We grouped together and watched from the yard between our houses. We were silent and I could feel the shared anticipation of the departure of the predator who had dwelt upstairs since last Christmas. Slowly the children had come from behind the locked doors of the houses arranged in a circle around the abandoned wooden play structure. Out into the soft September sunshine we emerged together. Everyone knew that Judge Gardner's order stated that he was to leave that day. No one planned that we would watch him go and yet all of us came out. There had been seventeen children a year ago. Over the past nine months as many as were financially able had escaped from Pickford/Leonard. Now those of us who had been left behind came out together to watch. I remember thinking there was safety in our numbers.
We watched and at exactly 5pm he opened the door of my house, walked down the front porch steps and took up his burden. We were all part of some kind of sad and necessary ceremony after all of these months as his captives.
He had been taking objects down the stairs from one of the two apartments above mine from dusk until dawn since Judge Robert S. Gardner had signed the protective stalking order five days before.
"Respondent shall leave the house at 2603 SW Leonard, Corvallis, Oregon, by 5pm on September 17, 2000 and not return."
He balanced the weight of the trailer against his strength and slowly broke the inertia of the load and slowly, slowly began his journey down Leonard Street and out of our children's lives.
The children and parents nervously spoke together, quietly at first, and then the voices rose in relief and soon we danced, all of us danced, all of us children of the sunshine and of the joy of being. We were out of our homes, and we laughed in the sunshine of our own backyards once more. Judge Gardner had ignored the unspoken rules of Corvallis. He had listened to the voices of the mothers of the children at Pickford/Leonard and secured our freedom for a little while and we were happy.
Darkness was thick on the December morning when the predator began his move into my house. Of course I didn't know he was a predator; we had been told by the non-profit that owned these houses, Corvallis Neighborhood Housing Services (now Willamette Neighborhood Housing Services), that we could not have a criminal history and live at Pickford/Leonard. I had been told it would be a wonderful place for my child. She was nine. They didn't tell me that the stomping up and down the stairs was a pedophile with 66 arraignments in Benton County before he was placed in my house as a favor to Benton County Mental Health and as a guarantee to our new property manager, James Hackett of the Linn Benton Housing Authority, that one more of the old units would be paid for every month by a HUD housing voucher. Later I learned that no one else would rent to him because he terrified the elderly and stalked the children everywhere he went. Much later, I learned from a Corvallis police officer that the protective stalking order we struggled so hard to get would not save us from him,
"He has the profile of a psychopathic serial killer," he had warned me.
Those were the same words that my new friend, Mike Rogers with the FBI, used after he had Quantico do research on our resident pedophile. Finally, the head of Mental Health for the State of Oregon, Barry Kast told me to be careful,
"He is a very dangerous man!"
I had no way of knowing this when the darkness began invading my peaceful, gentle world. Over and over again I heard the footsteps almost running up and down and I figured a new tenant had been found to fill the unit vacated by the college student with the fast red sports car.
I peeked from my bedroom window and my body froze when I first saw the face above the box of some sort of tools. He turned abruptly with his sixth sense to see who looking at him and I felt an all encompassing chill; a warning from the heavens above.
By the end of that day, refrigerators, car engines, washing machines, pipes, concrete bricks, beer bottles, box after box of strange machine parts in every size and configuration and over twenty computers had reached the apartment upstairs. By the end of the week I had heard the footsteps throughout every night and my bedroom ceiling began to crack. The front and side lawns were covered with overflow appliances, and car parts and dirty blue tarps covering hundreds of empty beer cans.
The smell in the house had changed and spiders and bugs began to creep into my apartment.
Finally, he was done moving in and he rode off on his black bicycle as darkness fell. He had made his transition into our sweet family neighborhood.
About one in the morning the pipes began to vibrate in our old house and I jumped from my sleep as the sound reached the velocity of a jack hammer. I went into the front hall and looked up into Tricia's wondering face. She lived in the other upstairs apartment and I said,"Its not me."
"Its not me," she responded.
She fetched a flashlight and I took my wrenches to turn off the new tenant's water supply at the street after we made sure he wasn't home.
The darkness lifted and he returned. I went into the front hall and introduced myself and explained why I had turned off his water in the night. He turned his body toward his door frame rubbing himself up and down again and again and his face melted into rippling liquid lines as he began uncontrollable laughter, first softly and then rising until it reached a pitch that almost matched the pipes from the night before. Trish and I disappeared into our newly formed prison cells behind locked doors. Our long journey at the mercy of the man upstairs had begun. Our children were no longer allowed outside. Much later we leaned that the true darkness came from a source much more perverse.
The warm summer sunshine filled the outside and I hurried to finish the hazelnut gateau I had promised a customer. I had worked on this recipe for over twenty years and I was happy with the way it made people feel. I hadn't given myself enough time to create all of the layers at a gentle pace so I had chocolate and coffee flavored whipped cream on my hands when a firm unfamiliar knock sounded on the kitchen door. I walked out into the light and met Joe Boyer for the first time in person.
"Ms. Rosenfeld?" he asked with great courtesy.
I looked at the beautifully made suits that fit the two gentlemen so perfectly and at their shoes gleaming in the hot sun and answered, "Yes."
