Back in 2004, a reporter named David Holthouse published this remarkable story in the weekly paper that he worked for back then called Westword. It's about something that he had waited his entire life to do since childhood. But I want to warn anybody listening now with children, we actually don't believe this story is suitable for children. There's nothing graphic in it, but the things that it's about are not right for kids we think. So this is going to take about 20 minutes. We're putting this on the radio because David take us inside the head of somebody, himself actually, who's contemplating things that he admits later, are completely reprehensible and wrong. And he explains how he got to that point. And then even more unusual, how he was able to snap out of it. So kids, good bye. And here's David Holthouse.
This time last year I was plotting to kill a man. This time last year I had a gun, and a silencer, and a plan. I had staked out the man's tract home in the Denver suburbs. I had followed him to and from his job in a high tech office park. I was confident I would get away with murder because there was nothing in recent history to connect me to him. Homicide investigators look for motive and mine was buried 25 years in the past.
The man I was going to kill was the one who raped me in 1978 when I was 7 years old.
When I was 7, I had a crush on Princess Leia and wanted to be a member of the rock band Kiss when I grew up. I was in the second grade and a cop dressed up like a bloodhound wearing a trench coat and calling himself McGruff came to my school and warned us all to watch out for strange men in cars offering candy. But McGruff didn't say anything about watching out for the son of my mom and dad's best friends. He was 15 and a star high school athlete. He wrestled and played football. The paper ran a profile of him in the sports section and my mom cut it out and stuck it on our refrigerator. I looked up to him. I thought he was super cool.
One night his parents had my parents over for dinner and he asked me if I wanted to go to his bedroom in the basement and play with his karate stuff. We snuck off together and once he had me alone inside his room, the door closed, he got out his karate stuff, throwing stars and nunchucks and a curved sword. And we started playing. He did not play nice. He spun the nunchucks inches from my face and hurled the throwing stars into the wall next to me. I didn't know what was going on, but I knew it was bad so I started crying. And he told me to shut up. Then he started chasing me around the room waving the sword. He put the blade to my throat and backed me into a corner where I dropped into a crouch in cowered.
The term child molestation doesn't begin to describe what happened next. When I think child molestation, I think inappropriate touching. I think fondling. What happened next wasn't fondling. It was rape.
He started off by telling me he'd cut my face with the sword if I didn't do what he wanted. I had no words for what was happening, no concept of rape or sex. I just knew that I was terrified and in pain. When he was done with me he said that if I told my parents, or his parents, or anyone else, that my mom and dad would be very angry with me because I'd done a bad thing. He said if I told on him he'd come to my house in the middle of the night and gut me like a salmon. Then he opened his door.
He told me not to go back upstairs right away and sat me down in front of a TV in the downstairs family room, and had me play Atari until my tears dried and I was more presentable.
When I was seven, I no longer believed in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. But from that night on, I had no such doubts about the bogeyman.
He only got me that once, or at least only once when I was conscious. There was one night two or three months later when my parents were hosting a holiday party and they took me to his house so he could babysit me and his little sister. He put on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and we played disco, which consisted of all of us getting drunk on straight, warm, hard booze while he watched his little sister and me gyrate to "Stayin' Alive" there by securing my lifelong hatred of the Bee Gees. I don't remember the rest of that night, just waking up the next morning with my first hang over.
I made sure he never got me alone again for more than a few minutes, which wasn't easy. Because our parents socialized almost every weekend at either their house or ours. And he didn't move out or go to college after high school. He turned into one of those guys who still dates high school chicks and lives with his parents well into his 20s.
I kept our little secret throughout my childhood. At first, I was scared and ashamed and believed his threats. By the time I was a teenager and understood what he'd done to me in his room, it just seemed easier to keep my mouth shut.
Why make a fuss? Why traumatize my parents? And why risk being viewed as damaged goods?
My memories of him in those early years are scatter-shot. One 4 of July he told me how much fun he'd just had torturing a cat with a fire cracker. And I remember for years after the rape, whenever he and I were in the same room and no one was looking, he would make an obscene gesture and give me a bogeyman smile. A smile that said, "I got more of this for you, you little 8, 9, 10 year old punk."
