Issue 336
May 13, 2005

INDEX

Articles

v A Glimpse at the Mind of a Pedophile by Jean Guccione

v Rough landing for exonerated inmate by Anna Badkhen

v The Boundaries of Justice by Neely Tucker

v In Kansas, Darwinism Goes on Trial Once More by Jodi Wilgoren

v Who Needs Giacomo? Bet on the Fortune Cookie by Jennifer 8. Lee

The following article appeared on latimes.com on May 11, 2005:

A Glimpse at the Mind of a Pedophile

A former priest who served under Mahony in the Stockton Diocese describes his ploys.

By Jean Guccione

Times Staff Writer

In a chillingly frank account, a former Roman Catholic priest, promoted 20 years ago by Roger M. Mahony, recently described his decades-long career as a pedophile, including his sexual tastes and how he groomed his young victims for abuse.

In a 15-hour videotaped deposition in March, Oliver O'Grady described how his heart raced when one of the slim, playful boys he preferred toweled off after a swim. He also said he liked to lift little girls' skirts and peek at their underpants.

Asked to demonstrate how he would lure one of his estimated 25 victims into his arms, the 59-year-old Irish native softened his voice, flashed an avuncular smile and looked directly into the video camera.

"Hi, Sally," O'Grady improvised. "How are you doing? Come here. I want to give you a hug. You are a sweetheart. You know that. You are very special to me. I like you a lot."

If his hug met no resistance, O'Grady testified, he would take the child's compliance as "permission" to molest.

The deposition came in connection with lawsuits filed against the Stockton Diocese over alleged abuse by clergy. Mahony, who was bishop of Stockton from 1980 to 1985 before heading the Los Angeles Archdiocese, inherited O'Grady, who had admitted years earlier to molesting an 11-year-old girl. In 1984, police investigated a therapist's report that O'Grady had molested a boy.

After police declined to file charges, Mahony transferred O'Grady to a rural parish and later promoted him to pastor there, where he allegedly molested three more victims, including a baby girl who suffered vaginal scarring, according to plaintiffs' lawyers. Mahony has said he was unaware of any molestation reports. The additional victims were molested after he left the diocese.

"The cardinal acted on the information he had, just as the police investigator did," church attorney Don Woods said.

Costa Mesa-based plaintiffs' attorney John C. Manly conducted the deposition in Ireland. The now-defrocked priest, an Irish citizen and native of Limerick, was deported from the U.S. in 2001, after serving seven years in California state prison for sexually abusing two brothers. He lives in Thurles, Ireland.

A transcript of the deposition was filed Tuesday in Alameda County Superior Court, where the Stockton Diocese is defending four lawsuits alleging that the church failed to protect parishioners from abuse. Manly filed the transcript in opposing a church motion to dismiss one of the suits.

O'Grady, on the video, asked why church officials did not remove him from ministry after he committed the molestations.

"I think it probably would have been best if, back in 1984, they said, 'Look, we need to put a halt to this. We need to take you out,' " O'Grady told lawyers during the questioning. "But even the 1984 situation, as I understand it, was handled as best it could have been handled at the time."

Woods said Tuesday that O'Grady "was not trying to say what should have been done. He's saying I wish it could have been done differently.

"It's a lament from hindsight," he said.

An attorney for the Stockton Diocese, Paul Balestracci, declined to comment, noting the open lawsuits over O'Grady's misconduct.

O'Grady's deposition offers a far-reaching, and often disturbing, glimpse into the mind of a convicted pedophile. Still, there were times during the marathon question-and-answer session when he was less than candid.

He refused to name any of his 25 victims, invoking his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. He at first denied molesting one little girl, then the next day admitted that he had lied and that he had abused her. He said his abuse ended in the mid-1980s, but in his criminal case he had pleaded guilty to molestations as late as 1991.

Although O'Grady voiced remorse for his abuses, he often appeared to be enjoying his videotaped performance. At one point, he winked into the camera.

O'Grady testified that he was molested as a child by two priests in the sacristy of his church. The first occurred when he was 10 and an altar boy, he said.

The priest "began the conversation by asking how I was, what I was going to do for the day, and I remember he was — he called me over to him and he began to hug me, you know, in a kind of gentle way, first of all.

"Then he turned me around … which means I had my back to him with him standing behind me, and then the hands would come down and hug me here and then went lower."

When he was growing up, he testified, he was involved in molestation within his family, both as perpetrator and victim. And when he was a teenager, he added, a priest touched him sexually.

