by Bill Moushey
Even the Sandusky football routine seemed to fit Sandusky’s purposes. On nights before home games, the Nittany Lions stayed at the Toftrees Resort and Conference Center right in State College. Toftrees was a perfect hideaway. It was located within ten minutes of Beaver Stadium, yet it was isolated on a 1500-acre parcel of land away from the Friday night Penn State rah-rah. Curfew was a lot easier to enforce at Toftrees than it would have been in campus dormitories. Sandusky invited the young man to stay with him at Toftrees and sexually abused him there, according to prosecutors. In addition, Sandusky had the young man join his family on bowl games to Orlando, Florida, in 1998 and San Antonio, Texas, in 1999. He said Sandusky visited his room in the team hotel on the Texas trip and threated to send him home if sexual advances were refused, according to the documents supporting the criminal charges made against Sandusky.
The number of children alleging abuse in the same time period is revoltingly mind-blowing. Also in 1997, yet another boy said he was lured into Sandusky’s secret world. The boy was eleven and had been experiencing personal problems at home. A school counselor had referred him to The Second Mile. Sandusky knew of the child’s issues at home and took an immediate interest in him. Within a short time Sandusky’s behavior became intimate. He said he was hugged, rubbed, cuddled, and tickled. When he was invited to sleep over at Sandusky’s house, the boy was overjoyed. But he was soon horrified when he was molested in the basement bedroom by the man who acted like a father to him, the young man said. The abuse lasted for three years, according to the boy. He said he endured being repeatedly forced to perform oral sex on Sandusky and was raped at least sixteen times. Most disturbing was this contention, according to the grand jury presentment: “On at least one occasion he screamed for help, knowing that Sandusky’s wife was upstairs, but no one came to help him.”
It is unclear if the alleged abuse of this boy was still going on in May 1998, when another child came home with wet hair after an evening with Sandusky. It was this child’s mother who called Penn State campus police to set the 1998 investigation in motion. It is saddening now to recall Sandusky’s promise to the boy’s mother after that investigation was fizzling that he would never shower with her son or any other child again. That a grown man got a pass after showering with an eleven-year-old boy and having a complaint registered by his mother is heartbreaking. Worse is that the campus police investigation and subsequent reprimand of Sandusky did nothing to stop him from continuing his inappropriate behavior with other young men, according to prosecutors. If anything, it’s possible that Sandusky was so relieved that the campus police didn’t think his behavior rose to the level of criminality that he became even more emboldened. He also learned that being a prominent figure on campus worked in his favor.
While he was still being investigated for that shower incident, Sandusky spoke at the 1998 commencement ceremonies at State College Area High, which were held in the Bryce Jordan Center of the Penn State campus.
Remarkably two more events of sexual abuse were alleged to have occurred in 2000. The first involved the child who came to the attention of authorities because another child was an eyewitness. The witness said he saw Sandusky inappropriately touching someone from The Second Mile. The child who was allegedly being touched wasn’t discovered until Corporal Joe Leiter began his door-to-door investigation nearly ten years later. The young man later told the grand jury that Sandusky had plied him with gifts and trips to football games and other places before he was also taken into the Holuba Hall shower. The physical contact had begun with rubs and hair washes and eventually naked bear hugs, the young man said. Sandusky also invited him to his house for overnights, where Sandusky touched him inappropriately until he’d turn over on his stomach to stop the molestation, he said. The boy stopped all contact with Sandusky, telling his parents he wanted nothing more to do with the man.
By the fall of 2000 Jerry Sandusky was no longer an employee of the university. But he still had an office in the Lasch Building and was authorized to use the sports facilities, workout rooms, and the training centers, along with the changing rooms, saunas, whirlpools, and showers. That fall a janitor named Jim Calhoun told fellow employee Ronald Petrosky that he had witnessed Sandusky performing oral sex on a child who seemed no older than twelve, according to the grand jury report. Petrosky encouraged Calhoun to report what he had witnessed to his supervisor, Jay Witherite. In his testimony before the grand jury, Witherite said he told Calhoun who in the Penn State chain of command to contact if he wanted to report the incident. No report was ever filed by Calhoun, who currently suffers from dementia and is incompetent to testify, according to the grand jury report.
