Molester gets life terms
Jason
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Molester gets life terms
A man who officials say molested 16 children while working at St. Jude's
will be nearly 100 before parole eligibility.
By Peter O'Connell
Review-Journal
A man who admitted molesting children while working as a caretaker
at St. Jude's Ranch for Children in Boulder City was sentenced to at
least 65 years in prison Friday.
Prosecutors had argued that Larry Wisenbaker, who pleaded guilty
in November to seven sex offenses, should spend the rest of his life in
prison.
"He was the most prolific serial sex offender we have ever
prosecuted in this state," Deputy District Attorney Gerald Gardner said.
"He will be a danger to young boys for as long as he lives."
Defense attorneys sought a sentence that would permit Wisenbaker
to be eligible for parole in 20 years. They said he now knows he is a
pedophile and yearns for counseling.
"He has done evil things, but he is not an evil person," Deputy
Public Defender Joseph Abood said.
District Judge Kathy Hardcastle said Wisenbaker, 34, maneuvered
himself into positions of power over children whose harsh experiences
led them to the various boys homes where the defendant was employed.
"Children who were already victims, you victimized them further,"
the judge told Wisenbaker.
Hardcastle sentenced Wisenbaker to four consecutive terms of life
in prison. He would be nearly 100 years old when he became eligible for
parole.
Wisenbaker in May 1998 was hired at St. Jude's, where he was a
cottage parent. The position gave him direct supervision over boys at
the Boulder City ranch, a residential treatment center for children who
have been abused, many of them sexually.
He passed an extensive background check, conducted by St. Jude's
authorities, because he had no prior criminal record.
However, reports of previous incidents surfaced after he was
arrested in April.
Texas authorities said Wisenbaker had been the subject of sexual
abuse allegations but had never been charged before his arrest in
Nevada.
Also, Boulder City police Detective Kristine Smallwood on Monday
discovered that Wisenbaker was convicted in Macon, Ga., in 1996 of a
felony charge of cruelty to children after he bound and gagged two boys
he was caring for at a shelter. The children told police he also fondled
them.
Authorities in Georgia failed to enter the conviction into a
national law enforcement computer system, which would have alerted
officials at St. Jude's to Wisenbaker's past.
In court Friday, an emotional Wisenbaker said he was driven by
compulsions he could not control.
The defendant, whom Abood said was molested as a child by two
family members, said he prays every day for the children he abused.
"I'm not the monster (prosecutors) portray," Wisenbaker said.
Gardner said Wisenbaker's crimes damaged more than two dozen
children in at least four states in the decade preceding his arrest.
The first known instance occurred in the late 1980s while the
Texas native was living with family in Austin.
"He molested his own cousin," Gardner said. "It has viciously torn
apart his family to this very day."
Authorities also believe that Wisenbaker molested at least two
boys while working at a YMCA in Massachusetts, the prosecutor said.
Following the Georgia incident, Wisenbaker worked at four youth
homes in Texas. Boys who say he molested them at these locations were
saved the trauma of testifying at trial when Wisenbaker pleaded guilty
as jury selection was about to begin.
Gardner said authorities believe Wisenbaker molested a total of 16
boys during the year he worked at St. Jude's.
Among the victims were two brothers whose mother abandoned them in
a Las Vegas park, and another boy who had no family and considered St.
Jude's his home.
One diminutive youngster resisted his advances, and Wisenbaker
threatened to have him sent to a home for the mentally retarded. "He is
a very bright kid, but Larry had him believing he was retarded," Gardner
said.
He said the greatest psychological damage may have been inflicted
on the boy whose parents permitted him to travel from Texas to stay with
Wisenbaker in Boulder City. Not only was he sexually abused, but
Wisenbaker used him to recruit additional victims, Gardner said.
Abood said Wisenbaker also did much good. In evidence, he read
just a few of the scores of cards and notes sent to Wisenbaker over the
years by families and children he had helped.
Wisenbaker said he would not want to be released if there was a
chance he would continue to harm children. "I don't want my freedom that
much," he said.
Reynard Foxx
Reynard Foxx
"I am only just recovering from the hilarity of the gag myself. It is most
swiftian in it's rapier-like subtlety..."
Nora Hiatt
state and his offense not disclosed to other prisoners.
Earl Shriner who is spending the rest of his life in jail for
severing the penis of a little 7 year old a few years ago his
housed out of state. He is allowed to call his mother collect
every day and is being given piano lessons and has a job.
From the Tacoma News Tribune May 19, 1994 edition:
> Earl Kenneth Shriner seems to have finally found his own kind of peace, his mother says.
> Shriner, sentenced to 131 years in prison for the rape and sexual mutilation of a 7-year-old Tacoma boy,
> is finally learning to read.
> He's taking music lessons and learning to play the piano. He earns $29 a month working in the prison dining
> room. Recently, he was the only inmate from his unit to earn a day off with pay because he kept his room so neat,
> his mother said.
> "He is doing fine. He is doing exceptionally well," said Delores Shriner, who has stuck by her son, insisting on
> his innocence through decades of run-ins with the law.
> He has a typewriter and likes to copy pages from books or magazines or letters and send them to his mom. He
> has a radio. He visits the prison store.
> "He calls me every day, collect," Shriner said. "My phone bill is four hundred and some dollars a month."
Nora
The *MIGHTY* (yet modest) Two Tub Man
>I hope the bastard gets beaten and raped in prison
If so, I hope he rapes and kills all your loved ones first.
Mum
This sick bastard doesn't deserve to live either. Let me be the judge, I
will free all the prisons up in no time at all.
The *MIGHTY* (yet modest) Two Tub Man <femin...@bigfoot.com> wrote in
article <n3fgas8doild17rp6...@4ax.com>...
DHollinsSC
monster.
Dave Hollins, Space Cadet -- AL-TEAM # Aleph-Null
------------------------------------------------
Kryten: He evolved from cats, sir, just as your distant ancestors once swung
from trees.
Rimmer: Ancestors? His <grandparents> swung from trees.