"It was not a very pleasant experience on some occasions, but it was a very normal thing. Nobody talked about it," he said. "I did not consider it a very serious criminal matter."

O'Grady testified that his own sexual attraction to children began before he was ordained a priest in 1971.

"The only thing I understood religion to say at the time was that anything … to do with sexuality was sinful, and that is where a lot of my conflict came," he testified.

His first assignment as a priest was to the Stockton Diocese in 1971. Five years later, O'Grady testified in an earlier deposition, he fondled an 11-year-old girl he had met at a summer camp and invited to sleep over at the rectory.

"I remember going into her bed, and I tried to caress her and fondle her, and I sensed her objections to that, nonverbally, and I stayed for a little while more and then decided not to continue. So I left and went back to my own bed," he told lawyers during the March deposition, estimating that he had spent no more than 20 minutes in the girl's bed.

The girl's parents complained to then-Bishop Merlin Guilfoyle, who preceded Mahony in Stockton. O'Grady testified that the bishop, who is now deceased, confronted him and he confessed.

O'Grady wrote the family a letter of apology, angering Guilfoyle, O'Grady said. The letter was in O'Grady's personnel file when Mahony assumed the bishopric, according to court records.

O'Grady said he suffered no repercussions for his transgression.

"Life just continued," he testified.

Court records show that in 1984, four years after Mahony became bishop of Stockton, O'Grady told his therapist he had fondled a 9-year-old boy. The therapist alerted child welfare officials, and police opened an investigation.

O'Grady took the 5th Amendment when asked during the deposition what he told his therapist. But he testified that Mahony was out of town at the time, so he told the bishop's second-in-command about the investigation. He said the official sent him to talk to the diocese's lawyer.

The child, who had been asleep during the alleged molestation, said he was unaware of any abuse, and police declined to file charges. Court records show, however, that police said an attorney for the diocese promised that O'Grady would be transferred to a job where he would not have contact with children, and that he would be sent to therapy.

O'Grady testified that Mahony sent him to a psychiatrist for an evaluation, which the cardinal has acknowledged was the church's standard operating procedure at the time for handling pedophile priests. Almost immediately thereafter, O'Grady said, Mahony transferred him to a parish in San Andreas, about an hour outside Stockton. Mahony later promoted him to pastor.

There was no school at his new assignment, but O'Grady testified that he supervised hundreds of students who came in on weekends and after school to study Catechism.

Mahony has testified in court that he never saw the letter of apology O'Grady wrote to his female victim's family. He also said that he did not know the details of what O'Grady had told his therapist and that once police declined to file charges in connection with the 9-year-old boy, he saw no reason to investigate further.

O'Grady "was in counseling at the time," Woods said, "and the second opinion that the diocese obtained said the counseling was satisfactory and he should continue with it.

The second opinion did not recommend that he be removed from ministry, nor did the [evaluation] render any diagnosis of pedophilia."

After years of therapy, O'Grady said, he's embarrassed and ashamed of his sexual attraction to children.

But asked to describe his "type," he gave an animated response. "Generally, a boy who was — spontaneous, affectionate, playful, generally around the age of 10, 11, and who seemed to maybe need somebody to care for him. I'm not saying that he necessarily had family problems but seemed to identify with me as somebody who he could trust, who he could come to, who was willing to take care of him."

The priest searched his congregation for submissive children. "If they demonstrated affection, by hugging and that sort of stuff, it sort of awakened within me urges to be affectionate in return," O'Grady testified.

"If I got comfortable doing that and felt he was comfortable with me hugging him, and I had thoughts or feelings that I wanted to go further, I might at that time explore that possibility," he said.

"I might have to do a little planning … to be sure that the boy was there, to be sure the boy was alone, and that there was not any hurry on him leaving."

O'Grady testified that he had sexual relationships with two mothers of children he molested. He also said he occasionally wore women's lingerie he found among donated clothes left at his church.

"Perhaps I was trying to use external things to arouse myself," he said.

A Stockton jury in 1998 awarded one of O'Grady's victims $30 million, later reduced to $7 million. Jury members told The Times they thought Mahony was untruthful on the witness stand, that he had allowed O'Grady's pattern of abuse to continue.

Mahony said he thought the jurors were wrong and that he took extraordinary steps to protect children.

Over the years, O'Grady said, he tried to understand and possibly curb his appetite for children — reading books about his disorder, touring a residential treatment center for pedophile priests and eventually opening his parish to secret Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings so he could attend.

After O'Grady was released from prison and returned to Ireland, the Stockton diocese paid for him to undergo three years of outpatient therapy, he said, and also agreed to pay him $800 a month for 10 years starting on his 65th birthday.