As far as the public was concerned, Sandusky was a model citizen. He received awards and adulation from a number of organizations in 2000. The American Football Coaches Association honored him as the Assistant Coach of the Year at its convention on January 10, 2000. At the presentation ceremony Sandusky spoke on the topic of “Working with Young People.” The Philadelphia Sports Writers Association also honored Sandusky with its career achievement award on January 17, 2000. At another event, this one on April 14, 2000, about 1,200 people attended a testimonial and roasted Sandusky at the Bryce Jordan Center. Joe Paterno made a very brief appearance, saying he had to leave early because of a prior commitment. Paterno said Sandusky was “what Penn State is all about,” according to news coverage of the event.
Penn State’s first game after Sandusky’s retirement was a 24–6 loss to Toledo on September 2, 2000. Sandusky attended the game, but he was not mentioned over the public address system. At Homecoming Weekend on October 21, 2000, Sandusky served as the grand marshal of the homecoming parade. From his seat in an open convertible he tossed candy to the crowd lining the streets.
His coaching days over, Sandusky wrote his life’s story in an autobiography. Touched: the Jerry Sandusky Story was published in 2001 and detailed the fun times he had working with kids from The Second Mile, including summer camps held on the Penn State campus. In one passage, he wrote, “I believe I live a good part of my life in a make-believe world. I enjoyed pretending as a kid, and I love doing the same as an adult with these kids. Pretending has always been a part of me. I’ve loved trying to do the right things to hopefully make a difference in kids’ lives and maybe make things better off for them . . . I enjoy the life that I have had, and I’ll never regret being called a ‘great’ pretender.” In another segment, he wrote: “At the times when I found myself searching for maturity, I usually come up with insanity. That’s the way it is in the life of Gerald Arthur Sandusky.”
BEHIND THE SCENES HIS CONTACT with Second Mile boys was continuing. Even after the incident in May 2002, when Mike McQueary saw him with a child in the showers, Sandusky still received only minimal punishment. It seemed as though people who could have made certain that law enforcement and child protection became involved chose instead to simply keep Sandusky from bringing kids onto campus. By once again giving him a pass they enforced his sense that he could get away with doing whatever he wanted. Their decision to adhere to Penn State’s code of silence rather than sound alarms over the rights and protections of a small child will haunt the campus for a long time. So many elements of the story are distressing, not the least of which is that neither Paterno, nor Curley, nor Schultz, nor McQueary, nor Spanier ever tried to find the boy and get his version of the event. They seemed like they hoped the whole thing would just go away. Banning Sandusky from bringing children onto campus, surrendering his keys, and taking away his privileges seemed to be the best they could come up with. Of course, that had no effect on his behavior. He was still seen at all the football games and freely coming and going from the Lasch Building, where he still had an office. Athletic Director Tim Curley later acknowledged in his grand jury testimony that the ban he imposed on Sandusky was unenforceable. Sandusky continued to use the Penn State facilities for nine more years until he was indicted on November 5, 2011.
On March 28, 2002, Sandusky was a cele
brity coach in the annual Easter Bowl, a fundraising football game sponsored by the Easter Seals of Central Pennsylvania. The event raised $14,500 for the Easter Seals. Interestingly, McQueary was one of the players on Sandusky’s team for that event.
On April 3, 2003 Sandusky and Katherine Genovese, vice president of programs for The Second Mile, accepted an award on behalf of the charity for Organization of the Year presented by The Pennsylvania School Counselors Association Five months later, Sandusky was presented with a Congressional Angels in Adoption Award after being nominated by the then-U.S. Senator Rick Santorum R-Pennsylvania, a 1980 graduate of Penn State. The citation said: “It is easier to develop a child than rehabilitate an adult.”
Despite the supposed restrictions against Sandusky, a twelve-year-old who was attending a Second Mile summer camp at Penn State said he was raped in Sandusky’s office in 2004. The young man was not among those who testified before the grand jury, but he filed a lawsuit against Sandusky in 2011. According to the lawsuit, the boy said Sandusky was awarding prizes to Second Milers who could answer questions on current events. The boy was applauded for his correct answer but Sandusky said he had exhausted his supply of prizes. He asked the boy to follow him to his office, where he could find him a gift in his stash. Inside the office, decorated with coaching awards and pictures of kids he had helped through his charity over the years, Sandusky gave the young boy a glass of whiskey and then sexually assaulted him.
