Kenny came to our house for a week in early July of 1989. My boyfriend Jonnie and I had provided bedding for Kenny, and a room of his own. My father and Kenny were gone for the first few days since my father took him to Monterey Bay Aquarium over 100 miles away, and other places that would be fun for a child. I had been told that Kenny was nine, and he seemed very small and young for his age. I found out later that he was eleven. Certainly, the amusements my father sought for him were much more geared towards a child than even a preadolescent, judging from the types of toys my father bought him.
On July 5th, Kenny and my father were at home instead of traveling. I walked into my father’s bedroom, and he was holding Kenny upside down by his feet. He was hugging him and touching him all over, and saying “I kiss the part that’s nearest.” Worse than that, his porn books were out: comic book porn and a book I remembered well from my own childhood called “Show Me!”
How I hated that book! I remembered it vividly, since my father had insisted I read it repeatedly when I was very small. It was a black and white artistic picture book, probably 14 by 18 inches, full of pictures of graphic sexual activity—including full penetrative sex—being explained by adults to a child. Worse than that, the child is initially disgusted and upset, and the adults persuade him how normal it all is.
I was horrified by what I saw my father doing to Kenny. I did not even try to confront him, because I knew he would just freak out, and then Kenny would cry and my father would freak out more, and God knows what would happen to Kenny if he was in a room with my father when he was emotionally compromised. I feared he would become violent. I left the room, and Jonnie and I left for Westercon in Southern CA in a huge hurry.
As we drove, Jonnie and I talked about what my father had done. Jonnie told me that Kenny’s bedding was unused, and that was the final straw for me: My father had clearly been sleeping with Kenny. As soon as we got to a safe place with a phone I called Jane Conger, and she put me on hold to call CPS. They told her to call the police because this absolutely could not wait.
Mary Mason came and got Kenny, and I had to tell my father over the phone what I had done. This prospect caused me about a million times as much trepidation as I had felt about asking him to close the bathroom door. I was trembling and shaking all over when I called him. I said: “Daddy, I did something and I’m afraid you’ll never forgive me.” He said “I love you and no matter what it is, I will always forgive you.” That was the last time he ever spoke to me with love in his voice.
I told him: “Daddy, I told the police about you and Kenny.”
He started screaming at me. “Asshole” was among the milder things he said. It was not the foul names he called me that made the biggest impression, but the nature of the crime he accused me of committing. He called me a murderer—His murderer. He disowned me. I am no longer his daughter. I am a parricide: a father-killer. I am nothing to him. I am dead to him. I betrayed him. I betrayed everything he ever taught me. I killed him. I killed his dream. I killed everything he ever loved. I am a monster. I am a failure. I have single-handedly destroyed his life, and he is going to die in prison, and it is all my fault.
I could no more have convinced him that Kenny was in danger from the sexual contact he was intent on having with him than I could have convinced him that we were both standing on Mars. He insisted that I only reported him to the cops out of “vengeance,” which I found bizarre. Had he concluded that I had been harboring some insane grudge for years, and for what? I did not have enough of a concept of a self to even begin to be angry with him for violating me, but he seemed to think I had been saving up my revenge on him for raping me all those years before. I was not aware of being angry, let alone seeking any kind of “vengeance.”
On the contrary, I felt like I had fallen on my own sword and ruined the most important relationship in my life with the person I treasured most.
When Jonnie and I came home from Westercon, I saw my father in person. I tried twice to talk to him, and he shouted and screamed at me and stomped around. I fainted from terror, like an absurd Victorian heroine. Twice this happened, and I realized we were at the point of no return.
I could no longer live with him.
I had been desperately frightened that he was either going to rape Kenny, or that he had already done so. He viewed my fears as intolerable. Not because I was wrong about his intentions, but because I was interpreting his acts wrongly: To him it was not rape but the fulfillment of his philosophy, destined to save Kenny from delinquency. All he cared about was what he felt was my “betrayal” of him and his Grand Vision. He had no concern for Kenny at all, because what he was doing was “right,” as his book made so clear. All he had done, in his view, was to “bring more love into the world” and I was trying to stop him.
