by Sid Holt
In the winter of 2013, after years of being turned down for employment, Christian, then twenty-eight, was offered a job in Idaho as a clean-energy repairman for a well-known company. Giddy, he packed his suitcase and said his good-byes. The night before his departure, he got a call. “Something’s come up,” a woman from the company told him; the company had run a criminal-background check and learned of his sex offense, and she had to let him know the bad news. “I heard the call,” Barnes said. “He was absolutely destroyed.”
One afternoon the following spring, Christian called his mother, sounding frantic: “Mom, did you know I can’t even come into the school and pick up my own kid?” His daughter was entering preschool. Christian hadn’t realized that his registrant status barred him from things like school visits and dance recitals. His mental health deteriorated, and within weeks he was facing a possible felony charge for falling behind on his annual registration at the police station.
On a Friday in April, Barnes called Christian from the grocery store in the early afternoon to see if he wanted anything; there was no answer. “Then I came in with my groceries, and I saw him lying there on the floor.” She pointed to the carpet, where she’d since placed an Autumn Cedar candle. “And I saw the gun three feet from his body.”
Christian had long struggled with depression, debt, and other pressures, and his former probation officer cautioned me against overly tidy explanations for suicide: “Who can know the hearts of men?” But Barnes remembers him as a fearless kid, swinging from ropes and snatching lizards from the woods. As Christian’s teenage mistake trailed him into adulthood, Barnes believes, his resilience proved unequal to the burden. She has since learned that suicide is not uncommon among registrants. Her son, who left no note, sent his girlfriend a goodbye text. “I shot myself,” it read.
• • •
Often, parents are the ones who carry the weight of the registry. In her grief, Catherine Barnes contacted Oregon Voices, an advocacy group that has the stated goal of achieving “justice and rationality in policies regarding sex offenses.” It was run by a professor whose son was arrested, several years ago, for an Internet sex crime and who had since become exercised by what he considered to be the evidence-blind nature of much sex-offense law. (In a study of more than a thousand male juveniles with sex-crime convictions, Elizabeth Letourneau and her colleagues found that public registration did not reduce repeat-offense rates.) Similar groups had emerged around the country, consisting mostly of parents whose children were on the registry or in detention. In the Midwest, there were the mothers who had formed Women Against Registry, seeking to educate the public about the effects of registration on families. In Maryland, another mother led parents in lobbying against strict residency restrictions. One of the largest and most effective advocacy groups was Texas Voices for Reason and Justice; its members include Mary Helen Metts, Anthony’s mother.
“People would rather have a murderer next door, especially here in the Bible Belt,” Metts, a Catholic hospice worker with a Southern-belle bearing, told me. When her son first appeared on the Texas registry, some friends and relatives stopped speaking to her. Then she got a letter from Mary Sue Molnar, a San Antonio mother whose son was in detention for a sex offense. The founder of Texas Voices, Molnar had contacted the families of thousands of registrants in the state. At first, Mary Helen Metts didn’t see the point of participating in the group. But after her son was sent to prison she agreed to start a local chapter of the organization in Midland. Soon she was hosting Texas Voices meetings at her husband’s oil-company office after hours. “We don’t feel like lepers anymore,” she told me.
This past June, Texas Voices hosted a gathering for a national umbrella advocacy organization called Reform Sex Offender Laws, at a church in Dallas. As many as 200 registrants and their loved ones traveled across the country to attend. Around big circular tables, parents shared stories about vigilantism and therapy troubles, as well as tips on navigating the demands of compliance. In the church’s dining hall, the group held a humble auction (“Antique cookie jar, anyone? Eighteen dollars? Twelve dollars?”) to raise lobbying funds. Among the parents whose children were charged with sex crimes, discussion revolved around how to change registry laws. Josh Gravens, the young man from Abilene who had been placed on the registry at thirteen, stood at the microphone and said that, if parents didn’t tell their kids’ stories, no one else would. “It takes a lot for a legislator to stick their neck out on this issue,” he said. “So it’s vitally important that you speak up.”
