CHAPTER 9
SEX CRIMES
“No verdict can undo the pain and suffering caused by Mr. Sandusky, but we do hope this judgment helps the victims and their families along their path to healing.”
—From a statement released by Penn State University on June 22, 2012, when Jerry Sandusky, a former Penn State assistant football coach, was found guilty of sexually abusing boys
A star film director. A football coach. Priests. The range of people pursued as sex offenders runs the full gamut. But in so many of the cases the predatory behavior is enabled, not by the threat of a gun, but by the power of leverage, of age, of authority. That power, which feeds on trust, surfaced repeatedly in The Times coverage of the child sex-abuse trial of former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky and similar charges filed against members of the Boston archdiocese.
POLANSKI GUILTY PLEA ACCEPTED IN SEX CASE
Roman Polanski, the film director, pleaded guilty today in superior court here in Santa Monica, California, to one felony count of “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a 13-year-old girl.
The plea, entered as a result of plea bargaining, could result in Mr. Polanski’s being deported or sentenced to a jail term. It was the least serious of six drugs and sex felony counts handed up by a grand jury after he allegedly seduced the girl last March in the Los Angeles home of Jack Nicholson, the actor.
In accepting the plea, the deputy district attorney, Roger Gunson, said the girl’s family was afraid that a trial on the original charges would be traumatic for her. He also suggested that the prospect of extensive news media coverage was a major consideration in choosing not to put the girl on the witness stand.
Roman Polanski entering court in Santa Monica, on August 8, 1977.
A lawyer representing the family read a letter before Judge Laurence J. Rittenband, saying his clients wished the plea to be accepted to spare the “emotional well-being” of the victim. He said the family was “not seeking the incarceration” of Mr. Polanski, only an admission of wrongdoing and a rehabilitation program for the director.
Knew Age of the Girl
Standing in a pinstriped gray double-breasted suit, the 43-year-old director of Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown replied, when asked what crime he had committed, “I had sexual intercourse with a person not my wife, under the age of 18.” He said he knew the girl was 13 at the time.
The crime used to carry a penalty of from 1 to 50 years in prison. But a new sentencing law that went into effect July 1 in California changed that to 16 months to 3 years. The judge may decide which to apply and also can suspend any sentence he pronounces. Before being sentenced, Mr. Polanski was ordered to undergo examination by two court-appointed psychiatrists as an “alleged mentally disordered sex offender.” Judge Rittenband said that their report would help determine if the defendant needed treatment or should be committed to a state hospital or mental health facility.
The assistant district attorney also said the judge could recommend that Mr. Polanski, a French citizen, not be deported. Under immigration law, aliens convicted of a crime involving “moral turpitude” and sentenced to confinement of more than one year are to be deported.
Mr. Gunson conceded that the acceptance of the guilty plea to the lesser charge departed from normal procedures used by the district attorney’s office. But in a statement, the district attorney, John K. Van de Kamp, said it was being done because “it may achieve substantial justice” yet “provide the victim with the opportunity to grow up in a world where she’ll not be known as the young girl with whom Roman Polanski had sexual intercourse.”
Lawrence Silver, attorney for the family, said that no money was involved in his clients’ decision to urge acceptance of the plea.
The trial was to have begun tomorrow, the eighth anniversary of the murder of Mr. Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and others by the Charles M. Manson cult.
Mr. Polanski was originally charged with rape by use of drugs, furnishing drugs to a minor, lewd and lascivious acts on a child under 14, unlawful sexual intercourse, sodomy and perversion. The first two counts carry penalties of three to five years under the new sentencing law.
According to published crime reports and material disclosed at preliminary hearings, the director allegedly first photographed the San Fernando Valley girl with the permission of her stepmother in February, saying it was for a French magazine.
—August 9, 1977
NOTE: Polanski fled to Europe on the eve of his sentencing in February 1978, after serving 42 days in jail. In 1996, he settled a lawsuit filed by his victim. He was arrested in Switzerland in 2009 and held under house arrest until 2010, when the Swiss government announced it would not extradite him to the United States. In May 2016, the Polish government said it would revive the extradition effort, but later that year a Polish court said it would not order Polanski’s extradition. (Polanski has dual French-Polish citizenship).
CRIMMINS FOUND GUILTY OF MURDER AS THE JURY ACCEPTS HIS CONFESSION
Craig S. Crimmins was found guilty yesterday of murdering a violinist at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City last July 23. The 22-year-old former stagehand remained impassive when the verdict was announced, but his girlfriend, Mary Ann Fennell, wept loudly. After Mr. Crimmins had been led away, she sobbed and kept repeating: “They’re wrong, they’re wrong. He didn’t do it.”
The jury in state supreme court in Manhattan determined that Mr. Crimmins had killed Helen Hagnes, who had been performing in an orchestra for the Berlin Ballet, by pushing her down an airshaft in his flight following his attempt to rape her.
Homicide in the commission of, or flight from, another felony is known as “felony murder.” The jurors found that Mr. Crimmins was not guilty of intentionally killing Miss Hagnes, as had been charged in the first count of the indictment against him. Both intentional murder and felony murder are punishable by a maximum of 25 years to life in prison. The minimum sentence is 15 years to life.
Mr. Crimmins will be sentenced July 2 by Acting Justice Richard G. Denzer. The jurors deliberated five and a half hours Wednesday and three and a half hours yesterday. As Mr. Crimmins’s mother, Dolores Higgins, waited outside the courtroom, she asked a companion if a jury could decide in a short time “all these years in somebody’s life?”
At that moment, a court officer summoned Lawrence Hochheiser, one of the defense attorneys, and Mrs. Higgins and an entourage of relatives followed him inside.
At 2:49 p.m., Mr. Crimmins was brought into the courtroom. Seated behind him, trembling, was Miss Fennell. Mr. Hochheiser then walked over to the railing separating the defense table from the audience and asked the family to try to remain calm “no matter what happens.”
When the jury foreman, Christine Overton, announced, “Not guilty,” to the intentional murder charge, Mrs. Higgins cried out, “Oh, my God!” Seconds later, however, Miss Overton said that Mr. Crimmins was guilty of felony murder. Once the import of the verdict registered, Miss Fennell began weeping. Mrs. Higgins moved to the seat beside her and tried to comfort her.
Mr. Crimmins was originally charged with attempted rape in addition to murder, but Justice Danzer ruled that there was no proof, independent of an alleged confession, that that crime had actually occurred. Under the law, there must be such corroboration. A confession alone is not considered enough.