Meanwhile, what I had told Jane Conger was nowhere near enough for the cops. They were convinced that there were more victims and they began calling me around the clock. They said on my answering machine that they would arrest me for obstructing justice if I did not call them back, meet with them in person, and make a formal statement.
When I listened to their messages, I panicked and called Mother. I told Lisa that the cops wanted to talk to me and I was afraid and really needed to speak to my mother. Lisa answered the phone, and she absolutely refused to let me speak to her. Yes, Mother was there and no, I couldn’t speak to her.
There was only one thing I could do: Handle this myself. I called the cops back and agreed to meet with Officer Harris from the Berkeley Police Department. We met at a little cafe on Shattuck Avenue, and I gave her the names of 22 kids I suspected he had had sexual contact with. I told her everything I could remember about the drugs, about my father’s Grand Vision, about what he did in the hot tub, and about our whole family’s strange attitudes about sex.
After my police report was complete, I went and sat with Jonnie at the Good Earth Restaurant in Berkeley, devastated with what I had done. I was torn in two. I knew my father would never speak to me again, never forgive me, and probably never even regard me as his daughter ever again. I knew the most important relationship in my life was over, and I wanted to die. Even so, Kenny didn’t deserve to be raped by my father, and his safety had to come ahead of all other concerns.
While the TV played images from Tiananmen Square: the young man facing the tank, I told Jonnie that since I had betrayed my father I deserved to die. I told him I was going to have to kill myself since what I had done could never be forgiven. Jonnie disagreed with me. He said emphatically that I was not going to kill myself, but we were going to leave, immediately. We went home, threw clothes and my Troubador harp into the car, and left very quietly.
Chapter 34: Prison for Him and Hell for me (1990–1993)
“And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.”
—The Holy Bible, Mark 9:42 (NIV)
On April 23 of 1990, after a long investigation, my father was finally arrested by the Berkeley Police for his crimes against Kenny. Very few people wanted to testify against him, no matter how much they knew. Some loved him, some didn’t want to rock the boat. For his male victims, talking about the specifics of what he had done to them was so excruciating as to be impossible. Many of the victims, including Sterling, denied everything until after my father was dead.
In May my mother divorced my father. Mother told me she still loved my father, and she did not want to divorce him at all. She told me she only divorced him because Lisa insisted on it. She also told me that if she could have traveled alone, she would have gone to visit him in jail every single day. Lisa insisted on the divorce to prevent Mother from losing the house and half the profits from Mists in the civil lawsuits which came from his offense.
This is from Lisa’s journals in her deposition:
“MR. DOLAN: Look to 10/16/89. Do you see where you say, ‘The divorce is going to make a lot o
f extra work, but it beats losing the house in a messy lawsuit.’ At the end of the first second full paragraph?
ELISABETH WATERS: Yes.”
To be perfectly fair, when Mother found out my father had molested yet another kid, she was furious and yelled and screamed, but she never indicated to me that she stayed angry with him for this, let alone that she was angry enough to divorce him.
“MR. DOLAN: I’m going to read to you from the 10-9-89 entry of Elisabeth Waters:
‘Marion always said she’d divorce Walter if he did this again. She seems to think that he molested both Glenn and Gregg, but she was rather startled when I told her about the letter to Dr. Morin about Sterling. She said that she thought Walter thought of Sterling as a son.’
“MR. DOLAN: Did you undertake any activity to ensure that Walter Breen would not molest young boys at this property that you rented to him?
MZB: As I say, at the time Barry was there. I told him Barry was off limits, and I told him Gregg was off limits.”
My mother knew what my father liked to do. She seemed to draw a line at the boys she liked, where my father preferred to fuse fathering and sex.
