Eighteen years ago, “Joseph” did something extremely stupid. Early on a July morning, and by his own telling so tweaked out on meth that he had lost his grip on reality, the then-23-year-old crawled through the window into the bedroom of what had been his childhood home and curled up next to the current occupant, a 12-year-old girl, leaving only after she startled awake and turned on the light.
It is an incident that Joseph, who like other registered sex offenders in this article has been granted anonymity in exchange for freely sharing his story, has quite literally never lived down. Now 41, he resides in the shadow of Mount Adams in southwestern Washington with his common-law wife of five years, their 3-year-old daughter, and her children from two previous relationships, ages 5, 13, and 14. Most afternoons and evenings, while his spouse is at work, it is his responsibility to look after the kids.
On a recent afternoon, the older ones stay in their rooms while the younger two—Joseph’s daughter and the boy he has raised since he was four months old—compete relentlessly for his attention, treating him as equal parts authority figure and jungle gym.
Joseph, who wears his hair pulled back in a ponytail, has a long, brown beard flecked with gray and a timeworn face hinting at a past discordant with the loving tone he takes with his children today. A convicted car thief and truant at 15, he spent the bulk of the next six years in juvenile detention. By 21, he’d been nabbed twice on burglary charges. In 1993, after pleading guilty to lewd and lascivious behavior with a minor under 14 for the incident in his old bedroom, he spent more than four years in prison, a stay extended by at least three suicide attempts.
After getting out, Joseph attempted to turn his life around. A stint at community college ended with an associate’s degree, a pile of student loans, and an accusation, in 1999, that he’d stalked another student. The incident resulted in a parole violation, but no criminal charges.
His most recent arrest, for grabbing an ex-girlfriend’s arms and shaking her chair, resulted in a misdemeanor domestic battery conviction. That was in 2003.
He has not reoffended sexually.
“[Joseph] is a great guy, but he’s manic-depressive,” says the former girlfriend, a psychology professor at the community college he attended, who broke off their five-year relationship in 2005. When he’s manic, she says, “he’s very forceful, but not in a destructive way.” During one episode, she recalls, he spent a weekend sanding down all her floors.
Whether you believe Joseph is a man who has overcome his checkered past or a danger to the women and children around him, one thing seems beyond debate: He did not go from being one of these things to the other within the past 18 months. Except, in the eyes of the law, that is exactly what happened.
In February 2010, Joseph received a letter from the Klickitat County Sheriff’s office. Four years earlier, he’d moved from California, registered as a sex offender, and was made a level 1, the lowest risk to reoffend in Washington state’s three-tiered sex-offender classification system. Now, the letter informed him, a county sex-offender panel had revisited his file, and he would become a level 2. The change was not trivial. Previously, only cops and those requesting specific information about him would be aware of his sex-offender status. Now his name and photograph would go up on the public sex-offender website, along with the block he lived on, and police would have the option of going door-to-door to alert his neighbors.
Joseph’s case highlights a simple but persistent flaw in Washington state’s pioneering sex-offender community-notification system, which was born more than two decades ago in the wake of a horrific crime. State corrections officials place risk levels on many of Washington’s approximately 20,000 registered sex offenders, the overwhelming majority of them male. But the final decision on the offender’s level—and, by extension, whether the public knows he is an offender—resides with the sheriff or the police chief where the offender lives. In some cases, there are delays before files are properly reviewed. In others, sex-offender levels are raised in ways critics say arbitrarily drive offenders out of some areas of the state and into others, including Seattle. In addition, critics contend, the decentralized system adds uncertainty to the lives of sex offenders, increasing the risk they pose to others.
For Joseph, his new status has had real consequences. Shortly after he became a level 2, he was fired from his job—in part, he believes, because of the level change. With the 5-year-old he’s raised as his son set to begin kindergarten in the fall, he worries the boy’s classmates will tease him for having a sex offender for a father.
“If it was just me, I wouldn’t care,” he says. “But I have little ones to take care of.”
Earl Shriner was on the prowl the Saturday evening in May 1989 that he came across fair-haired, 7-year-old Ryan Hade riding his bike in the small park near both their homes in south Tacoma. Dragging the boy out of view into a nearby woods, Shriner tied a noose tight around his neck and raped him repeatedly. Before leaving him bloodied, caked in mud, and semiconscious near a drainage ditch, Shriner cut off Hade’s penis.