For felony murder, however, there must only be independent proof that a murder took place, and the body of Miss Hagnes was sufficient evidence in this case. The jury could then consider the confession in determining whether Mr. Crimmins had killed Miss Hagnes while attempting to flee from another crime. The judge instructed the jurors that if they did not believe the confession, they must acquit Mr. Crimmins of the murder charge.
In returning its verdict, the jury apparently rejected the defense contention that Mr. Crimmins was “entirely innocent,” but had been tricked into confessing to the crime by shrewd and experienced detectives who “put words in his mouth.”
One juror, Vernon Symmonds, 70, said, “It was the palm print and the confession. We explored the confession. That is why we wanted to see the tape played because we wanted to make sure it was his lips that were moving, saying, ‘Yes.’ We intended to make sure that the confession came from him.”
Mr. Symmonds was referring to a videotape made Aug. 30 showing Mr. Crimmins acknowledging answers he had made earlier in a statement.
Called “Highly Suggestible”
From the beginning of the trial on April 27 through his closing statement to the jury on Monday, Mr. Hochheiser had maintained that Mr. Crimmins had severe learning disabilities, a low intelligence level and was “highly suggestible” to a confession containing questions asked by Detective Gennaro Giorgio and answers he said Mr. Crimmins had given him.
The case began with the disappearance of Miss Hagnes sometime between 9:40 p.m. and 10:19 p.m. at a performance of the Berlin Ballet. Miss Hagnes, 31, had performed with various orchestras in this country and in Europe since her graduation in 1974 from the Juilliard School of Music. She had been married for nearly four years to Janis Mintiks, a sculptor.
At the end of the pas de deux from Don Quixote at 9:29, the orchestra left the pit for their break. And, “because she didn’t feel well,” according to another violinist, Elena Barere, “we went to the women’s lounge,” one floor beneath the stage level. About 9:40 Miss Hagnes left the lounge, ostensibly to try to speak to Valery Panov, the Soviet émigré dancer and choreographer, about giving work to her husband.
When she failed to return for the final number, a search began which continued throughout the night. At 7:45 a.m., Lawrence Lennon, a maintenance mechanic, went to the sixth-floor roof that contains six large fans that make up part of the building’s cooling system.
Noticing a pair of women’s shoes, he went downstairs to alert Detectives Giorgio and Patrick Heaney, who returned to the roof with him and with several other police officers. There they spread about the roof and “within minutes,” Detective Giorgio said, he heard an outcry from an officer. “I looked down through an opening and observed the body of the victim,” he said.
Bound Body Discovered
It was 8:20 a.m. The body was found dangling on a steel ledge midway down a six-story ventilation shaft beneath those roof fans. It was supine and nude, with the arms and legs bound with rope and old rags and with a gag stuffed in the mouth.
That afternoon, police officers found a partial palm print on a pipe on the roof. On Aug. 29, Charles J. Heffernan, an assistant district attorney, thought there was enough information to believe that Mr. Crimmins was the killer.
The police theory, according to testimony by Mr. Heffernan at a pretrial hearing, was that Miss Hagnes “had been abducted and killed by somebody intricately familiar with the Metropolitan Opera House.” They had observed that her bindings contained a “particular knotting device or style commonly used by craftsmen and especially by stagehands” at the Met.
Mr. Crimmins had begun working at the Met when he dropped out of Manhattan Vocational High School in 1976. By Aug. 29, according to the state’s case, the detectives thought he resembled a police artist’s sketch of a suspect.
The palm print from the pipe had been identified as his. They knew that he had disappeared from his assigned post at 9:15 and did not return to work until the next day. They knew from other Met employees that he had not been asleep either behind the main stage or in a lounge as he had said. And they had his admission that he had been on an elevator with Miss Hagnes the night she was slain.
At 11 that night, according to Detective Giorgio, Mr. Crimmins said, “I killed the lady.” The detective then took down the stagehand’s statement. Each page was signed by Mr. Crimmins.
—June 5, 1981
NOTE: Crimmins was sentenced to 20 years to life. He remains in custody in a New York State prison.
DARKNESS BENEATH THE GLITTER: LIFE OF SUSPECT IN PARK SLAYING
Both the victim and the suspect in the strangling death Tuesday of an 18-year-old woman moved in the same Manhattan circle of privileged young people, a circle centered on the Upper East Side singles bar where the two spent the hours before the murder, the police and others close to the case say.
For Jennifer Dawn Levin and Robert E. Chambers Jr., life was private schools, fancy apartments, foreign vacations and underage drinking at a preppy hangout called Dorrian’s Red Hand. But for Mr. Chambers, it was also unemployment, academic futility and signs of cocaine abuse.
The two had known each other for about two months and dated several times, the police said, before they met early Tuesday morning at Dorrian’s Red Hand, at 300 East 84th Street. The owner, Jack Dorrian, said he knew both as regulars.
Arrived Separately, Left Together
Mr. Chambers and Miss Levin each had arrived with a separate group of friends, but they left together at 4:30 a.m., exchanging “boy-girl talk” as they walked toward Central Park, the police said. It was there, the police believe, that she was killed.
Less than two hours later, a passer-by found Miss Levin’s body—strangled with her bra and apparently sexually abused, according to the authorities—in the park, just behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An autopsy yesterday confirmed that she was strangled. Further tests were to be conducted today.
Early this morning, Mr. Chambers was arraigned on a charge of second-degree murder.
The police picked up Mr. Chambers at his East 90th Street apartment Tuesday afternoon and brought him to the Central Park Precinct for questioning. Mr. Chambers had scratches on his face that the police said he sustained in a struggle with Miss Levin.
Mr. Chambers’s lawyer, Jack Litman, entered a plea of not guilty at the arraignment early this morning in Manhattan Criminal Court before Judge Richard Lowe 3d.
Mr. Litman told the court that Miss Levin had sought out Mr. Chambers in the bar and that they had had a prior relationship. “But that night she was the one who was the aggressor,” he said.
He asked that bail for Mr. Chambers be waived, but Judge Lowe ordered Mr. Chambers remanded to jail.
The charge against Mr. Chambers was presented by Stuart D. Schwartz, an assistant district attorney, who told the court that Miss Levin had bite marks on her face and breast and that Mr. Chambers had “lied to the police to protect himself.”