"I would have liked somebody in the diocese or somebody to have intervened as early as possible in helping me confront this situation as a very, very serious one," he said, "and help to educate me to the very serious nature of the problem that I had and was causing."

Each time he reached into a child's pants, O'Grady said, he knew his conduct was wrong, "definitely a sin." But there was "another part of me saying, 'I can't seem to control these desires, thoughts, feelings when they come.' "

After a molestation, O'Grady testified, he always went to a priest and confessed his sin.

* * * * *

The following article appeared on sfgate.com on May 9, 2005:

Rough landing for exonerated inmate

He's one of 159 who have been freed after DNA testing

Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer

Baton Rouge, La. -- As so often happens lately, Michael Anthony Williams is lost.

The driver's license examiner towers over him, rattling off orders through the rolled-down window on the driver's side. But at each command, Williams, 40, hesitates. He signals to the left when he is told to turn right. He forgets to turn off the windshield wipers.

He fails the test, another blow in Williams' quest to put together a life that was taken from him when he was just a boy.

At the age of 16, a sophomore in Jonesboro High School in northern Louisiana, he was arrested and convicted of raping his female math tutor. He spent 24 years in the Angola state penitentiary. Two months ago, he walked free. A DNA test -- which didn't exist when he was growing up -- proved what Williams had claimed all along: the state had gotten the wrong man.

Now, like dozens of others wrongfully accused and subsequently exonerated, a bewildered, once-young man finds himself, without resources, thrown into a world with which he is entirely unfamiliar.

Tasks that are second nature for most adults -- using a cell phone, leaving a voice message, going to an ATM, paying the phone bill or turning on a blinker -- for Williams are pieces of a puzzle he has yet to figure out.

"I got to find a new life," says Williams, a heavyset man who was an inside linebacker on his prison football team. A black skullcap covers his receding hairline; a key to his apartment hangs on a ribbon strung around his neck.

"It's not gonna be easy. It's not gonna be fast."

Williams is one of 159 people who have been jailed and then freed in the United States through post-conviction DNA testing since it became available in 1989, according to the Innocence Project, a national group that works on preventing and reversing wrongful convictions.

Justice may have been served, but in most cases these people have lost virtually everything they ever owned.

Almost half suffer from depression, anxiety disorder or some form of post- traumatic stress disorder, according to a study by Lola Vollen, director of the DNA Identification Technology and Human Rights Center in Berkeley. None has access to public services such as health insurance, job training and anger management that are routinely available to ex-convicts on parole to help their transition back into society. Some states, including California, award financial compensation to the wrongfully convicted. Compensation packages vary from state to state, and in California reach $100 per day of incarceration.

But Louisiana, where 18 people have been exonerated since 1989, has no compensation for people such as Williams.

Check for $10

Upon his release, the state of Louisiana cut Williams a check for $10. He keeps it in a frame on his coffee table.

"They are expected to jump right in and pick up their lives where supposedly they left them off," said Ernest Duff, who heads the Berkeley-based Life After Exoneration program. "But after being institutionalized like that it's very, very hard to move forward."

Like most exonerated inmates, Williams, who finished high school in prison, has no marketable job experience and few social skills. Unlike most others, Williams had almost no contact with the outside world during the years he was inside.

His mother died when he was 12. Both of his grandparents, who brought him up, and his father died while he was in prison. His four brothers and two sisters stopped calling, writing or visiting him in 1990. During the last 15 years of his imprisonment, Williams' only visitors were his lawyers from the Innocence Project.

Now, he rises early in the morning and starts dozing off around 8 p.m. He had one job, at a construction site, for three weeks but quit, he says, after a conflict with the foreman who "felt like I got lucky and got out of prison."

He has $1,400 saved up and is frugal with it, partly because he doesn't know what to spend it on. He does not go out with friends because he doesn't have any.

He does not have a girlfriend. He says he has never had sex. He does not know how to meet women.

"They're all taken," he says with a shrug. He stares out the car window, watching white egrets flush from the bayous on both sides of the road.

Williams' time inside, isolated, makes it hard for him to "interact with people socially and pick up on social cues," says Barry Gerharz, who runs Inside/Out, a New Orleans program that helps exonerated prisoners return to normal life. "Michael's adjustment is and will be difficult."

Not a homey apartment

On many days, Williams stays in his ascetic, one-bedroom apartment in Baton Rouge, watching "Amazing Race" on CBS. He laughs at all the prison scenes in "Raising Arizona," one of the DVDs in his small collection. He draws pencil sketches of cartoon-like cats and birds on thin paper.