Before the attack, Shriner would have been labeled a high-risk offender—if such a term had then existed. Diagnosed as mentally retarded at age 3, he spent his youth in and out of juvenile centers and mental institutions. As a boy, he was caught setting off firecrackers in the rectums of dogs. In 1966, while at a reform school, he led teachers to a classmate tied to a tree and strangled to death. Deemed insane, Shriner was sent to Western State Hospital, where he stayed until his release five years later.
In 1977, Shriner pled guilty to kidnapping and assaulting two teenage girls he’d picked up hitchhiking. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, where he did nothing to mitigate his reputation as a dangerous man not fit for the outside world. His cellmate reported to authorities that he had talked about getting a van with cages in it to kidnap, sexually torture, and murder children. As Shriner’s release date neared, a list was found in his cell of items he’d need to carry out similar plans.
His freedom pending, corrections officials, armed with a psychiatric review finding that he had “unusual sexually sadistic fantasies and plans to carry them out,” tried to get Shriner involuntarily placed in a mental institution. But because he wasn’t acting in a sexually violent manner at the time, and because it wasn’t clear that his predatory inclinations were the direct result of his mental illness, there were no legal grounds to have him committed. It wasn’t that the system had broken down, but that it had reached the limits of its power.
“We did everything legally possible to keep him in custody,” Kathryn S. Bail, then the chair of the Indeterminate Sentencing Review Board—Washington state’s parole board—told The Oregonian at the time.
After finding the young boy alive but near-comatose, the cops had little trouble tracking down Shriner. They knew his history of attacking children; they knew where he lived; they even knew of his tendency to keep a rope close at hand. That he was swiftly arrested and charged with first-degree counts of attempted murder, rape, and assault was little consolation to a public staggered with fury that a man with such a background could be at large and living anonymously. By the time Hade’s mother organized a “Tennis Shoe Brigade” rally that August, where protesters dumped 1,600 pairs of footwear at at Governor Booth Gardner’s office with notes attached like “These are the shoes of a beautiful 18-year-old girl who was murdered last summer,” the wheels of change were already spinning.
Sensitive to the depth of public anger, Gov. Gardner tapped Norm Maleng, the widely respected King County Prosecutor who had attempted to unseat him in the previous year’s gubernatorial election, to figure out how best to upgrade the system. The fruit of those efforts, known as the Community Protection Act of 1990, would represent a radical departure from previous sex-crime statutes, and would serve as a template for laws soon enacted in other statehouses throughout the country.
In addition to drastically increasing punishment for sex crimes, the Community Protection Act allowed for civil commitment of sexual predators after their prison terms were up. With the government’s awesome new power to preventively lock up people for the rest of their lives, the broader impact of the legislation was not immediately clear: With the stroke of a pen, Gov. Gardner had ushered in a new era in American life—the age of the public sex-offender registry.
Washington’s sheriffs and police chiefs wasted no time in getting into the spirit of the Community Protection Act. In February 1990—five months before the law took effect—then–Tacoma Police Chief Ray Fjetland called a press conference to announce the name and address of an “extremely dangerous, extremely violent” child molester due to be released from prison into his city. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time, there were just two problems: The man named was actually the father of the 23-year-old sex offender. And the intended target, though convicted of indecent liberties, arson, and criminal mischief, had not been convicted of molesting children. Despite the embarrassment, Fjetland stood by his initial warning.
Later that year, a Pierce County sheriff’s deputy covered Eatonville in flyers bearing the name of a newly released sex offender, along with the name, address, and phone number of an elderly woman who had once been his foster mother. For days afterward, the woman received dozens of angry, sometimes threatening phone calls. She had little to say in response, as she hadn’t been in touch with her onetime foster son for years.
And when, in the summer of 1993, a convicted rapist named Joseph Gallardo was pending release from prison to his house in Lynnwood, the Snohomish County Sheriff’s office stuck flyers on his neighbor’s doors, some of which residents blew up and taped to telephone poles. Gallardo, the posters announced, “has sadistic and deviant sexual fantasies which include torture, sexual assault, human sacrifice, bondage, and the murder of young children.” The day he was to return to his home, it was burned to the ground.