Mr. Schwartz said Mr. Chambers had thought out a story and then changed it when he realized it was not working.
“An Accident?”—“Yes”
Judge Lowe asked the defense attorney, “Are you saying this was an accident?” “Yes, your honor,” said Mr. Litman. “At the hands of the defendant?” asked the judge. “Yes, your honor, a tragic accident.” During the arraignment, Mr. Chambers wept. His parents sat quietly behind him.
Mr. Litman said Mr. Chambers had been about 100 feet from the body of Miss Levin when the police arrived in the park Tuesday morning. But he said Mr. Chambers left because he was in a state of confusion.
The details of both Mr. Chambers’s life and Miss Levin’s began to emerge yesterday—details that contradicted Mr. Chambers’s golden-boy image and revealed a naiveté beneath Miss Levin’s worldly exterior.
Mr. Chambers, in the recollection of friends, possessed charisma and mature good looks rare for a 19-year-old. He stood 6 feet 4 inches tall and was a gifted athlete who had played for three years on the soccer team at York Preparatory School on East 85th Street.
“Nothing less than total success,” said the caption beneath Mr. Chambers’s photograph in his yearbook.
A Way with Women
Mr. Chambers had a particular way with young women. Mr. Dorrian, the bar owner, said: “He didn’t have to chase girls. They chased him.”
Mr. Chambers, an only child, lived with his mother in an apartment in a town house on East 90th Street. Robert Chambers Sr., the police said, is a record promoter who has been separated from his wife for a year.
Robert Chambers, left, with his lawyer, Jack T. Litman, on October 2, 1986, a day after being released on bail.
As a teenager, Robert Chambers Jr. was a cadet in the Knickerbocker Greys, a drill team for the children of prominent families; his mother, Phyllis, was at one time the president of the Greys’ all-female board.
Both Robert Chambers and his mother were interviewed in an article about the Knickerbocker Greys in the May 1981 issue of Town and Country magazine. “Discipline is still the main theme,” Mrs. Chambers was quoted as saying. “The Greys teaches what society should be about, the niceties of life.”
“Boss Other People Around”
Robert, then 14, added: “The best part is becoming an officer. Then you get to boss other people around. That’s a whole lot better than taking orders.”
But self-discipline, it appears, was something Mr. Chambers lacked. If anything, he seemed to try to coast on his good looks and charm, not always with success.
“He was bright, charming and not a particularly good student,” recalled Ronald P. Stewart, the York headmaster. A friend from York, Larry J. Greer, said: “He could have been captain of the soccer team, but he was lackadaisical. He was an underachiever.”
Before attending York, Mr. Chambers had lasted one year at the Choate School in Wallingford, Conn., and less than one semester at the Browning School in Manhattan.
Dropped Out of College
Mr. Chambers entered Boston University in the fall of 1984, but dropped out at the end of one semester, university records show.
Back in New York, Mr. Chambers worked briefly as a restaurant host, but for the most part he was unemployed.
Still, Mr. Chambers had enough money to drink and flirt “five or six nights a week” at Dorrian’s Red Hand, Mr. Dorrian said.
The bar owner described Mr. Chambers as “the nicest kid you’d want to meet,” someone who would help calm rowdy customers and pick up litter from the floor. But he added that Mr. Chambers had “a drug problem” and had gone to treatment program in Michigan about three months ago.
“We hear rumors that at one time he did have a cocaine problem,” said the deputy police commissioner for public information, Alice T. McGillion. “We’re pretty sure it’s true.” Miss Levin, meanwhile, was a young woman who “was always happy,” said Eric Barger, the manager of Flutie’s Pier 17, the restaurant in the South Street Seaport where she worked as a hostess this summer.
“Never once, from the time I hired her, did I ever see her come to work with anything but a smile,” he said.
Boyfriend Gone for the Summer
“She was a lovely, lovely little girl,” Mr. Dorrian said. He said Miss Levin’s regular boyfriend, whom he recalled only as “Brock,” was vacationing in Europe this summer. Miss Levin had dated several different co-workers from Flutie’s, according to Mr. Barger.
Miss Levin was living with her father and stepmother on Mercer Street in SoHo and had graduated last spring from the Baldwin School on West 74th Street in Manhattan.
This fall, Miss Levin was going to enter Chamberlayne Junior College in Boston, an expensive, two-year school that does not require Scholastic Aptitude Tests for admission. Miss Levin’s father, Steven, said yesterday that his daughter was “always the straight kid of her crowd.” Her stepmother, Arlene Levin, added that the young woman might even have been considered “a prude.”
Still, Mr. Levin acknowledged that his daughter “liked to go out at night.” Mr. Dorrian said she came into his bar several times a week. And amid Miss Levin’s belongings at the murder scene, the police found a learner’s driving permit giving her age as 22.
It had been her passport into Dorrian’s Red Hand.
—August 28, 1986
NOTE: In 1988, as a jury was deliberating his fate, Chambers pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to five to 15 years in prison. Levin’s parents sued him for $25 million, a claim he opted not to contest. In prison, Chambers racked up more than two dozen disciplinary violations and ended up serving the maximum sentence before his release in 2003. In 2008, he was sent back to prison, sentenced to 19 years for selling cocaine.
LORENA BOBBITT ACQUITTED IN MUTILATION OF HUSBAND
In a verdict that highlighted the plight and rights of abused women, a jury today found Lorena L. Bobbitt not guilty of all criminal charges, concluding that she was temporarily insane last June when she cut off her husband’s penis with a kitchen knife.
When the jury of seven women and five men announced its decision, acquitting Mrs. Bobbitt of malicious wounding, an offense for which she could have been imprisoned for 20 years, a gasp went up among her supporters in the courtroom.
Mrs. Bobbitt, who was born in Ecuador and raised in Venezuela, apparently did not understand what the jury foreman had said. Turning to one of her lawyers, Lisa Kemler of Alexandria, Va., she asked, “Is that good?” Ms. Kemler replied, “You’re free.” Mrs. Bobbitt smiled briefly, then resumed her customarily serious, slightly sorrowful expression.
She still faces one more hurdle—a psychiatric examination that could last 45 days.
To Undergo Evaluation
Moments after the verdict, Mrs. Bobbitt left through the rear of the courtroom and was taken for psychiatric evaluation, as state law provides for people acquitted for reasons of insanity. She was taken to Central State Hospital in Petersburg, Va., where a psychiatrist and a psychologist will determine whether she poses any danger to herself or the public.
