THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 13, 1994 TAG: 9411130062
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long : 346 lines
Straightening out her daughter's apartment one Saturday morning last spring, Pat Richardson found two empty beer cans and a plastic Revco bag full of cigarette ashes.
But Betsy Richardson - a 28-year-old mentally retarded woman living alone with the help of a support program - didn't smoke and didn't drink. And neither did her new boyfriend, Al.
So where, Richardson called to Betsy, who was splashing in the bathtub, had the cans and ashes come from?
The answer took time to register.
Three men - only one of whom Betsy knew - had come to the apartment the night before, Betsy told her mother. They pounded on the door until she opened it and told her they wanted sex.
Heavily medicated and half asleep, Betsy asked them to go away.
But they didn't listen, they wouldn't go away, and eventually, she told her mother, they talked her into it.
``She kept saying, `I didn't want to. I didn't want to. But they wanted to,' '' remembers Pat Richardson.
That day, Betsy and Pat Richardson went to a festival at Cape Henry Collegiate School, where Betsy's father is headmaster. Driving to the school, says Pat, it dawned on her that her daughter had been the victim of a crime.
``I thought, `This was really a sexual assault. That's what it was.' ''
The Richardsons went to the police.
But James Lee Little - the one man whom Betsy Richardson could identify - was not immediately charged with rape. He was charged instead with grand theft because he took Betsy Richardson's VCR when he left her apartment.
The Richardsons appealed to Virginia Beach Commonwealth's Attorney Robert Humphreys. Although Little eventually was charged with rape in the case, Humphreys decided not to pursue that charge. He made the decision, he says, because the case lacked the necessary elements that would have made a conviction possible. Efforts to locate Little for comment on this story were unsuccessful.
For three months following the April 29 incident, Betsy Richardson had trouble sleeping. She vomited constantly and lost 50 pounds. She had frequent tantrums, and clung to Al.
What happened that night was ``in my head for a long time,'' she says. ``It was in my head for a long time before it went away.''
People like Betsy Richardson have a right to live outside institutions, advocates say. After a long history of forced institutionalization, of being drugged and sterilized, discriminated against and shunned, people who are mentally disabled have achieved the same basic rights as everyone else. They hold jobs, live in their own homes and have fully realized consensual sexual relationships.
In light of this history, many advocacy groups oppose any laws, passed in the spirit of protection, that could compromise the hard-won rights of mentally disabled adults.
At the same time, however, no one denies that these adults are especially vulnerable to crime and exploitation. That they are easily misled, cheated out of money, and duped into doing things that could harm them. And that they need protection, especially when it comes to navigating areas that are fraught with danger and uncertainty even for those who are not disabled.
But where should their rights to make their own decisions end? And where does society's obligation to protect them begin?
In matters of sex, these issues become especially complicated.
Mr. Little is unsure of the dates in which he has had sexual intercourse with Betsy; however, he states that he and his half-brother Dennis Becker have; and on another occasion, he and a black male (unknown name) have had sex with her. He states that he does not remember the date but he believes it to be possibly Wednesday when he and his brother Dennis Becker went over to her apartment. He states that Betsy performed . . . sex on him and he took her to bed, and then his half-brother Dennis Becker went in.
- From a police report of an interview with James Lee Little, taken from Little's Virginia Beach Circuit Court file.
Betsy Richardson has an IQ of 70, the highest IQ she could have and still be considered mentally retarded.
She has epilepsy, which is controlled by an anti-convulsant medication that causes weight gain, and she is hearing-impaired. She picks nervously at her skin, and recently peeled a thick outer layer off one of her feet, leaving its surface a tender, angry red.
She loves Barry Manilow. Photos of the singer, cut from the pages of magazines, are plastered across the living room wall of her apartment in Virginia Beach. She has been to two Manilow concerts.
``He's got romantic songs I like that makes me think of a bunch of things that seems like love almost,'' she says.
Love means everything to Betsy. Recently, she made a list of all the terms of endearment she uses for Al, the handsome man with cerebral palsy, hearing loss and mild mental retardation who now lives with her.
``Sweetheart,'' she wrote in shaky, expansive print. ``Lover, Loverly, LoverDucky, Punking Head, Punking.''
