James Lamb, 46, is in the last phase of therapy for sexual predators who finish their prison terms and are sent to Atascadero State Hospital for treatment before release. • See additional images Sacramento Bee/Paul Kitagaki Jr.

Special report: Sexual predators evading treatment

Many violent molesters and rapists sent to a state mental facility are being freed with few restrictions after refusing therapy

By Mareva Brown -- Bee Staff Writers
Published 2:15 am PST Sunday, February 12, 2006

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A decade ago, as California was gripped with outrage over the release of a notorious rapist from prison, the state took bold action.

Legislators vowed to keep the highest-risk sex offenders locked up for years after completing their prison sentences. They were to be sent to a maximum-security psychiatric facility - Atascadero State Hospital - for a strict, five-stage treatment program.

California's solution was considered among the nation's toughest.

But the program has a fatal flaw, a six-month investigation by The Bee has found, because there is a much easier way out of Atascadero, one chosen by the vast majority of sexually violent predators housed there: Refuse treatment and bank on winning release through the court hearing each offender receives every two years.

That loophole makes California's get-tough solution in practice one of the most lenient sexually violent predator laws in the nation.

It is precisely how 54 rapists and child molesters won release through the end of 2005 from their Atascadero commitments, according to a review of court records and interviews with dozens of prosecutors, law enforcement officers and sexually violent predators in California, Oregon, Arizona, Missouri and Colorado. Only four men have completed the five-step program, and one of those was returned to custody less than two months after his release.

To be declared a sexually violent predator and sent to Atascadero, offenders must have at least two sex-crime convictions, and prosecutors must convince a court that they are likely to re-offend if released directly from prison.

But there is no guarantee that the offenders will remain in Atascadero.

Some convinced state psychiatrists that they were unlikely to commit a new offense, which obligates the state to set them free. Others won release after juries could not agree whether they should continue to be held. Still others were freed after county district attorneys did not challenge the offenders' petitions for release, judging them too old or infirm to re-offend.

None of the 54 went through the full regimen of treatment the state designed for them. More than two-thirds underwent no treatment at all.

"All they need is a doctor's slip to get out," said Harriet Salarno, president of Crime Victims United of California. "Nobody should be let out unless they're truly rehabilitated."

Instead, an investigation of the program found that in California:

* There's a built-in incentive to refuse treatment, because the few offenders who actually follow the hospital's full program find themselves not only targets of scorn inside Atascadero but subject to both tighter scrutiny and community protests upon release.

* Nearly all of the highest-risk sex offenders released from Atascadero without completing treatment have returned to society with less supervision than lower-risk sex offenders freed directly from prison.

* Members of the public have no sure way to tell if a sexually violent predator has settled in their neighborhood because the state refuses to identify them as such.

Despite that policy, The Bee found the last-known locations of all 54 sexually violent predators who were released through the end of 2005 without completing the treatment program. The search included use of court records, public documents, media archives, Internet search tools and interviews with law enforcement and county prosecutors throughout California. It also relied on cooperation from some Atascadero patients and released sex offenders, as well as California's Megan's List, the attorney general's Internet listing of all sex offenders registered with California law-enforcement agencies.

Eleven of the 54 men are back in custody, including one convicted of molesting two girls he was baby-sitting two years after his release. Two were accused of new sex-related crimes. At least 10 left the state after release, some saying that life as a convicted sex offender is easier outside California, where registration requirements and monitoring efforts can be even less stringent.

Seven have died, and three currently are in violation of their quarterly registration requirements, including one - Donald Warren Delaney - who seems to have disappeared.

Authorities say Delaney, a 77-year-old former Stockton police sergeant, has dropped from sight and may be in Mexico.

Delaney, sentenced to 24 years in prison in 1985 for lewd acts on nine children, was released from Atascadero on March 25. California's Megan's List indicates he is incarcerated, but there is no record of him in any California prison, and San Joaquin County Deputy District Attorney Stephen Taylor said he may have left the country.