The doctors are to decide on a course of treatment for Mrs. Bobbitt, which will determine how long she is held. She could be released after 45 days under an order to seek private treatment.
The defense had argued that Mrs. Bobbitt, flooded with nightmarish images of her husband’s abuse and suffering from various mental illnesses, snapped psychologically after her husband raped her and yielded to an “irresistible impulse” to strike back.
In testimony, Mrs. Bobbitt said she had not realized what she had done until later, when she fled their home and was in her car. She said she then discovered the knife in one hand and her husband’s penis in the other. She threw what she called his “body part” in the underbrush, from which it was retrieved, and, after nine hours of surgery, reattached.
The verdict brought to an end the eight-day trial, during which the Bobbitt marriage became one of the most highly publicized and minutely scrutinized ever. Forty-eight witnesses, including Mrs. Bobbitt and her husband, John W. Bobbitt, graphically depicted a relationship gone sour.
The disintegration culminated early on the morning of June 23, Mrs. Bobbitt said, when, moments after her drunken husband raped her and while she was drinking a glass of water in the kitchen, she spotted a 12-inch knife, picked it up, approached the sleeping man and cut him.
“Seek Her American Dream”
In a statement read in English by Janna Bisutti, owner of the nail salon where Mrs. Bobbitt has worked as a manicurist, Mrs. Bobbitt thanked her supporters and urged other battered women to seek the help of friends and counselors. “She did once and will again seek her American dream when she is able, and if the publicity of her abuse can help one person find freedom, then all of this is not in vain,” said the statement, which was later read in Spanish.
The prosecutor in the case, Paul B. Ebert, expressed fears that the verdict could send the wrong message about deterrence and punishment.
“I have a certain amount of sympathy for Mrs. Bobbitt, but that doesn’t justify what she did,” Mr. Ebert said. “A lot of people go to the penitentiary who in some ways tug at your heart strings, but when you violate the law, you’ve got to be punished, in my opinion, and this is no exception. I’m happy she went out the back door rather than the front.”
Kim Gandy, executive vice president of the National Organization for Women, said today, “We’re glad the jury rejected the twisted argument that a battered woman should be locked up in a prison cell.”
Marital Abuse Corroborated
In remarks in the courtroom after the verdict, Mr. Ebert said he had no regrets about calling Mr. Bobbitt to testify, even though the prosecution’s own experts concluded that he had abused and raped his wife.
“I don’t think we could begin to have a successful prosecution without calling the victim in this case,” Mr. Ebert said. “John Bobbitt is what he is and he testified, I’m sure, to the best of his ability.” He also said he felt he had done nothing wrong by handling the prosecutions of both Mr. and Mrs. Bobbitt. Last November, a jury cleared Mr. Bobbitt of charges of marital sexual abuse in a case that examined evidence from only the five days immediately preceding the mutilation.
A procession of witnesses corroborated Mrs. Bobbitt’s account of marital abuse, saying they often saw her with bruises on her body. Two forensic psychologists and a psychiatrist from the hospital in Petersburg concluded she was a battered woman. They also concluded that she was seriously depressed when she cut her husband; two held that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
But all rejected the diagnosis of a defense expert that Mrs. Bobbitt had suffered a “brief reactive psychosis,” one that left her defenseless when the thought of mutilating her husband came to her. Her actions, they concluded, were too purposeful to meet the definition of “irresistible impulse,” which impel random attacks without regard for the consequences.
At the insistence of the defense, Judge Herman A. Whisenant’s charge to jurors on irresistible impulse was considerably less stringent, requiring only that they find that Mrs. Bobbitt’s mind “was so impaired by disease that she was unable to resist the impulse to commit the crime.” The jury wrestled with the language of the charge, once asking Judge Whisenant whether they could use the doctors’ broader definition. He told them they could not; moments later, they returned with their verdict.
Memories of Mutilation
The jury rejected the prosecution’s assertion that Mrs. Bobbitt acted intentionally and maliciously. It also acquitted her of a lesser charge, unlawful wounding, rejecting the assertion that she acted with intent and “in the heat of passion.”
The prosecution maintained that Mrs. Bobbitt’s testimony of remembering nothing about the episode—an assertion, they hinted, that fit her insanity defense—was belied by more credible statements that she had made earlier.
“He always have orgasm and he doesn’t wait for me to have orgasm,” she told a police lieutenant hours after the incident. “He’s selfish. I don’t think it’s fair, so I pulled back the sheets then and I did it.”
While Mrs. Bobbitt’s memories of the mutilation waned over time, her memory of the prelude grew more expansive as she detailed how her mind clouded over with what she called “pictures” and what psychiatrists call flashbacks, common to people who have suffered severe trauma. But with witness after witness, along with Mrs. Bobbitt herself, attesting to Mr. Bobbitt’s psychological, physical and sexual abusiveness, and with Mrs. Bobbitt’s having won sympathizers nationwide through broadcasts of the trial, prosecutors appeared fearful of challenging Mrs. Bobbitt’s credibility too explicitly.
The verdict ended, at least in the courts, what began as a depressingly ordinary domestic dispute between two mismatched people—one a 26-year-old former marine, bar bouncer, cab driver and construction worker, the other his Ecuadorean-born wife, whom he married in 1989.
The matter would surely have remained that way had Mrs. Bobbitt amputated any of her husband’s other appendages. Whether generated by concern for the problem of domestic violence, voyeurism or the way it has broken numerous social and journalistic taboos, however, public appetite for the Bobbitts seems insatiable.
Mr. Bobbitt was not in the courtroom for today’s verdict.
Lorena Bobbitt meets reporters outside court in Manassas, Virginia, February 28, 1994, after Circuit Judge Herman Whisenant Jr. ordered her release from a mental hospital.
Appearing on Larry King Live, his parents, Marylyn and Bill Biro, who were with him elsewhere in Manassas at the time of the verdict, said their son was “dumbfounded” by the results and asked, “You mean she got away with it?”
Throughout, the case juxtaposed images of normalcy and perversity. Mr. Bobbitt, Ms. Kemler said in her opening statement, was everything Mrs. Bobbitt wanted: “He was handsome, he seemed nice, he was a U.S. marine, after all.”
Mrs. Bobbitt depicted herself as an unworldly and deeply religious Roman Catholic but one who admitted stealing dresses from Nordstrom and manicuring equipment from Ms. Bisutti.
