Judge orders 4-week trial for foster father accused of sexual abuse to begin in April

CASPER, Wyo. — The four-week trial for a Casper business owner accused of sexually abusing four foster children over a nine-year period will begin as scheduled on April 7, according to a judge’s ruling.

Steven Randall Marler, 51, stands accused by four former foster children of 11 acts of sexual contact, most of which carry a separate, alternative charge for a lesser felony under the statutes, according to Judge Kerri Johnson. He is also accused of five misdemeanors, including four counts of battery and one count of child endangerment. 

Marler is presumed innocent unless proven or pleading guilty.

At Marler’s district court arraignment last year, attorney John Hummel said Marler intended to testify in his own defense. In a filing late last year asking for more time, Hummel said the pool of potential defense witnesses had been narrowed from over 600 to around 100. Of those, 17 worked in the Wyoming Department of Family Services, which had extensive oversight and access to the Marler family.

The filing indicates that Marler and his wife Karen fostered about 75 children over two decades at their home on Casper Mountain. “Most of these children who were fostered appreciate the care they received in the Marler home,” Hummel wrote in the filing, adding that there are thousands of DFS reports documenting the care they gave to the foster children.

The Marlers were recognized in 2013 with the national Adoption Excellence Award by the federal Administration for Children and Families. Marler said at his initial appearance over a year ago that he has been a Natrona County resident since 1999 and owns Secondwind Performance, a diesel vehicle repair and accessory installation service.

Hummel estimated that it would take about seven weeks for both the state and the defense to make their cases, and asked for additional days to be scheduled or for the trial to be delayed. State prosecutor Brandon Rosty opposed the motion, saying the state’s case in chief could be delivered in two weeks.

Judge Johnson denied the motion in late January, writing in an order that cases of similar scope have transpired expediently in the past. 

Hummel’s list of expert witnesses for the defense includes Roxanne Thompson, a Denver-based licensed counselor with 33 years of experience. She is expected to testify about the nature of “Reactive Attachment Disorder,” also known as developmental trauma, and its prevalence in children who are fostered or adopted. Thompson would be expected to testify about acting-out and manipulative behaviors, including false allegations against foster parents, that children with the condition might exhibit in order to reclaim a lost sense of safety.

According to Hummel’s filing, Thompson advises foster parents that they will more likely than not face allegations at some point.

Another defense witness is expected to testify about best practices for forensic interviews of children and critique the ones conducted in the Marler investigation.

The state’s case will rely mostly on the named victims’ testimony, though a filing indicates that videos extracted from the Marler home’s camera systems will be part of the evidence.

Many of the allegations in the heavily redacted affidavit come from two of the girls. They said Marler would come into the room at night, lay with them and engage in inappropriate touching, including on the bare skin of the genitals.

One victim told investigators these incidents happened regularly to her over seven or eight years, especially when Marler’s wife was out of town. She said the first time Marler touched her was when she was about 9 or 10 years old, around 2012 or 2013. She said it happened with increasing frequency around the time she turned 14. She also said she was severely beaten by Marler for disclosing the abuse to his wife.

Two of the counts against Marler are charges of sexual abuse of a minor in the first degree, which concerns intrusion, “however slight,” into the genital area. Each of those counts carries a penalty of up to 50 years in prison.

Natrona County Sheriff’s Office investigator Lisa Lauderdale’s report indicates that some allegations concerning the Marler family had been investigated as early as 2016, but there was limited corroboration to support charges.

The case was revived in May 2023 when one victim, upon intake into a state agency, disclosed that she was sexually assaulted by Marler. That same month, most or all of the foster and adopted children were removed from the Marler home.

One victim who left the home at the age of 17 told authorities she had been “scared to death” to tell anyone about the abuse “because after suffering several beatings, she was afraid that she would be killed.”

She added that whenever the family was being investigated, “the children were told what to say and the family did ‘pep talks’ with the children … ‘so we lied,’” the affidavit said.

Many of the children also told investigators that “there was a lot of excessive discipline” at the Marler home, including being forced to run miles in the snow in their pajamas, the affidavit said. One child said that Marler had punched him in face in one instance, and that beatings were common. 

The statement is corroborated in the report by at least one other witness who told investigators that in the winter of 2020–21, he and other children were shoveling snow off the roof when Marler pushed him, causing him to slide off the roof. He told investigators that “everyone” saw the incident, the affidavit states.

Misdemeanor counts of battery and child endangerment related to these alleged incidents have followed the case to district court.

Marler’s wife pleaded no contest to one count of misdemeanor child abuse in 2022. The victim in that case stated she was starved and forced to stand with her shoulder against the wall for 12–14 hours a day. She told Oil City News earlier last year that life at the Marler home was fairly isolated and all the children were homeschooled. She said the feeling that something “wasn’t right” increased over the years.

“Nobody wanted to be there,” one child told investigators.

Marler is out on a $225,000 cash or surety bond. Hummel successfully petitioned for an amendment to allow Marler to travel to Salt Lake City for several days in mid-January for trial preparation, according to a case filing.