One property record linked Delaney to an address in Pollock Pines that turned out to be a logging road with no homes.

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Most of the 54 who failed to start or complete treatment simply moved into communities around California and the nation with little or no public notice, no requirement that they wear satellite tracking devices, and none of the parole restrictions heaped on other sexual offenders, such as the ability of law enforcement officials to search their homes and computers without a search warrant.

The only additional monitoring for sexually violent predators who stayed in California was a requirement to register quarterly with local police - as opposed to the annual registration required of other sex offenders.

The sexually violent predators' faces, names and addresses do show up on the state's Megan's List site, along with general descriptions of their crimes, but there's no way to differentiate them from the 63,000 other registered sex offenders depicted there.

Many other states provide more detailed information on offenders and their crimes and whether they are high-risk offenders.

In California, from the top on down, law enforcement officials typically refuse to identify sexually violent predators who have been released. Attorney General Bill Lockyer's office rejected a California Public Records Act request by The Bee for their names and whereabouts.

The state law that set up the Megan's List Web site requires that "sex offender records remain confidential and not subject to disclosure under the California Public Records Act," Supervising Deputy Attorney General Janet E. Neely wrote in a response to the request.

Some local law enforcement agencies do pass out fliers in neighborhoods announcing that a sexually violent predator is moving in nearby. Some, among them the San Francisco Police Department, continue to reveal the offenders' identities only to neighbors, citing concern for their privacy and safety.

"It's department policy," said San Francisco Police Inspector Jim Zerga.

Though Zerga won't say so, four sexually violent predators live in San Francisco: Kinn Weber, Keith Tribble, Nicholas Yost and Douglas LeCorno.

Weber was convicted of four counts of sexual assault involving at least two victims, including rape and oral copulation with a person under 14.

Yost, now 65, was convicted of molesting three boys in the early 1990s.

Tribble was just 18 when he was convicted of attempting to rape an 8-year-old female relative, who he later claimed had tried to seduce him. Fifteen years later, he was convicted of fondling the 7-year-old daughter of a former girlfriend. A psychologist testified that the time lapse between the two events, as well as the similarities in the victims, qualified Tribble as a pedophile and sexually violent predator.

LeCorno, 56 - listed as LeCorna on Megan's List - was released in 2000 but landed in court two years ago, charged with failing to properly register. Court records indicate that while he had an address in San Francisco, at that time he was staying at least part-time with friends on the Peninsula while doing construction work. Zerga testified against LeCorno at that hearing.

Still, Zerga told The Bee that San Francisco police policy dictates only that neighbors be notified when a high-risk sex offender moves into the city and he refused to disclose any information about the four men.

"I'd have to justify why I'm disclosing this information," Zerga said. "There's no public interest. I'm not disclosing to the media. I don't see that you're at risk right now."

As a result of such secrecy, many sexually violent predators faded from view after release, mostly back into California communities where even the most vigilant parents would have no way of knowing their true background.

Three are registered as living in Sacramento, including 45-year-old Harold Royster, who was released from Atascadero in 2002 and arrested last year for failing to register properly.

Royster pleaded guilty in a deal that gave him a year in county jail. He is now out on five years' probation.

Delmar Lee Burrows, 42, was convicted in 1990 of molesting two Roseville boys and spent six years in prison and two years in Atascadero. He was released in 1998 after voluntarily having himself castrated, and he now lives in a downtown hotel adjacent to the K Street Mall.

Eighty-year-old Eddie Caperton moved into a south Sacramento nursing home in December 2004 following his release from Atascadero.

Caperton was convicted of sodomizing a 7-year-old girl in Chicago in 1961, court records show, and of lewd acts with another 7-year-old girl near Reno in 1977. He was convicted in 1993 of two counts of lewd acts on a child under 14 in Sacramento and sent to prison until December 2002, when he was committed to Atascadero for treatment.

