They describe him as an incorrigible sex offender who, behind prison bars and a curtain of deception, preyed on others just like himself.
Someone controlling. And submissive.
Clinging. And brutal.
Childlike. And calculating.
Those who know Brent J. Brents – or thought they did – collectively sketch Denver’s admitted serial rapist in shades of contradiction, as a nearly lifelong criminal whose instinct for self-preservation melded with his tendency toward predatory acts.
They describe a man who transformed his persona from sex criminal to white supremacist within a prison culture that brutalized sex offenders as its lowest life form. A man who, once released, oozed through cracks into the fractured families of vulnerable women. Someone who traded freely on the kindness of the Capitol Hill community he ultimately terrorized.
“Brent came into my life as a friend,” wrote one frustrated Capitol Hill acquaintance under a pseudonym in The Denver Voice, a monthly urban publication. “I trusted him, invited him into my home. … The depth of the feeling of betrayal is impossible to convey.”
Brents’ path of crime and deception twisted through a stay at a state mental-health facility, morphed into a bizarre double life during terms at six prisons and, upon his release last summer, cut a six-month swath through the Denver area, acquaintances say.
But it began during a tumultuous childhood defined by its own contradictions, notably his claim of childhood sexual abuse by both his parents against his mother’s vehement denials. His father died last year of congestive heart failure.
Since his capture in February, the 35-year-old Brents has claimed responsibility for more than 30 sexual assaults and remains in the Denver County Jail on $25 million bond. Denver authorities filed 80 counts against him for allegedly assaulting eight people in Denver. Rape charges also were filed in Arapahoe County involving a 49-year-old Aurora woman.
Derailing train cars at age 13
Years ago, his parents met on a $5 bet.
His father, an itinerant oil driller, was looking for a nice girl, someone quiet and ready to get married and settle down. Friends wagered he couldn’t get a date with the switchboard operator in their small Texas town.
He asked her out for a soda on July 6, 1968. Raised a devout Baptist, she prayed for guidance on what this outgoing, mannerly gentleman meant for her future – and married him a week later.
Eleven months after the wedding, the couple welcomed their first child – an 8-pound, 12-ounce son – after 30 hours of labor. They named him Brent, but when the hospital insisted on a middle name, they arbitrarily threw in the letter “J,” which stands for nothing.
His mother, who has asked not to be identified for fear that her family could become a target for retribution, remembers Brents as “super happy” as a baby, and precocious.
In Brents’ early years, the family toured the West – Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Texas and Wyoming – while following his father’s drilling jobs on the oil rigs. When his dad wasn’t working 16-hour days, father and son sometimes went hunting and fishing. His dad taught him how to trap. They stalked rattlesnakes in the Arizona desert.
“Brent was an excellent hunter,” his mother says.
But the boy’s downhill slide passed some familiar signposts. He became a “latchkey kid” while both parents worked, his mom recalls. He fell in with some bad friends. He bullied other kids and took their money to keep up with more affluent pals’ allowances.
Then, in Wyoming, 13-year-old Brents threw a railroad switch and derailed some cars on a freight train, his mother says. That began a succession of brushes with the law that escalated once the family moved to Fort Collins.
“We’d hoped he’d straighten up and do things right,” she says. “But it seemed the more you tried with him, the worse he rebelled, and the worse things kept getting. He just like … lost it.”
His mom, who has devoted much of her life to street ministry, says she tried to pass on her faith to her children. But Brents experienced only what she calls a “jailhouse saving” that she regarded as insincere.
Even now, she isn’t sure she wants any contact with him.
“I’m afraid I’ll say something that would not be nice to him,” she says. “I’d lay into him. The preacher in me would come out more than the mother.”
Using sex to manipulate
In the early 1980s, when Brents went into juvenile detention for sex offenses involving children, only 22 juvenile sex offender programs existed nationwide. Colorado had three of them.
In adult lockup after conviction for sexually assaulting two Denver children in 1988, Brents served his time under provisions that pre-dated the current Lifetime Supervision Act. That law mandates a progression of monitored behavior with polygraph tests, requires a stable living situation and prohibits contact with children.
Ultimately, Brents waived his parole hearings seven times and refused sex-offender treatment of any kind, even though that refusal cost him an additional six months in prison.
Brents learned the brutal truths of inmate culture and eventually reinvented himself with protective lies and deception, according to several men who did time with him.
Brents began his adult incarceration in 1988 at the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo, where he was to receive sex-offender treatment.
Gary Hilton met him in Forensic Unit 12.
He recalls the 19-year-old Brents as a meek, skinny kid, different from the psychiatric cases who spoke to invisible friends and stood in medication lines.
“He had a little mustache,” says Hilton, who was sent to the hospital in 1987 for a series of robberies and later was found not guilty by reason of impaired mental condition. “I can see him sitting at the table – headphones, long hair, brown eyes. He looked 14 or 15.”
But he also recited a litany of supposed molestations, according to a former patient named Chuck, who asked that only his first name be used. (Like some other prisoners interviewed for this article, this inmate said he feared retaliation if named publicly.)
Brents soon learned that sex offenders were reviled in the forensic hospital, much as they are in the general prison population. He obtained protection from a feared inmate by becoming the man’s lover, according to former and current patients.