• • •
After packing up her life in Howell, Leah DuBuc boarded a plane for Tokyo. Her visit to Japan during college had filled her with a rush of big-city anonymity. Now she was determined to seek her second chance abroad.
“It was such a relief to have a fresh start,” DuBuc told me. Like nearly every other country, Japan has no public sex-offender registry. DuBuc taught English and fell in love with a Filipino man from her church named Kimo, a surfer and a karaoke enthusiast who worked at a Disney resort. She had dreamed of volunteering in India, and with Kimo’s encouragement she spent six months working in orphanages from New Delhi to Kolkata. Along the way, Kimo joined her and proposed. In 2010, they married over doughnuts in Bangalore, and soon returned to Tokyo, where their son was born.
To show the baby off, they planned to travel to Fukushima, where Kimo had spent much of his childhood and where his family still lived. But, three days after the birth, the earthquake hit, followed by the tsunami, which killed Kimo’s mother and his twelve-year-old sister.
DuBuc planned to stay in Japan, despite the devastation; she felt that God had called on her to help rebuild. Then, after a trip to obtain her in-laws’ remains, she received a flurry of Facebook messages from Sharon Denniston, her juvenile advocate in Michigan. Denniston had been pushing the legislative reforms that DuBuc had helped promote. “Be sure you are sitting down,” she wrote. “Juveniles that were less than 14 at the time of their offense will be straight out removed from the registry: no hearing, no court visit, no paperwork to fill out!”
DuBuc asked Denniston for updates as the bill was implemented.
“Sweet child of God, Leah,” Denniston wrote one evening. “Your name no longer appears on the public registry.”
DuBuc decided to take her family home. Her father now had a girlfriend who owned a horse-rescue farm, where Leah and Kimo could work while they looked for steady employment. Even without a high-school diploma, Kimo quickly found a factory job making plastic car parts. Leah’s search proved harder, despite her master’s degree. Her fingerprints and her record still popped up in certain criminal-background checks. She spent months with the baby on her back, shoveling snow from horse stalls and tending to the hogs and cows before dawn, continuing her job search when the sun came up.
She found work at the Salvation Army, helping families in search of housing, but she was let go after several months without an explanation. The pattern persisted through jobs at a bookstore, a gas station, and a fry house—the same place she’d worked as a teen, when she was certain that her adult life was destined for public service.
As DuBuc discovered, getting off a state’s online database doesn’t mean the end of online notoriety. Some companies have programs that retain information that was expunged from registries, which they publish online, demanding that offenders pay steep fees in order to have the damaging data removed. Charla Roberts, who had “pantsed” her classmate in Paris, Texas, when she was ten, was removed from the registry in her early twenties, with the help of Lone Star Legal Aid. But the Internet refused to forget. Not long ago, she learned that her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend was circulating a link to a commercial website called SexOffenderRecord.com. The site featured Charla’s photograph along with her race (black), age (twenty-five), and home address, as well as the message: “To alert others about Charla Lee Roberts’s Sex Offender Record … Just Click the Facebook Icon.”
With each rebuff, DuBu
c tried to motivate herself afresh. By her bed, she stuck a NASA bumper sticker that Kimo had given her, which read, “Failure is not an option.” And Sharon Denniston had made a present of DuBuc’s favorite prayer, from Jeremiah, in a gilt frame: “ ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord. ‘Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ ”
• • •
The reform movement’s efforts have started to see gains. In recent years, many institutions—from district attorneys’ offices to detention facilities—have improved the way they deal with youths who have committed sexual offenses. The broader justice system, too, has shifted, acknowledging that juveniles aren’t just mini-adults; not long ago, the Supreme Court affirmed that “children who commit even heinous crimes are capable of change.” The current executive director of Indian Oaks Academy, Mike Chavers, says that the institution has advanced considerably since the era of DuBuc’s treatment. “Today, while there are some children who need treatment in a more controlled setting, we know that the vast majority of individuals are better off in their own communities, closer to their families, and that’s what we’re pushing to have done,” he told me. Chavers has also recently joined the fight to reform Illinois’s juvenile-registry laws. “To write a kid off at an early age and to label them like that is just unconscionable,” he says.
