by David DeKok
The same guaranteed access to the legal system that protects good people, giving them their day in court, also grants nearly unfettered access to those whose motives are less pure. American judges have historically been reluctant to bar any but the most flagrantly frivolous of litigation, meaning that a defendant can be forced to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees just to get to dismissal. It mattered little to Haefner that he lost nearly all of his revenge lawsuits. The point was to inflict pain on his perceived enemies or to massage his easily bruised ego, and filing a lawsuit accomplished both quite nicely, even if he lost.
In fact, the only significant revenge lawsuit that Haefner pursued in which he was conventionally victorious was against Los Angeles County as owner of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and against certain officials of the museum. This lawsuit was in court in the early 1980s. Rick’s grievances were many, dating back to February 17, 1976, when the museum terminated its offer to hire him as curator of mineralogy-geology. That occurred after Marion Stuart, a member of the museum board and a major donor, learned of his arrest on the molestation charges in Lancaster. Haefner didn’t disclose the arrests when he was being interviewed for the position, or when it was finally offered to him. Although he claimed that museum officials told him he would be considered for other positions, three years later, when Rick applied for the position of chief curator of Earth Science, he received a summary letter of rejection. They wanted nothing more to do with him.4
Deciding to fight back, Rick and his mother, Ere Haefner, flew to Los Angeles in February 1980. They showed up at the home of Leon G. Arnold, who was acting director of the museum and chief of personnel, and confronted him. According to Chris Haefner, who was told the story by Rick, Arnold admitted that Rick was qualified for the curator positions but would never be hired because of his arrest on the child molestation charges. Haefner claimed he was told that he would forever have a “black mark” against him, and that his presence at the Museum of Natural History would be bad for the museum’s image. Chris Haefner says Rick secretly recorded the conversation and that it proved crucial to his case, although, again, it should be noted that only Rick’s interpretation of this meeting is known.5
Haefner made other accusations in his complaint. He revealed that he had applied for a job at the Smithsonian Institution in October 1981 and that the official who did the vetting was his old F&M classmate, Harold Banks Jr. Banks phoned Arnold and was told, according to Haefner’s lawsuit, that the museum didn’t hire Rick in 1976 because of his arrest on the molestation charges. Banks can’t have been totally surprised, since he was a character witness for Haefner at the trial, but regardless, Rick didn’t get the Smithsonian job. Rick would also claim that Marion Stuart urged that he not be hired by the US Geological Survey when he sought a job there in 1983. She told a USGS geologist that she had Rick checked out thoroughly, and that he was a repeat sex offender.6
One of Haefner’s stronger arguments in his litigation was that the museum’s decision to deny him employment based on an arrest, rather than a conviction, violated the California Labor Code. But there was more to it than that. The law simply didn’t allow a California employer to treat a job applicant in the way the museum had treated Haefner, even given his background. Part of the lawsuit was thrown out in 1982, but the rest lived on and was later modified to incorporate the allegations regarding the Smithsonian and USGS jobs he had sought. US District Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer denied a defense motion for summary judgment on July 12, 1984. This ultimately led to settlement talks and to a payment by the museum to Haefner of damages said by Chris Haefner to have been upward of $250,000. He hid the money from his creditors, especially from Richard A. Sprague, his lawyer, and lived on that for years, according to Chris. He never won another significant lawsuit, even though he filed many and caused considerable pain to the targets of his wrath.7
In the first blush of their professional relationship, Rick Haefner and Richard A. Sprague agreed that because of the nature of the criminal charges filed against him in 1975—child molestation—there might be a strong civil rights case for damages against the Lancaster Police Department. It is no surprise that Haefner thought so. He spent nearly every waking minute obsessed with his victimhood. Sprague, who did not respond to several requests for an interview for this book, believed in Rick’s innocence, and the case was the kind he loved. Seemingly, it was about a little guy inexplicably persecuted by a small-town legal system run amok. It is no surprise he thought it might yield a strong civil lawsuit for damages.8
There was no doubt he was a skilled litigator; in assessing the winnability of Haefner’s case, though, Sprague was at a disadvantage. It is doubtful Rick ever told him about the other boys he had approached for sex over the past fourteen years, ever since that first reported incident in 1962. Nor, we can imagine, did Rick seem mentally ill. Indeed, he could come off as charming, intelligent, and normal, according to Chris Haefner. Rick and Sprague would spend seven years together as client and lawyer, until Haefner’s anger and paranoia got the better of him.9
When Sprague filed the lawsuit on March 9, 1981, the defendants were, in order, the County of Lancaster, Lancaster County Prison, the City of Lancaster, Lancaster Police Department, Detective Jerry P. Crump and Sergeant Edward H. Snyder, Jimmy Burkey, because of his role as a concerned older brother in encouraging Kevin’s accusations against Haefner, Kevin Burkey himself, Thomas Dommel, captain of the guard at the county jail, and Randy K., the other victim. The defendants who were government employees were also sued as individuals in case the court ruled they had immunity in their public roles.