Together, they made an unusual couple, whose bitter, bruising fights were interspersed with trips to Luray Caverns and the Kings Dominion amusement park, who engaged in consensual sex 72 hours before the amputation, even as they planned to divorce.
—January 22 1994
A CRIME REVISITED: THE DECISION; 13 YEARS LATER, OFFICIAL REVERSAL IN JOGGER ATTACK
Thirteen years after a Central Park jogger was beaten and raped on a night of teenage violence that horrified New York, prosecutors pointed to a convicted killer yesterday as the probable lone rapist and asked a court to throw out the convictions of five Harlem men whose graphic but unsupported confessions had sent them to prison.
In a remarkable turn in the infamous case, the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, submitted to state supreme court a report on new evidence that not only presaged a reversal of the convictions early next year but also appeared to raise the curtain of mystery that has long shrouded the events in the park on the night of April 19, 1989.
The prosecutor’s report reopened a window on an era of rampant crime and racial tensions in New York that had generated a climate of fear and a sense of vulnerability in a citizenry that felt helpless against marauding teenagers in the streets, subways and parks.
Contradicting a longstanding theory that the jogger had been gang-raped, the report said that an 11-month re-examination of the case had found DNA and other persuasive evidence that the woman had been brutally beaten, raped and left for dead by one man, Matias Reyes, a murderer and serial rapist who confessed last January that he alone had attacked the jogger.
The report, a motion by Nancy E. Ryan, Mr. Morgenthau’s chief of trials, to join the defense in seeking a dismissal of all charges, said that a fresh look at the confessions of Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise, and a reconstruction of the events that night suggest that the youths could not have raped the jogger because they were elsewhere in the park, assaulting, robbing and harassing joggers, bikers and others, on a night of what one suspect called “wilding,” a term police investigators had never heard before.
The report also said that the convicted youths’ confessions—videotaped, written and so powerful that they persuaded two juries who had heard almost no other evidence—were so full of discrepancies and errors regarding the rape, even about where, when and how it took place and who was involved, as to make the statements implausible as evidence of the rape.
In addition, the report said, many details in the confessions were never corroborated. None of the DNA evidence linked the youths with the jogger, and their descriptions of her clothing and injuries, the weapons used and other details were at odds with the facts. The report also noted that these weaknesses were not exploited by defense lawyers in two trials. The report said nothing about investigators’ using coercion or trickery to obtain the confessions, as supporters of the convicted men have charged. But it suggested that the youths’ statements regarding the rape—each minimizing his own role while implicating others—might have amounted to false claims by the teenagers trying to become witnesses rather than defendants.
The report also undercut the only physical evidence offered by prosecutors in the trials to link the youths directly to the jogger. It said that strands of hair found on Mr. Richardson and on another youth who was charged but never prosecuted in the rape had been shown in recent DNA tests not to have come from the jogger, though prosecutors had exploited them in the trials as matching or “consistent with” hers.
The report contained no sweeping admonitions about a miscarriage of justice, and did not portray the convicted men as innocents who committed no crimes in the park the night of the rampage. But in an avalanche of facts, it focused narrowly on legal grounds and argued that, given the new evidence, the verdicts probably would tip in the defendants’ favor if new trials were held.
But in carefully constructing an argument that the five men had been wrongly convicted, the report made no attempt to assign blame for how it happened, and it did not criticize or name any of the detectives and prosecutors who handled the case, one of the most important in Mr. Morgenthau’s 29-year tenure.
Besides the dismissal of rape and assault charges in the jogger case, the report recommended that the men’s convictions for other assaults, robberies and crimes that night should also be set aside. While there was ample evidence to show they were part of a pack of 30 youths who beat and harassed eight other victims, the report said the youths had been portrayed in court as predators in a vicious sexual assault, and thus jurors’ perceptions of them would have been tainted for judgments on the secondary charges.
“We conclude that there is a probability that the new evidence, had it been available to the juries, would have resulted in verdicts more favorable to the defendants, not only on the charges arising from the attack on the female jogger but on the other charges as well,” the 58-page report concluded.
There was no reaction from the jogger, now 42, married and a resident of Connecticut. She was unable to provide an account of what happened after the attack. After 12 days in a coma she emerged with no memory of what happened. She testified at the trials, but only on her injuries and experiences before and after the attack. As a rape victim, her identity has been withheld by the news media, but she intends to use it in a book she is writing about the case.
Barring unforeseen developments, the prosecutor’s report made it all but certain that Justice Charles J. Tejada, at a hearing set for Feb. 6, would dismiss all the convictions of the five men, both in the jogger case and the attacks on eight other people in the park that night.
The five convicted men, now 28 to 30 years old, who have all completed their prison terms of 7› to 13› years for the park offenses, made no comments yesterday. But their lawyers and families praised the district attorney’s office and expressed relief that the men’s long ordeal would soon end.
“To really breathe and really take a deep breath and not have to go back under—you don’t know how good it feels,” said Linda McCray, the mother of Antron. “I was never ashamed of my son.”
Myron Beldock, another lawyer, praised Mr. Reyes for confessing. “We wouldn’t be here but that Matias Reyes found a conscience and came forward,” he said.
Whoops of joy from a cluster of relatives greeted Mr. Beldock as he emerged from the district attorney’s office in the Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre Street at 1 p.m., and announced the prosecutor’s move.
A police spokesman, Michael P. O’Looney, said that Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly was reviewing the report and had no immediate comment. The department is conducting a parallel investigation of the jogger case, and the two agencies are said to be sharply divided over the convictions. Some prosecutors and detectives continue to believe that the youths had some contact with the jogger, perhaps starting an assault that Mr. Reyes finished. Thomas J. Scotto, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, the union that represents police detectives in New York, sharply criticized the report and said the detectives who worked on the case “did an outstanding job.”
Michael Sheehan, a detective originally on the case, said he was outraged by the report. He scoffed at its description of Mr. Reyes as candid, calling him a manipulative, untrustworthy person.
The investigation found no evidence that Mr. Reyes knew any of the men in the park rampage and was “a loner” who stalked, raped, robbed and murdered on the Upper East Side and in Central Park. One of his victims was raped in the park two days before the jogger, a fact that could have helped the defense had the lawyers known of it, the report said.