Despite doing no therapy, Caperton was released two years later after three psychiatrists found that he no longer fit the criteria of a sexually violent predator because he was too old and infirm to pose a threat.

When he got out, no one warned neighbors. If any of them happened across him on the Megan's List site, they would find just a single mention of lewd and lascivious conduct.

As a result, no one has raised objections that Caperton's new home is three-tenths of a mile from a day care center that takes in children ranging in age from 6 weeks to 12 years.

Even if they had, they would have found the law is not on their side: While paroled sex offenders may face legal restrictions against living near schools and day care centers, the sexually violent predators tend to complete their parole period while inside the mental hospital and have no such restrictions upon release.

Caperton spends his days watching television and taking notes on commercials offering Shirley Temple DVDs for sale, he said in an interview at the nursing home. He hopes to relocate.

"If I can find another place, yes, I'll move," said Caperton, who uses a walker to get around and keeps his Atascadero-issued jacket, a beige coat emblazoned with dark "ASH" letters over the left breast, hanging in his closet.

"The old people here make me feel old," he said. "I want someplace where I can lay my body down and get three squares a day."

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Public knowledge of a high-risk offender's whereabouts is even more remote if he leaves the state. John Douglas Olson Sr. quietly headed north after winning release from Atascadero in April 2004 without having participated in any therapy.

"If I was in California, I'd have to register every 90 days," said Olson, a 63-year-old retired mechanic and convicted child molester who lives near Medford, Ore.

"Here, I only have to register once a year unless I move," he said. "Here, they say, 'Oh, the next time you're in tell us if you've moved. Don't worry about it.' "

Oregon is one of only two states that do not have any Megan's List information posted on the Internet. If Olson's new neighbors wanted to discover whether he was a sex offender, they would have to request that information from the state by ZIP code or by his name and wait several weeks for a reply in the mail.

More than a year after his release from Atascadero, Olson still had not been assigned a risk level by Oregon authorities, because an Oregon Supreme Court decision put that state's classification system on hold.

"The information we received from California was that he was considered predatory, but he is not currently deemed predatory in Oregon," Vi Beatty, manager of the Oregon State Police's sex offender unit, said last summer.

That nonchalance angers Olson's victim, the daughter of one of his former girlfriends and now a 30-year-old married woman with a teenage daughter.

"I don't think a person like that can ever be healed," said the Bay Area resident, who agreed to be interviewed if she was identified only by her first name, Christina, for fear that her daughter would be harassed at high school.

"That's my personal opinion," Christina said. "If you're a rapist or a pedophile or whatever they want to name them nowadays, you're always going to do it. I don't feel that there's reform for it."

Over the summer, Olson met two reporters and a photographer at a city park in Oregon, near a birthday party for a group of young children in swimsuits.

There are no legal restrictions on where he can go or what he can do, although Olson said he is careful never to be alone with children. He considers himself healed, but fears he would not be able to defend himself against a false accusation if people learned of his history.

"I've had no problems here, because nobody knows," said Olson, who showed off a photo a friend had taken of him the day of his April 2004 release from Atascadero State Hospital. In the snapshot, Olson is making an obscene gesture at the hospital sign.

"I'm pretty sure if the people I associate with here found out, they'd no longer associate with me. Friends, people I square-dance with, ballroom-dance with, those people."

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The debate over how much information the public should have about sex offenders became a national issue last year as angry protests and heinous, high-profile crimes dominated the news.

Politicians responded with proposals ranging from lifetime electronic monitoring to a national online registry that would force offenders to list their addresses every six months.

Some states have taken radical steps. Washington state officials sequestered the worst offenders on an island off Tacoma. Iowa barred offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school.