His apartment, on the first floor of a red-brick apartment complex, is so clean it suggests little human activity takes place there. Not a single picture adorns the off-white walls. The bed with a beige spread and burgundy comforter is meticulously made, so unruffled it could be made of a solid piece of plastic. After sharing a barracks at the penitentiary with 63 other inmates for more than two decades, Williams says that life on the outside feels lonely.

The acquaintances he does have seem to be related to prison in some way. Ashanti Witherspoon, in charge of video production at the enormous, nondenominational Miracle Place Church in Baker, La., served 27 years in prison for armed robbery. Susan Martin was arrested in 1987 after rustling 640 cows in 30 days by putting sneakers on their hooves and packing them into four 18-wheeler trucks. Her roommate, Carol Batey, is the fiancee of Martin's brother, Hulen, who is still in Angola for aggravated child rape, which he says he did not commit. Williams knows these people through the Innocence Project and through the Miracle Place Church, which Williams likes because "people can come here as they is, no need to dress up."

One sunny afternoon, Martin thinks Williams needs entertainment. She drags a boom box onto the narrow back porch of the house she shares with Batey, and begins to dance on the patchy lawn in stocking feet to a CD of Christian music. The yard smells like garbage. Williams watches her, a can of Coke in hand, tapping his foot to the music.

Soon, Williams' attention switches to his new cell phone. He has recently set up a tune from "Mission Impossible" as the ring tone, and now is exploring the phone's other options. He punches in names and phone numbers written in the red spiral notebook he carries in the chest pocket of his short-sleeved shirt. With the tiny cell phone camera, he takes pictures.

Asked about his family, and why they had not communicated with him for 15 years, Williams offers little.

"They must've wanted to get on with their lives," he says. "Past is past."

Since his release, he has visited his younger sister, Kay, in Virginia, and his brother, Roger, in northern Louisiana. He is considering moving to Virginia to live with Kay, a dentist. But she has just moved into a new house, and he doesn't have her new phone number.

For now, he prefers to think about other things he's missed. He wants to go to Disney World -- "never been there," he says. He wants to buy books on interior design he saw at a Barnes & Noble. And a nail gun, for putting stuff up on the wall -- "much better than using a hammer."

He wants to eat a lot of shrimp. In prison, Williams said, "you see a lot of beans, a lot of rice, meat." At Sammy's Grill in Zachary, about 7 miles north of Baton Rouge, Williams orders an enormous plate of deep-fried oysters, fish and shrimp, which he eats delicately with two fingers, leaving the shrimp for the last.

Williams also wants a pet, like one of the raccoons, perhaps, who feed at the Dumpster in his apartment complex. One evening, he walks over to the Dumpster and throws half of an ice cream sandwich to a raccoon. The animal gingerly approaches the sweet mess on the asphalt, sniffs it, picks it up with its front paws. As Williams begins to walk away, he calls out to the raccoon: "I've got your number, buddy. I'm gonna get you. I'm on to you, buddy."

No rush to get job

Getting a job is not so urgent. He's not looking for one right now, although he says he'd like to work in interior design, "do something creative."

Such seeming complacency is a pattern among exonerated inmates, Duff says.

"They have a sense of entitlement because they were in prison for something they didn't do, and now they're looking for society to make amends to them in a way that other prisoners are not," he says.

Duff likens people like Williams to refugees who are coming home after spending decades in refugee camps: traumatized, unused to making independent decisions. He says they need compensation packages, access to health care benefits and social services, counseling by specialists in human rights and torture, and constant contact with family members "to bring them back into the fold of humanity."

So far, Williams has received none of the above.

On Tuesday, Williams got his first electric bill.

On Wednesday, he saw someone lock the car using a remote control for the first time.

Yellow "Support Our Troops" ribbons on cars surprise him. Angola inmates didn't talk much about the war in Iraq.

"We had our own war in there," Williams says with a quiet laugh, massaging the scar near his left elbow, where an inmate stabbed him with an ice pick.

Surviving 24 years in Angola, one of the nation's most notoriously violent prisons, is a memory Williams prefers not to share. He describes his time there simply as "terrible."

The next juncture in his learning curve, he says, will be operating a computer, something he hopes to do soon.

"I need to get the mouse," he says. "I don't know how to use the mouse."

Williams knows what he wants his first car to be: a Chevrolet Avalanche, a large pickup truck.

But first, he has to pass his driver's test.

