by Mark Bowden
—sorry., I got stuck at home w work . . . n I worked last night 2.. anyway.. givin u my number was 2 call to meet up not 2 call all hours of the day/night. I guess that gave me a bad vibe as 2 who u really r n ur real interests in me/us . . ., we r goin 2 the shore w a friend this weekend n wont be back til sun nite have good weekend
He found her note when he got home early from work that afternoon. Chastened, he tried to patch things up.
—well sorry about your vibe, because it was a wrong vibe,,,, I will not call til you tell me too, I tried to call to hook up yesterday and today,,,,,, my interest is in your girls but I did want to meet you first, so I was trying to hook up with you, so the next time and the future would be with them,,,, I am sorry you felt like that, because it is NOT a correct one, yes I want to hook up with you first but then then, I was only trying to get us all started, that was all,, so I will NOT call your number again, UNTIL you tell me to hook up again, OK???? I hope we can do this next week and I hope we can talk again . . . I do want as you put it, US,,, you me and the girls and I would love to babysit for you too some time, LOL again have a good weekend and we will talk on Monday
He did not hear from her for another week. Each day he would type apologetic messages to her and get no response. When she reappeared the following Friday afternoon, J was desperate to right things. He rushed pathetically to reassure her that he was on board with her fantasy completely, even dangling the possibility of a sex session with the girls first, but then immediately retreated from it:
—hey question, would you like me to by pass you, and just have the girls. I do not want to worry you that I only wanted you,,,, if you would like me to have them only I can do, you need to tell me what your ok with
—that’s why i asked . . . u what ur into b/c i wasn’t sure.
—that is totally cool . . . I wanted you first then the girls . . . just it would make it easier on me when I am there with you and them, you and I would have already been together and I would feel a lot more comfortable with them, then, but if you would prefer that I do NOT play with you and have only them, I can do, but I really wanted all of you
The meeting had to be on his terms, and if what he wanted was just to have sex with her, all he had to do was admit it, and she would drop her investigation. She kept offering him the door out.
—ok I understand I think . . . whatever u want . . . its up to you
—well I would LIKE to meet you make love to you, then return to take your girls with you there, like the scenario we spoke about,,,, that is what I would like,,,, just need you to be ok with that
—ill think about it . . . that just seems kinda weird to me ill let u know . . . it just seems odd to me that you would want to come here to do me . . . then come back to do them . . . seems shady
Through the rest of October, heather would disappear for days at a time, emerge just for a perfunctory exchange, and then disappear again. For J, the breakthrough came on the afternoon of Monday, October 24, when for the first time she agreed to his scenario of meeting her alone for sex first. His proposal had not changed:
—I was just thinking maybe you and I could meet earlier,,,,, play, I will wait in your bed as you leave and get the girl and then send in the oldest, when i will be in bed naked you close the door wait outside with youngest
—thats cool
After more detailing of the various sexual acts planned with both her and the girls, again rendered in explicit detail, J reiterated:
— . . . so we will play fast then if i get there at 2 since you need to pich the gorls up at 3 wow ok, fast one I see that is cool
—why do u keep askin me that? to come here then leave then come back? seems odd
—NO I am just trying to make it easy on ALL nothing sneaking at all
—huh?
—I am coolith whatever you ewant
—well what do you want? im open after 2 .. i told u that a million times
—ok cool
—seems like ur really not into the girls, if not just say that .. its all good either way
Again J assured her that he was interested in her and her girls, but once more he made it clear that he was coming to meet her alone first. They would have sex and then she would leave to get the girls. After weeks of wrangling, heather had finally agreed to what he wanted.
Deery relented. It wasn’t as clean as she might have liked, but she had him. They arranged to rendezvous on the afternoon of Friday, October 28, in the parking lot of a Wendy’s on MacDade Boulevard just outside of Media. She asked J to bring condoms, and he promised to do so. But at the last moment he panicked.
On the morning of their meeting, J wrote heather:
—I had a fucked up dream last night, lol
—do tell?
—that you set me up like you were the cops, I walked in and you arrested me for this and I needed to kill myself, because I will never go to jail lol
—good god! are u serious
—I know . . . freaked me out
She reassured him. Before they signed off that morning, J made sure one more time that the plan was the way he wanted it. He would meet her, they would have sex, and then she would leave to pick up her girls and come back with them.
—do they know I will have you first too??
For J, it was a short drive along Interstate 476, the Blue Route, to MacDade Boulevard. Before heading for their rendezvous he showered and changed into casual slacks, dress shoes, and a clean gray pullover shirt. He turned off the expressway and pointed northeast on the busy four-lane highway, lined on both sides by strip malls. He was excited. His persistence had paid off. Heather had described herself to him as Italian, dark-eyed, dark-haired, and he had a vivid mental picture of her submitting herself to him that made his heart pound. He had purchased the condoms she requested at a Rite Aid, a three-pack, the smallest item on the rack. He had the condoms in a bag with the sex toys he hoped to use in the short time they had before she would leave to get her daughters. In the bag was a set of handcuffs, just the play kind with no locks on them, some dildos, and some rope, in case she wanted to be tied up. He wanted to be right on time, because there would be only an hour for them to get to her house and have sex before she had to leave to get her daughters—and then he would flee.
