Jury hears opening statements in Marler child sexual abuse trial

CASPER, Wyo. — After two days of jury selection, 16 Natrona County residents heard opening statements Wednesday morning in the case of the State of Wyoming v. Steven Randall Marler, a noted Casper business owner and former foster family patriarch. 

Marler, 51, stands accused of 11 acts of sexual contact involving four former foster children over a nine-year period. There are five misdemeanor counts of battery and a count of child endangerment that also involve four other children.

Marler is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.

“This is going to be a difficult case for a lot of reasons,” defense attorney Devon Peterson told the empaneled jury during opening statements.

Marler and his wife Kristen had three biological children, and in 2008 became foster parents at their home on Casper Mountain. Defense filings indicated the Marlers fostered about 75 children over two decades, and nearly a dozen were formally adopted.

State prosecutor Brandon Rosty told the jury that, despite commendations from the governor and the Department of Family Services, the culture of the Marler home became one of silence, obedience and sexual abuse. 

He said food was withheld from the children as punishment, that they were subjected to extreme exercise regimens and that one was spanked on bare flesh with a rubber strap.

“The very fact that things went wrong in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Marler is not in dispute,” Peterson told the jury during opening statements. “That in itself is justification to fabricate sexual assault allegations.”

Peterson said the Marlers themselves would acknowledge that they were “in over their heads” with the family, most of whom were in adolescence, during the era of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Rosty told the jury that in 2020, all the girls were made to sleep on one mattress, and all the boys slept on another mattress, and they all slept in the home school room. He said they were also made to shower and go to the bathroom with the doors open. 

“The Marlers went too far,” Peterson acknowledged to the jury, saying again that those  conditions gave the children a strong motive to fabricate sexual assault allegations.

“It was their ticket out,” Peterson said. “To get out and do whatever they wanted, to have control, have freedom.”

Peterson said this was supported by the timing of the allegations.

In 2016, the oldest adopted girl told her mom that Marler would come into her room at night, lay with her, and touch her bare genitals, Rosty said. She said she was about 10 years old when it started and that it happened almost every night for six months until she left. She said Marler also struck her in the head with a broomstick.

The Natrona County Sheriff’s Office investigated the allegations at the time, but Marler denied them, Rosty said. The affidavit of probate cause filed by NCSO Investigator Lisa Lauderdale said that the claims could not be substantiated. 

On Wednesday, Peterson said that girl’s disclosures to her biological family were an effort to derail her adoption process by the Marlers, which was nearly final.

In February 2021, the Marlers sent one of the oldest adopted girls to the Cowboy Challenge Academy. Marlers wife Kristen pleaded no contest to charges of misdemeanor child abuse for conduct leading up to the girl going to the Academy. Starting the previous October, the girl said her foster parents, specifically Kristen, had forced her to stand with her shoulder against the wall for 12–14 hours a day. She said she was also denied food and forced to run in the snow. Rosty said this girl, adopted in 2011, had quickly become favored by Marler.

Academy personnel and DFS investigators noted the girl’s “skeletal” appearance and the fact that, at the age of 17, she had yet to begin menstruating. 

Rosty said that while she was at the Academy, she heard her peers discussing sexual topics, prompting her to state that those were activities she associated with her father. Her peers encouraged her to report further. Rosty said the girl told authorities she would wake up with Marler on top of her, grinding and minimally clothed. She said she was made to touch Marler’s genitals, and reported an instance of penile penetration, an allegation resulting in one of two counts of sexual abuse of a minor in the first degree.

Peterson said that those disclosures hadn’t surfaced until the girl learned that the next stop after the Academy would be the Marlers’ instead of the job corps, as she had hoped. 

In May 2023, another girl who had run away and been arrested told authorities that she didn’t want to go back home because Marler had abused her. She recalled specific incidents when she was about 13 years old of Marler laying in bed with her, touching her genitals above and below clothing and rubbing his “private part” against her, according to statements in the affidavit. 

In June 2023, the foster children were removed from the home, according to court filings. The Natrona County Sheriff’s Office conducted 120 interviews. Corroborating statements were recorded by all but two of the children who denied feeling unsafe at the home, according to the affidavit.

“One by one, the longer they are away the more they are willing to talk,” Rosty told the jury Wednesday.

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

Another boy told investigators that in the winter of 2020–21, he and other children were shoveling snow off the roof when Marler pushed him and he slid off, gashing his leg. One child told investigators “‘everyone’” saw the incident and that “nobody wanted to be there.”

Rosty said that pictures taken of the home in 2021 had revealed cameras in the halls and school room, but not the bedroom. Rosty said the 1-terabyte hard drive was empty when investigators obtained it, but that in January of this year, about 9,000 deleted files were recovered. Only 1,500 files were accessible, but Rosty said they would collectively show one of the girls going into the master bedroom; Marler crawling over a mattress where all the girls slept and sitting on one girl’s face; and the girls massaging Marler for a 45-minute period.

Another video would show one of the boys standing naked while Marler holds a belt and other children are made to stand and watch, Rosty said. He said the jury would see the boy and Marler move out of frame and the boy return into camera view with obvious injuries to his buttocks.

Last month, Rosty had filed an unopposed motion to continue the trial to give both sides time to review the files, but the motion was denied.

Rosty said many evenings in the family room centered around the children giving Marler clothed massages, which he would return, and that the activity was known in the family as the “Daddy Tax.”

Before opening statements, Judge Kerri Johnson instructed the jury that evidence presented regarding massages, punishments or Marler observing the children undress was not direct evidence of specific allegations of sexual abuse, but they may consider it as part of the overall narrative of the case.