* * * * *

The following article appeared on washingtonpost.com on May 7, 2005:

The Boundaries of Justice

A Confession. A Life Sentence. Now, a Court's Mistake May Set a Child Abuser

Free.

By Neely Tucker

Washington Post Staff Writer

CUMBERLAND, Md. -- Some things are worse than murder, and nobody wants to know about them. So when the pudgy mama's boy named Johnny Kroll did what he did to the 9-year-old little girl out by the lakes 25 years ago and the courts sent him to prison for eternity, everyone agreed justice had been done. Nobody wanted to talk about it anymore.

What the 30-year-old Kroll did was kidnap the child and brutally assault her.

However, here's a short list of people who blew it the day Kroll pleaded guilty: The prosecutor. The judge. The defense attorney. Read: Everybody.

He assaulted that little girl in the Appalachian hills, yes, and Maryland nailed him for it. The problem was and is that he did it in Pennsylvania, not Maryland. The Maryland court sentenced him for an assault committed in another state. It's a bone simple violation of jurisdiction, perhaps the most basic pillar of the legal canon.

"How dumb can a state's attorney be?" says John Henry Kroll, the inmate's older cousin.

"I just don't know what to say," says John F. Fader II, a judge in Maryland for 26 years and now a senior judicial fellow at the University of Maryland School of Law. "When you don't have jurisdiction, you just don't have it."

Now there is no justice to be had, either.

A Maryland circuit court judge has vacated Kroll's sentence and dismissed the sex assault charges against him. He's already served the agreed-upon 15 years for the kidnapping. In terms of Maryland law, he's been held illegally for a decade. And -- you knew this was coming -- the statute of limitations has expired on the crimes in both federal and Pennsylvania courts.

There's a perverse precision to it. The court managed to make the one -- the only -- error it could have made that would let Kroll out of the life-plus-15-year plea bargain. In the words of Judge James S. Getty advising Kroll of his rights in a 1980 hearing: " . . . On a plea of guilty you waive any right to any defect in the prosecution of any nature other than jurisdiction" [emphasis added].

Scrambling to keep the 55-year-old Kroll behind bars, the state's attorney for Allegany County, Michael O. Twigg, on Thursday asked a judge to vacate the plea agreement. Twigg is asking for a new trial -- on charges that his predecessor agreed to drop a quarter-century ago. His argument is that Kroll, by pointing out the state's error, has breached the original deal. It's clever. It's imaginative. It's a long shot.

"I don't know that I've ever heard of a case like this," says Fader. "There's just no precedent for it."

During the half-hour hearing, Circuit Court Judge W. Timothy Finan noted that prosecutors had failed to take the usual step of securing a written agreement with Kroll at the time of the plea, had not asked the judge for a specific term at sentencing, and produced no witnesses during Thursday's hearing to say that a life sentence was their intent.

He said he would issue a ruling "shortly" and adjourned the court.

For his part, John Leroy Kroll listened attentively in his orange jail uniform, handcuffed, flanked by two sheriff's deputies. He has spent roughly 33 years, since he was 18, in penal institutions. He has been deemed a "sexual sadist," a "monster," and, going back to his youth, a "defective delinquent."

He's also a legal whisker from his version of justice -- freedom. "I will get on my knees and beg if I have to, to get you to give me one more chance," Kroll wrote the judge in 1980.

His prayers, as it turns out, were answered.

Cases like this drive people crazy. They want justice and they want it now. There are the two cases down in Florida, where convicted sex offenders are alleged to have killed two little girls. Legislators are already talking up new laws. After New Jersey's 7-year-old Megan Kanka was raped and killed by a sex offender, there was Megan's Law. When John Walsh's 6-year-old son Adam was abducted and killed in 1981, there was Adam's Law, and Walsh went on to host the television show "America's Most Wanted."

This case hit particularly hard 25 years ago in a little down-at-the-heels Appalachian spot, Cumberland, with the railroad tracks and the tumbling waters of Will's Creek running through the center of town, the church spires still here but almost all the factories long gone.

It was here that John Kroll grew up, on the spinelike ridges of mountains that divide one community from the next. It was the postwar era of quiet yards and long summers, when it was safe to play until the streetlights flickered on and your mother opened the screen door and called you in for supper.

Certainly there was nothing about young Johnny Kroll to raise much worry. His dad, Elmer, a World War II vet, worked at Kelly-Springfield tire plant for three decades. His wife, Doris, raised the two boys, and the family faithfully attended church. (Elmer died last month and Doris Kroll is in a nursing home, says John Kroll's attorney. Kroll's brother, Floyd, lives in the area. Repeated calls over the past two weeks to his apparent residence were not answered.)