“He gets him in a room. He’s on one side of the desk, the boy is on other,” said his lawyer in a posting on the law firm’s website. “[Sandusky] proceeded to engage him in conversation—he had lost his mother, his mother died the year before, he had a very hard time, they were very close—they talked for a while about that. Then [Sandusky] pulled out a glass with alcohol in it and told him to drink it. Then he sodomized him.” Afterward Sandusky gave the child a commemorative hockey puck and a bottle inscribed with details of a football championship. The child then returned to The Second Mile camp.
On November 6, 2004, Sandusky was inducted into the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame in Lancaster. His father had been inducted fifteen years earlier.
The following year another boy, this one eleven years old, said he also met Sandusky at a Second Mile camp on the Penn State campus. Sandusky was extremely generous with him, giving him golf clubs, a computer, clothing, and money. He took the boy with him to college and professional sporting events. Then came the invitation for the overnight at the Sanduskys’ house. True to the pattern, Sandusky rubbed the boy’s back when he was putting him to bed. The contact progressed to Sandusky’s performing sex acts on the boy and having the boy engage in similar activity with him, according to testimony given to the investigating grand jury.
Meanwhile, Sandusky and former Penn State players were honored on March 23, 2007, at a fundraiser connected with The Second Mile’s Celebration of Excellence program. The event was held in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and was publicized in a news release by the Penn State sport information department. In addition, Sandusky delivered the commencement address on campus for the Penn State College of Health and Human Development on May 19, 2007. Less than a month later, Sandusky participated in a charity golf tournament benefitting The Second Mile. The event involved former football players from Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh. One of the items sold during a silent auction was as Penn State football jersey autographed by Joe Paterno. In September 2010, Sandusky retired from day-to-day involvement in The Second Mile, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family and to handle personal matters.
The first story about the statewide investigation into Sandusky’s alleged sexual abuse of boys in his charity appeared March 31, 2011, in the Patriot News of Harrisburg. Penn State’s spring practice media day was held the next day, but Joe Paterno, who had testified before the grand jury, refused to answer questions about the story. “Well, I came here to talk about football and this football team, and I don’t have any comment on that,” Paterno told sports writers.
Sandusky was seen working out at campus facilities a week before he was arrested on November 5, 2011. On the day he was arraigned, the Creamery, the on-campus ice cream factory, still offered a concoction called the Sandusky Blitz, which featured banana-flavored ice cream with chocolate-covered peanuts and caramel swirl.
In an interview published December 3, 2011, in The New York Times, Sandusky disputed the notion he had led the double-life of a humanitarian and someone who was sexually assaulting young boys. “They’ve taken everything that I ever did for any young person and twisted it to say that my motives were sexual or whatever,” Sandusky said.
His attorney, Joe Amendola, who sat in on the interview, chimed in. “All those good things you were doing have been turned around, and the people who are painting you as a monster are saying, ‘Well, they’re the types of things that people who are pedophiles exhibit, ’ ” Amendola told the newspaper.
Four days after that interview was published, Sandusky was arrested and arraigned on new charges brought by two new accusers, bringing the total number to ten young men who had told their stories under oath to an investigating grand jury. One young man, identified by prosecutors as Victim 9, said he was sexually assaulted after meeting Sandusky in 1997. Another, listed in the indictment as Victim 10, said the sex abuse by Sandusky started in 2004.
“As in many of the other cases identified to date, the contact with Sandusky allegedly fit a pattern of grooming victims,” Attorney General Linda Kelly said in a statement on December 7, 2011. “Beginning with outings to football games and gifts, they later included physical contact that escalated to sexual assaults.”
At his second arraignment, Sandusky befittingly wore a blue-and-white Penn State workout outfit with a Nittany Lion logo.