Brents’ further willingness to engage in sexual relationships with fellow patients paid him dividends in cigarettes, coffee, clothes or money, they add. But it also caused problems: Officials say he was moved to different hospital wards three times because of assaults and sexual incidents.
Reinventing himself, his crimes
The young sex offender left the hospital in 1991 after a series of sexual incidents, according to Chuck, the former hospital patient. Officials say Brents simply wasn’t doing well in treatment there and was moved to prison under a “dual commitment” that provided for both treatment and incarceration.
Hospital spokeswoman Eunice Wol ther said she couldn’t comment about any incident involving a particular patient.
Hilton recalls riding in a van to the Denver Reception Diagnostic Center with a frightened Brents, who suddenly worried that his sex offender background would haunt him in the general prison population.
Hilton advised Brents to work out and get into shape, fight if confronted so he wouldn’t be labeled a “mark” – and never to disclose his crime.
Lie, if necessary.
The Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility, the rock-walled “Old Max” in Ca on City, would shape the next phase of Brents’ life.
“That environment molded him,” says Hilton. “You start learning about the con code. That becomes your teacher, your guide in life. It changes you.”
At Territorial, Brents suppressed information about his background and cloaked himself in the protection of the “211 Crew,” a white-supremacist group that actually targeted sex offenders for rough treatment, several inmates say.
Brents reportedly kept up the deception when he was moved to the Sterling Correctional Facility. Out of a need for survival, says Jay Kirby, the Department of Corrections’ intelligence coordinator, prisoners have successfully hidden their crimes from other prisoners for years.
One of Brents’ former cellmates says Brents consorted with 211 Crew members, worked out with weights and – like fellow gang members – preyed on “cho-mos,” prison vernacular for child molesters. He claimed to have stalked, raped and killed a female judge, a cellmate says.
But in the relative privacy of nighttime lockdown, he turned sexually submissive, fellow prisoners say.
“I believed he was a killer like he said he was,” the former cellmate says. “He certainly put on a good facade.”
Brents regularly attended Wiccan services at the prison and displayed a pentagram on the wall of his cell, says his former cellmate – adding that Brents also tried to convert him. In 2002, Brents filed a complaint over the high prices of Wiccan and Pagan religious items at the prison.
For all Brents’ deception and contradictions, his fellow inmates seem to agree on one thing: He faces a perilous return to the general prison population.
“There are ‘211’ guys right now saying he better not come back to Sterling,” the former cellmate says. “If he goes to any prison in this state, he’ll be dead. It’s just a matter of time.”
Blending in on Capitol Hill
Around Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, the recently released Brents found work helping to renovate old houses. He slowly immersed himself in an eclectic community that, though it later reflected on intuitive misgivings about him, initially accepted him.
He frequented the “Oh My Goddess” coffee shop on East Colfax Avenue, where he came to know the owners, employees and customers. In an interview from jail, he called them “my closest friends and family.”
He hung out at area dance clubs.
In January, he marched among locals to the state Capitol to protest the presidential inauguration. Afterward, he submitted an article to The Denver Voice urging people to do something to make a difference.
He developed relationships, some of them intimate, and seemed particularly drawn to two types of people – women with kids and women with vulnerabilities, says one local who knew him.
Last summer, Brents became involved with an Aurora woman and later was accused of molesting her 8-year-old son. In November, Brents admitted to police that he’d inappropriately touched the boy, but authorities didn’t arrest him at the time.
Authorities would later connect him to an alley assault at knifepoint of a 25-year-old Denver woman.
In February, Brents – knowing that police were looking for him – allegedly embarked on one final, violent rampage.
Police linked Brents with assaults on a 29-year-old Denver woman at knifepoint and, hours later, a 44-year-old woman working alone in a shop.
Three days later, police said, he entered a Cheesman Park area home and assaulted a 67-year-old woman and her two granddaughters. And four days after that, he brutally assaulted a woman who managed a Capitol Hill apartment building.
Hours later, he sped away from Denver with another alleged female victim in a stolen car.
Authorities in Glenwood Springs captured him after a brief car chase.
His attempt to blend with the Capitol Hill community now appears to some locals as little more than a ruse, a predator scouting potential prey.
“He got this fatherly thing on,” says the Capitol Hill resident, who asked not to be named. “Looking back, it’s like a Chester the Molester thing.”
But increasingly, the resident adds, Brents revealed an anger that would roil to the surface over things like his dog or his personal history.
John Kulsar, who along with his wife, Kaewyn, owns and operates the coffee shop and another nearby business, describes Brents as “a big 9-year-old” in terms of his emotional development.
“He was this needy, clingy kind of guy you didn’t want to spend time with,” Kulsar recalls. “He would say, ‘Can I do this for you? Do that for you?’ He was kind of creepy, but never inappropriate in a place of business. You can’t throw anybody out for being creepy on Colfax.”
Kulsar, whose wife sometimes was alone in the coffee shop with Brents, feels lucky that neither she nor his other employees fell victim. And he notes that, in a strange way, the ordeal brought people together and affirmed their ideals of community.
“You can never know what somebody’s all about,” Kulsar says. “You can live afraid and suspicious or kind with an open heart. He doesn’t have the power to change us.”
Staff writer Kevin Simpson can be reached at 303-820-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com.
Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-820-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.
