Thanks, Nerd. I'm having trouble finding any news reports on the internet to support Larry's claim that Kohl's store security "turned her purse out." I could only find one mention of Toogood's purse at all: in a CNN interview with Toogood on September 22nd (click on link to go to interview: http://asia.cnn.com/2002/US/Midwest/09/23/tuchman.toogood.cnna/). Here's the "purse" excerpt from that interview:

CNN's GARY TUCHMAN: Not that anything went wrong in the store? Not that you took anything or ...

TOOGOOD: No -- I never took nothing. I come in with a bag and I double-knotted it before I went in. As soon as I walked through the door, I double-knotted that bag twice.

TUCHMAN: But you think the camera outside was following you?

TOOGOOD: No ...

TUCHMAN: Why was the camera following you, do you think?

TOOGOOD: Because -- I -- because they opened my bag in the middle of the store. I have in my shopping cart with my little girl. And somebody come over and opened up my bag -- unknotted it and opened it and looked through it. And I come over and said, "That's mine. What are you doing?"

TUCHMAN: So they were suspicious of you?

TOOGOOD: My purse was in it. Yeah -- it wasn't unattended. It would be like a shopping cart -- a lady with a shopping cart that left -- yeah.

I gather from this account that the plastic bag that Toogood took into the Kohl's store, into which she had put her purse, is the bag that was opened and searched. This is not at all unusual. Many department stores have a policy that prohibits shopping bags from being brought into the stores – in order to prevent shoplifting. Even at Wal-Mart, the "greeter" will stop you if you carry a bag into the store, and will send you directly to the customer-service counter if the bag contains an item you wish to return (and will prevent you from going anywhere else in the store!). So if Toogood entered the store with a shopping bag, I'm not surprised that she was stopped by security and that the bag was searched. Nowhere does she say that the purse itself was searched, just the shopping bag, but if the purse in the shopping bag had been searched it would again be standard procedure for anyone suspected of shoplifting because of his or her actions.

Elsewhere in that interview, she claims that she was nervous in the store because she thought people were identifying her as a Traveler and were going to take her child because she had no permanent address, but that makes no sense unless authorities had already identified her as an individual who was endangering her child in some way. Sounds to me as if she was just spouting some rhetoric about prejudice, but it also seems that she doesn't believe that prejudice played a part in the court's decisions concerning custody of her daughter. I say this because the following exchange occurred later in the same interview:

TUCHMAN: Madelyne, do you think you're a victim here?

TOOGOOD: No.

TUCHMAN: It seems like you're saying that the state is doing something wrong.

TOOGOOD: They're probably just doing their job....