Detailing his attack on the jogger, the report said Mr. Reyes first saw her running north on the East Drive near the 102nd Street Transverse. He followed to rape her, and along the transverse picked up a fallen branch, hit her head and dragged her into a secluded wooded ravine. He pulled off her jogging tights and raped her.
Afterward, he said, she broke away and ran, and he recalled “an image of her running naked from the waist down.” He had already beaten her, but his violence escalated and he hit her face and head repeatedly “with a rock and other things,” fracturing her skull.
He said he had no memory of tying her up, but when found she was bound with her shirt looped around her neck and used to gag her and tie her wrists near the neck, a method he had used before.
He said he took her Walkman and, as he left the park, stopped to speak with a police detective he knew who was working undercover in a taxi. The detective recalled working in a cab that night, but not the brief encounter. The report said the victim had a cross-shaped wound on her left cheek, and Reyes had worn a ring with a cross that apparently had made the wound, it said.
But the most telling evidence that he raped the jogger was scientific. DNA tests established—“to a factor of 1 in 6,000,000,000”—that Mr. Reyes was the source of the DNA found on the jogger’s sock and in her cervix. It was the only DNA found. In addition, DNA tests established that Mr. Reyes was the source of a pubic hair found on the sock.
“In short, the DNA tests showed the Matias Reyes’s claim that he raped the jogger was true, and confirmed that no one else’s DNA was present in samples taken from the victim or the evidence at the scene,” the report said.
Moreover, three strands of hair found on Mr. Richardson were re-examined with more sophisticated DNA tests than were available in 1989. “None of the DNA matched the victim’s,” the report said.
The report said the youths’ confessions had “serious weaknesses,” adding: “Perhaps the most persuasive fact about the defendants’ confessions is that they exist at all. While all of the defendants began by denying knowledge of the attack, each ultimately made himself an accomplice in a terrible crime.”
The statements seem powerful, it said, but “they differed from one another on the specific details of virtually every major aspect of the crime—who initiated the attack, who knocked the victim down, who undressed her, who struck her, who held her, who raped her, what weapons were used in the course of the assault and when in the sequence of events the attack took place.”
None accurately described the attack’s location; with one exception all put the attack at or near the park reservoir, a half-mile to the south. And at 9:15 p.m. when the jogger was being raped, they apparently were elsewhere, attacking other victims, the report said.
It added: “It is difficult to construct a scenario that would have allowed the defendants the time to interrupt their progression south, detour to the 102nd Street Transverse and commit a gang rape. All of these issues were apparent at the time of trial.”
—December 6, 2002
NOTE: The five men whose convictions were vacated sued the city, alleging their confessions had been coerced and citing a conspiracy among law enforcement officials. The suit ended in 2014 with a settlement of $41 million—roughly $1 million for each year the men had spent in prison. In the settlement, the city denied any wrongdoing.
BOSTON CHURCH PAPERS RELEASED; A PATTERN OF NEGLIGENCE IS CITED
Hundreds of pages of church documents released today show that officials of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston allowed priests accused of abuse to remain in ministry or failed to persuade them to receive residential psychiatric treatment.
The documents, 2,200 pages concerning eight priests, were released by lawyers for plaintiffs in a lawsuit involving the Rev. Paul R. Shanley, who is accused of molesting several boys. The lawyers, who got the documents from the archdiocese, are trying to strengthen their case by showing that the Boston church officials engaged in a pattern of mishandling abusive priests.
In one case, a priest from Youngstown, Ohio, was placed in a Boston parish just after being treated for pedophilia, despite warnings by the treatment center and the Youngstown bishop that the priest not be allowed to have contact with children. Several young men in Boston parishes later said the priest abused them, and he was convicted of sexual abuse in New Hampshire.
In another case, a priest was transferred in 1984 to a different parish after he admitted sexual activity with a teenage boy. Three years later, the church received more reports of sexual misconduct by the priest. He was finally removed from ministry in 1993.
In two other cases, priests accused of abuse did not receive long-range in-patient treatment despite recommendations by church officials. The records show the priests resisted such treatment.
Some of the documents also suggest that Cardinal Bernard F. Law was more directly informed about complaints against priests than he has previously asserted in his public statements.
The records contain letters from Cardinal Law to accused priests that are more personal and sympathetic than those released in other cases. In them, he compliments or sympathizes with the priests.
In one case, responding to a letter from a priest accused of sexually assaulting young women studying to be nuns, he said, “Our recent conversation and your written reflection are a beautiful testament to the depth of your faith and the courage of your heart.” Cardinal Law added, “It is important that all of us be reminded by the pain endured by those who have been accused.”
Donna M. Morrissey, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said today: “We can’t change the past. We can recognize the inadequacy of our policies and change them and recognize the suffering and the pain the victim-survivors have gone through and are continuing to go through.
“For the past 11 months our comprehensive new policy has not allowed any priest with a credible allegation of abuse of a minor to serve in ministry in the Archdiocese of Boston. We wish it would have been our policy for the last 50 years.”
The archdiocese sought last month to delay the public release of the documents, and 10,000 other pages concerning 57 other priests, but a judge denied their motion, saying the church was trying keep information from public view.
The release of documents comes at a time when tensions are high over settlement negotiations in the Shanley case and hundreds of other lawsuits over priests accused of abuse.
Financial advisers to the archdiocese have said that the church is considering filing for bankruptcy. Lawyers in the Shanley case, who also represent about 200 other plaintiffs, have accused the archdiocese of threatening bankruptcy to persuade plaintiffs to accept less compensation. The lawyers have said they will quit negotiating unless the church puts off consideration of bankruptcy.
“These documents are going to be very important to us in the trial of this case,” said Roderick MacLeish Jr., a plaintiff’s lawyer. “Now there’s more context and understanding of what was happening.”
Advocates for abuse victims said today that the documents were more troubling than the records released earlier this year on a handful of priests accused of abuse because they appeared to show a more consistent pattern of mishandling abusive priests.
“What is striking to me about these documents is that it is very clear from them that Cardinal Law and other top archdiocesan officials knew far more, far earlier about far more priests and their abusive behavior than the officials have ever let on and yet did so very little,” said David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, a group based in Chicago.
In some cases, the documents suggest that archdiocese officials tried to discourage accusers of priests from filing lawsuits seeking compensation. In the case of the Ohio priest, Father Robert M. Burns, a memo from the Rev. John B. McCormack, now the bishop of Manchester, N.H., said he told a meeting with a family complaining of Father Burns’s abuse: “I didn’t think compensation would be helpful to their son. It is not what he needs.”
