He’ll Write About the Railroads
Kevin, a 48 year old disabled veteran of the 101st Airborne, says he’s survived everyman’s worst nightmare. He’s a big guy with thick dark auburn hair and beard laced with grey, and moves as slow as a tapir. “My bones because I went for so long without testosterone,” he explains. “And because of the infection.” In 2001 he had necrotizing fasciitis—the flesh-eating staph infection. He was lucky. He had enough muscle and fat in his thigh and groin area that let him beat the 4% survival rate, and keep his left leg and genitals. But the fever and the antibiotics toasted his testicles leaving him sterile and effectively castrated. Eight years after, the doctors diagnosed Low-T osteoporosis, and the daily injections began.
Still, he has half the normal level, and his libido is gone.
His step-daughter didn’t know about that part . Even at fifteen, her math skills were equally lacking. In 2011, the day the school made a presentation about sex crimes, she told her teacher Kevin had been raping her since she was three. The police came to the house and ordered him to move out until the investigation was over. The charge was bogus, he told them. Until she was nine, she lived with her biological father, and he rarely saw her or her older sister. The girls came to live with him and their mother after the father was killed in an industrial accident, and he was still getting cadaver skin grafts to cover the hole in his thigh. But he left.
When an examination showed no evidence of childhood rape, the girl changed her story. He began raping her when she was thirteen. Impossible, Kevin said. He wasn’t strong or agile enough to best anybody. Impossible, the older sister said. She shared a bedroom with her sister, and Kevin never went in there—too dirty for his safety; her little sister was just pissed off because Kevin wouldn’t allow her to smoke weed and screw her boyfriend in his house. The court granted a restraining order. She called him and asked him to confess. He refused.
“And they arrested you?” I said.
“Twenty-one felonies. Then they gave her a polygraph test, and she failed—although the public defender didn’t tell me that until after I was adjudicated—and she changed her story a third time. They changed the indictment from rape of a minor to molestation and contributing to the delinquency of a minor between the ages of 14 and 16. She said I made her watch computer porn with me.”
“How long were you locked up?”
“Eighty-four days before adjudication. Nine months all together in the county jail. Bail was set at a million dollars, then two-fifty. It didn’t matter. We’re poor. I had a public defender I saw four times for about ten minutes. I told him the first thing we needed to do was make a time-line. Then get all my medical records, and her psych records. She’d been seeing the school counselor too because she’d lied on some girls at school and they were going to kick her ass. She was taking anti-depressants because of her dad, they said.”
Kevin has an Associate of Technical Arts degree: Paralegal, and dresses the part. Suit. Tie. Fedora. “Had you ever been in jail before? I asked him.
“Never. Well, I spent a night at the police station when I was sixteen. Got caught drinking on the beach with my friends. Our parents wouldn’t come get us. I’ve always had respect for law enforcement. Thought about joining the Sheriff’s Department, but my ankle never got better.”
“Your ankle?”
“I made a bad landing after a jump, and that’s why I was discharged from the Army. Shattered ankle. Fucked up knees. I’ll never run again.” There’s a sadness creeping into his voice that seems to come from somewhere deep inside.
“Tell me about this book you want to write.”
“It’s important to get the story out. I want guys to know what the CPS woman told me the night she came with the cops: every man is rapist. If they’re arrested for a sex crime, they’re guilty until they prove they’re innocent. And how do you prove a negative? Sex crimes involving kids is the only crime in the state where someone is arrested without probable cause—an arrest can be made on the alleged victim’s complaint alone. No corroboration or evidence is necessary. Once you’re in jail, you’re fucked. Bail will be set so high, you can’t get out, and you might as well be in a gulag because the job is to break you. Especially in cases where it’s your word against hers. They push people into a plea agreement because they’re playing politics; the ADAs want to be seen as tough on sex offenders so they can run for office. They ruin peoples’ lives and force them into deviancy treatment by making that part of the plea agreement. And public defenders are there to arrange a plea deal, not to advocate for you. They’re not going to trial for a thousand dollars. ”
“Is that what they’re paid?”
“People think public defenders are free. They aren’t. I had to pay him a thousand dollars. My fine was three thousand. I had to pay Department of Corrections a hundred. Five hundred for a psych evaluation that usually ends up marking the guy for the rest of his life. In my case, I got lucky. The psych gave me all kinds of tests and concluded I wasn’t a deviant, and told the court I didn’t need treatment except for the depression I was in caused by a ‘recent traumatic event’. Yeah, being railroaded by the court system. And I wasn’t the only one. Two other students that day reported their step-fathers, and Chrissy’s best friend bragged on how she put her step-father in prison. He’s is still there on a bum tip. That’s how the racket works. They indict you on crimes where you’re looking at—in my case—thirty years to life, so they can get a steep bail that means you’ll be in jail. Then the public defender comes in. He told me if I went to trial, there’s no way I could win. That every guy in the county that chose a trial went to prison for at least twelve years.”
“How many guys are we talking about?”
“Nineteen over three years. There was another guy in jail with me who was in for the same thing. He was a wreck too. I mean, I never wanted kids. But when the girls came to live with us, I said it was time we got married then. I came to love those girls like they were my own. I went without to give them whatever they wanted even though we don’t have much money. Everything was fine until she went through puberty. people don’t realize how precocious these teen-age girls are. She started screwing the kid next door.We took her to planned parenthood and got her on birth control because I told her we couldn’t support a baby and neither could she. She went wild, and I put my foot down. She didn’t want to do chores, go to school—just gossip and create drama. All the time. If I’d say anything, I’d get the you’re not my father trip, you don’t make any money, you’re a slug. They money the girls got from SSI went to their mother, and Chrissy demanded it be turned over to her because it was “her” money. It was hell. She wanted me gone, and the State grave her her wish.”
