Audio By Carbonatix
part 2 of 2
Surrounded by an expanse of rich corn and soybean farmland in northeast Iowa, Eagle Grove is 370 miles from Chicago and an hour-and-a-half drive from Des Moines. Its proximity to the cities makes it an ideal location for truck-transfer stations; at one time, fully one fourth of Wright County’s population was employed by two large trucking concerns.
Only one of them, Umthun Trucking Company, remains. Nevertheless, many people continue to grow up, work and raise their families in the area. Adding solder to the community is a powerful and shared commitment to the Bible. “Maybe the Bible Belt reaches a little bit north here,” says Keith Riley, who has been Eagle Grove’s mayor for eight years.
The cover of a brochure distributed by the town’s chamber of commerce features a photograph of Robert Blue, an Eagle Grove resident who served as Iowa’s governor in the 1940s. The town has adopted his words, a combination of optimism and faith, as its civic slogan: “What you believe is what you are.”
That was certainly true for James Christensen, who, after shuttling between Oregon, California and Iowa for several years, landed in Eagle Grove in 1984. “He applied for a job where I was working,” recalls Mayor Riley, who at the time managed the local Umthun Trucking depot. “He seemed like a decent sort of guy–ordinary.”
George Lent worked with Christensen on Saturdays in Umthun’s grease pit. Lent, today the proprietor of Big George’s Little Engines repair shop, still remembers Christensen as Christopher Nelson. “I never knew a guy who’d take so much time and patience to train someone,” he recalls. “He was just a real nice guy, very caring, always wanting to help.”
“He worked with my husband,” remembers Alicia Burras. “He’d married a woman who had a son, and I babysat for them. We instantly became friends. We’d have picnics together, and he’d babysit for my son. Brandon still calls him Uncle Chris.”
The woman Christensen married was Justine Pigman. Today she is remarried and lives in Fort Dodge, twenty miles southwest of Eagle Grove. Her breakup with Christensen at the end of 1988 was acrimonious; reached by phone, she is reluctant to talk about it.
She “doesn’t know” what attracted her to Christensen, and they split because they “weren’t getting along.” Still, she says that to her knowledge, Christensen never broke the law while in Eagle Grove, and he did not act improperly around her son.
“There were no problems as far as I know,” adds Curtis Green, who has been Eagle Grove’s police chief since 1971. “I never had any difficulties with him. He seemed like a pretty decent person.”
Convicted felons often come to know the Lord in prison. Christensen did it in Eagle Grove, and people who knew him there say it made a difference.
“He began coming to our church when he was having problems with his wife,” Lent remembers. “He just came over to my house and asked me when services were.”
“The main thing was when he came to know the Lord,” Riley says. “At that point you could really see a change. When I say change, I guess I seen his values change–things he thought about had a much stronger spiritual nature about them. We had a men’s fellowship that met on Saturday, and he participated faithfully in that. He attended faithfully.”
In early 1989 Burras introduced Christensen to her friend Laurie Wisecup. “He was a nice guy,” recalls Wisecup. “And my son liked him. We got along good. One week later we were going steady. On our dates we went to shows, watched TV. About a month later he moved into my house. We were going to get married. But three months after that, he was arrested.”
Doug Dean, now retired, was a Wright County sheriff’s deputy in 1989. “I went with the sheriff to arrest James,” he remembers. “Somebody had tipped me off. They called and said this individual was living under an assumed name and working at this place down in Humboldt. We checked it out, and it looked like a pretty good possibility.
“So we went down to arrest him. We was going to put the handcuffs on him, but he was a big man, broad across the chest, and his arms wouldn’t fit behind him. So we cuffed him with leg irons instead. He gave us no trouble. He seemed a decent sort.”
“When he was first taken in, there were lots of ugly rumors going around–that he was a murderer and such,” says Lent. “You know small towns.”
Adds Riley, “It was totally shocking to me. It wasn’t at all the person I knew.”
While in the Wright County Jail awaiting Colorado authorities, Christensen told most of his new friends about his past. “He didn’t tell me nothing about it before,” says Wisecup. “I guess he thought I’d break up with him. But he explained everything when he was arrested. I told him I still loved him. After he went back to Colorado, we were still going to get married over the phone. But after a while I just…I don’t know. I still think about him a lot.”
At various times, Christensen has pegged different people as the source of the tip that returned him to prison. “I’m sure I’m the last person around you would expect a letter from,” he wrote his friend Erickson from Canon City in September 1989. “I was brought back to the main prison on July 16 this year. I was arrested at my job on the 13th of June. My ex-wife of four years turned me in to CrimeStoppers for $1,000.”
“I have no idea who turned him in,” replies Justine Pigman. Later, Christensen grew to believe that a former Colorado inmate who’d moved to Iowa tipped off the police because of some personal conflicts.
On July 16, 1989, Christensen was returned to the state prison in Canon City to serve out the remainder of his day-to-life sentence.
When it became law as part of the Sexual Offenders Act of 1968, the day-to-life sentence had a simple intention: to guarantee that sex criminals stayed in jail. “The primary purpose of the act is the protection of members of the public from proven dangerous sex offenders,” the law reads.