Last year alone in California, 30 bills were introduced in the Legislature to tighten controls on sex offenders. Legislators renewed their efforts last month, proposing a strict new measure to require satellite tracking of sex offenders with felony records and force them to live more than 2,000 feet from schools and parks.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called passage of the measure a top priority, but it died in legislative committee and another measure that critics said was not as tough passed the Assembly and is now in the Senate. Petitions to place the issue on the June ballot are being circulated. That initiative also would eliminate the requirement that sexually violent predators be given a release hearing every two years.

In August, California's first new mental hospital in 50 years opened near Coalinga in Fresno County. The $388 million compound can house up to 1,500 sexually violent predators and other seriously mentally ill patients. All of Atascadero's SVPs are expected to be transferred to Coalinga State Hospital this year.

But few involved in solving the sexually violent predator problem are satisfied with the current solutions or their cost, and that dissatisfaction may heighten as releases from the Atascadero program continue in coming months.

The program was launched in 1996 in response to public anger surrounding the release of Melvin Carter, the "College Terrace Rapist," from prison. Carter was convicted of 23 felonies and confessed to more than 100 rapes on Bay Area campuses and in areas of Stockton and Davis.

Carter was set to be paroled to Alameda County, but in the heat of Gov. Pete Wilson's re-election campaign, state officials instead sent him to remote Modoc County, where he lived on the grounds of a prison camp on U.S. Forest Service land.

He later was escorted to San Francisco International Airport and placed on a flight headed out of state, and authorities refused to divulge where he went.

The uproar over his case led the Legislature to approve a plan allowing California authorities to detain the highest-risk sex offenders even after they complete their prison sentences.

Before their prison release, offenders with two or more victims are evaluated by psychiatrists hired by the state Department of Mental Health.

Those judged not to have a diagnosable sexual disorder are paroled from prison. But the cases of those found to have pedophilia or some other sexual disorder are forwarded to local prosecutors, who usually seek their commitment to Atascadero State Hospital.

Since the program began in 1996, more than 6,200 sex offenders have been evaluated, and 538 have been judged dangerous enough to be labeled sexually violent predators.

"It's pretty rare to find a group like this," said Jesus Padilla, a clinical psychologist at the mental hospital. "They comprise about half of 1 percent of the registered sex offenders in California. So, even as sex offenders go, they are the elite."

The plan was for them to undergo years of treatment offered in four phases inside the hospital and eventually be judged by psychiatrists as ready to return to society - the fifth and final phase.

Those who made it that far were to be released in the county where they committed their crimes, where they would face extremely tight scrutiny - including constant satellite tracking - until authorities decided they were no longer a danger.

In 10 years, only the four men who have gone through the treatment program have returned to society under those strict guidelines. So far, one of those has been released from monitoring - at which point he left California. One was returned to Atascadero only two months after being released, because authorities said he posed a danger to himself and others.

A handful of other fully treated sexually violent predators are poised to follow, including James Vincent Lamb, a 46-year-old child molester.

Lamb has undergone years of therapy and both physical and chemical castration. He has studied the reasons for the crimes that landed him in Atascadero, and moving beyond his crimes has become his cause.

"We've got a new message to deliver," Lamb said in an interview inside the mental hospital. "We're going to be out there among you, and we want to have a chance."

But the treated offenders' re-entry into society is much different from that of those who win court release without completing treatment. Rapist Cary Verse's experience was typical.

As the second sexually violent predator to complete the therapy program at Atascadero and be released in 2004, Verse was chased out of four Bay Area communities by angry protests. He eventually settled near Pittsburg in Contra Costa County after two area lawyers offered him housing and work inside the gated compound of their offices.

Verse credits his therapy inside Atascadero with helping him cope on the outside.

"There's no way I could have dealt with those protesters if I hadn't been trained in empathizing with the community," Verse said from inside his one-bedroom cottage. "I hadn't been in society for 12 years, and I'd just come out and I was on the news.

"People were just screaming. It was just surreal."