He crossed through a wide intersection, turned into the restaurant parking lot, and started backing into a space. A car startled him, pulling up fast, right behind him, cutting him off. It made him angry, but then he saw another had pulled in front of him. They had nearly hit his car! Then men rushed toward him with handguns drawn. They were shouting, “Get out of the car! Get out of the car!”
His first thought was that it was a holdup. He was being robbed or carjacked. But then one of the men told him he was under arrest. These were cops. He stepped out and was immediately pushed against the side of his car and frisked, handcuffed, and placed in the back of a sport-utility vehicle. Deery was watching from her own car nearby. She did not get out.
J moved like someone in shock. Lieutenant David Peifer, Deery’s boss and head of the ICAC unit, got behind the wheel. He was about J’s age, a sturdy man with a crew cut and a handgun on his belt. J flung questions at him. Why was he being arrested? Because he had come there to meet with a woman? The lieutenant told him, in so many words, that he was under arrest for “soliciting” sex with children.
“I would never have touched those kids!” J protested. “I wasn’t interested in them!”
“That’s what they all say,” Peifer replied.
J kept trying to explain himself, and the lieutenant told him, patiently, that he had to wait until they got back to his office, where they could talk at length. First he had to be fully advised of his rights.
His rights! J was angry, bewildered, and frightened. He knew that the scenario he had described to heather online was criminal, and he had seen busts like this on TV, but somehow his knowledge that the fantasies he described were untrue, that he never intended for them to actually happen, had convin
ced him he was safe. How could meeting an adult woman alone make him vulnerable to arrest?
He met Deery for the first time at the police station. He was sitting on a bench in Peifer’s office, feeling vulnerable and foolish, his thick arms resting in his lap, handcuffed to a chair. When the detective entered and sat down, J didn’t know who she was until the lieutenant introduced her as “Heather.” She seemed timid. Peifer did most of the talking. J was frightened but also angry. He tried to stay calm as he explained to them both that he’d had no intention, despite whatever he had written, of sticking around for sex with the girls. Deery said, “You brought three condoms, one for me and one for each of the girls.”
“They come in packs of three,” he told her. “You can’t buy just one.”
Still, that looked bad.
Peifer set a microcassette recorder in the desk and read him his rights, and J then reviewed a form explaining that he was entitled to have a lawyer present, that he had been read the Miranda warnings, and that he was waiving them all, agreeing to answer questions. He didn’t just agree, he was frantic to explain himself, to explain it all away. Both Peifer and Deery signed as witnesses to the statement.
J answered Peifer’s questions about where he lived, where he kept his computer, his log-ins and passwords. He told them they would find some porn on his computer, files that had been e-mailed to him.
“There’s a few snapshots,” he said. “It’s not that I keep them, but they were sent years ago. . . . But I didn’t go out and search it. I did not do child pornography. I never search anything like that.”
Peifer and Deery gave J a transcript of the chats he had had with heatherscutiepies and started reading to him some of the more explicit things he had said about having sex with children. J was frantic to explain himself. “The conversations were based on just to keep the woman interested and to just be erotic and aroused, and that was it,” he said. They were not buying it. Peifer read him line after embarrassing, incriminating line.
“I, honest to God . . . ,” said J, exasperated. “I don’t want them [the girls]. I never been into it, ever with anybody, anywhere, at any time!”
“And that’s easy to say now that we’ve arrested you, and you’re sitting here talking to the police,” said Peifer.
“Even if I wasn’t arrested, I wouldn’t be interested in kids. It was just, I wanted . . . the woman to be excited. I wanted me to be excited. And that was it. I know how it looks. I know what you’re reading, but—”
“When you bring kids into this whole thing, why would you even go there?” asked Peifer.
“I know,” J said, defeated, but still trying to make them see, running phrases together in his panic. “The idea was only to keep her interested. I, in my mind, my mind, was working differently, I guess, than most people’s, because I just wanted to be with a real woman, not the kids, but I wanted, I didn’t want to lose my opportunity to, to have some real passion, and I, I was wrong in stating that. I know you’re telling me it’s solicitation, in your definition, but I, I can tell you that when I was doing it, it’s not solicit—I wasn’t trying to solicit because I know in my heart and in my mind, I would not under any circumstances be with a child and nor have I ever, ever, ever, in any way shape or form, been with a child. I never want to.”
“But you’d never know that by reading this chat,” said Peifer.
“I understand that,” said J.
It went on like this. He could see how they viewed what he had written, and it was obvious that it looked very bad. It would look that way to anyone who didn’t understand. It looked criminal.
“I have no interest in young kids, whatsoever,” J insisted. “It was just cyber chat, to be a lie, and to try and keep the mother interested so I could have some passion with an older woman, which I’ve missed at home.”