Chapter 15
Preliminary Hearing for Curley and Schultz
On December 16, 2011, Tim Curley and Gary Schultz solemnly emerged from their vehicles at the Dauphin County Courthouse in Harrisburg after their eighty-mile drive from State College. As police officers held back the crowd, the men and their lawyers entered the mammoth stone courthouse through the main doors on Market and Front Streets. They passed through metal detectors and then were screened with electronic wands by guards stationed just outside the courtroom doors. The public was about to hear testimony for the first time related to the child sex abuse charges brought against Jerry Sandusky.
Both men were facing a preliminary hearing on charges that they failed to act properly in a 2002 incident on campus involving Sandusky and a ten-year-old boy, and that they had lied about it before a statewide investigative grand jury. The media had gathered to witness the public proceedings, but the number of reporters was half the throng that had gathered three days earlier in Bellefonte at the Centre County Courthouse. Even though their ranks had been thinned, media members and other courtroom observers who were granted seats through a lottery system had to wait in a long queue to enter the courthouse. They too had to file past the menacing police dogs and through the double layer of security to get inside the proceedings presided over by District Judge William C. Wenner.
Before the hearing convened, a court administrator warned everyone in the crowded room that no outbursts would be tolerated and that anyone who left during the proceeding would not be allowed to return until a recess was called. Those inside the room were told to remain seated at all times, even if a fire alarm sounded. These rules were to prevent distractions in the spacious chamber, even though the judge earlier had granted permission to reporters to bring their laptops inside so that they could transmit accounts of the hearing to social media networks.
Just before nine o’clock Curley and Schultz settled into their seats. In front of them was a marble wall on which were chiseled the words “No man can be deprived of his life, liberty or property unless by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” The fate of Curley and Schultz hinged largely on the testimony of another Penn State employee, Mike
McQueary. The lawyers for Curley and Schultz steadfastly contended they had not committed any crimes, but the attorneys also knew that the preliminary hearing would likely result in a ruling that would send the case to a full trial.
In the preliminary hearing the prosecution’s burden was only to show that there was reasonable suspicion that a crime had been committed. Once that evidentiary hurdle was cleared, the cases would go to trial. No one expected the men to waive their hearing as Sandusky had done, or that the charges against them would be dropped. The Pennsylvania attorney general had publicly announced that McQueary had already told a grand jury what he had witnessed. Still, anticipation was palpable in the courtroom.
The government’s case was built on what McQueary said he told Curley and Schultz about the nature of the incident and what the two Penn State officials had sworn was the truth before the grand jury. McQueary claimed he had reported a very specific sexual assault to them. Both Curley and Schultz said the assistant coach mentioned inappropriate horseplay, but not a sexual assault.
At eight minutes after nine o’clock the lawyers for Curley and Schultz waived the reading of the indictments against them. Next McQueary walked quickly through the chamber’s back door and up the room’s center aisle past both defendants to the witness box. Dressed in a blue pinstriped suit, he raised his right hand and swore that what he was about to say was the truth.
After taking his seat McQueary nodded toward Curley. He rubbed his ears and the tightly shorn sides of his bright red hair before he consumed the first of many cups of water he would down during the next two hours of testimony. A helpless frown had replaced the broad smile friends were accustomed to seeing on Curley’s face as McQueary began. Schultz, sitting at semi-attention on the edge of his chair, alternately gazed at McQueary and at the legal notebook in front of him.
In a deliberate tone, McQueary repeated what he had said before the grand jury. He happened upon Sandusky and the child after venturing to the Lasch Building at nine o’clock on a Friday night before the beginning of spring break 2002 to retrieve films of potential Penn State recruits. He went to the graduate assistant locker room to put away a pair of new sneakers when he heard the slapping sounds of wet skin from what could have been a sex act. As he walked toward the shower he saw through a reflection in a mirror Sandusky leaning against a child. On a second trip into the area seconds later, he witnessed Sandusky holding the child’s waist from behind, their bodies locked together. He retreated again, slammed the door of his locker shut, and returned for a third view. By then the man and the boy had separated. He didn’t see Sandusky’s genitalia or penetration, he said, but added, “That’s what I believe was happening,” especially since he saw the boy’s hands against the shower wall. Once he saw them apart, he thought the child was safe and figured it was best to leave the awkward situation because his mind was racing. “To be frank, I can’t describe what I was feeling or thinking. Shocked and horrified, quite frankly, not thinking straight. I was distraught,” McQueary said from the witness chair.