Haefner demanded compensatory and punitive damages in excess of $50,000. He accused the defendants of engaging in a conspiracy that resulted in him being denied his right to a fair and impartial criminal trial. His prosecution was “malicious,” he said, intended to inflict emotional distress. He accused the Lancaster police of having a policy or practice of condoning false testimony. He specifically accused the Burkey brothers and Randy K. of knowingly providing false testimony to Detectives Crump and Snyder, intended to result in his arrest. His standard complaints about the polygraph and the supposed deal the police ignored were also included.
In dismissing the lawsuit on August 11, 1981, US District Judge E. Mac Troutman zeroed in on the statute of limitations, saying Haefner should have filed the lawsuit before February 1978. Troutman ruled that it didn’t matter whether his complaint had merit. Nor, under federal law, could Haefner claim malicious prosecution, because his trial had ended in a mistrial. To seek damages for malicious prosecution, he would need to have been convicted.10
Rick was furious, believing that Sprague, the lawyer who had saved him from prison, must have filed a “defective” lawsuit. Sprague filed an appeal on Rick’s behalf to the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals, and later, to the US Supreme Court, but neither luck nor law was with him. He also filed a second civil rights lawsuit that he hoped would evade the statute of limitations problem by adding later events that Haefner claimed were part of the alleged conspiracy. Judge Troutman did not agree. He dismissed the new lawsuit but transferred parts of the case back to Lancaster County Common Pleas Court, the last place Haefner wanted to be. Rick was beside himself with anger.11
He would continue to harass some of the defendants with further lawsuits that he filed himself, especially the various members of Kevin Burkey’s family. If Rick Haefner hated anyone more than the Lancaster police or the Lancaster Recreation Commission, it was the Burkeys—David, Jimmy, their parents, Harry and Eileen, in addition to Kevin. They had once been his neighbors on Nevin Street but had moved away after the parents divorced. Between 1981 and 1995, Kevin Burkey was tied up in one lawsuit after another. David and Jimmy were in some of them, especially after 1989.
It was a remarkable instance of one psychopathic pedophile’s misuse of the legal system to ruin the lives of his accusers. No judge seemed able to stop it. N
o sooner would one of Haefner’s lawsuits be thrown out of court than he would be back with another, or so it seemed. Too often, the judges in Lancaster County seemed to be on autopilot, unable to see the harm that was occurring before their very eyes. Rick was relentless, without pity, and he forced his victims—the Burkeys were not alone—to worry endlessly and pay money to lawyers to defend themselves and avoid a default judgment. They had no choice. Rick would have destroyed them if he could. The Burkeys were not angels, and they used questionable tactics at times to get back at Haefner. But they were the real victims, and their agony lasted for twenty years, beginning the day Rick took Kevin Burkey to the garage until 1995, when the last of the lawsuits involving the brothers was dismissed.
Chapter 32
Paranoid and Agitated
Rick Haefner became convinced that the police and prosecutors in Lancaster and Lancaster County were entirely corrupt and were engaged in a conspiracy to deprive him of his civil rights. The lawsuits stemming from his 1975 arrest, beginning with the one filed by Richard A. Sprague, were only part of a broad effort by him to persuade the world that he, Dr. Richard Haefner, a distinguished professor of geology, was a victim of a relentless, sordid conspiracy.
At first, he thought that if he went to federal law enforcement outside of Lancaster County, he would get an objective hearing and could make his case that what he said was true. Late in 1976, or early in 1977, not long after a private detective he hired to look for dirt on his accuser, Kevin Burkey, allegedly was hassled by the Lancaster police, Rick went to the offices of crusading US Attorney David W. Marston in Philadelphia and told his story. But Marston wasn’t interested, much to Haefner’s dismay. This should have been no surprise. No one who approaches a prosecutor—or a newspaper reporter, for that matter—and claims that the entire local law enforcement system is corrupt is going to get a good reception unless they have some really solid evidence. They’ve heard it all before, and it never seems any less paranoid. But such were Haefner’s delusions of grandeur that he thought Doctor Richard Haefner, PhD, would automatically be believed.1
Haefner had little trouble attracting sympathetic coverage from the Philadelphia newspapers. Stories about potential police or government corruption and the little guy fighting back were an easy sell to journalists in those post-Watergate days, especially in Philadelphia. It was no surprise, and little reflection on them, that they went for Haefner’s story. He was white, handsome, well educated—a college professor! He told a good story, and the renowned Richard A. Sprague was his lawyer. What more was necessary? No one knew of his earlier pedophilia incidents. The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote a story in 1976 when Sprague first took his case, and on March 18, 1979, a week after the double jeopardy ruling, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin weighed in. Then on its last legs (it would cease publication in 1982), but still turning out quality journalism, the Bulletin published a long story and sidebar by David Runkel about Haefner’s quest for vindication.