For seven years after passage of the act, there were no rules on when or how local law enforcement could notify the public of sex offenders in their midst, or on which sex offenders were worthy of notification. An arm of the corrections department created by the Community Protection Act, named the End of Sentence Review Committee, would release information to local authorities about offenders coming out of prison, and the locals, aided by a model policy set forth by the nonprofit Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, would decide how to proceed.
“We were given no guidelines, no information [on how to set levels]. We were just told to go out and do it,” says Don Pierce, then the Bellingham Chief of Police, now executive director of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. While he was sensitive to the damage that publicizing an offender would do to his chances of getting his life back together, he says, “the bottom line, if I was undecided and had to take a chance, I sided with protecting the community.”
In 1997, the system was overhauled, and lent an air of uniformity. The End of Sentence Review Committee, made up of members from corrections, juvenile rehabilitation, the parole board, and law enforcement, studies each sex offender coming out of prison. It evaluates each offender using tools modeled after the insurance industry’s. In addition to the crime itself, this method incorporates factors such as how long ago it happened, how many other victims the offender had violated, whether he knew them, whether he had since been accused or convicted of further crimes, whether he had since been in a stable relationship, and whether he had a job. After careful evaluation, the committee sets a level for the offender—1, 2, or 3—based on his risk of reoffending—and forwards it with the offender’s file to local authorities. Information in hand, the locals do as they see fit.
The system is still in use today.
It was three in the morning on July 7, 2004, and as “Daniel” tells it, he was going for a walk in the South Mercer Playfields after visiting his friend’s nearby home. A self-described night owl, Daniel came upon a bathroom and went inside to pee. As he was washing his hands, a female police officer appeared at the door.
Did he have anything to do with the paintball paint splattered on the side of the building? she asked. Daniel insisted that he didn’t. The officer took his ID and ran his name, discovering that he’d been a registered level 2 sex offender for a decade.
“Then you start getting the real bad treatment,” Daniel says.
The officer asked him about his necklace, which has a replica King County Sheriff’s badge on it roughly the size of a dime. It was a gift from a friend, he told her.
When the officer took a look in his car, she found a King County Sheriff’s baseball cap, a Maglite flashlight, and a ham radio. The hat, Daniel told her, was another gift, and he’d never worn it. The flashlight was for emergencies. And he was a licensed ham radio operator.
When the questions kept coming, Daniel lost patience. “If you want to arrest me, arrest me,” he said, putting his hands out in front of him. When the officer declined, Daniel got in his truck and drove home.
The next day, Det. Robert Shilling of the Seattle Police Department put out a public bulletin with the headline “SEX OR KIDNAPPING OFFENDER INFORMATION BULLETIN LEVEL 3 NOTIFICATION OF RELEASE.”
After listing Daniel’s history—he served 20 months starting at age 18 for propositioning an 11-year-old boy for sex, and by his own account had been sexually active, and aggressive, since before he was of school age—Shilling moved on to more recent events. Daniel, he wrote, “is clearly acting out. He was found by Mercer Island Police in a darkened park bathroom with a bottle of lotion at 3 AM. He said he was meeting a friend. Police subsequently found a King County police hat, flashlight, and King County miniature police badge on a necklace in his possession.”
Daniel was never asked about the lotion, he says, and he had no idea it was, as the police report says, “in the corner of the restroom.” After his level was raised, other ham operators, uneasy with a level 3 sex offender among their ranks, persuaded the FCC to revoke his radio license. Daniel, an operator since age 14, appealed. Because his level 3 status was central to his losing the license, the Washington, D.C., administrative law judge in the case felt free to analyze Shilling’s actions.
To begin with, the judge wrote five years after the incident, the bulletin wrongly made it seem as if Daniel had just gotten out of prison. “Even worse, it was not made clear that his offenses did not include kidnapping, leaving the inference that [Daniel] had been a kidnapper.” Noting that Shilling had referred to Daniel as a “clown” in an e-mail to another cop, the judge also slammed the detective for engaging in “petty, needless name calling.”
As for the re-leveling, which Shilling testified he then had the sole authority to do in Seattle, the judge found it “unjustifiable,” and restored Daniel’s ham license. But despite 19 years with a clean record, Daniel is still a level 3 sex offender, meaning he is considered likely to have predatory tendencies. He acknowledges his past misdeeds, but given that his status has made finding a job nearly impossible and the thought of trying to move and get approval from another landlord overwhelming, he wonders about the utility of notification in general—which a 1994 Washington State Supreme Court ruling, State v. Ward, found does not, and so must not, “constitute punishment.”