But as psychologists and other experts began promoting the idea of sexual disorders as treatable–and as straight prison sentences for sex crimes got longer–day-to-life took on a different meaning. Rather than a weapon used by prosecutors against the injustice of single-digit prison terms for some of society’s most despicable criminals, defense attorneys began using it in the hopes of obtaining a shorter treat-and-release sentence for their clients.
“It’s kind of an odd thing,” says Deputy Attorney General Steve Erkenbrach. “When the sentence was first in play, when I was a deputy district attorney in the 1970s and early ’80s, day-to-life was something that would be good from a DA’s point of view, because sentences for sex crimes were so short. But then, beginning in the 1980s, when sentences for sex offenses were becoming longer, defendants began seeking it because it seemed like a pretty good deal.”
Recently, some of Denver’s most heinous sex offenders have asked for day-to-life as a relief from lengthy prison sentences. Last year Quentin Wortham, who through a string of central Denver attacks became known as the “Capitol Hill Rapist” and was sentenced to 376 years in prison in 1987, requested that his sentence be changed to day-to-life. The judge rejected the idea, contending that Wortham would not benefit from psychiatric counseling.
Theodor Castillo, the “Washington Park Rapist,” also requested resentencing under the day-to-life statute. At the time his request was rejected, Craig Silverman, a Denver County deputy district attorney, contended that day-to-life sentences had outlived their usefulness. “Now it’s a final long-shot hope for serial rapists,” he said. “I would hope the legislature would look to save the state money and spare sex-assault victims the anxiety of their rapists getting out at virtually any time.”
For all of Silverman’s fears, however, the Colorado Department of Corrections still houses fifty men serving day-to-life prison sentences for sex crimes. (Of those, twelve were let out on parole, then rearrested–half for nonsexual offenses–and brought back.) The average stretch for those doing time on a day-to-life sentence is just over twelve years. One man has been in jail for nearly a quarter-century.
As punishment, the lengthy sentences may be appropriate. Yet to many rehabilitation advocates who feel prison is not the best place for sex offenders, the hard time seems misplaced–particularly if the convict never is treated.
James Haugh, convicted of a Colorado Springs rape, managed to convince a judge that he was being held unfairly under a day-to-life sentence. By 1992, when Haugh’s appeal was heard, he’d been held in Pueblo’s state mental hospital since 1979.
“He had written to me asking if I could do something,” recalls Mike Warren, a fifteen-year veteran of the public defender’s office in El Paso County. “At the time he entered a guilty plea [in exchange for the day-to-life], it was an acceptable sentence, because he was told he would get treatment…but he just stayed down there, languishing in the state hospital. As a result, he did more time–many, many more years–than he would have if he was convicted straight up. He had roughly tripled his sentence.”
In July 1992 a judge agreed that Haugh had more than done his time. He was released the day of his hearing.
Roger Lauen, Colorado’s first director of community corrections and now a teacher at the University of Colorado, has worked for the past two decades as a lobbyist and consultant to promote alternatives to prison for nonviolent offenders.
“I don’t think that sex offenders get better in prison,” he says. “If you want to solve the problem–versus punishing the offender–don’t waste your time putting him in prison. The best that could happen is that they will remain the same.”
Lauen finds evidence close to home. In 1989 he was appointed by Governor Roy Romer to the Criminal Justice Commission, which was created to look at the state’s prison system and recommend ways to confine its growth. Prison officials estimate that up to one quarter of all convicts have some sexual disorder. In an effort to treat them–and free up scarce cells for more hardcore offenders–Colorado has spent much time and money building a state-of-the-psychology treatment program. Although corrections officials are proud of the Sexual Offenders Treatment Program (SOTP), Lauen says that “it was not particularly good. They just didn’t have the statistics [of success] to support their pride.”
One criticism of the program is that it can seem endless. Since 1980, four men who were condemned to day-to-life sentences have had them changed. One of them, Kent Johnsen of Larimer County, contended that, given the way the SOTP operated, he’d never get out.
“You must go through treatment for favorable recommendations to the parole board,” explains Andy Gavaldon, a public defender who successfully challenged Johnsen’s sentence. “And the court found that no one had officially completed the Sexual Offenders Treatment Program. The structure for treatment in the Department of Corrections is such that Mr. Johnsen never would have removed himself from prison. It was almost like a ladder that never ends.”
“We don’t use the day-to-life anymore,” Warren says. “The sentence just frightens the hell out of me. People who are doing the treatment have the idea that it’s useless to try to treat sexual offenders, that they can’t change their sexual orientation. They’ll deny it, but that is a bias that runs through the treatment community. The result is a kind of catch-22: The only way you can complete the treatment is if you don’t need the treatment.”
Peggy Heil, director of SOTP, maintains that since pedophilia is like alcoholism–a lifelong condition–treatment never officially ends. As a result, her prison program is intense. Participants are pulled out of the normal prison routine and live in a separate facility, where they receive non-stop counseling. She denies that any prisoner would be prevented from completing the program, although it does take some time–“two and a half or three years, at the minimum.”