“But it doesn’t stay cyber chat when you get in your car, and you drive from Exton to Delaware County and park at the Wendy’s parking lot waiting for the mom and the two kids,” said Peifer.
“The mom was going to get the kids after we had, had sex, and then, when she left, I was leaving. I was not going to have sex with the kids.”
“That’s what you say now.”
“That’s what I would say now and yesterday and the day before that.”
“No, no, no, no,” said Deery. “What you said yesterday was when the mom leaves to go get the kids, you were going to wait in her bed naked, and the oldest daughter was to be sent into that bedroom.”
“That was written, yes.”
“That was what was said yesterday,” said Deery.
“That is correct, but that is no—”
“And the day before.”
“But that is not what I was planning on doing, that was only to keep your interest.”
“OK, again, that’s self-serving now that you’re under arrest.”
“Even if I wasn’t under arrest, I would feel the same way.”
When they were finished, J asked Peifer when he could go home.
He still did not understand the seriousness of his predicament.
“No,” the lieutenant explained in the calm, patient way of his. “You’re being arrested, and you are going to jail tonight.”
J served a year in prison. His lawyer negotiated a plea that reduced what might have been a much longer stay, and that allowed him to serve his time in a relatively unthreatening county prison. He was charged with sixteen counts, starting with “criminal attempt—rape forcible compulsion” and ending with “criminal solicitation—corruption of minors.” He was given one year of parole and sentenced to ten years of probation, during which time he must attend counseling weekly for his supposed sexual desire for children. His wife left him. He lost his job. His face, name, address, and criminal conviction for “Attempted Involuntary Sexual Deviate Intercourse” with a minor appear on the Pennsylvania website for “sexual offenders,” the modern equivalent of a scarlet letter. There it will remain until 2016.
He is deeply ashamed, and bitter. He wanted to fight the charge. Indeed, he is still furious with the lawyer who persuaded him to take a plea, but it would appear that the copy-machine repairman received wise counsel. Because he didn’t have a prayer of getting off. The array of charges against him could have sent him away to prison for up to eight years. At the trial, he would have been painted as an all-too-familiar monster. This was the interpretation of Deery and the Delaware County district attorney, and they were not particularly interested in any other. They might have been able to find out for sure on the day they arrested him. Deery could have worn a wire, and if he had been as determined as she believed he was to have sex with her daughters, she could have presented him with that exact opportunity, telling him, for example, that her girls were home at that moment and she was going to take him directly there, bypassing the prospect of his having sex with her. It might have unequivocally sorted out his interests. But it was clear that, to her, such a consideration was moot.
“I had enough already to convict him,” she said. “There was no need for a wire.”
J was guilty of some things, serious things. He was guilty of saying he wanted to have sex with two imaginary children. He was guilty of being a troubled soul in a bad marriage, of abusing steroids, of a lifelong inability to establish a healthy intimacy with a woman, and of being morally adrift in a netherworld of illicit sexual desire. He was guilty of lacking moral boundaries and good sense. There is a chance that without treatment of some kind, J would have evolved into someone dangerous. I asked him, “What if you found yourself, after all of that talk on the Internet, consumed with your steroidal lust, in a room with this woman and her children? Is it possible that you might have gone ahead with it?”
J bowed his head and thought about it for a long time.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I know I have no sexual interest in children at all. I pray that I would never have gone that far. I certainly had no intention of doing it. I intended to have sex with her and the
n leave. Period.”
There is no evidence that J has ever made a sexual overture to a child. Deery told me that she couldn’t remember ever arresting a child molester who did not have child porn on his computer. It is all too easy to obtain. J had no images that were obviously child porn. His appalled parents paid for a battery of psychosexual testing, the kind where involuntary responses to images are measured. The tests showed exactly what J claimed, that he had no sexual interest in children.
J is off steroids. His body has slipped back into a normal slightly pudgy shape. His manner is subdued, submissive, earnest, eagerly friendly, and polite. He helped several inmates earn high school diplomas when he was in jail, and he is proud of that. He no longer owns a computer. He lives alone in his suburban town house with his dogs. He has joined a church. He says the pastor there has embraced him, forgiven him, and provided him with support and direction. After his arrest he went to every neighbor in his suburban cul-de-sac, knocking on doors to tell each of them his story. He did not want them to know only what they learned from the police. He says they believe him, and he feels accepted. He recently found a new job, after telling his whole story to the man who hired him. He sees the years he spent obsessed with cybersex as an illness, or a lapse into sinfulness, that drew him deeper and deeper into depravity. He is embarrassed. He has been humiliated.
But he has stayed angry. The classes he attends as a condition of his probation demand that he admit a sexual desire for children. It is considered an essential step toward recovery. J told his instructor that he has no such desire. He never did. He was told that if he persists in this denial he will jeopardize his probation and could be sent back to jail.
So he pretends to be something he is not. He is good at it.
The Case of the Vanishing Blonde
