by Bill Moushey
Caroline Roberto, Curley’s lawyer, focused on details during her cross-examination. But McQueary stuck to his story in a matter-of-fact voice. He couldn’t be 100 percent certain it was a rape, he told Roberto. “But I’m sure I saw what I saw.”
“Did you say anything to Sandusky?” Roberto asked.
“No, nothing,” he responded.
“You didn’t confront him at all over what you saw?”
“They looked directly at me,” he said.
“What was the expression?”
“A somewhat blank expression.”
Roberto asked McQueary why he didn’t notify authorities. “Did you consider calling the police?”
“Absolutely . . . without a doubt,” McQueary said.
“Did you?”
“No, I did not call police.”
Attorney Thomas Farrell of Pittsburgh, who represented Schultz, later delved into the details of what McQueary said he saw. He challenged whether or not Sandusky, who at six-feet-two-inches tall, could have sex with a short-statured child in the physical position described without lifting him off the ground. He wondered if McQueary’s view of whatever was going on would have been obstructed by the former coach’s body. He also got McQueary to admit he did not know what color the child’s hair was or other details normally associated with credible eyewitness accounts.
Preliminary hearings limited cross-examination on any topic not broached by the prosecutors first, so defense lawyers were unable to challenge McQueary about such details as the design of the locker room or the size of the shower. McQueary did say he was so unnerved, he dashed to his second-floor office and phoned his father. “I said, I just saw Coach Sandusky in the showers with a boy, what I saw was wrong and sexual, and I needed some advice quickly,” he testified.
His father told him to come to his house in State College, where a family friend, Dr. Jonathan Dranov, joined them for the discussion. The three of them decided to forgo calling the police, but to have McQueary report the scene to Joe Paterno. McQueary said he took the advice, and the following morning went to Paterno’s house. “I saw Jerry with a young boy in the shower and it was way over the lines, extremely sexual in nature and I thought I needed to tell him about it.”
Out of respect for Paterno, who was seventy-eight at the time, he did not reveal the graphic details of what he saw. But he was sure from the coach’s reaction that he knew the context of the act.
Bruce Beemer, a deputy attorney general, handled the questioning. “Did you make it clear it was Jerry Sandusky?” he queried.
“Yes, I did,” replied McQueary.
“Did you make it clear it was a young boy?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you make it clear it was sexual?”
“Without a doubt.”
McQueary said Paterno was shocked and saddened. The coach professed sorrow that his graduate assistant had to witness such a thing, but told him he’d done the right thing. He said he’d report it to the proper authorities.
The “proper authority” Paterno would seek out was Tim Curley. Paterno had watched him grow from a Penn State football player to a low-level aid in the Penn State Athletic Department to the school’s athletic director, handpicked for the job by JoePa himself. Paterno told Curley about McQueary’s shocking allegation, and Curley said he’d relay the report to Schultz.
At issue from the time Paterno and Curley first spoke and throughout the entire investigation of the Penn State officials was the exact nature and substance of the complaints against Sandusky. While Paterno and McQueary and later McQueary’s father would claim the young coach always described the incident as a sexual assault, Curley would swear that neither Paterno nor McQueary ever mentioned sexual contact. Schultz backed up Curley’s statements.
Neither Curley nor Schultz testified at the preliminary hearing. Paterno, hospitalized with a broken hip and under treatment for lung cancer, was not available to take the stand either. Instead the testimony of all three men was read into the court record.
“He [McQueary] said he saw a mature person, fondling, whatever you might call it, I’m not sure what the term would be . . . a young boy,” Paterno said in testimony delivered to the grand jury on January 12, 2011. “It was of a sexual nature, I’m not sure exactly what it was and didn’t push Mike to describe it.” Paterno also testified that his involvement ended after Curley, a man he trusted implicitly, told him he would handle it.
McQueary said it was not until nine or ten days later that he was summoned to a meeting with Curley and Schultz. “I told them I saw Jerry Sandusky in the showers with a young boy in what seemed was extremely sexual, over the lines and it was wrong,” McQueary said. Under questioning by Beemer, he testified that he told the two officials about the sounds he heard in the shower and the body positions of Sandusky and the boy. “I would have described them as extremely sexual and that some sort of intercourse was going on.” Asked specifically if he told the officials that Sandusky was committing a sexual act against the child, McQueary answered, “There is no doubt at all.”
If Curley and Schultz had simply said that McQueary told them the event he witnessed in the shower was sexual in nature, they probably would never have been charged with perjury, leaving the case with only the “failure to report” count, which Curley’s lawyer insultingly compared to a traffic ticket. But if he had conceded to what the prosecutors were pushing, Curley essentially would have had to admit an eight-year cover-up of the 2002 event. Curley claimed he did not make those admissions because they were not true.