“How does it stop me from molesting anyone if I want to?” he asks, quickly adding that he does not, in fact, want to.
“The whole thing is just really screwy to me. It doesn’t protect people and causes hysteria and makes it hard for people who screwed up in their life to start over,” he says. “You either have to kill us when we do it or face the fact we have to get integrated back into society someday.”
The judge in Daniel’s case also admonished Shilling for using the wrong methodology to determine Daniel’s level during a subsequent reassessment in 2008. Shilling used the Washington State Sex Offender Screening Tool, which is intended to evaluate offenders just out of prison—not 16 years out, as Daniel was then. Another tool, called the Static-99—a 10-question worksheet that is the most widely used of its kind in the world—would have been preferable, the judge wrote.
There is no standard worksheet, or “tool,” that police use to determine a sex offender’s level. The Washington Association for Sheriffs and Police Chiefs conducts training and puts out a “model policy” for law-enforcement leveling which recommends the Static-99. But how cops level sex offenders is ultimately up to each department. Seattle is now using the Static-99. Klickitat County, where Joseph lives, uses an older worksheet called the Washington State Sex Offender Risk Level Classification. Until last year, Mason County used one of its own creation, which required offenders to list, among other things, their religion. No one keeps track of which methods different departments use.
In the first seven months of this year, the End of Sentence Review Committtee assigned levels to 463 sex offenders. Of those, 21 were re-leveled after an initial review by local law enforcement. When local authorities change offenders’ levels at any point thereafter, they are not required to report the change to the state. Those numbers are not available.
Washington’s leveled sex offenders break down as 70 percent level 1, with the remainder at levels 2 and 3. According to the latest State Patrol figures available, from 2009, a fourth category of offender, 12 percent of the total, has no level at all. These are listed as “unknown,” indicating that their county of residence has yet to level them, or in some cases that the paperwork has yet to make it to the State Patrol. There is also variation among counties. Sixty-nine percent of assessed offenders in King County are level 1. In Mason County, that number is 56 percent; in Thurston County, 45 percent.
Deputy Chief Dean Byrd of the Mason County Sheriff’s office points out that his county switched to the Static-99 last year. Of the disproportionate number of moderate- and high-risk offenders in his county, he says, “It’s a statistical anomaly.”
Sex offenders have long been aware of these geographical inconsistencies. When Daniel was getting out of prison in 1992—when levels were still informal classifications—he recalls discussing with other offenders “where to go and where not to go.” Snohomish County, he says, had a reputation as being especially inhospitable.
That was also the experience of “Randy,” a former store owner who acknowledges seducing many (“closer to 100 than to five,” he says) teenage boys he hired to work for him over the years. After one of them turned him in, he spent two and a half years in prison for rape of a minor, getting out in 2002. Two years later, Randy moved from Seattle to a trailer park in Snohomish County, where he lived as a level 2. Bristling at what he viewed as harassment by the local sheriff’s deputies assigned to monitor him (and whom he declines to name), and disappointed after his request to be reduced to a level 1 was turned down, Randy returned to Seattle.
Now re-established as a successful businessman, Randy has a long-term boyfriend near him in age, and, after years of treatment, an understanding, he says, that “even though [many teenaged boys] are horny and have a lot of hormones, it’s not my place as an adult to give them an experience.”
With the help of his lawyer and the approval of the Seattle detective assigned to keep tabs on him, Randy managed to get reduced to a level 1. Now 70, he’d like to relocate somewhere outside the city.
“The bad news is, I can’t move to Snohomish,” he says. “There’s nothing that prevents a detective there from totally ignoring what a detective here has decided.”
Adam Walsh was 6 years old when he was kidnapped from the parking lot of a Sears store in Hollywood, Fla., in 1981. Two weeks later, fishermen in nearby Vero Beach found his severed head. His body was never recovered. Twenty-seven years later, police would name longtime suspect and long-deceased serial killer Ottis Toole as the culprit.