Joe Boyer introduced his partner and himself and said that they had driven to Corvallis from the Eugene office of the FBI to question the man upstairs about his use of our phones. Until now, I had only spoken with Agent Boyer on the phone.
"I felt that I had to tell you something." he said. "When someone starts knifing your car it is a classic sign that they want to be knifing you. I thought you should know that. I've been worrying about you."
In our phone conversation of several days back, I had told Agent Boyer that I was finding knife marks on my car. I told him that my daughter had found her blow-up swimming pool stabbed and Shawna's children's pool had been slashed. Shawna lost her car, too. The oil plug was removed in the night after she testified to Judge Gardner that the man upstairs took digital photos of her young children undressing through cracks in the curtains at night. All of us had suffered this fear and humiliation.
I had told Agent Boyer that my neighbor, Jim, had his tires slashed after testifying in court that he had witnessed the man upstairs tapping the neighborhood phones on the corner Qwest post.
Jim told me later that the man upstairs had three very large knives arranged in a row on his kitchen counter. When Jim asked the man what he used those for, he was told that they were used to kill deer.
I remembered that one of the man's felonies was for poaching deer with a knife. I had written to the Oregon State Police for that information. How could one kill a deer with a knife I had wondered? You would have to use stealth and sneak up on the deer sleeping in the night. How awful to be part of this horrible death. He must like having blood on his hands, to feel the struggle and the control. Maybe he was simply starving I had reasoned, yet I couldn't get the knives out of my mind and now he was slashing things in the night outside and unlocking my door with his locksmith tools on some nights and leaving it open just a crack so I would wonder how it got that way in the morning. I wondered if he would come in the next time. I no longer slept.
Initially the man upstairs had asked Jim if he could tap his phone so he could have Internet use and Jim had agreed. Night after night he went back to the Qwest phone post, Jim had explained. Jim actually lifted a square metal lid off of the post to expose all of the neighborhood phone wires so I could see for myself. I was grateful to Jim. I had been under the house so many times trying to understand how he was accessing my phone. The phone company could not find a physical tap under there and told us that they were not the "phone police". I couldn't find a physical tap either. Here, finally, was an explanation.
All of us had heard him on our phones. We heard recordings of our own children laughing when we tried to use our phones. and then came the calls when he was bold enough to laugh his demonic laugh, usually softly, and usually when one of us had already hung up so only one of us heard it. We all ended up hearing it eventually.
Soon our phone service was disconnected for fifteen minutes at time unless he was really mad. When he was really mad the surges of electricity he used to disconnect the phones must have been greater. The circuit for just my phone was permanently burned out in the building next to the Court House downtown and Tricia's phone burned up on the inside. When Qwest's phone technician came to troubleshoot for Tricia, the man upstairs chased the technician to her truck and she was terrified. I remember she phoned James Hackett and told him that it was very frightening and that he should take the mothers at Pickford/Leonard seriously.
I asked Mr. Hackett for a transcription of that voice mail and he sent it to me. That’s all he did, though.
"I talked to my boss in Portland and we can't do anything about his phone activity." Agent Boyer continued. "It costs us a great deal of money to investigate and prosecute someone and since he is mentally ill, he would only go into a mental institution for six months and it is not worth the tax payers' money."
"Thank you Agent Boyer," I replied
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The segmented story above was written for a summer college class. We were supposed to write about a time in our life that strongly affected us and break it into segments and scramble it up a bit. I used it as therapy to help heal the horror I experienced when James Hackett and Jim Moorefield placed and HUD funded nine felons around my daughter and me and sixteen other young children. My story was about the first man. The mothers at Pickford/Leonard wrote letters to Mr. Hackett and I reported everything that happened to him and to Jim Moorefield and Barbara Dahlman. I learned later in a federal Final Investigative Report that contained testimony from other people that worked at the Linn Benton Housing Authority at the time that when I called asking for help James Hackett would get off of the phone and laugh to his co-workers.
After the protective order that Judge Gardner granted us evicted the man upstairs, he violated it over and over again. We would hear small taps on our window at 2 in the morning. He wore a police scanner so he always knew when the police were on their way.
Oregon is currently sending money that is co-mingled with federal money to Benton County and that money is used to fund housing for registered sex offenders, including extremely dangerous predatory sex offenders, right in the middle of family neighborhoods around hundreds of children in violation of federal laws that make it illegal to use any federal money to house these individuals. This is money laundering. This is destroying the lives of children in the neighborhoods where this is done. These children are living in fear. They think about this before they go to sleep at night.
The terror that families experience when this is done leaves scars for life.
This is happening on Ramona Lane in Corvallis right now where three registered sex offenders, including a predatory sex offender who is extremely dangerous, have been placed in a "group home". There are about fifty homes in a two mile radius of the house where the three registered sex offenders live.
The contracts for this funding are on file in the Benton County Counsel's office. The Benton County Commissioners are Annabelle Jaramillo, Jay Dixon and Linda Modrell. The contracts are for hundreds of thousands of dollars to Renew Consulting that is housing the sex offenders near the children on Ramona Lane.
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