It was admissions that made me swallow hard. If he was conning me, he was doing a great job. “You fit the profile,” I said. “White male, over forty, step-father.”
“The country’s gone nuts. I warn my friends it can happen to them so they’d better be careful. We’ve gone down that slippery-slope. I tell them not to be alone with their kids or touch them unless there’s a witness. The schools prime these kids with information, but it’s really ammunition. There’s a hysteria in this country of political correctness that marks the natural attraction of males to females as deviant. Did you know it’s not pedophilia when it comes to teenagers? The correct term is ephebophilia for post-pubescent attraction.”
The word jarred my memory, and when I got home I found Marie Bernard’s [Sexual Deviations as Seen in Handwriting, 1990] examples I’d used in a paper: …the Renaissance’s Petrarch fell in love with his Laura when she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve. Juliet was only twelve or thirteen when she made love to Romeo. Kevin is correct, American culture sexualizes children, gives birth control to eleven year olds without their parents knowledge, and keep people adolescents well into their twenties. Social rules are plentiful and ambiguous and, sometimes, cruel. “How did you get out of jail?”
“Like I said, they tried to break me, and I knew that was their game from my Army training. From the start they isolated me, terming it Protective Custody, in a 6 X 8 cell with no windows. I never knew if it was day or night except they brought breakfast, which I couldn’t eat. I’m a diabetic and though they wouldn’t give me my metformin, they said I was on a “diabetic” diet and they used that as an excuse to feed me slop. I got maybe twelve hundred calories a day, and lost a pound a day. Yeah, I lost eighty-four pounds. There was no meat, just tofu and veggies. On Thanksgiving they gave us hot turkey for lunch, but pea soup for dinner as the cooks allegedly went home. In jail, the cooks were the inmates, so it was bullshit. And they refused me all my meds, including my testosterone, so within thirty days, I was in pain all the time. I got out one hour a day for a shower and phone calls, when I had the $20.00 for the fifteen minutes on the phone card. But my wife went through hell too. At first, she wasn’t allowed to talk to me. I complained to my public defender, and she was allowed to call, but we weren’t allowed to talk about the case. Eventually CPS had to place Chrissy in a home because she got so violent; CPS had threatened to arrest my wife for abetting a sex crime and she was terrified.
The guards treated me like dirt until the details got around, then they were very nice. I could hear them talking about the prisoners because my cell was close to their desk. When it was quiet, which it rarely was. Screaming. Cursing. Arguing. The guards would tell people to shut up, depending on who was working. There were crazies there—real crazies, some of them on holds from other counties. And once in a while, the public defender would stop by and ask if I’d thought about a plea bargain yet.
I told him I would never plead guilty to something I didn’t do, but I’d take an Alford plea. Most people think any plea deal means the person is guilty. It’s not true. An Alford plea only means the accused stipulates the State would win at trial—and these sons-of-bitches would have done anything to convict if I’d have cost the county a trial. Like a used car salesman, the public defender acted like he had to work hard to get the DA to agree to an Alford when I knew they were in bed together. I found out afterwards from my wife that the plea bargain was already done the first week I was in jail.
But, anyway, the judge gave them both a hard time because of the 21 felonies that had been reduced to one, Class C felony, that’s Molestation 3, meaning “one count of inappropriate touching.” And he wanted to know why the Complainant wasn’t in court. The DA said she’d refused to cooperate with the case and they were still trying to get her to testify when the agreement was reached. The judge accepted the plea reluctantly: Nine months to include time served. One year probation. Costs, fines and fees. Deviancy evaluation. Registering without notification of community for five years, and loss of voting and gun rights. In five years, I can petition for pardon which will wipe the slate clean, and get my rights back. After the adjudication, I was a POD and helped clean out the cells and other odd jobs around the jail. That helped because I got out of my cell instead of pacing and crying. Oh, and no contact with the victim for five years. She’s almost nineteen now.”
“Has your wife and the sister had any contact with her at all?”
“No. She’s poison. She fucked up my life, our lives. My mother, my sister never believed the lie. My wife and daughter stood by me too—against the pressure of the State to testify against me, and they tried like hell to get them to go along with Chrissy’s lie. Everyone in the system knew she was lying. No one cared.”
Given the gravity of his situation, my next question seemed almost insulting. “Did they let you read while you were in jail?”
“Yeah. There was a little cart they’d wheel by on Saturdays. It had 50-60, mostly old books, a lot of them tore up and written on too because some of the prisoners are just slobs. Nothing recent Nothing newer than the 1990s. I was never a big pleasure reader. I read mostly technical manuals and watched U-tube documentaries on all kinds of things because my eyes were bad. In jail, though, I read 48 books. Mostly sci-fi, fantasy, magic and Nordic stuff. And action books like Flemings 007, and Sherlock Holmes mysteries—and all the history they had. Tuchman’s Guns of August was my favorite.”
“And your book?”
“I want to get the word out. Children have too much power. They feed the feminist agenda. They cannot be disciplined. They threaten their parents. We might as well be living in Nazi Germany. If a man’s girlfriend has children, he should steer clear of commitment. Children break your heart.”
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