Making the rounds
Published: August 23, 2005
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Of the News-Register
Randy Settell has only one employer, Yamhill County's Community Corrections Department. But he has two jobs, a day job and a night job.
By day, he meets with the sex offenders on his parole and probation caseload in his office in the county's jail and courthouse complex downtown.
One of two P.O.s specializing in sex offenders, his caseload typically runs 100 or more. He likes to get an early start, generally coming in at 5:30 a.m. and meeting his first offender of the day at 6.
But it's important for him to visit offenders in their home environment as well - particularly troublesome offenders deemed most likely to return to their old ways. That's a night job, so he and partner Daphne Bach periodically set aside a night to pay some of their clients home visits.
On this night, he has agreed to take a reporter along for a firsthand look at the sex offender's world.
---
The first stop is a dilapidated Victorian with fading paint and a sagging porch.
A tired old place in a poor state of repair, it's set in a field choked with weeds, grass and hay standing as tall as a grown man. A wheelchair maintains a precarious presence on the front porch, simultaneously seeming both oddly out of place and oddly appropriate.
The place resembles the setting for an Alfred Hitchcock horror classic. It's a fright to behold.
Settell's knock on the door goes unanswered for what seems an eternity.
Then a grizzled man getting around with the aid of a walker peers out the front window. He's framed by a set of scalloped drapes whose once pristine whiteness has long since turned a sickly yellow.
Settell and Bach wait patiently as he slowly makes his way to the door. He opens it in a white undershirt, black shorts, black socks and brown house slippers - the uniform of an old man.
The man invites them in.
But he's not the one they've come to see. They're here to see a younger man - a man Settell calls the one true pedophile on his long roster of offenders.
Settell isn't sure what the older man's relationship is to the younger. He thinks the association may be through a church. But no matter.
---
Inside, the contents of the house pay homage to everyday life tenfold. Books, newspapers, magazines and all manner of objects known to mankind lie here, there and everywhere.
Stuff is piled on every surface, taking up every corner and filling every chair. It is even mounded up on the dining room table.
Cans of all kinds lie among a vast collection of odds and ends. And lying on top of it all sit unwashed plates and unrefrigerated leftovers.
The stench is overpowering. The smell of rot and decay permeate everything.
Settell asks to see the younger man. "Is he here?" the officer asks.
The old man nods affirmatively, then picks up a cast iron skillet.
A former athlete, Settell stands 6-feet and weighs 280. But he steps back instinctively as the man winds up to swing the large, heavy skillet.
But the old man takes aim at the wall, not at Settell. "It's how we communicate," he explains as the skillet thuds against the plaster.
---
Shortly, a door opens in the middle of a living room wall. Out steps the younger man, who has come downstairs in response to the older man's summons.
Settell asks if it's all right if he goes on up and has a look around the offender's room. He gets the go-ahead, but finds he can barely squeeze his massive frame up the narrow staircase.
The steps are warped, and it's easy to see why.
Buckets line the steps, and each is full of dirty brown water. Water stains spot the walls above.
The paint is peeling and the plaster is crumbling. The narrow stairway reeks of mold, dust and mildew.
The climb is made all the more difficult by the old house's precarious leftward tilt. It resembles the Fun House at a carnival.
His room differs in no important respect from the rest of the place.
A collection of toys fills a makeshift shadow box. The box has been fashioned out of old printing press trays.
Everywhere, there is clutter, clutter, clutter.
Falling plaster has left a gaping hole in the ceiling. And the stench matches that of the old man's downstairs quarters.
Cases of Mountain Dew fill one part of the room. At least, some of them contain Mountain Dew. A quick look confirms that some of them now contain urine instead.
This is a common practice for certain types of sex offenders, and it has been an ongoing problem with this one. It seems they derive some sort of satisfaction from saving up urine.
---
The man is thin and slightly built. Barely 30, his babylike face would make him seem even younger if it weren't half-covered in full beard.
He looks neither intimidating nor imposing. His manner is soft and gentle.
His harmless look and manner have proven useful to him in approaching children to perpetrate his crimes.
He recently slipped a note to a 12-year-old girl asking her to perform a sex act on him.
"What did you ask her to do?" Settell asks.
When he answers in terms not printable here, Settell follows up by asking, "Don't you know this is wrong?"
"Yes," the man mumbles.
"Then why did you do it?" the officer asks.
"I don't know," the man responds.