But John Leroy didn't do well at school. He was terribly shy and unpopular, according to later psychological reports, and his mother's protection was overbearing. She even waited with him for the school bus when he was a senior in high school. Kroll was 6-foot-3 and about 180 pounds at the time. Kids razzed him. He had stomach ulcers.

He graduated almost dead last among the 197 students at Beall High School.It was about this time that he began to scare people -- he was dismissed from his job as an orderly at the local hospital because of "his marked interest in staring at female patients in the delivery room and the intensive care unit," according to a diagnostic report from the Patuxent Institution, a psychiatric prison where Kroll did time. Female co-workers said he followed them home. A neighbor said he prowled around at night.

According to Twigg, Kroll was arrested for trying to pick up a 12-year-old girl, then released. He was also found guilty of knocking a 16-year-old girl over with his car, then accosting her, but the conviction was overturned, Twigg said.

Then, on April 30, 1970, when he was 20, Kroll drove his car, at a low speed, into another teenage girl. This one was 13 and she was walking in a city park. He dragged her into the woods, slashed her neck, scalp and forehead with a penknife, with such ferocity that the blade broke off. He sexually abused her. He beat her nearly to death with a tree limb. When police arrested him, he acknowledged chasing and cutting a 15-year-old girl a few months earlier, a case that had been unsolved.

The investigation was unsettling. Police found that Kroll kept a half-dozen six-inch wooden dowels in his bed. Some had girls' names on them. He had lain on top of them so often he had a callus on his belly.

"His behavior could be quite bizarre and potentially dangerous," a state psychologist wrote. "The patient apparently derives sexual pleasure by torturing his young victims."

Kroll did eight years.

Six of those were spent at a state mental institution. Psychologists, who found him to be both sane and of "average intelligence," didn't think it did much good.

Cousin John Henry Kroll saw him again in 1979, after he got out, when John Leroy and his parents came over to visit.

"Johnny was a big boy, but polite. He never worried me or the family," says Kroll, who had four daughters at home at the time. "He was meek. I think he was just so happy to be out of prison."

It didn't take long for Kroll to attack again. On March 7, 1980, in a parking garage, he tried to force a woman into his car. She got away easily, though, and Kroll ran off almost as fast as she did.

Three weeks later, he went back to smaller targets.

He had been following the local school bus up a twisting, isolated stretch of mountain road when he saw a pretty little girl get off at a remote stop. Her house was sharply uphill, out of view from the roadway.

"I thought she was a real nice little girl," he later told police.

On March 25, he pulled into a turnoff just opposite her driveway and waited. There were just two children still on the bus when it pulled up. The only kid going further, Charles Andrew Jackson, then 13, didn't like the look of the heavyset man sitting in the car.

"I asked her if she wanted to go on up the hill with me to our house, about a mile, and I'd bring her home on the dirt bike later on when her parents got home," he remembered in a recent interview. "She said, 'Nah, I'll just walk up the driveway.' "

When the bus pulled away, Kroll walked over to the girl and asked directions. There was nobody around, just him and her and the trees and asphalt roadway.

"I then placed my arm around her and walked her toward my car. . . . [She] started to yell," he told police the next day. "I placed my hand over her mouth and used more force to get her to my vehicle. . . . I opened the car trunk and placed her in the trunk and closed the lid. . . . She started to yell and scream."

Kroll drove several miles north, crossing the state line, and got the girl out of the trunk a spot near two remote lakes. He assaulted her in the woods. It involved a sharpened broomstick. He then drove her back home, dropping her off on the roadway.

"She was bleeding very badly," remembers her father. She underwent surgery and psychological therapy, but "she's had health problems ever since. She went for a long time being scared of every large male."

The criminal case was no mystery. Kroll was arrested the next day. He confessed in detail. He apologized.

This brings us to the Pennsylvania issue.

"I . . . drove to Naves Crossroad to the Bedford Road to Lake Koon and Lake Gordon, which is located in Pennsylvania," Kroll told police, going on to describe the site. The girl's account matched his. She even told police that he had let her ride on the front seat on the way home and that she'd seen a "Welcome to Maryland" sign on the way. And, just to make it perfectly clear, the chief detective confirmed at the sentencing hearing that was where the attack took place.

But, somehow, no one in the courtroom said the word "Pennsylvania" during the hearing, the transcripts show. The detective mentioned the lakes, yes, but there was no explicit mention of another state.