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Although California is among 17 states with sexually violent predator statutes, it is the only one that requires a court review every two years for those committed. Most other states commit their sexually violent predators for at least five years and allow them out of the mental hospital only after therapists say they pose a low enough risk.

At California's reviews, Atascadero patients who can afford them hire private attorneys and experts in sex-offender therapy who question the validity of the state psychiatrists' evaluations and try to downplay the danger of future sexual attacks.

Although a jury trial is an option, many sexually violent predators opt for a lone judge, figuring they will fare better making legal arguments than making an emotional plea for freedom.

The hearings take place in open court but rarely draw news coverage or community protests.

"The apathy is overwhelming," former Crescent City Mayor C. Ray Smith said in August after sitting in a nearly empty Del Norte County courtroom watching convicted murderer and molester Phillip Kohler ask to be released. "I can't understand it."

Compared to many other sex offenders, Kohler's chances of ever getting out appear slim. At 53, he is one of Del Norte County's most notorious offenders - in and out of mental hospitals and prisons for much of his life.

In February 1971, he attacked a female student from Humboldt State University and attempted to rape her, court records indicate. She escaped, but the next day Kohler returned to the same spot and attacked another young woman, eventually slashing her to death with a knife.

A doctor later said Kohler told him that "if he had not been caught it might have happened again," records show. His crime earned him a conviction for second-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon.

After 13 years in state mental hospitals, Kohler was paroled in 1984 to live with his mother in Crescent City, despite intense efforts by Smith and others to bar him from returning to Del Norte County.

He failed to register annually as required but was not arrested until 1994, when he was accused of molesting two children from a church where he worked as a janitor.

Kohler was returned to custody, then paroled in 1998. By April 2000, he had five more parole violations, including one for approaching children at a bus stop. Those landed him back in custody and ultimately sent him to Atascadero.

Despite his background, Kohler still gets his day in court every two years. When his turn came up in August, Del Norte County District Attorney Mike Riese dutifully asked that Kohler remain in the mental hospital.

The hearing in Crescent City was typical of such proceedings, with only a few people in the courtroom, and only one - Smith, the former mayor - there specifically to watch the hearing.

Kohler did not testify. His court-appointed attorney quizzed Riese's experts about how they had determined Kohler was likely to re-offend but did not present evidence to show that Kohler should win release.

Instead, the two-hour hearing was dominated by devastating testimony from two psychologists who had interviewed Kohler and reviewed his medical records.

"He told me that he molested his 2-and 3-year-old brothers starting when he was 10," said one of the psychologists, Clark Clipson. "He has a long history of this type of behavior.

"He also told me in an interview that he is sexually aroused at the thought of seducing an innocent, and that he finds the lack of hair on children's bodies to be sexually arousing."

Judge Robert K. Weir's decision was swift. After a brief recess, he declared that Kohler "does pose a significant and substantial risk of re-offending."

Some Atascadero offenders list the court trials among their justifications for shunning therapy: They fear information from those sessions could arise in their hearings, as it did for Kohler.

"A lot of them are afraid that if they get into the program, it will be used against them in court," said Tony Iannalfo, a convicted rapist from Los Angeles who has been in Atascadero eight years and has refused treatment.

Others say offenders feel participating in treatment legitimizes a system they feel unfairly and illegally keeps them incarcerated after they have completed their prison sentences.

"Everybody says, 'Don't do the treatment, it's a major trap,' " said former Atascadero patient Cary Verse. "They feel that if everybody would not do it the program would fall apart.

"But I wanted to do it," Verse said. "It was something I'd wanted for years."

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State officials won't reveal who the released sexual offenders are, but The Bee has identified all 58. Read about them:
 California
 Out of state
 In custody
 Dead or missing

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TODAY: California's plan to treat sexual predators has failed because the offenders can opt out.

MONDAY: Keeping track of sexual predators on the outside relies on them to register with law enforcement.

TUESDAY: Inside Atascadero State Hospital, some sexual predators undergo treatment - but does it work?