The last time I ran into him was 12 years ago when I was 21. I was back home from college between my sophomore and junior years and I needed a cheap suit for a job interview. And there he was. A 31-year-old cheap suit salesman and rapist of children. I hadn't seen him in six or seven years and I immediately realized two things.
The first, was that he was no longer bigger than me. I had 6 inches and at least 30 pounds on him. The second thing I realized was that I wanted to kill him. I wanted to grab a coat rack and bash in his head. Snatch that metal ball point pen out of his cheap suit jacket and stab him in the eye, over and over again. But I did nothing.
My mother was with me and even more than I wanted revenge, I want to prevent her and my father from finding out that he had raped me when I was seven-years-old while they were upstairs with his parents drinking wine and playing board games. I didn't want to burden them with that. I didn't want to tarnish their memories of my childhood. The bogeyman gave a weak smile and made small talk with my mom while I was pretending to look at cuff links on the other side of the store. Then he vanished into a break room after passing us off to another salesman. He wanted no part of me anymore.
The memory of being raped when I was seven was never repressed. It was not recovered under hypnosis. It has always been with me, festering. When I was a teenager, I began researching how being raped as a child might affect the development of my personality. And I recoiled in horror. Every study I read supported the vicious cycle theory. That victims of pedophilia are more likely to become pedophiles themselves. I felt like a werewolf had bitten me and it was only a matter of time before the full moon rose.
Throughout my early adolescence, I was constantly, tortuously checking myself for evil impulses. I made a blood oath with myself that if I started feeling the desire to rape children I would kill myself and make it look like a mountaineering accident. I was already in the habit of solo rock climbing. No partners, no ropes despite my parents' repeated warnings against such a dangerous activity. Had I throw myself down a mountain they would have believed it. And better a son who died climbing than one who lived and rape kids.
The next death I plotted was his, the boogeyman's.
After I moved to Denver three years ago I learned from my parents that he also lived in the area. I became fixated on the idea that he was raping children nearby, and that it was up to me to stop him. I had no evidence, but authorities agree that most pedophiles begin molesting when they're teenagers and most of them never stop. Not even after they're caught. If they're caught. My guy has never been caught.
According to a 1998 Colorado Bureau of Investigation polygraph study of convicted child molesters, the mean number of victims per molester, at least in this state, is 184. And that's only for the molesters who've been arrested.
All my adult life I'd been aware that he was in all likelihood, still raping children. But as long as he was doing it far away, I had felt no compulsion to do anything about it. But once I found out he was here and living nearby, I began to agonize over my failure to stop him. I considered going to the police, but I had no evidence except my memories, and the statute of limitations has long run out for the crime he committed with me.
I thought about placing subtle advertisements in newspapers. I thought about sending anonymous letters to everyone he knows, his ex-wives and everyone in this new neighborhood in Colorado, warning them and begging them to please come forward if they knew or suspected anything. But I was afraid such measures would somehow lead to my parents finding out. And the cold, hard truth is that I just didn't want them to know.
My parents are retired, and in their 60s, and they didn't need that. I wanted to protect them more than I wanted to protect children I'd never met.
The more I obsessed on it, the more I came to the seemingly inescapable conclusion that the best way to make sure he never raped another child, to make sure I had my revenge, was to kill him. To just walk right up to him in a secluded place and scrape him from this world like a piece of dog [BLEEP] off my shoe.
I bought the gun last April. I had a few firearms in my closest already, but they'd all been purchased legally in my name from a licensed firearm's dealer. I make my living as a reporter. My assignments at the time routinely brought me into contact and sometimes friendship with unsavory characters, including the leaders of a street gang. So I went to their barrio where I bought a Beretta 9 millimeter with a homemade silencer and the serial number removed. I took this gun to the local garage gunsmith and had him put dozens of deep nicks and grooves in the Beretta's barrel to corrupt ballistic's tests.
After testing the gun and silencer in the desert, I put them in storage and kept scheming.
It seemed insane to me now that I was actually going to kill a man instead of just bringing out in the open what he had done to me. But that's how kiddie rapers get away with it. They depend upon shame and embarrassment to keep their victims quiet. By the time I was an adult, I feared that if my friends knew my secret they wouldn't trust me around their children. And parents need to be watchful. The commonly accepted estimate among law enforcement and sexual abuse treatment specialists in Colorado is that 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men who live in this state were either molested or raped before the age of 18. Most of them by men or teenage boys they knew. By coaches, scout masters, priests, family friends, sons of family friends.
