Caseworker of Tyler & Ariana Payne violates gag order to bash mom in a blog

A
prosecutor's questions about confidential child welfare reports and a
former caseworker's comments on a Tucson Citizen blog interrupted
Christopher Mathew Payne's capital murder trial Thursday.
Former
Arizona Child Protective Services caseworker Cindy Graupmann had just
taken the stand late Thursday afternoon when Deputy County Attorney
Susan Eazer lodged an objection.
After
the jury was dismissed, Eazer told Pima County Superior Court Judge
Richard S. Fields that the defense hadn't disclosed that it had
unredacted CPS records it shouldn't have had.
Fields
told attorneys to come back earlier than usual Friday to continue
discussing the matter as well as an earlier situation involving
Graupmann and blog comments.
Graupmann
admitted to Eazer that she had made comments on the Tucson Citizen's
trial blog that disparaged Jamie Hallam, the mother of Ariana and Tyler
Payne and Payne's ex-wife.
"The
saddest part is that Jamie Hallam is responsible just as much as
Christopher Payne," Graupmann, who is unemployed, wrote March 3 under a
fictitious name.
Eazer wants to use Graupmann's comments to impeach her testimony.
"Aside
from the bias the witness brings into the courtroom, as a CPS worker,
one of the things that she blogged about contained information about a
subsequent case that clearly she learned about while still working for
CPS that was totally confidential," Eazer said.
"She
is breaking every rule known to CPS, that CPS has out there, which is
exactly what she and her supervisor did March 9," Eazer said.
Eazer
was referring to the 2006 incident in which Graupmann and her
supervisor Christy Tarpley advised police to allow Payne to keep his
children despite a signed court order giving custody to Hallam. Hallam
had complained to police in 2006 that Payne had taken the children for
a visit and refused to return them. She called police, who went to
Payne's house and then called CPS.
"I never told the officer to do that," Tarpley testified Thursday. "I told him if he had the court paper, that was the answer."
Tarpley
said she remembered talking to Officer William Nutt, who testified
previously that Tarpley told him to leave the children with Payne,
because she "laughed about his name."
Despite a CPS letter dated March 1, 2006, that cleared Hallam of an unsubstantiated.. charge, Tarpley said the case wasn't closed then.
"The button was not pushed," Tarpley said, explaining that the unit issuing the letter was "a mess" at that time.
Prosecutors
say Payne kept the children after Hallam left them for the visit
because he didn't want to pay child support. When his girlfriend, Reina
Irene Gonzales, complained of caring for them, Payne shut them in a
closet and starved them to death over a period of months in 2006.
Ariana's body was found in February 2007. Tyler's body has never been found.
Defense
attorneys say Gonzales abused and starved the children. Payne faces the
death penalty if he's convicted on either of two first-degree murder
charges.
Hallam settled a lawsuit against CPS, Graupmann and Tarpley for $1 million. A suit against Tucson police is pending.
Earlier, Tarpley questioned why she was even called to testify for the defense.
"I didn't look at any of this and I really don't care," Christy Tarpley said, when shown reports on the case.
"I
was shocked when I got a subpoena yesterday and I'm just trying to
figure out what I'm doing here," said Tarpley, who now works for the
Pascua Yaqui tribe.
"Just another CPS nightmare," she said, shrugging.