In Pennsylvania, in 2014, the state Supreme Court ruled that mandatory lifetime sex-offender registration for juveniles was unconstitutional, after the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center led a legal challenge. And in Texas an official task force has formed to assess ways of improving outcomes for juveniles charged with sex offenses; Josh Gravens was invited to testify at one of its hearings this month. But the legislative provisions have proved far more recalcitrant.
One of the movement’s best hopes for advancing legislative change is an attorney named Nicole Pittman. In the early 2000s, Pittman worked as a public defender on the juvenile docket in New Orleans, where she first noticed the long-term toll that the registry took on convicted offenders. (In Louisiana, teenagers’ licenses are stamped in red with “SEX OFFENDER.”) In 2011, she embarked on a cross-country trek to interview youth registrants and their families. Her findings were released in a hundred-plus-page Human Rights Watch report, which she was sure would inspire changes in policy. On the road, Pittman met with members of local government to present her findings, and most politicians listened politely. But few, if any, were moved to action.
“The biggest barrier in this work is: ‘If I act, I’m going to lose the next election,’ ” she says. She was dejected and weighed giving up, but when she won last-minute funding from the Stoneleigh Foundation she moved her operations to Oakland, California, and launched a program called the Center on Youth Registration Reform, with a new criminal-justice-advocacy group known as Impact Justice. Then she forged a surprising alliance with Eli Lehrer, the president of the R Street Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
It was a curious pairing. Pittman favors funky red Converse sneakers, a silver nose ring, and a punk-rock-meets-courtroom aesthetic; Lehrer, a navy-blazer type, had a life-sized cutout of President Reagan in his office. Yet they both deplored juvenile registration; he saw it as a costly and invasive problem of big government, and one that flew in the face of the prevailing evidence about kids who offend against other kids. Pittman observed that some conservatives were willing to take risks that their progressive counterparts wouldn’t, to defend second chances for juvenile offenders. The religious right, for instance, shared a ready-made language of redemption.
Last summer, Pittman and Lehrer drafted a plan of action that focused on revising a single clause of the Adam Walsh Act. Instead of mandating that states include certain kids on the public registry, they proposed that the law stipulate the opposite: that states failing to eliminate the practice of juvenile registration would fall afoul of federal law and lose funds. Any savings could be put toward programs that took a preventive approach to childhood sexual assault. Pittman and Lehrer contacted Stacie Rumenap, the head of Stop Child Predators, who agreed to help push the proposal nationwide and to work with them on state-level reforms. “Over the years,” Rumenap told me, “I’ve become more sympathetic and more aware that, as we draft our sex-offender laws, we need to be very careful about how we insure young kids’ lives aren’t being ruined.”
• • •
This past July, I drove around Midland, Texas, trying to find the girls—now women—who were involved in Anthony Metts’s case. Having no luck with doorbells, I left notes, and two days later I got a call from one of them. “I never wanted Anthony to be prosecuted,” she told me. “It was a consensual relationship—the kind when you’re young and you’re stupid. My mom knew about it. We’d go on dates, drive around, hang out.” She was shocked to learn of Metts’s fate: his nine-plus years of probation, his current decade of incarceration. “I told [law enforcement] that I didn’t feel like he should have to be prosecuted,” she said.
That same month, I made plans to visit Metts in prison, at Fort Stockton. For nearly two years, I’d routinely spoken with him by phone. But now Anthony’s calls had mysteriously stopped. His mother told me that he had been assaulted by two inmates after they took his ID number and found out that he was a sex offender. He was hospitalized and then moved to solitary confinement.
Several weeks later, he was transferred to a remote penitentiary in deep East Texas, eight hours away, built on farmland cleared by former slaves and now maintained by prison labor. When I drove there for an interview, guards shuffled Metts, tall and monkish in his prison whites, into a small booth with a partition between us. The night before, he learned that he’d lost a pending appeal in his case. His eyes were puffy from tears and sleeplessness.