"I was under the impression that it was a Maryland crime," remembers Getty, now a senior judge on the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. "I thought they were mentioning the lakes as the general direction, not the specific site. I'd been a circuit judge for 16 years at that point. I certainly knew better than to sentence someone for a crime in Pennsylvania."

Why the attorneys didn't hash it out isn't clear. Then-State's Attorney Lawrence V. Kelly is now retired and declined to comment. Defense attorney John F. Somerville Jr. is dead.

So a remorseful Kroll pleaded guilty that day -- sparing the 9-year-old from testifying -- and prosecutors dropped a charge for simple assault in her case, as well as the attempted kidnapping charges from the incident in the parking garage. Getty sentenced Kroll to spend "the balance of your natural life" in prison for the sexual assault, plus another 15 years for the kidnapping.

"We thought it was all over," says the girl's father.

In the intervening years, the case so faded from public view that most people in town scarcely remember it.

On a recent morning at Kline's Restaurant, a city institution for the older coffee-and-breakfast crowd, Brook Atkinson is explaining that the charm of Cumberland is that you know "two out of every five people walking down the street."

Stirring his coffee, furrowing his brow, he says he can't remember John Kroll. Neither can anyone else.

A few miles away, Michael Twigg, the new state's attorney, is sitting at his desk in a building just behind the courthouse. He is serving his first term as the county's elected prosecutor. He was 11 when the assault took place. He thought it was ancient history, too.

But as it happens -- this case has a million little pieces that have fallen just so -- a jurisdictional claim is the one basis for appeal that never expires.

So a year or two ago, Kroll hired local lawyer Raymond F. Weston to appeal, saying Maryland never had a right to imprison him for the sex assault. Judge Finan said there was no debate -- Kroll was right.

"An insufficient factual basis existed for the trial judge to accept the plea," Finan ruled on Feb. 8. "Territorial jurisdiction is never waiveable." He threw out the conviction and the accompanying charges.

Twigg was aghast. Kroll had already served the 15 years for kidnapping. The court had just ruled he had been held illegally in a Maryland prison for a decade. The statute on sexual assault had lapsed in other jurisdictions. John Kroll was about to walk out of prison.

Twigg immediately filed a request to try Kroll on the old charges the prosecution had agreed to drop so many years ago. He argued that Kroll had violated terms of the plea deal by seeking to overturn part of his sentence -- even if, as the court ruled, that sentence was improperly imposed.

Twigg also wrote that Kroll had craftily waited more than 20 years for several statutes of limitations to expire before appealing, to engineer his release. It's not clear that is true, but what patience it implies! What cunning, for a man to bide his time for two decades!

"All we're asking is to be back at square one," Twigg explained in his office.

"Is it going to be a walk in the park to prosecute a case that's 25 years old?

No, but I think we can do it."

Finan's ruling is due in coming days.

At best, from the state's point of view, there will be a new trial -- in Maryland, or, if the Pennsylvania authorities want to try to argue their way past the statute of limitations, perhaps there. The little girl, now 34 years old, will have to testify if they retry part of her case, or the woman Kroll grabbed in the parking garage may have to come forward.

Getty, the original trial judge, thinks the state is out of luck.

"I think you'd just have to let him go," he says.

So much time has passed since that awful day in 1980. So many things change, so many things don't, in a little town like Cumberland.

The railroad tracks are still there. The courthouse on the hill, too. Kids still play in the streets in quiet neighborhoods in the late afternoon. You look to the ridge where the 9-year-old's parents still live -- the child has moved away -- and you know that courts are courts and the law is the law, and it doesn't really matter, because some things are never going to be right.

A ridge or two over, there's the Big Claw, a bar where the evening's patrons knock back shots of schnapps and chase them down with a cold beer. Save for a brief story in the local paper, none of the Big Claw crowd has heard of the case. You walk back outside, letting the screen door slap closed behind you, the darkness falling, the wind whipping hard down from the mountains. There is a last ray of sun, a hard light, shining on the building just down the road, on the razor wire and ugly edges of the county jail, the Allegany County Detention Center.

* * * * *

The following article appeared on nytimes.com on May 6, 2005:

In Kansas, Darwinism Goes on Trial Once More

By Jodi Wilgoren

TOPEKA, Kan., May 5 - Six years after Kansas ignited a national debate over the teaching of evolution, the state is poised to push through new science standards this summer requiring that Darwin's theory be challenged in the classroom.