So this time last year I was plotting to kill a man and I was telling myself that it was noble. I was doing it to protect the children. But really, more than anything else, I think I just wanted to shoot the son of a bitch. And I believe I would have, taking a second deep and dirty secret with me to the grave. But then my parents found out just in time to prevent me from committing first degree murder.
If you have a secret you want to keep, never write it down. I know that now, but I didn't when I was 10, the summer between fourth and fifth grade when I sat down with a pen in my Garfield the cat diary. The entry is dated June 1981. And while I have no memory of writing it, the penmanship is unmistakably my own. There between accounts of my grandfather dying and a game winning double I hit in little league is an account of my being raped three years before. I concluded the entry by wondering what I would do if I ever met the man who had raped me on the street once I myself was a grown man.
Will I smile and shake his hand and pretend nothing happened? I wrote. Or will I punch him in the face?
Last September my mom and dad decided to spend part of Labor Day weekend going through the cabinets in my old bedroom and box up all my childhood stuff for attic storage. My mom found the diary and read it. She told my dad. I received a frantic message from her on my voice mail saying I needed to call home right away. They told me about finding the diary. My mom asked in a shaking voice if it was true. Had I had any warning, I would have lied. But I was not prepared and so I told the truth.
My mom started crying and I said I'd fly home as soon as I could. I'd scheduled the murder by then giving myself a 72-hour window immediately before I was to leave on a two-week trip to Mexico in late December. My plan was to shoot him, ditch the gun, then fly out of the country and keep my ear to the ground from afar just in case. There's an ill-kept baseball field near his house where I was going to stalk him on a late-night walk. It's a good place for killing in the suburbs. Quiet, usually empty, and hundreds of yards from the closest house on its far side.
But now, because of my parents, I called off my plan. The truth was now out. It was my mother who let it out. She called the boogeyman's parents who know live in the Midwest. She started off by saying that what she was about to tell them would be difficult for them to hear, but for the sake of their grandchildren they should listen. The bogeyman has children of his own now, as well as step children.
She told them that their son had violently raped me in the Fall of 1978. She told him that he had used a knife. She told them that the typical number of victims for a pedophile his age is well over a hundred, She told them that she regretted finding out what their son had done to me, but now that she had she felt that they had to know as well. She told them that she wished them to have good lives, but to never contact her or my father again. No Christmas cards, nothing. She told him she hoped their son eventually got caught and spent the rest of his life getting raped in prison. Then she hung up.
By then, I'd begun writing about how I was sexually assaulted as a child, all the while knowing that I would never get to the bottom of it and really understand what had happened if I did not at least try to confront the bogeyman. I was a lot more comfortable with the concept of shooting him in the head than I was with talking to him on the phone, let alone in person.
On May 5, I finally sent two copies of the same letter to his house. One by overnight airborne express, one by registered mail. It began, "Remember me? Our parents were good friends. I remember my childhood years very, very well. Especially a certain night when I was seven when your parents had my family over for dinner and you and I went down yo your bedroom to play with your karate stuff. I kept what you did to me a secret for 25 years. It's time for you and I to talk this over. I suggest a meeting in public, anywhere in the Denver metro as soon as possible.
If seeing me face-to-face is too uncomfortable for you, then at least call me. Simply ignoring this letter is not going to work. If I don't hear from you by Friday late afternoon, I'll start calling your house, and then knocking on your front door. I want to be perfectly clear here, I'm not threatening you with any physical harm and I'm not hinting at blackmail. I don't want your blood or your money, just one uncomfortable conversation."
He received the letters and phoned me all in the same day. I told him that I appreciated his calling me and that I was surprised he had.
"Well," he said, "it's a call I should have made a long time ago."
I was stunned because from his words and tone of voice it sounded like he was going to actually admit what he'd done when I knew that almost all pedophiles deny, deny, deny until the day they die.
We arranged to meet at 2:00 pm the following afternoon at a Cracker Barrel near his house.
"Is there anything you want to say to me now." I asked?
"Just that I'm deeply sorry," he said. "I've thought a hundred times about contacting you in the last 20 years to tell you that, but I just never had the courage to pick up the phone. I'm sorry for the pain I've caused you, and my parents, and your parents."