These days, Heil adds, she seldom sees day-to-life sentences–maybe one or two new prisoners a year. But she stresses that she remains strongly in favor of the idea. “The whole purpose of it is to hold in the people who aren’t motivated to change and allow those who are an opportunity to get out,” she says. “The concept of that is good.”
Some sex offenders with short sentences leave before they receive adequate treatment, she notes. A day-to-life sentence, on the other hand, “allows prisoners to take whatever time is considered necessary to complete treatment.”
The sentence also permits inmates to start their treatment earlier. Because of budget limitations, SOTP accepts only those inmates eligible for parole within eight years; the theory is to pay attention to those who will be released soonest.
Prisoners sentenced under day-to-life are technically eligible for parole almost immediately, so they may enter the program soon after they are incarcerated. But only if they want to, of course; Christensen says he has no faith in SOTP, and he has refused to attend.
“I molested no one then, but it wasn’t a piece of cake, either,” he says of his nearly dozen years as a fugitive. “Like the time Justine’s niece came to stay with our son. They both took a bath, and she came out stark naked. She was eleven, and she said I could wipe her off. A quick thought, and then I told her to go get her clothes on, she was too old to be walking around grownups nude.”
Many sexual offenders, pedophiles in particular, grow accustomed to lives of secrecy and lies, and it is possible that Christensen never stopped. “We’re a small community,” says Riley, Eagle Grove’s mayor. “It’s pretty hard to hide anything that goes on, and I never heard anything about James.” Still, he adds, “I don’t know everything that happens here.”
And, while most of Christensen’s story checks out, there are some gaps. The Iowa Department of Corrections, for example, has no record of a Charles Logsdon–Christensen’s father–serving time there. Christensen also says one of his sons died in Portland, but the sheriff’s department there has no record of that, either.
Even if Christensen’s story is not entirely believable, though, there are now real reasons why he may present a low risk to reoffend.
In 1992 Christensen was diagnosed with cancer, and several months later underwent surgery to have both of his testicles removed. Christensen points out that’s a procedure that at least one Colorado judge has proposed as an alternative sentence for pedophiles.
“The only real castration research comes from Denmark,” says Jerome Miller, a former state commissioner for youth in both Massachusetts and Pennsylvania who now runs the Augustus Institute in Virginia, which has treated sexual offenders for nearly fifteen years. “But there’s no question–castration lowers the rate of repeat quite dramatically for nonviolent sexual offenders.”
In October 1992 Christensen paid a private Canon City psychologist to evaluate him and report whether he was a threat to the community. Harold Hobbs concluded: “Even though he is and admits to being a pedophile, he has demonstrated the ability and capacity to control this orientation. I see James as a very minimal risk candidate for registered parole.”
Department of Corrections testers have found Christensen, now at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Crowley, an exemplary prisoner. Every year, prison officials and social workers measure a prisoner’s risk for escape and behavior. Christensen’s most recent scores show him to be a low risk; his academic report cards have all been outstanding.
Sexual offenders sentenced under the day-to-life statute are entitled to an annual hearing before the Colorado Parole Board. Each spring, when Christensen appears before the board, he hears the same thing: Until he goes through SOTP, he will never be released.
From the March 1993 parole hearing:
Parole boardmember Anthony Young: “You must complete SOTP before this board will let you out on parole.”
Christensen: “You’re not going to accept anything that came from the outside, like my outside psychiatrist?”
Parole boardmember Evonne Scott: “I’ve read the letter from your outside psychiatrist. I’ve also looked at your file, and I repeat: You will not be released on parole until you complete SOTP, whether you have faith in the program or not. Is that clear?”
From the March 1994 hearing:
Christensen: “I’m proud of my achievements since I’ve been back in prison.”
Scott: “But your achievements before that were very bad. You deserve a life sentence.”
Christensen: “I’ve finished all my programs but SOTP. I don’t have that much faith in SOTP.”
Scott: “It’s the only game in town we’ve got. We can’t tailor a program for you. You’re lucky we have anything…The only thing I can find in your file that shows you did anything positive is that you didn’t commit any more crimes while you were in Eagle Grove. I don’t know if that balances out the years of sexual abuse of your own children.”
And from the March 1995 hearing:
Christensen: “Going to sexual offenders treatment [here] is like going to a dentist and asking for heart surgery.”
Parole boardmember Young: “It’s a voluntary program. But it’s a requirement of this parole. The parole board realizes that the only type of sexual offenders treatment is what we have, no more or no less. It doesn’t matter about the number of references you have from other people.
“The fact is, you’re here, incarcerated, because you screwed up a number of lives of children. You messed them up for life. The least you can do is take whatever treatment we have available. As long as you continue to refuse, we will continue to refuse giving you parole.”
Until then, George Lent will continue to store the half-dozen boxes of Christensen’s belongings in his basement in Eagle Grove, waiting for his return. “I know a man’s got to pay for his crimes, but this seems backwards,” he says. “I dunno; maybe the Lord’s got a job for him there in prison.”
end of part 2