Curley’s grand jury testimony, read into the record at the preliminary hearing, was as emphatic as it was contradictory to the testimony of others. “My recollection was there were people in the shower area, horsing around, playful, but it was not appropriate,” he testified. He had been questioned repeatedly by Frank Fina, head of the attorney general’s investigations branch, at the grand jury. Curley insisted that McCreary never told him the event amounted to a sexual assault. Because there hadn’t been any indication of criminality, he called McQueary to tell him he had taken action with the full blessing of Schultz and Graham Spanier, the university’s president.
In Spanier’s testimony before the grand jury the previous April he stated that neither of his underlings had told him about the sexual nature of the report. Nevertheless Sandusky did suffer repercussions. The Second Mile’s CEO, John Raykovitz, was informed of the incident so he could take his own action. As far as Penn State was concerned, Sandusky was ordered not to bring kids around the football program or its facilities at any point in the future and to forfeit his keys to the facilities. The grand jury testimony stated that Paterno told McQueary what actions had been taken and asked if the actions were acceptable to him.
“I accepted what he told me and said ‘okay,’ ” McQueary testified.
Curley said he spoke with Schultz repeatedly about the issue. He explained why no criminal referral or complaint was filed with police or other agencies: “I didn’t think it was a crime at the time.” Neither he nor anyone in power at Penn State sought to determine the identity of the child. While his testimony matched Curley’s, Schultz admitted he was one of the few Penn State officials who knew about the allegations of child abuse leveled against Sandusky in 1998. Once the district attorney, Ray Gricar, decided not to pursue charges against Sandusky and the state welfare investigators considered the allegations of abuse unfounded, that probe was hushed up too. Gricar was declared legally dead in July 2011, six years after he disappeared without a trace forty-five miles east of State College. The missing persons investigation is ongoing; some people speculate that the disappearance is somehow tied to the Sandusky case. It would be irresponsible not to note that the week before Gricar disappeared he had very publicly announced the largest heroin bust in Centre County’s history, an event that undoubtedly earned him lots of dangerous enemies.
Mike’s father, John McQueary, took the stand at the preliminary hearing to testify ab
out two events. Deputy District Attorney Bruce Beemer handled his questioning too. First, the elder McQueary testified to the conversation he had with his son the night the young man witnessed the assault. Next he testified about a conversation he had with Schultz during an unrelated business meeting a few months later. The elder McQueary said he told Schultz the issues surrounding Sandusky were important, “and that there should be something done about it.”
“Did you refer to Sandusky?” asked Beemer.
“Absolutely, yes.”
“Did you describe the nature of the incident?”
“Yes.”
“What words did you use?”
The elder McQueary said he related to Schultz that his son told him he “saw Jerry Sandusky in the shower with a young boy and that between the sounds . . . and the visualization . . . there was something at best that was inappropriate, and it was sexual in nature.”
John McQueary said Schultz told him he had heard things about Sandusky before, apparently referring to the 1998 event. “What he indicated was that they had heard allegations and were aware of the situation, and they would look into it.” He testified that Schultz told him they’d looked at similar reports before, but “he was never able to sink their teeth into something that was substantial. . . . But I got the impression he was going to look at it more.” McQueary said he was disappointed that nothing came of this.
During the preliminary hearing Thomas R. Harmon, director of the campus police from 1992 to 2005, said he was never told about McQueary’s allegations against Sandusky. He knew about the 1998 incident because the investigation was conducted by his police force, but he defended the outcome as proper because there was no specific evidence “of touching of genitals or anything overtly sexual about this incident,” a statement both the child and his mother would contest. What Harmon did not tell the grand jury or defense lawyers inquiring about his actions was that he and Sandusky were former neighbors. The two families had lived in the same community for several years dating back to 1977, the year the coach started The Second Mile. Their children had played together in the Norle Street cul-de-sac until the Sanduskys moved to a bigger house two miles away in 1984. The Sandusky and Harmon families also attended the same church.
For his part, Gary Schultz’s sworn grand jury testimony, entered into the record, also denied that McQueary or anyone else specified any criminal behavior. “I had the feeling there was some kind of wrestling-around activity and maybe Jerry might have grabbed the young boy’s genitals,” Schultz said. He admitted that any such conduct was clearly inappropriate but said, “The allegations came across as not that serious,” and certainly didn’t rise to illegal behavior. “There was no indication that it was.” To reinforce his point of view, Schultz said he believed a central Pennsylvania social services agency was told about it. He just couldn’t remember which one it was.
Anthony Sassano, an investigator for the attorney general’s office, testified before Judge Wenner that no regional police or social service agencies under subpoena produced even one report about complaints made to them regarding the McQueary allegations. Schultz had responded with surprise. “Wow, I thought it was turned over,” he had told the grand jury months earlier.
In 2011 at least six more young men would go before that same panel to claim abuse at Sandusky’s hand.
Within a year of reporting the incident, Mike McQueary was appointed as a full-time assistant coach for the Nittany Lions football team. McQueary would have no further discussions with law enforcement until October 2010. That’s when state police and investigators for the attorney general’s office contacted him.