A spokesman for Bishop McCormack said he could not comment on any of the cases because he had not seen the documents.
Experts on the sexual abuse cases said the Burns case was an example of a pattern of dioceses around the country accepting troubled priests from other dioceses, particularly in the 1970s and early 1980s.
“There was a general practice of these guys helping each other out,” said Patrick J. Schiltz, a professor at the University of Saint Thomas School of Law in St. Paul, Minn., who has represented religious institutions in sexual abuse lawsuits. “It was often thought by bishops that what these guys needed was a fresh start.”
In the case of Father Burns, it was no secret to the Archdiocese of Boston that he had molested children. In 1982, when Father Burns applied to be a pastor here, he had just finished treatment for pedophilia at an institution, the House of Affirmation, which recommended that he not be given a clergy job involving contact with children, the documents show. The priest’s bishop in Youngstown, Ohio, James W. Malone, said later in an affidavit that although he supported Father Burns for the job, he urged Boston church officials to keep him away from children.
Boston archdiocese notes about the priest at the time state next to Father Burns’s name: “Problem: little children.”
Mr. MacLeish said the note had been written by the second highest-ranking archdiocesan official in Boston, Bishop Thomas V. Daily, now the bishop of Brooklyn. The notes also say that Bishop Daily had “reservations” about placing Father Burns in a parish but that after consultation with the archbishop at the time, Cardinal Humberto Medeiros, he was made a part-time associate pastor in a church in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Calls seeking comment from Bishop Daily were not returned.
The documents show that Father Burns was recommended for the post by Bishop Alfred Hughes, now the bishop of New Orleans. A spokesman for Bishop Hughes, the Rev. William Maestri, said today: “Sometimes after treatment a new environment and new placement after treatment, a new beginning, is important. Bishop Hughes was thinking he’d be in a very limited ministry, he would not be in a parish assignment.” Father Maestri added, “In hindsight, that judgment did not turn out to be a sound judgment.”
In 1991, with Father Burns now in his second Boston parish, the archdiocese received a detailed complaint that the priest had repeatedly raped and molested a boy.
Cardinal Law removed Father Burns from ministry, but wrote him an unusually consoling note.
“Life is never just one moment or one event and it would be unrealistic to have too narrow a focus,” he wrote. “It would have been better were things to have ended differently, but such was not the case. Nevertheless I still feel that it is important to express my gratitude to you for the care you have given to the people of the Archdiocese of Boston.”
The letter continues, “I am certain that during this time you have been a generous instrument of the Lord’s love in the lives of most people you served.”
In 1999, after publicity about the 1996 conviction of Father Burns for molesting boys in New Hampshire and after more accusations had surfaced in Boston, Cardinal Law wrote to the Vatican, acknowledging that the archdiocese was warned in 1982 “that Father Burns ought not receive an assignment that placed him in a position to minister to minors.”
He continued: “Through a misjudgment of the severity of his past behavior and the likelihood of its recurrence, Father Burns received the full faculties of the archdiocese and was twice assigned as part-time parochial vicar to parishes within the city of Boston. Neither of the pastors with whom he was assigned was informed of a need to restrict Father Burns’s ministry with children.”
While events in the Burns case straddle the tenures of two cardinals, some cases occurred solely during Cardinal Law’s tenure, which began in the spring of 1984.
In November of that year, the Rev. Robert H. Morrissette admitted to accusations that he had invited a boy to his room and run his hand along the boy’s leg while the boy was wearing a bathing suit, the documents show. The priest received treatment by a therapist and Bishop Robert J. Banks, now head of the diocese of Green Bay, approved his transfer to another parish.
In 1988, a note apparently written by Bishop Banks said about Father Morrissette that “he should come out” of the priesthood. But Father Morrissette was allowed to remain in ministry until 1993, when the case of the Rev. James Porter, who was accused of molesting more than 100 people in the nearby diocese of Fall River, Mass., prompted archdiocesan officials to review the files of Father Morrissette.
Bishop Banks did not return calls seeking comment.
In another case, Bishop Banks fielded a complaint about the Rev. Robert V. Meffan in 1986, an anonymous accusation that in the 1960s he had seduced girls who were studying to be nuns. A memo Mr. MacLeish said was written by Bishop Banks said that Father Meffan’s reactions in a meeting suggest “that the allegations might well be true: not upset, but matter-of-fact, no desire to know who or attempt to puzzle it out, no indignation.”
The documents provide no indication that the archdiocese did anything in response to the accusations. In 1993, after the archdiocese received similar complaints from women about Father Meffan’s luring them into sex, in one case telling a girl to imagine that Christ was touching her, he was pulled from ministry.
Although the archdiocesan review board recommended residential treatment, Father Meffan refused and was allowed to live at home. In 1996, he wrote Cardinal Law that he missed the joys of ministry, but was still devoted to Christ.
Another priest, the Rev. Thomas P. Forry, was the subject of a number of accusations over more than 15 years, including one he admitted—beating up a housekeeper in 1979—as well as accusations in 1984 that he had had an 11-year affair with a woman.
In 1984, the archdiocesan personnel secretary wrote to Cardinal Law that psychiatrists who evaluated Father Forry felt he should be in a psychiatric hospital because “he is in grave need of some long-range assistance.” Documents indicate that after Father Forry refused, he had two months of outpatient treatment.
Later the woman’s son complained that Father Forry had molested him. A doctor at a treatment center found he had “an underlying personality disorder” but did not believe the abuse accusations were true. In 1999, while Father Forry was serving as a prison chaplain, the Department of Corrections complained of “scandalous” behavior, saying he was screaming and shouting and exhibiting emotional and behavioral problems.
An archdiocese official wrote, “I think Father Tom Forry is a deeply troubled person, that he should be held accountable for his behavior.”
After that complaint, Cardinal Law placed Father Forry on the emergency response team, meaning he would fill in at parishes when the regular priests were on vacation.
In October 2001, the archdiocese received a complaint that Father Forry molested a girl and inappropriately touched her brother “some years ago.” The girl, now a woman, was uncomfortable because Father Forry had been assigned to fill in at her parish and felt “he should not be allowed to preside in a parish setting to protect other children.”
In February 2002, the archdiocese removed Father Forry from active ministry.