Settell reminds the man that bad decisions like this have led him to his current situation. But the offender offers all manner of excuses.
This wasn't the man's first offense. Settell hopes to make it his last, but it won't be easy.
He checks the room for porn, for children's photos, for anything that could conceivably be an object of lust. Finding nothing, he issues a final warning and leaves.
He'll be back. He doesn't trust this one.
---
Unbelievably, the second stop is as warped and surreal as the first.
Smack dab in the middle of suburban McMinnville - a stone's throw from a new housing development, a heartbeat from an elementary school - is something even Hitchcock would have been hard-pressed to dream up.
Settell's Dodge Durango turns down a driveway snaking behind a pair of homes, bursts through a dense stand of trees protecting polite society from the sight and comes upon a profusion of travel trailers and makeshift outbuildings.
All turn out to have inhabitants. These are people curled up in the meanest of circumstances.
There is no running water. That rules out taking a bath or using a toilet.
There is electricity, but it arrives here by extension cord. Bags of garbage have been stacked against the side of one of the makeshift hovels.
Several old burn barrels lie here and there, standing like silent sentinels. Oily standing water, covering the ash and embers of old fires, reflects the moonlight when one peers in.
The rusting metal skeletons of devices that outlived their usefulness many years ago litter the landscape. A stench resembling that of rotting meat permeates the place.
---
The man Settell and Bach have come to visit molested his daughter. They quickly locate him in the aging travel trailer he calls home.
He looks like a cross between an absent-minded professor and a mountain man.
The stench is even worse inside than out. Closed up in close, unventilated quarters with a man who neither bathes nor cleans, Bach soon finds herself gagging reflexively.
The place is crammed with all the man's worldly possessions. There is hardly room to turn about.
A bare yellow bulb provides the only light, but wires run everywhere. And one of them connects to an ancient hulk of a computer.
From his jacket pocket, Settell pulls out a floppy disk containing a program called STEALTH. Designed to search a computer's hard drive for evidence of access to pornographic websites or storage of pornographic files, it is an invaluable tool for parole and probation officers.
---
Settell plugs the floppy into the antiquated computer, a hand-me-down from his son. It chirps and clatters as it chokes to life.
"What do you use the computer for?" Settell asks, as he waits for the program to perform its search.
"I type my assignments for class on it," the man responds, referring not to a college class but rather to his mandated group therapy sessions.
"Is that all you use it for?" Settell asks.
"Pretty much," the man says.
The computer is so old and dusty, it hums audibly and processes files with an astonishing lack of speed.
The P.O.s wait. And wait. And wait.
The hard drive only holds three-gigabytes of files, but the program churns away for 15 minutes without substantial headway. This could take all night.
There have been no hits, so Settell decides to call it good. If there had been any Internet activity, surely something would have turned up early on.
As Settell and Bach troop back to their truck, they suck in deep breaths of the fetid air hanging over the camp. By comparison, it smells like a pine forest.
---
The third stop on tonight's tour stands in stark contrast. It's a nice, well-kept middle-class home.
It's decorated with silk roses, doorway swags and a china hutch filled with delicate cups and plates of porcelain.
It has a feminine touch totally absent from the night's earlier stops.
The family they have come to look in on is just sitting down to eat their evening meal. Sliced carrots and fresh broccoli grace their dinner table.
They clearly resent the intrusion.
They are defensive. They are upset. But they grudgingly cooperate.
During a home visit last year, the P.O.s found all sorts of porn, including child porn, on the family computer. So they confiscated the hard drive.
Legal issues arose that prevented prosecution. The sex offender specialists have been patiently biding their time ever since, figuring the opportunity will present itself again eventually.
As his wife and child stand by, the offender tells the visiting officers he's experienced a breakthrough in his therapy. "There are no more secrets," he says.
His wife of 20-odd years seconds the assessment. She says there was always a good man inside and "God has finally let him out."
"Secrecy is a sex offender's biggest problem," Settell says as he walks through the man's home, politely seeking permission to look here and check there. Finding nothing amiss, he thanks the family for the cooperation and apologizes for interrupting dinner.
---
Settell thinks the man may have made some real progress, but Bach's not convinced.
"I'd like to check his computer at work," she says as she fastens her seat belt. "I just don't trust him."
Transformation or not, continued scrutiny can keep a man from resuming old habits that are hard to break.
"If I can prevent just one offender from re-offending," he says, his voice trailing off. "That's why we do it every day."
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