For Adam’s father, a developer of posh hotels, his son’s brutal demise would spur a change of career. John Walsh began by founding the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center, which later merged with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, on whose board he still sits. He successfully lobbied for passage of the Missing Children Act of 1982, and went on to host America’s Most Wanted, the ubiquitous TV show, for 23 years, until its cancellation in June. But for all his tireless pursuit of bad guys, Walsh’s most lasting contribution to American criminal justice may turn out to be his fierce championing of a piece of federal legislation particularly close to his heart: the Adam Walsh Act.
Passed unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by then-President George W. Bush on July 27, 2006, it is a sweeping, if somewhat obscure, law. Designed to update the mid-1990s federal sex-offender laws that followed in the wake of Washington’s Community Protection Act, it threatens to slash millions of dollars in federal crime-prevention grants to states refusing to adopt a uniform, hard-line sex-offender management scheme. In addition to lifetime registration for most offenders, it mandates leveling offenders based solely on their crimes, as opposed to their risk of reoffending. Perhaps most significantly, it would put the name, photograph, home address, and employer of every offender, regardless of level—or tier, the term the feds prefer—on a nationwide public registry. Even for many with scant empathy for sex offenders, it goes too far.
Appearing before Congress in 2009 as part of a failed bid to repeal key portions of the act, Detective Shilling, himself abused as a child, sharply denounced it a “faulty alternative” to the risk-assessment approach used in Washington state. Making most offenders level 3’s, as the law would do, “will cause great confusion and anxiety to the citizens as they believe each of these offenders is a high risk to reoffend. That just is not true.”
After two year-long extensions, Governor Christine Gregoire sent the state’s “implementation packet” for the Adam Walsh Act to the feds in June. While claiming that Washington “substantially complies” with the new rules, Gregoire insisted that the state intends to keep its current system in place because “a risk-based model is a superior predictor of recidivism than an offense-based model.” Changing course, she wrote, would “not allow law enforcement to focus its limited resources on the most dangerous offenses.”
On August 17, the feds replied. “Based on our analysis of the entirety of the materials submitted to our office, Washington has not substantially implemented [the Adam Walsh Act] at this time,” wrote the Department of Justice’s Linda Baldwin.
According to a study published in May in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, two-thirds of America’s approximately 670,000 registered sex offenders are publicly named and pictured. In some states, like Minnesota, the shamed include only the most obviously dangerous offenders. In others, they include exhibitionists and public urinators. While it is clear that public notification stirs fear, can lead to vigilantism, makes it harder for offenders to find work, and leads to less stability in their family lives, a question lingers: Does it make us safer?
Roughly 15 studies have looked at this question over the past decade, and have with few exceptions come to the same conclusion: There is no clear connection between community notification and keeping sex offenders from reoffending. A 2008 University of Michigan study, for instance, found that while notification may act as a deterrent to committing sex crimes in the first place, it increases the desperation of those on the list, making them more likely to commit crimes.
“For the most part, the research is showing that there has not been a reduction in reoffending that can be attributed to registry and notification laws,” says Jill Levenson, an associate professor of psychology at Lynn University and a leading researcher on the effects of sex-offender registries. When the majority of offenders are publicly listed, she adds, the most dangerous ones become “a needle in the haystack.”
This is not to say, however, that sex offenders are more likely to reoffend than other ex-cons. A 2003 U.S. Justice Department study found that 94.7 percent of sex offenders released in 1994 were not arrested for another sex crime within the next three and a half years. Their arrest rate for all crimes over that period was 43 percent, compared with 68 percent for non–sex offenders.
It is also worth noting that those whom the system has identified as highly dangerous sexual predators—the Earl Shriners of the world—have been removed from the equation. In addition to imposing longer prison terms, Washington state keeps more than 300 would-be Shriners on McNeil Island in indefinite, preventative detention.
Don Pierce takes issue with this line of reasoning. On whether notification works, he says, “There’s too much viewing offenses in the aggregate and forgetting about individual victims. There’s no way to measure whether I was able to prevent my daughter from being raped by a guy being released to my neighborhood” after being notified of him.
Calming and reasoning with a fearful, angry crowd at a community meeting after announcing a new sex offender is coming to town, he points out, is a task that falls squarely on law enforcement. “I don’t see folks from the [End of Sentence Review Committee] standing in a room of outraged citizens,” he says. “Don’t give me that responsibility and not give me the authority” to set the levels.
Terapon Adhahn was in a rage. The Thai-born former U.S. Army soldier wanted to see his son, but when he stopped unannounced at the boy’s mother’s Tacoma house on the afternoon of July 4, 2007, they weren’t there.