He sounded sincere, well rehearsed. The next day an hour before we were supposed to meet I changed the location from a chain restaurant in suburbia to the intersection of the 16th street mall and Market Street in downtown Denver. He showed up wearing jeans, a grey t-shirt, and a Colorado Avalanche cap. When I saw him standing on the corner anxiously trying to pick me out of the crowd, I realized the moment I had written about in my diary in 1981 had arrived. We were both grown men and I was meeting him on the street.
I didn't punch him in the face. I did shake his hand. But neither of us pretended that nothing had happened. We were afraid of one another. I was so jacked up on adrenaline I was shaking. He was sweating like he'd just run a mile.
"Nervous," he said. I nodded. "Me too," he said.
We walked around the block and he started by telling me that he'd been waiting for me to contact him for several weeks. Soon after my mom had called his parents in March, he said, they'd flown to Colorado and confronted him. He told me that he'd admitted he had raped me to both his parents and his wife.
"My mom got extremely emotional and didn't handle it well at all. And my dad just went quiet and became very stoic," he said. "They've sort of written me off since then. They used to call me every week, but they don't call me anymore. Even though I told them it only happened with you that once."
He made this claim repeatedly during our conversation, working it into his response to nearly every question I asked. He only had one victim-- me. He had not sexually assaulted any other child before or since.
We sat on the mall's stone stools and kept talking, our voices low. Both of us looking around to make sure no one was in ear shot. I asked him how his wife had reacted. "She was concerned, obviously," he said. She wanted to know right away if our son was safe, and I told her, "Yes, he is."
Then I hit him with the question I'd always wanted to ask. "Why did you do it?" He shook his head and tears welled in his eyes.
"I've asked myself that question over and over and over again, David. And I just don't have a good answer for you. I wish I did, but I just don't know. I know that until I was in my 30s I didn't really believe other people's feelings were real. I didn't think anyone really mattered but me. Maybe that was it. Maybe if I'd gone to therapy I could have come up with the answer. All I can say is that I'd never done it before and I never did it again. And if there was one thing I could go back in my life and change, that would be it."
I asked if his attack on me was spontaneous or planned.
"It wasn't planned," he said. I just acted on this one weird impulse. As soon it was over, I was, thinking, oh my God. That's my little sister's friend. How could I have just done that?
He said he'd wanted to apologize to me for many years but hadn't sought me out because he didn't want to reopen old wounds and because he hoped I'd forgotten it had ever happened.
"My biggest fear was that I'd ruin your life," he said. "I was afraid that you would turn out to be a homeless drug addict or something and it would all be my fault."
I told him that while I wasn't I street junkie, I did have a tremendous fear of becoming a father. Because I didn't believe I'd be able to protect my child from people like him.
Becoming a father had changed his life he told me. "I found what love really means," he said. "I used to think that love meant you just really liked somebody a whole lot. But when you become a father, you really understand what love is."
I asked what he would do if he found out that someone had raped his son. He said, "I'd probably rip their head off."
There's a scene in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly where the gunfighter played by Eli Wallach righteously blows away a guy and then drops this pearl of murderous wisdom. "If you going to shoot, shoot. Don't talk. Because if you let them talk, you may not shoot."
And sure enough, as soon as I exchanged a few sentences with him, I didn't want to shoot him at all. Because I saw him as a frightened, damaged man. He wasn't the bogeyman any more, he was real. He begged my forgiveness. He swore I was the only one. All the experts say he was almost certainly lying. But then, all the experts say it was extremely unusual for him to admit his crime to me, let alone his wife and parents. And he did at least make the admission to his parents. I checked.
I did not grow up in a religious household, but he did. Talking to him on the mall, I thought of this passage from Romans. "Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath. for it is written: "It is mine to avenge. I will repay."
When I had nothing else to say to the man who had raped me when I was seven, we parted ways. He blended into the crowd.
David Holthouse is a reporter now living in Alaska. After his story was first published in 2004, his newspaper, Westword, was inundated with letters from people who had been molested as children themselves thanking him. Grateful, especially for the part of the story where he shows that it's possible to let go of your anger. So coming up, the most unromantic guy imaginable puts the rest of us to shame in the romance department. That's in a minute. From Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.
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