How do you catch a child molestor?
My daughter insists she was molested by my ex brother in law, when she was eleven. She didn't tell until she was seventeen, and my sister had filed for a divorce from this man, obtaining an epo which stated he couldn't come near her or her family.. Bonnie's reason for not telling until that time, was his threat "I'll kill you and put your body so far deep in the coal mines they'll never find you."
This threat of his has been made by him so often, that most anyone who knows him has heard him repeat one variation of it or the other. Even a police officer who was in that family heard him repeat it at a family dinner.
When Bonnie first told me what he'd done, I didn't question it, but phoned the state police right away to let them handle it. They questioned him, but he denied it. They set up a phone recorder, had Bonnie call him, and even though he thought she was in Mexico - a runaway - he didn't ask where she was, how she was, just 'what do you want?' and then when she told him she'd told us, his answer to her was "Don't start." and he hung up.
A police officer took some equipment to my sister's house to try to find seminal fluid on the carpet but found nothing. This had been 6 years previously, and the carpet has been cleaned many times since this happened to my daughter.
The alleged molester was a big man. A very overweight man, and yet he has a teeny little penis. He also has birthmarks in that area. My daughter was accurately able to describe size, marks, everything to prove what she was saying had happened. She satisfied the officers that he had actually done what she'd said he did, yet since it was her word against his, and she waited so long to speak up, the grand jury wouldn't indict him. They wanted more proof.
In the past, this man has also told us that if he ever had to take a lie detector test he would pass it easily. He informed us that all he had to do was to confuse the test by putting a thumb tack in his shoe, and press it down into his toe every time he had to answer a question. Too, he said he could take a valium and be so mellow he could pass one. Only in hindsight, did I pause to wonder why the hell he even bothered to mention how he could pass a lie detector test. Yes. Bonnie was in the room. I think now, that he was letting her know right there in front of her family that there wasn't a damned thing she could do about what he had done to her.
So how do we catch this guy? How do we get him indicted so that he can't do this to another child? There was nothing we could do.
His son used to have a rash around his bottom, rectal bleeding when he was from three to four years old. The doctors checked it and said he must have strained when having a bowel movement. Later, we learned these too were signs of child molestation. Still, even though there was also Bonnie's allegation, there was no proof. No eye witnesses. Hell, what sort of child molestor would do something so horrible in front of a witness who wouldn't be too afraid to tell?
During one of his visitations with his father this past spring, my nephew came back and while playing with his cousing, he grabbed his cousins privates while wrestling, and my sister caught them. She asked him what he was doing, and he replied that he was giving his cousin a "coal miner's hold". When my sister asked him who taught this to him, he replied that another cousin had while visiting his father, in the presence of his father, and that his father (the man who allegedly molested my daughter) told him that it was a coal miner's hold. My sister told him that he wasn't to touch other people's private areas, nor was anyone to touch his. She said that understanding lit in his eyes and after a couple of more visits he decided he wasn't going back up there anymore.
The thing is, he wouldn't state why. He refuses to say why. Is he too afraid of being killed and thrown deep into a coal mine where no one will ever find his body?
So tell me. How.. How do you catch a son of a bitch like this? So that it's not his word against the child's he's hurting? How?