Stalking the Bogeyman

On May 5, I finally sent two copies of the same letter to his house in Broomfield, one by overnight Airborne Express, one by registered mail.

Remember me? Our parents were good friends in Alaska. I was seven the first year we all moved there. I remember my childhood years in Alaska very, very well, especially a certain night that first year in Alaska, when I was seven -- seven years old, think about it -- when your parents had my family over for dinner, and you and I went down to your bedroom to play with your karate stuff.

I kept what you did to me a secret for 25 years, until my mom found a diary I kept when I was a kid, and in that diary I wrote it all down. It's time for you and I to talk this over. I suggest a meeting, in public, anywhere in the Denver metro, as soon as possible. If seeing me face to face is too uncomfortable for you, then at least call me.

Simply ignoring this letter is not going to work. If I don't hear from you by Friday late afternoon, I'll start calling your house, and then knocking on your front door.

I want to be perfectly clear here: I am not threatening you with any physical harm, and I am not hinting at blackmail. I don't want your blood or your money, just one uncomfortable conversation.

He received the letters with my contact information the next day, and without even taking a night to think it over, called my voice mail and left a message stating that he was willing to meet with me and giving his mobile phone number. I called the next day, got him on the phone, and told him that I appreciated his calling me -- and that I was surprised he had. "Well," he said, "it's a call I should have made a long time ago."

I was stunned, because from his words and tone of voice, it sounded like he was going to actually admit what he'd done, when I knew that almost all pedophiles deny, deny, deny until the day they die.

We arranged to meet at 2 p.m. the following afternoon at a Cracker Barrel near his house. "Is there anything you want to say to me now?" I asked.

"Just that I'm deeply sorry," he said. "I've thought a hundred times about contacting you in the last twenty years to tell you that, and I just never had the courage to pick up the phone. I'm sorry for the pain I've caused you and my parents and your parents."

He sounded sincere, well-rehearsed. The next day, an hour before we were supposed to meet, I changed the location from a chain restaurant in suburbia to the intersection of the 16th Street Mall and Market Street in downtown Denver. He showed up wearing jeans, a gray T-shirt and a Colorado Avalanche cap. When I saw him standing on the corner, anxiously trying to pick me out of the crowd, I realized the moment I had written about in my diary in 1981 had arrived: We were both grown men, and I was meeting him on the street.

I didn't punch him in the face. I did shake his hand. But neither of us pretended that nothing had happened. We were afraid of one another. I was so jacked up on adrenaline, I was shaking. He was sweating like he'd just run a mile.

"Nervous?" he said. I nodded. "Me too," he said.

We walked around the block, and he started by telling me that he'd been waiting for me to contact him for several weeks. Soon after my mom had called his parents in March, he said, his parents had flown to Colorado and confronted him with her accusations. He told me that he'd admitted he had raped me to both his parents and his wife.

"My mom got extremely emotional and didn't handle it well at all, and my dad just went quiet and became very stoic," he said. "They've sort of written me off since then. They used to call me every week, but they don't call me anymore, even though I told them it had only happened with you that once."

He repeated this claim over and over during our conversation, working it into his response to nearly every question I asked. He only had one victim, me. He had not sexually assaulted any other child before or since.

We sat on the mall's stone stools and kept talking, our voices low, both of us looking around to make sure no one was in earshot. I asked him how his wife had reacted. "She was concerned, obviously," he said. "She wanted to know right away if our son was safe, and I told her yes, he is."

Then I hit him with the question I'd always wanted to ask: "Why did you do it?"

He shook his head, and tears welled in his eyes.

"I've asked myself that question over and over and over again, David, and I just don't have a good answer for you. I wish I did, but I just don't know. I know that until I was in my thirties, I didn't really believe other people's feelings were real. I didn't think anyone really mattered but me. Maybe that was it. Maybe if I'd gone into therapy, I could have come up with the answer. All I can say is I'd never done it before and I never did it again, and if there was one thing I could go back in my life and change, that would be it."