“My career has been in limbo,” Haefner lamented to Runkel. “My interest is in Death Valley. I haven’t had access to it, or to any laboratory equipment or computers that are essential for my research. I have read articles, but have not been able to pursue my research, or teaching, or my museum work.” No one would hire him, he complained. Rick told the Bulletin that the arrest and trial had ruined his parents and brother financially, leaving them “destitute.” They would all leave Lancaster if only they could. Not wanting to miss an opportunity, he leveled a blast at the legal system in Lancaster County. “The courts operate directly contrary to the way I’ve been trained,” he told Runkel. “In science, we assume the integrity of the other side and organize the facts around that. In Lancaster County law, you attack the integrity of the other side and ignore the facts. Logic has no part in the legal system of Lancaster County.” It was a remarkable portrait of how Haefner thought. He assumed that the criminal justice system outside of Lancaster County operated like a genteel academic debate in the Deike Building at Penn State. “I shudder to think of where I would be if it weren’t for Mr. Sprague,” said Rick, concluding his remarks to the Bulletin. “He unlocked the truth.”2
But despite his good press, the harassment continued—at least as he saw it. Rick claimed in one of his lawsuits that on June 11, 1979, and October 4, 1979, he was accosted by Lancaster police officers in a parking garage in downtown Lancaster and threatened with arrest unless he produced identification. And that on March 5, 1980, he was stopped by police on the street and advised to plead guilty to the Randy K. charges, about three weeks before they were withdrawn by the prosecution. And that on March 25,1980, the police photographed him on the street. Were the police messing with him? It’s hard to say, but it would not be entirely surprising.3
Brilliant, yet too obtuse to understand the consequences of what he was doing, Haefner tried to turn the tables on the police, helped by his brother George when he was visiting from California. George would watch from a parking garage across the street from the city police station and try to obtain video evidence of the Lancaster police mistreating Rick when he went downtown and, apparently deliberately, strolled past the station. Chris Haefner remembers that George got in trouble once when police accosted him in the parking garage and took his videotape. But he continued to watch them, sometimes helped by their mother, Ere Haefner. This went on for years, and one has to wonder whether George, in particular, and perhaps even Ere had their own mental health issues.4
Late in 1980, Rick took his accusations about corrupt law enforcement in Lancaster to the FBI. On November 24, he phoned the Public Corruption Hotline run by the Philadelphia Field Office of the FBI to state his concerns, but he apparently received no reply, or at least no reply that satisfied him. So off he went to Washington, DC, appearing at the office of US Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, where the staff inexplicably referred him to US Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater’s staff referred him to FBI Headquarters. Haefner then was referred to the Washington Field Office of the FBI to make his complaint. He described who he was and why he believed the entire police department in Lancaster to be corrupt, along with the district attorney’s office in the county. He alleged that “certain judges” were also involved in a conspiracy to deprive him and others of their civil rights. Rick told the FBI that he never molested anyone and that the accusations against him were concocted by Harry Burkey, Kevin’s father. The FBI agent took careful notes on everything he said, telling him they would send an agent to interview him at home in Lancaster.5
An agent did visit him at his house on December 22. Haefner later complained bitterly to the Harrisburg Field Office of the FBI that the agent “excused himself early that day and did not finish taking the complaint from me.” The agent had apparently promised to return “after the notes he had taken thus far were typed up.” And of course, he had not returned. Rick knew a blow-off when he saw one. In a February 6, 1981, letter, Haefner protested that the agent had requested him to make his statement in detailed, chronological order, and that he was far from being finished when the agent abruptly excused himself and left. Like some other people of a paranoid bent, Rick could not stop talking about his perceived victimization.6
In a memo to William Webster, the director of the FBI in 1981, the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Philadelphia office explained that Haefner had spoken to at least seven agents during the course of making his complaint. He noted pointedly that Haefner “considers himself” exonerated of the molestation charges against him in Lancaster. “It is believed that further contact with Haefner would be both counterproductive and unnecessary,” the agent wrote. “Both in personal and telephonic contacts, Haefner has adopted an adversary posture.” In a reply memo from headquarters, he was advised to inform Haefner that his complaint had been reviewed by the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, and that “no further investigation has been requested by the Department.” Like every agency that dealt wi
th Rick Haefner, the FBI seemed under no illusion that he was blameless in what had happened to him.7
On the same day he mailed the letter to the FBI complaining of the truncated interview, Haefner, now thirty-seven years old, appeared in an agitated state at the downtown offices of the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal and New Era newspapers. In a subsequent lawsuit against the City of Lancaster and the police officers who arrested him, Rick said he went to the newspaper offices to arrange for publication of a news story about his belief that the city and its police department were engaged in a corrupt conspiracy against him. He was probably upset, too, because the FBI had shown no interest in his case. That was why he had sent the letter that morning. Rick’s visit to the newspapers did not go well.8
The subsequent police report doesn’t fill in all the details, but suggests that Haefner was denied permission to enter the newsroom and began yelling at the reception staff and acting aggressively. They urged him to use the lobby phone to talk to a reporter. Ernest Schreiber, the reporter for the New Era who spoke to him, recalls the incident today but not what they talked about. Meanwhile, the staff phoned the police and three officers arrived. They talked Haefner out of the phone booth—the lobby phone was in a phone booth for privacy—and away from the receptionists. Officer John Wertz asked for identification. Rick insisted he didn’t have to provide it. He began pacing the lobby, moving back toward the reception desk, and became boisterous. Finally he reached over the counter into the cashier’s area, almost inviting a police response.9