“I wanted to destroy a human, to cause pain,” Adhahn told FBI agents 14 months later. Driving the streets of Tacoma a couple hours later, he settled on his prey: Zina Linnik, a slender 12-year-old with a blonde ponytail. Waiting for her in the alley behind her house, he beckoned to her, then grabbed her and threw her in his van. After gagging and tying her up with plastic ties, Adhahn drove the 15 minutes to his Parkland home. By the time he arrived, he told the investigators, she was dead.
Adhahn was a level 1 sex offender, convicted of raping his half-sister in 1990, when she was 16 and he in his mid-20’s. When it emerged that he had more victims—at least two additional rapes, one ending in murder, were soon linked to him—it became clear that another sexually motivated psychopath had eluded the system. Eighteen years after the Earl Shriner fiasco, Gov. Gregoire was forced to borrow a page from Booth Gardner’s book and appoint a blue-ribbon panel to investigate what went wrong.
The Sex Offender Policy Board, born of that panel’s recommendations, was intended to shed light on what leads to cases like Adhahn’s, offer remedies, and keep lawmakers abreast of trends in sex-offender management. In attendance at its first meeting in the summer of 2008 was attorney Brad Meryhew, a silver-haired, silver-tongued Seattle specialist in sex-crime defense. Given that he’d be working alongside prosecutors, cops, and victims’-rights advocates known for their demands for ever-stiffer penalties for offenders, he didn’t come in with high hopes. “I was expecting to be the lone voice in the back of the room on a lot of 10–2 or 11–1 votes,” he recalls.
But that wasn’t what happened. Instead, in dozens of meetings over the next three years, several ideas championed by Meryhew made it through the board, often unanimously, and eventually into law. In 2010, the legislature removed certain bad acts, including drunken driving and a one-time failure to register as a sex offender, from the list of crimes that trigger the automatic reset of an offender’s 10- or 15-year term on the registry. And this year, at the board’s recommendation, the End of Sentence Review Committee will start assessing and recommending levels for all juvenile sex offenders entering the community—including, for the first time, the roughly half who are released from county detention or are moving to Washington from elsewhere.
The final say will remain with the cops, however. Changing that has been a key focus for Meryhew on the board. A better way, he suggests, would be to empower the End of Sentence Review Committee to set levels for everyone. Local law enforcement could present its case, the offender his, and the board would decide. If either side objected, they could appeal. “If you’re disputing something in Fish and Game or Licensing or anywhere else in the system, you get an administrative law judge who decides. And if you don’t like their decision, you can go to superior court,” he says. “I’m not trying to create a burdensome system. I want to create some predictability in the lives of sex offenders so that they can plan their future.”
For three years Meryhew pushed the issue, eventually winning over most board members, says Sex Offender Policy Board staffer Shoshana Kehoe-Ehlers. The prosecutors had their doubts, but the biggest stick in the mud, as Kehoe-Ehlers tells it, was the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, which remained unwilling to yield the power that cops have held since the inception of the Community Protection Act. “It’s an extremely sensitive, touchy, delicate issue, because leveling by law enforcement has been in place for some time,” she says.
For his part, Pierce makes no apology for his group’s position: “Police chiefs and sheriffs understand their community way better than some state agency.”
In any event, it seems that the cops can breathe easy, at least for a while. In the latest round of state budget cuts, the policy board was mothballed. It won’t meet again until the legislature or governor asks it to reconvene. That could be 10 weeks—or 10 years.
“The joke, if you can call it that, is that we’ll all see each other once there’s been another horrible sex crime,” says Meryhew.
As for Joseph, a couple of months ago he moved to a new place a little outside of town. The backyard of his old house abutted the deck of a popular bar, making him feel like he was in a fishbowl. By contrast, the new place is on 20 acres backing up to a national forest, complete with a swing set, a huge trampoline, and a raised swimming pool for the kids.
The cops haven’t been by yet to check in on him. The last thing he wants to do, he says, is “rattle the cage.” That’s why, shortly before publication of this article, he asked that his name not be used. He knows the cops won’t have a hard time deducing who he is, but hopes that the gesture at least will show that he’s not spoiling for a fight. After all, it’s been more than two months, and though he reported his move to the authorities immediately, they haven’t yet gotten around to updating his address.