In the first of three daylong hearings being referred to here as a direct descendant of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, a parade of Ph.D.'s testified Thursday about the flaws they saw in mainstream science's explanation of the origins of life. It was one part biology lesson, one part political theater, and the biggest stage yet for the emerging movement known as intelligent design, which posits that life's complexity cannot be explained without a supernatural creator.

Darwin's defenders are refusing to testify at the hearings, which were called by the State Board of Education's conservative majority. But their lawyer forcefully cross-examined the other side's experts, pushing them to acknowledge that nothing in the current standards prevented discussion of challenges to evolution, and peppering them with queries both profound and personal.

"Do the standards state anywhere that science, evolution, is in any way in conflict with belief in God?" the lawyer, Pedro Irigonegaray, asked William S. Harris, a chemist who helped write the proposed changes.

When a later witness, Jonathan Wells, said he enjoyed being in the minority on such a controversial topic, Mr. Irigonegaray retorted, "More than being right?"

If the board adopts the new standards, as expected, in June, Kansas would join Ohio, which took a similar step in 2002, in mandating students be taught that there is controversy over evolution. Legislators in Alabama and Georgia have introduced bills this season to allow teachers to challenge Darwin in class, and the battle over evolution is simmering on the local level in 20 states.

While the proposed standards for Kansas do not specifically mention intelligent design - and many of its supporters prefer to avoid any discussion of it - critics contend they would open the door not just for those teachings, but to creationism, which holds to the Genesis account of God as the architect of the universe.

For Kansas, the debate is déjà vu: the last time the state standards were under review, in 1999, conservatives on the school board ignored their expert panel and deleted virtually any reference to evolution, only to be ousted in the next election.

But over the next few years anti-evolution forces regained the seats. And now, the board's 6-to-4 anti-evolution majority plans to embrace 20 suggestions promoted by advocates of intelligent design and are using this week's showcase to help persuade the public. "I was hoping these hearings would help me have some good hard evidence that I could repeat," Connie Morris, an anti-evolution board member, said in thanking one witness.

Sighing was Cheryl Shepherd-Adams, a physics teacher who took an unpaid day off from Hays High School to attend the hearings. "Kansas has been through this before," she said. "I'm really tired of going to conferences and being laughed at because I'm from Kansas."

The proposed changes to the state's science standards would edit everything from the introduction to notes advising teachers on specific benchmarks for individual grades. Perhaps the most significant shift would be in the very definition of science - instead of "seeking natural explanations for what we observe around us," the new standards would describe it as a "continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena."

Local school districts devise curriculums in Kansas, as in most other states, but the standards provide a template by outlining what will be covered on the statewide science tests, given every other year in grades 4, 7 and 10.

Even as they described their own questioning of evolution as triggered by religious conversion, the experts testifying Thursday avoided mention of a divine creator, instead painting their position as simply one of open-mindedness, arguing that Darwinism had become a dangerous dogma.

"There is no science without criticism," said Charles Thaxton, a chemist and co-author of the 1984 book "The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories."

"Any science that weathers the criticism and survives is a better theory for it," Mr. Thaxton said.

But the debate was as much about religion and politics as science and education, with Mr. Irigonegaray pressing witnesses to find mentions of the theories they were denouncing, like humanism and naturalism, in the standards, and asking whether they believed all scientists were atheists. He largely ignored their detailed briefings to ask each man if he believed Homo sapiens descended from pre-hominids (most said no) and how old he thought earth was (most agreed on 4.5 billion years.)

"These people are going to obfuscate about these definitions," complained Jack Krebs, vice president of the pro-evolution Kansas Citizens for Science, whose members filled many of the 180 auditorium seats not taken by journalists, who came from as far away as France. "They have created a straw man. They are trying to make science stand for atheism, so they can fight atheism."

Convened 80 years, to the day, after John Scopes was arrested for teaching Darwin's theory to his Dayton, Tenn., high school class, the hearings were cut back from six days when the evolutionists decided not to present witnesses.

Beaming from a laptop to a wide screen, the scientists showed textbook pictures of chicken, turtle and human embryos to try to undermine the notion that all species had a common ancestry. Diagrams of complex RNA molecules were offered as evidence of a designed universe. Dr. Harris displayed a brochure for his Intelligent Design Network, which is based in Kansas, depicting a legal scale with "design" and "evolution" on each side and the words "religion" and "naturalism" crossed out in favor of "Scientific Method."

"You can infer design just by examining something, without knowing anything about where it came from," Dr. Harris said, offering as an example "The Gods Must be Crazy," a film in which Africans marvel at a Coke bo