“I thought, by the time we finally met, we’d be on the rooftop at the Hilton,” he said, laughing halfheartedly. For most of the next four hours, he spoke of how he planned to get through the coming decade. “In my mind, I don’t live here,” he told me. He spends his days reading business and life-style magazines and making plans to return to his daughter, who is now eight. “I look forward to being the dad she deserves, the dad I feel I am,” he said. “I miss reading her stories. Getting doughnuts with her, helping her with her homework, brushing her hair. Everything. Everything.”
He began to sob. “It’s a son of a bitch,” he said. Eventually, guards came over and recuffed his hands. After he’d been shuffled back to segregation, it occurred to me that if Anthony Metts serves out his full sentence he will have spent more than twenty years—nearly half his life—under state supervision.
• • •
Last October, Patty Wetterling got a startling piece of news at home, in St. Joseph, Minnesota. Twenty-six years after Jacob’s unsolved disappearance, the police had identified a “person of interest” in the case: Daniel James Heinrich, a man whose DNA allegedly matched that found in another unsolved case involving child kidnapping and sexual assault from 1989, in a nearby town. Heinrich was subsequently arrested on five counts of child pornography, unrelated to Jacob; he has pleaded not guilty and is currently awaiting trial. He appeared to be the sort of figure for whom Patty Wetterling first envisaged a private law-enforcement registry.
On a Tuesday afternoon a few days later, Wetterling and her husband walked to the end of their driveway in St. Joseph and stood before a group of reporters. “We still don’t know who took Jacob—we have as many questions, or more, as all of you,” she said, according to local newspapers. “Child sexual abuse and abduction is something we cannot tolerate. I refuse to be silent.”
The discovery of Heinrich took place a few months after Wetterling’s retirement as the director of Minnesota’s Sexual Violence Prevention Program. Just before stepping down, Wetterling had overseen the publication of a remarkable legislative report, titled “Sexual Violence Prevention,” which maps out a public-health response to rape, incest, and childhood sexual assault. It
calls for “taking on the root causes like alcohol and drug use, emotionally unsupportive family environments, and societal norms that support male superiority and sexual entitlement.”
The report was an apt summary of Wetterling’s work, and—with its emphasis on prevention—belonged to a maturing vision that began, years before, with the open-ended pain of losing a child. That pain had helped her craft an early model of the sex-offender registry and, later, a nuanced critique of what it had become. But Wetterling’s grief had never abated into abstraction. And so, on that Tuesday afternoon in November, flanked by her husband, she returned to a touchstone. “The one question that we have said for twenty-six years is, Where is Jacob? Where is Jacob?” she said. “I will still always, always hope.”
• • •
In Howell, Leah DuBuc has grown largely reconciled to her circumstances. On occasion, though, her fear resurges; when I first visited her at her home, she’d spent the previous night in her rocking chair, keeping watch, having been alerted by a noise that stirred thoughts of vigilantes. She still tracks news of registrant attacks across the country. Last year, a neo-Nazi couple were convicted of murdering a man on the registry and his wife, with plans to take down others. “Child molesters don’t deserve to live,” the man told reporters, adding that if he “had to do it over again, I’d kill more.”
DuBuc and I spent part of the day in her garden, with the tomatoes and the strawberries that her four-year-old son had helped plant. Her two-year-old daughter played in a sandbox nearby. DuBuc spoke of her efforts to find a job. She’s been working for a company called Life Leadership, which does “financial fitness” coaching; at night, she sells the company’s self-help books, CDs, and videos from her car. She believes that self-employment is the best option for current and former registrants. She also holds regular yard sales, selling old baby clothes and toys, and makes her own home decor, including a wreath on the front door which lists, in bright colors, the things the family is grateful for: “Food,” “Our health,” “Daddy’s Job,” “Mommy’s Hope.”