A sex offender convicted three times for exposing himself admits that he did so thousands of other times to young male victims at schools, malls and parks over the past 36 years.
As soon as he’s out from under monitoring by the Colorado Department of Corrections in October, the 47-year-old traveling salesman with HIV plans to return to public places to expose himself again.
“I am very angry. When I get real with myself, I realize how much I want to re-offend,” he said. “I haven’t found anything as powerful to get my needs met as that behavior.
“I have to admit that I will re-offend.”
The man lives in his home in virtual anonymity, free to go to his job and shop for groceries in local markets, ready to fulfill his promise.
His suburban Denver neighbors likely don’t know about his criminal past. And they probably won’t know unless they become suspicious and do some digging.
That’s because he doesn’t meet Colorado’s criteria for being identified as a sexually violent predator, a court-ordered designation that would mean officials would knock on his neighbors’ doors to warn them about his background and where he lives.
“He’s basically shooting a gun in a crowded theater,” said his therapist Greig Veeder, founder of Teaching Humane Existence, a Denver therapy program that treats 80 sex offenders.
Colorado, like most states, passed a community notification statute for sexually violent predators in 1999 to comply with Megan’s Law, a federal mandate named for a little girl in New Jersey who was raped and killed by a convicted child molester.
Although exposure to children is a qualifying offense under Colorado’s sexually violent predator law, this offender wasn’t evaluated as a predator because his three convictions came in the early 1990s. The notification law covers only convictions since 1999, and unlike the sexual-predator laws of other states, Colorado’s isn’t retroactive.
The Denver Post, through Veeder, learned of the sex offender being featured in this story. He agreed to be interviewed only on the condition of anonymity. Veeder said the offender agreed to do the story because he wants to do the right thing, “short of costing him his freedom.”
While the man has threatened to re-offend, there isn’t much the state can do, Veeder said, because his threats aren’t specific enough to revoke his sentence. He hasn’t named a specific victim.
“It’s an unactionable threat,” Veeder said. “It’s a certain uncertainty.”
One thing that is certain, the offender says, is that come October, he’s going to do what he has done for almost 36 years, only more carefully – stalk teenage victims.
His latest crime, stealing $100,000 from elderly clients in 2002, was not a sex offense. But he was required to abide by sex-offender restrictions while serving a community corrections sentence because of his earlier exposure convictions.
His court-ordered restrictions include attending sex-offender treatment and taking polygraph tests to confirm that he is not re-offending.
Because of the threat of going to prison, the sex offender said he has not exposed himself to anyone for a year – the first time he has gone that long since he was 11.
He said he started exposing himself after he began to feel rejected because he felt his homosexuality conflicted with his Christian beliefs. It was a way to find acceptance and to strike back at God and society, he said.
“I live my life in the pursuit of risk,” he said. “The high is so high.”
In therapy, he has come to recognize that his practice of having unprotected sex with strangers in bathhouses is another attempt to strike back at society.
“I use HIV as a weapon,” he said.
The sex offender said he’s biding his time until his sentence is complete, when he will be free to go where he wishes without restrictions. He knows he’ll soon be indulging in dangerous practices that could hurt his victims.
“I don’t know if I’m capable of understanding how dangerous I am and admitting it,” he said.
Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-820-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.