because of the negative stereotypes. “It’s so important that the family validates [Martha’s] ethnic origin and celebrates it, so she gets a strong sense of who she is and where she came from.”