Walter felt no shame and no remorse over his acts:
“ELISABETH WATERS: Okay. First, I asked him why his bank account was overdrawn, and he said he had written a check for $5,000 to hire a lawyer because Officer Harris wanted to talk to him, and at that point I began to really seriously believe he was guilty of the accusations made about his behavior with Kenny. A couple of days later I asked him if he really performed oral sex on Kenny, and he said, ‘yes.’ No, actually he asked me who told me, and I said Mary Mason did, and he said he didn’t know she was talking about it, and I said, ‘Well, she did to me.’ So he didn’t actually say, yes, but he didn’t deny it. And then sometime later, I forgot how the subject originally came up, but I said, ‘How could you do that to an 11 year old?’ And Walter said, ‘He was 12.’
MR. DOLAN: Anything else?
ELISABETH WATERS: You mean like his exact words?
MR. DOLAN: Correct.
ELISABETH WATERS: ‘He was 12 and besides he wasn’t a virgin.’
MR. DOLAN: Okay. Anything else that he said that you can recall in any of these three conversations regarding whether or not he actually molested Ken Smith?
ELISABETH WATERS: Well, he seemed to think that it didn’t matter because Kenny didn’t care about it and Mary didn’t care about it; that it was okay because Kenny and Mary didn’t object.”
On June 8, 1990, in Alameda County Superior Court, my father pleaded guilty to one felony count of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor under the age of 14. This was not the crime I witnessed, but a previous offense which he had committed against Kenny in Berkeley between August 6–12 in 1988. Sadly, my father had been molesting Kenny for some time.
After he was arrested I told my mother that my father had raped me. I took a chance, considering her response the last time I had tried to tell her about anything like that, and I regretted it even as the words were coming out of my mouth. To my surprise and relief, my mother was angry with him, not me. She told me she had been out of town on the weekend of my father’s birthday when I was five years old. I think she remembered how much it hurt that when her own father had raped her. She told me later that she had hoped he would leave me alone since he preferred boys.
She confronted him immediately, bursting into the room where he was having a massage and yelling at him about having raped me. My father denied her accusations. She said, “Shall I believe someone who has never lied to me, or someone who has never told me the truth?” Marion later told me that she reminded Walter that he didn’t remember much of that time period, and he finally agreed with her. For some reason, that restored peace between them. She wasn’t concerned about what he had done to me, only about the fact that she was right and he was wrong.
My father’s denial puzzled me since he was generally truthful in his fashion. The only thing I can conclude is that he expressed again and again that he never seduced or raped anyone, but the children always seduced him. So maybe, in his imagination, I had done the same thing.
At the age of five.
After all, Lisa did not ask my father if he had raped Kenny. She only asked if he had performed oral sex on him. Maybe if Mother had rephrased her accusation as a clear statement of physical actions, my father would have cheerfully admitted it. In any event, I never went to the cops. It was enough that my mother knew.
On October 17, 1990, Mary Mason, Kenny’s mother, filed a civil complaint against my father, asking for $500,000 in exemplary and punitive damages. Mary Mason claimed that the molestation began in April of 1986 when Kenny was 9, and that there were six separate episodes.
My father was sentenced to three years of probation on November. 30, 1990.
Three years of probation for six life-destroying episodes of sex with a little child. Three years. Sadly, at that point the law saw my father as a first offender. Back then there was no Internet, and the investigation was limited to our local area. Among the six Johnny Does identified as victims, nobody wanted to testify, no matter how bad their injuries were.
But my father’s legal difficulties were only beginning. Kenny was not his only victim, but the only one who had talked up to that point.
I am going to use pseudonyms in referring to the next victim. I am in touch with him, and he does not want his name publicized. He already went through too much and he does not need to have his privacy violated. For the purposes of this book, my father’s next victim will be referred to as John Smith Jr, and his father will be called John Smith Sr.
