Special report:
Sexual predators evading treatment
Many violent molesters and rapists sent to a state mental facility are being freed with few restrictions after refusing therapy
By Mareva Brown -- Bee Staff Writers Sunday, February 12, 2006
A decade ago, as California was gripped with outrage over the release of a notorious rapist from prison, the state took bold action.
Legislators vowed to keep the highest-risk sex offenders locked up for years after completing their prison sentences. They were to be sent to a maximum-security psychiatric facility - Atascadero State Hospital - for a strict, five-stage treatment program.
California's solution was considered among the nation's toughest.
But the program has a fatal flaw, a six-month investigation by The Bee has found, because there is a much easier way out of Atascadero, one chosen by the vast majority of sexually violent predators housed there: Refuse treatment and bank on winning release through the court hearing each offender receives every two years.
That loophole makes California's get-tough solution in practice one of the most lenient sexually violent predator laws in the nation.
It is precisely how 54 rapists and child molesters won release through the end of 2005 from their Atascadero commitments, according to a review of court records and interviews with dozens of prosecutors, law enforcement officers and sexually violent predators in California, Oregon, Arizona, Missouri and Colorado. Only four men have completed the five-step program, and one of those was returned to custody less than two months after his release.
To be declared a sexually violent predator and sent to Atascadero, offenders must have at least two sex-crime convictions, and prosecutors must convince a court that they are likely to re-offend if released directly from prison.
But there is no guarantee that the offenders will remain in Atascadero.
Some convinced state psychiatrists that they were unlikely to commit a new offense, which obligates the state to set them free. Others won release after juries could not agree whether they should continue to be held. Still others were freed after county district attorneys did not challenge the offenders' petitions for release, judging them too old or infirm to re-offend.
None of the 54 went through the full regimen of treatment the state designed for them. More than two-thirds underwent no treatment at all.
"All they need is a doctor's slip to get out," said Harriet Salarno, president of Crime Victims United of California. "Nobody should be let out unless they're truly rehabilitated."
Instead, an investigation of the program found that in California:
* There's a built-in incentive to refuse treatment, because the few offenders who actually follow the hospital's full program find themselves not only targets of scorn inside Atascadero but subject to both tighter scrutiny and community protests upon release.
* Nearly all of the highest-risk sex offenders released from Atascadero without completing treatment have returned to society with less supervision than lower-risk sex offenders freed directly from prison.
* Members of the public have no sure way to tell if a sexually violent predator has settled in their neighborhood because the state refuses to identify them as such.
Despite that policy, The Bee found the last-known locations of all 54 sexually violent predators who were released through the end of 2005 without completing the treatment program. The search included use of court records, public documents, media archives, Internet search tools and interviews with law enforcement and county prosecutors throughout California. It also relied on cooperation from some Atascadero patients and released sex offenders, as well as California's Megan's List, the attorney general's Internet listing of all sex offenders registered with California law-enforcement agencies.
Eleven of the 54 men are back in custody, including one convicted of molesting two girls he was baby-sitting two years after his release. Two were accused of new sex-related crimes. At least 10 left the state after release, some saying that life as a convicted sex offender is easier outside California, where registration requirements and monitoring efforts can be even less stringent.
Seven have died, and three currently are in violation of their quarterly registration requirements, including one - Donald Warren Delaney - who seems to have disappeared.
Authorities say Delaney, a 77-year-old former Stockton police sergeant, has dropped from sight and may be in Mexico.
Delaney, sentenced to 24 years in prison in 1985 for lewd acts on nine children, was released from Atascadero on March 25. California's Megan's List indicates he is incarcerated, but there is no record of him in any California prison, and San Joaquin County Deputy District Attorney Stephen Taylor said he may have left the country.
One property record linked Delaney to an address in Pollock Pines that turned out to be a logging road with no homes.
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Most of the 54 who failed to start or complete treatment simply moved into communities around California and the nation with little or no public notice, no requirement that they wear satellite tracking devices, and none of the parole restrictions heaped on other sexual offenders, such as the ability of law enforcement officials to search their homes and computers without a search warrant.
The only additional monitoring for sexually violent predators who stayed in California was a requirement to register quarterly with local police - as opposed to the annual registration required of other sex offenders.
The sexually violent predators' faces, names and addresses do show up on the state's Megan's List site, along with general descriptions of their crimes, but there's no way to differentiate them from the 63,000 other registered sex offenders depicted there.
Many other states provide more detailed information on offenders and their crimes and whether they are high-risk offenders.
In California, from the top on down, law enforcement officials typically refuse to identify sexually violent predators who have been released. Attorney General Bill Lockyer's office rejected a California Public Records Act request by The Bee for their names and whereabouts.
The state law that set up the Megan's List Web site requires that "sex offender records remain confidential and not subject to disclosure under the California Public Records Act," Supervising Deputy Attorney General Janet E. Neely wrote in a response to the request.
Some local law enforcement agencies do pass out fliers in neighborhoods announcing that a sexually violent predator is moving in nearby. Some, among them the San Francisco Police Department, continue to reveal the offenders' identities only to neighbors, citing concern for their privacy and safety.
"It's department policy," said San Francisco Police Inspector Jim Zerga.
Though Zerga won't say so, four sexually violent predators live in San Francisco: Kinn Weber, Keith Tribble, Nicholas Yost and Douglas LeCorno.
Weber was convicted of four counts of sexual assault involving at least two victims, including rape and oral copulation with a person under 14.