As expected, when all the testimony was concluded, Curley and Schultz were held for trial. Senior Deputy Attorney General Marc Costanzo told reporters the preliminary hearing offered a brief taste of what was to come at trial, which was not expected to be held until late 2012 at the earliest. Costanzo said prosecutors would present further evidence showing the extent of the Penn State cover-up the two defendants helped perpetrate and then lied about. The stakes were high.
Penn State is footing the legal bills for Curley and Schultz, its two employees. If convicted, Curley would lose his coveted job but because he invested his retirement savings in a private mutual fund account, he will be able to keep his money, no matter what the outcome. Schultz is at risk of losing his retirement savings if convicted; his $5 million is invested in the state’s retirement system. A forfeiture provision holds that state officials convicted of crimes, such as job-related perjury, can lose all benefits. In Schultz’s case, this amounts to retirement fund payments of almost $28,000 a month.
After the preliminary hearing both Caroline Roberto and Thomas Farrell, the lawyers for Curley and Schultz, respectively, again admonished the attorney general’s office for even bringing the cases against their clients. Roberto said the government did not provide evidence of the single most important element of perjury under Pennsylvania law: corroboration. One of the few people who could have corroborated the testimony was no longer available to do so.
Chapter 16
Penn State’s Reputation
There is a count that puts the number of living Penn State alumni at more than 560,000 worldwide. James F. Murtha, fifty-seven, was proud to be one of them. He graduated from Penn State in 1977 with a degree in journalism and once covered Penn State football games. His wife, Lisa, was a Penn Stater. Some of his best friends were alums with season tickets to football games. He was angry and dismayed about the damage done to Penn State’s reputation in the fallout from the arrests and how the university’s administration handled it and reacted to it.
Murtha was attending a conference of the Independent Oil and Gas Association in mid-November 2011 in upstate New York. As a legislative affairs consultant, his responsibilities were to provide information to local officials about the impact on water wells from drilling into the Marcellus Shale rock formation and extracting an energy source through a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. During the presentations Murtha listened intently as a geologist used charts and graphs to explain the procedure. When the geologist referred to a cutting-edge study on environmental concerns done by Penn State University, his alma mater, he tensed up.
“He said this study comes from Penn State, so please, no laughing. And there was some snickering in the audience because this was when Jerry Sandusky was all over the news,” Murtha said. “It was the first time in my life I ever heard Penn State mentioned in the context of a joke. It really bothered me.
“I have a ton of affection for that place. I really enjoyed my four years there. I got a good education that prepared me for life. And now we’ve all been tarred with the same brush. We have to make apologies for an entire school because of what a retired football coach did. I couldn’t feel any worse if somebody shot my dog. It really pisses me off. But in retrospect, you could almost predict how this would turn out because of the way Penn State does business. Isolation is one of its charms, but it’s also part of the problem. They all drank the Kool-Aid up there. They lost all focus. The only way to solve a problem is to admit that you have one. It’s crisis management 101. When I saw the way they handled it, I wanted to projectile vomit.”
The inner conflict of love for a university and disgust over a child sex abuse scandal was something that Penn State’s 560,000 alumni were wrestling with, each in his or her own way. But Murtha, for one, was not blaming outside forces for causing the damage. What bothered him most were the missed opportunities to stop the abuse, particularly the 1998 investigation by campus police that went nowhere and the 2002 incident witnessed by Mike McQueary. “Penn State administrators are people who were intelligent enough to run a multibillion dollar operation and sophisticated enough to deal with any problem. Yet every time they had an opportunity to make the right decision, they did the wrong thing. To me, the attitude seems to have been to circle the wagons, to protect the brand at all costs. A child abuse scandal would go against the narrativ
e they tried to write. Kids’ lives were destroyed. No brand is worth the lives of ten-year-old boys.”
It will take more time to sift through the rubble to determine who knew what and when they knew it, Murtha said. The impact on Joe Paterno’s legacy will hinge on what McQueary told the legendary coach and what Paterno reported up the chain of command. What’s haunting, however, are Paterno’s own words—that he wished he would have done more—after Sandusky was charged with fifty-two counts of sexually assaulting ten boys from The Second Mile over a fifteen-year period.
“You can’t argue that Joe succeeded in winning football games with players who had to go to class,” Murtha said. “I was proud of the fact that Penn State was never investigated for recruiting violations or cheating. I was proud of the high graduation rates. Joe did do things the right way. But in his own words, his sin was one of omission, a lapse in judgment. Just follow the thread. McQueary goes to his dad and then goes to Joe. JoePa doesn’t have a badge. He’s not a cop. Then JoePa reports it to his superiors, but he had no superiors. Nobody on that campus told him what to do. For decades, JoePa was the center of attention in every room he walked into. Getting an interview with him was like getting an interview with the pope. It’s just going to take a lot of time for the whole story to come out. I do a lot of business all over the country. Somebody told me that the Penn State people are no longer virgins, that now they’re whores like everybody else. I don’t even know how to respond to that right now.”