—December 4, 2002
NOTE: Cardinal Law resigned as archbishop of Boston on December 13, 2002. A 2004 report by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops found that 10,667 people had made allegations of children having been sexual abused by U.S. priests between 1950 and 2002 and that 95 percent of dioceses had received at least one complaint.
SANDUSKY GUILTY OF SEXUAL ABUSE OF 10 YOUNG BOYS
Jerry Sandusky, a former Penn State assistant football coach, was convicted Friday of sexually abusing young boys, completing the downfall of a onetime local hero in a scandal that shook a proud Pennsylvania community, a prominent American university and the world of major college football.
A jury in Centre County Court, in Bellefonte, Penn., convicted Sandusky, 68, of sexually assaulting 10 boys, all of them children from disadvantaged homes whom Sandusky, using his access to the university’s vaunted football program, had befriended and then repeatedly violated. The jury, more than half of whom had ties to Penn State, returned a verdict on the second day of deliberation.
Sandusky stood stoically as the jury foreman read off the verdicts on the 48 counts against him. The foreman said guilty 45 times. Many of the charges, which include rape and sodomy, carry significant prison terms, and it seems likely that Sandusky will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
The case against Sandusky, even before his trial, had exacted an enormous toll. Joe Paterno, the university’s famed head coach who had been alerted to at least one of Sandusky’s attacks on a boy, was fired, went into a kind of exile and was dead of cancer within months. The university’s longtime president, Graham B. Spanier, was dismissed as well, and Penn State officials, alumni and students were forced to confront the possibility that the interests of big-time college sports had trumped concern for the welfare of vulnerable children.
Sandusky, who had been Paterno’s longtime defensive coordinator, had also founded a charity, The Second Mile, to work with troubled youths. In a trial that lasted two weeks, prosecutors asserted that Sandusky had used the charity as his private hunting ground, scouting for potential victims. He gave them gifts and money, invited them to his home, took them to Penn State football games, showered with them at the university’s football building and slept with them in hotel rooms on the road.
Eight men testified during the trial, offering graphic accounts of repeated assaults by Sandusky—on the Penn State campus, in hotel rooms and in the basement of Sandusky’s home. It was painful testimony, the men telling their horrifying stories in public for the first time. Some wept. Others said, with anger and relief both, that they wanted to move on at last.
Jerry Sandusky, during a December 2011 interview with Jo Becker of The New York Times to answer questions about his indictment on sexual abuse charges.
In one of the case’s final startling chapters, coming after the case went to the jury, another man came forward to assert that Sandusky had molested him: it was one of Sandusky’s adopted children, Matt, who said he had offered to testify at the trial.
Sandusky’s lawyer, Joseph Amendola, said outside the courthouse that he and Sandusky’s wife “accepted the verdict,” but complained that he had been rushed in preparing a defense. “There are a lot of people sitting in jail who are innocent,” he said, prompting booing from the crowd that had gathered.
The verdict against Sandusky will not bring an end to Penn State’s problems. Lawsuits loom. At least two formal investigations, including one by a former director of the FBI at the behest of the university’s board of trustees, are under way. And two senior university officials—the athletic director and the administrator in charge of the campus police—face criminal charges that they failed to act when informed that Sandusky had assaulted a 10-year-old boy in a university shower in 2001 and then lied about that knowledge before a grand jury.
The university, in a statement issued after the verdict, said: “The legal process has spoken, and we have tremendous respect for the men who came forward to tell their stories publicly. No verdict can undo the pain and suffering caused by Mr. Sandusky, but we do hope this judgment helps the victims and their families along their path to healing.”
Sandusky’s arrest, on a Saturday last November, registered with seismic force in this corner of Pennsylvania known as Happy Valley. He was regarded as a local pillar, a former Penn State standout who had played for Paterno and then spent 30 years on the sideline with him building the Nittany Lions defense into “Linebacker U” and the football team into a national power.
People expressed shock that a man they knew as a committed coach, a prominent fund-raiser for charity and a father figure to scores of aspiring football players and other children could be capable of such crimes.
But things got worse for Penn State, as charges and revelations were laid out by the state attorney general’s office: Sandusky had been investigated by the campus police for possible sexual crimes against children as far back as 1998; in 2001, a graduate assistant in the football program, who was a former Penn State quarterback, had told Paterno and then other university officials that he had seen Sandusky sexually attacking a 10-year-old boy in the football building showers.
No one—not Paterno, not the graduate assistant, not the other university officials—ever reported the attack to the police. Sandusky, who had retired two years before but retained an office and privileges on campus, was merely told not to take boys onto campus any longer.
The university erupted with upset. Paterno’s reputation was badly tainted. The outsize importance of college sports was debated anew, but this time with a wrenching soul-searching.
Sandusky’s own behavior in that first week only deepened the sense of bewilderment. He gave a strange, almost incriminating interview to Bob Costas of NBC. He seemed not to grasp the severity of the accusations. Amendola insisted his client was innocent, and began what would become a prolonged assault on the credibility of Sandusky’s accusers.
Soon, though, more accusers came forward. Sandusky’s house, where he raised a family and apparently carried out many of his attacks, was vandalized. And Sandusky became a subject of national scorn and curiosity. At one point in his interview with NBC, Sandusky was asked if he was sexually attracted to boys.
“Sexually attracted, you know, I, I enjoy young people,” Sandusky answered. “I, I love to be around them. No, I’m not sexually attracted to young boys.”
Joseph E. McGettigan III, the lead prosecutor, cited that reply in his closing argument on Thursday as evidence that Sandusky was a guilty man.
“I would think that the automatic response, if someone asks you if you’re a criminal, a pedophile, a child molester or anything along those lines would be: ‘You’re crazy. No. Are you nuts?’” McGettigan said.
In the end, Sandusky chose not to take the stand. Amendola said he made that decision after learning from prosecutors that they would have called his son Matt to testify as a rebuttal witness if Sandusky testified. That, Amendola said, would have devastated Sandusky.
The repair work for Penn State, the university made clear Friday night, is far from complete.
The university said it planned to invite Sandusky’s victims to work with its officials to settle legal claims, stating, “The purpose of the program is simple—the university wants to provide a forum where the university can privately, expeditiously and fairly address the victims’ concerns and compensate them for claims relating to the university.”
—June 23, 2012
NOTE: Sandusky was sentenced in October 2012 to 30 to 60 years in prison. He is seeking a new trial, claiming his legal representation had been ineffective.