Yost, now 65, was convicted of molesting three boys in the early 1990s.
Tribble was just 18 when he was convicted of attempting to rape an 8-year-old female relative, who he later claimed had tried to seduce him. Fifteen years later, he was convicted of fondling the 7-year-old daughter of a former girlfriend. A psychologist testified that the time lapse between the two events, as well as the similarities in the victims, qualified Tribble as a pedophile and sexually violent predator.
LeCorno, 56 - listed as LeCorna on Megan's List - was released in 2000 but landed in court two years ago, charged with failing to properly register. Court records indicate that while he had an address in San Francisco, at that time he was staying at least part-time with friends on the Peninsula while doing construction work. Zerga testified against LeCorno at that hearing.
Still, Zerga told The Bee that San Francisco police policy dictates only that neighbors be notified when a high-risk sex offender moves into the city and he refused to disclose any information about the four men.
"I'd have to justify why I'm disclosing this information," Zerga said. "There's no public interest. I'm not disclosing to the media. I don't see that you're at risk right now."
As a result of such secrecy, many sexually violent predators faded from view after release, mostly back into California communities where even the most vigilant parents would have no way of knowing their true background.
Three are registered as living in Sacramento, including 45-year-old Harold Royster, who was released from Atascadero in 2002 and arrested last year for failing to register properly.
Royster pleaded guilty in a deal that gave him a year in county jail. He is now out on five years' probation.
Delmar Lee Burrows, 42, was convicted in 1990 of molesting two Roseville boys and spent six years in prison and two years in Atascadero. He was released in 1998 after voluntarily having himself castrated, and he now lives in a downtown hotel adjacent to the K Street Mall.
Eighty-year-old Eddie Caperton moved into a south Sacramento nursing home in December 2004 following his release from Atascadero.
Caperton was convicted of sodomizing a 7-year-old girl in Chicago in 1961, court records show, and of lewd acts with another 7-year-old girl near Reno in 1977. He was convicted in 1993 of two counts of lewd acts on a child under 14 in Sacramento and sent to prison until December 2002, when he was committed to Atascadero for treatment.
Despite doing no therapy, Caperton was released two years later after three psychiatrists found that he no longer fit the criteria of a sexually violent predator because he was too old and infirm to pose a threat.
When he got out, no one warned neighbors. If any of them happened across him on the Megan's List site, they would find just a single mention of lewd and lascivious conduct.
As a result, no one has raised objections that Caperton's new home is three-tenths of a mile from a day care center that takes in children ranging in age from 6 weeks to 12 years.
Even if they had, they would have found the law is not on their side: While paroled sex offenders may face legal restrictions against living near schools and day care centers, the sexually violent predators tend to complete their parole period while inside the mental hospital and have no such restrictions upon release.
Caperton spends his days watching television and taking notes on commercials offering Shirley Temple DVDs for sale, he said in an interview at the nursing home. He hopes to relocate.
"If I can find another place, yes, I'll move," said Caperton, who uses a walker to get around and keeps his Atascadero-issued jacket, a beige coat emblazoned with dark "ASH" letters over the left breast, hanging in his closet.
"The old people here make me feel old," he said. "I want someplace where I can lay my body down and get three squares a day."
Public knowledge of a high-risk offender's whereabouts is even more remote if he leaves the state. John Douglas Olson Sr. quietly headed north after winning release from Atascadero in April 2004 without having participated in any therapy.
"If I was in California, I'd have to register every 90 days," said Olson, a 63-year-old retired mechanic and convicted child molester who lives near Medford, Ore.
"Here, I only have to register once a year unless I move," he said. "Here, they say, 'Oh, the next time you're in tell us if you've moved. Don't worry about it.' "
Oregon is one of only two states that do not have any Megan's List information posted on the Internet. If Olson's new neighbors wanted to discover whether he was a sex offender, they would have to request that information from the state by ZIP code or by his name and wait several weeks for a reply in the mail.
More than a year after his release from Atascadero, Olson still had not been assigned a risk level by Oregon authorities, because an Oregon Supreme Court decision put that state's classification system on hold.
"The information we received from California was that he was considered predatory, but he is not currently deemed predatory in Oregon," Vi Beatty, manager of the Oregon State Police's sex offender unit, said last summer.
That nonchalance angers Olson's victim, the daughter of one of his former girlfriends and now a 30-year-old married woman with a teenage daughter.
"I don't think a person like that can ever be healed," said the Bay Area resident, who agreed to be interviewed if she was identified only by her first name, Christina, for fear that her daughter would be harassed at high school.
"That's my personal opinion," Christina said. "If you're a rapist or a pedophile or whatever they want to name them nowadays, you're always going to do it. I don't feel that there's reform for it."
Over the summer, Olson met two reporters and a photographer at a city park in Oregon, near a birthday party for a group of young children in swimsuits.
There are no legal restrictions on where he can go or what he can do, although Olson said he is careful never to be alone with children. He considers himself healed, but fears he would not be able to defend himself against a false accusation if people learned of his history.
"I've had no problems here, because nobody knows," said Olson, who showed off a photo a friend had taken of him the day of his April 2004 release from Atascadero State Hospital. In the snapshot, Olson is making an obscene gesture at the hospital sign.
"I'm pretty sure if the people I associate with here found out, they'd no longer associate with me. Friends, people I square-dance with, ballroom-dance with, those people."
Rest of article at:
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