Posted on 08/24/2004 10:59:08 AM PDT by Pyro7480
....He was a strange, strange lad," said Jack Gannon, a former neighbor in this Seattle suburb. "When he was 12 or 13, I caught him stealing balls out of my golf cart. I chastised him and sent him home. He came back with a rifle. I jerked it away and busted it up and took him back to his dad."
Anger was just the veneer. Beneath it, Stokes harbored a hunger for sexual violence that took root early, in encounters with younger boys that began, by his own account, when he was 9....
Today, Stokes, 48, is known to authorities as one of the West's most insatiable sexual predators. By his own count, he has assaulted scores of boys and young men over a generation. Prosecutors still hope to put him in prison for life.
What sets Stokes apart from other serial sex offenders is his ability to escape prolonged incarceration in an era of habitual-offender laws and minimum sentences. Though often caught, he has never been stopped.
Stokes has been convicted of felonies stemming from sexual assaults at least five times and has spent more than 20 years behind bars in four states. Yet each time, he has managed to avoid a lengthy prison term, get free again and find new victims. Along the way, he's caught plenty of breaks: cases weakened by uncooperative witnesses and clouded recollections, cases dropped or plea-bargained by prosecutors.
"He appears to be like a giant teddy bear," said Lynda Estes, a former Oregon sheriff's detective who arrested Stokes in the early 1990s for allegedly sodomizing two teenage boys, and then watched as he plea-bargained the case to avoid a potential life sentence. "But he is evil to the core."
(Excerpt) Read more at story.news.yahoo.com ...
Oh yeah. This guy is a Charles Manson level wierdo. His family adopted him and he spent his youth in a mortuary. He was said to have been caught molesting the dead.
So judgemental. Not at all nuanced. Who are you to judge? Tisk tisk.
(steely)
Anyone wanna guess which I am leaning toward?
Meanwhile, there was an article in the L.A. Weekly last week about a guy who was accused of some truly heinous child abuse back in the 1980s. Told by his lawyer that the only way he'd ever see daylight again was to plead guilty, he copped. He spent something like twelve years in prison, then was shipped off to the state mental hospital for treatment. Eventually he stopped protesting his innocence and learned to say what the therapists wanted him to say. After about six years in the hospital, he'd made so much "progress" that they decided he didn't pose any threat and put him up for release. As part of the procedure, they went back and interviewed the two kids who had accused him. They admitted that the whole story was false, originally concocted by an aunt and coached by DAs. The aunt was out to get custody of the kids for the welfare checks and had accused the mother and father. The guy was just a neighbor they tossed into the accusation to make it even more lurid.
He doesn't look like a "teddy bear." He looks like a monster.
He isn't a 'teddy bear'; that's some liberal-demokkkRAT-left-wing-wacko-rehabilitator who thinks that murderers and pedophiles can be returned to society, without any of the 100% recidivism rate.
Some People Just Need Killing™. ASAP!
What's your point?
Someone else should end it for him.
That the whole system is f**ked? That the guilty go free while the innocent serve time?
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