My father had stayed as a house guest at the house of John Smith Sr. and John Smith Jr. for several coin conventions in Southern California over a period of several years. One day, John Smith Sr. mentioned my father to a friend, since my father was a huge celebrity in coin collecting circles. John Smith Sr.’s friend had heard about my father’s arrest. He reacted with horror and said: “You mean Walter Breen, the child molester?” John Smith Sr. went to talk to John Smith Jr, now twelve. He told his father what my father had done to him, starting at the age of seven. John Smith Jr. was now twelve.
John Smith Sr. wasted no time, and called the police. He filed a criminal complaint against my father, who was charged with eight felony counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor under the age of 14. My father faced six years of prison per count plus fines for a possible 48-year prison sentence. He was arrested on September 24, 1991 at Superior Stamp and Coin Galleries in Beverly Hills, and brought to the Los Angeles County Jail. He was never released after that.
On September 26, 1991, my father was arraigned in Los Angeles County and pleaded not guilty. On the same day, Alameda County revoked my father’s probation and issued a “no bail” bench warrant. If Los Angeles County ever released him, Alameda County would pick him up immediately and hold him without bail. Alameda and Los Angeles agreed to hold him without bail at the Los Angeles County Jail and transfer him to Alameda County when it was time for him to appear in court there for his probation violation.
On October 28, 1991, my father pleaded not guilty to all charges at a preliminary hearing in Los Angeles Municipal Court. Detective David Berglund testified that my father met John Smith Jr. in the fall of 1986 while waiting for the same plane flights. The complaint stated that my father molested John Smith Jr. at his father’s house in West Los Angeles from June of 1987 to January 1991. Most of the dates of my father’s overnight visits coincided with the Long Beach Numismatic, Philatelic and Baseball Card Exposition, held three times annually. My father was bound over for trial in Santa Monica Superior Court, and held in lieu of $200,000 bond.
The Los Angeles police undertook a thorough investigation of my father’s criminal background, and the prosecutor put together an ironclad case against him. Not only did they have all the details of his 1990 arrest and felony conviction, but they dug up his 1954 arrest in Atlantic City. This destroyed the notion that he
had been a “first offender.” It was obvious that my father was a habitual offender. In fact, my father’s probation officer had regarded him as having a 100% chance of recidivism.
The police contacted me as part of the investigation, and asked me to decipher some portions of my father’s journals. My father, if you recall, had written down his every thought at the instruction of Dr. Morin, and he had hundreds of little spiral-bound books full of incriminating things. Naturally, my father had instructed me and my brother to burn his journals if he was ever arrested.
I realized much later that I had been my father’s only confidant about his sexual activities other than Dr. Morin. That was why my brother Patrick had denied any wrongdoing on my father’s part, and asking him to testify did no good: Patrick simply did not know.
The journals were written in calligraphic script, often with a heliotrope (pinky-purple) chisel-point pen. From long experience, I could read my father’s appalling handwriting. I spoke as much “Walterese” as anyone else alive, and I could decipher his abbreviations and codes. For example, “M” was my mother. “M” followed by a treble clef (a musical symbol) indicated me.
I was saddened to see the things he wrote about me. I was a worthless piece of garbage who had been locked in a looney bin. He never knew me, he didn’t love me, he should never have trusted me, and he would never forgive me. Yeah. I got it. I’m evil. Big surprise, and I can cry later.
I was baffled by the things he said about his long-term boy-lover Gregg. My father said, with absolute rage, that Gregg had turned against him. Worse, Gregg now perceived himself as a child victim rather than a willing lover. My father was outraged at Gregg’s “betrayal.”
After all, how dare the Thanksgiving turkey protest the carving knife?
I was also relieved, if saddened. I had tried to intervene on Gregg’s behalf ten years before, and gotten nowhere. Now Gregg was finally old enough to stand up for himself, and apparently no longer cared that my father would be mad at him which was the whip keeping the rest of us in line.
The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon Page 32
