A 70-year-old Missouri woman has admitted trading her foster daughter to a family in Texas in exchange for a monkey because the pair were not getting along, in a case that has exposed a devastating catalogue of alleged abuse and a failure by authorities to act on hundreds of complaints stretching back years.
Brenda Deutsch, of Winfield, took a plea deal on Monday, agreeing to plead guilty to one count of endangering the welfare of a child in the first degree. She faces up to seven years in prison, with her case due to be reviewed on 21 July.
The girl’s whereabouts only came to light after her excessive school absences triggered an investigation by the Winfield School District in February 2025. Deutsch had reportedly sent the eighth-grade-aged girl to a family in Texas in exchange for a monkey. Authorities later discovered the girl had been passed on again — this time to a family in Texas that was unable to care for her. Lincoln County Prosecuting Attorney Mike Wood described the situation the child ended up in as deeply troubling. “Both of those people are disabled and not able to take care of the child. From what we can tell, the child was taking care of them,” he told reporters. “The child had been left alone in Texas for extended periods of time. It wasn’t isolated. It was a culture of abuse and neglect.”
The discovery followed an anonymous tip to the Missouri Department of Social Services in November 2024 alleging Deutsch was abusing the girl. The child told investigators the abuse had begun three years earlier, in September 2022, and included being hit in the face, struck with a paddle and slapped, leaving her with injuries and bleeding, according to probable cause documents viewed by the Daily Mail. The girl told investigators Deutsch had called her a “b**ch,” threatened to “kill her” and described her as “annoying and rude.” She also alleged that on one occasion, a family member held her down while Deutsch pulled down her trousers and spanked her with a paddle.
The girl additionally told investigators she had spent nine months in a residential psychiatric facility at the age of 14 after Deutsch called police on her when she attempted to run away. She said she had raised concerns about the abuse with multiple people over the years but had not been believed, and alleged that other children had also been abused by Deutsch.
Deutsch, who has fostered more than 200 children over the course of her life, is understood to have told associates she did not want the girl back. She said she had bought a plane ticket to return the child but that a friend had no way of transporting her to the airport.
Perhaps most troubling for prosecutors is the revelation that more than 200 calls had been made to a child welfare hotline about Deutsch over the decades without ever resulting in a police referral. “Disappointed to learn that this particular home, despite the notoriety that it had gained, was not in our system,” Wood said. “We didn’t have any police reports. We didn’t have any requests for prosecution. We didn’t have anything.” KMOV reported the scale of the missed alerts, highlighting what prosecutors described as a systemic failure to act on repeated warning signs.
Deutsch also faces a separate pending financial fraud case.