Having a boyfriend also means a lot.
``For one thing, I need someone to clean up the house for me,'' she says. ``. . . And to make sure that I'm all right after I have my seizures, and to make sure that I'm happy. Because when I didn't have a boyfriend, I was sad all of my life. My life wasn't so good.''
Before she met Al, Betsy says, she had problems ``with guys playing with me and going with me and breaking up with me.''
Her supported-living counselor and her family confirm a long string of bad relationships with disabled men she met in programs and institutions. The last such man, who was mentally disturbed and impotent, introduced her to, and encouraged her to have sex with, Little.
``Betsy really wants to be accepted and she has a hard time saying no,'' says Betsy Richardson's counselor, who asked that her name not be used.
Experts say this problem is common for adults with mental disabilities, who tend to have very low self-esteem and long to be normal and accepted. These feelings, combined with the limitations imposed by their disabilities, make it easy to exploit them.
``While you can't generalize about any population, there are some common denominators that show up among these people,'' says Roger Blue, executive director of the Tennessee chapter of the Association for Retarded Citizens.
``There is a lack of good judgment. And they tend to be literalists. They get the message from TV and porn films that this is what people do, and it's OK. And they have little knowledge of the risks and perimeters of sexual behavior.''
Often, says Blue, adults with mental retardation engage in promiscuous sex for reasons that are not sexual.
``A lot of times, it's for acceptance,'' he says. ``All of a sudden they're making all these friends and getting all this attention. And the other side to that is loneliness.''
In the early 1970s, hundreds of thousands of mentally disabled adults were released from institutions into the general population.
Winifred Kempton, a pioneer in the field of mental retardation and sexuality, was a social worker for Planned Parenthood at the time.
``The women were getting pregnant and the men were getting into trouble because they didn't know the rules of how to treat people,'' she remembers. ``Many of the women became almost like prostitutes.
``They didn't know how to say no. They didn't have enough self-esteem to stand up for themselves and say they didn't want to do that. Sometimes, they didn't really know what was going on.''
The problem has perhaps diminished with the the development of intensely supervised supported-living programs and special sexuality-awareness classes. But it remains widespread.
``So many of our clients have been taken advantage of for not saying no, for being too trusting,'' says Betsy Richardson's counselor.
``. . . A lot of them use public transportation to go places, and that can be a problem. . . . But they have a right to be part of the community. It helps other people learn about them and it helps them to learn about other people.''
Betsy Richardson met James Little one night last spring when her mentally disturbed ex-boyfriend - who was living with Little at the time - called and asked her to come over and celebrate his birthday at Little's trailer.
``He said, `I've got someone for you to meet, Betsy, if you could come over for my birthday,' '' she remembers.
At the trailer, Betsy told police, Little told her he wanted to have sex with her, but she said no. ``Betsy says that James told her that his wife would not see them, so she went ahead and let James have intercourse with her,'' a detective wrote in his summary of the interview.
``Betsy says she did not want to have intercourse with James, but he talked her into it.''
On March 1, 1989, a 17-year-old mentally retarded girl was playing basketball at a Glen Ridge, N.J., playground when a group of 13 high school athletes persuaded her to follow them to the basement of a nearby house.
Once there, one of the boys asked her to perform oral sex on him. She did. Another boy then promised her a date with his older brother if she would perform various sex acts on herself with a baseball bat, a wooden dowel and a broomstick. She did that, too.
Asked during their subsequent rape trial why she didn't just tell the boys to leave her alone, the girl, whose IQ is 64, said: ``I didn't want to hurt their feelings.'' Questioned about why she didn't leave the basement after the assault, she said: ``I didn't think they were through yet.''
The decision to prosecute the Glen Ridge incident was unusual, experts say, because prosecutors are typically reluctant to bring such cases to trial.
``These kinds of cases have traditionally been considered to be dead losers,'' says Glen Ridge prosecutor Robert Laurino, who has also successfully prosecuted rape cases in which the victims were retarded men.
``There can be great problems with the victims' credibility. Sometimes it's difficult for them to communicate or understand certain questions. Or they are very vulnerable to being led by defense attorneys. There is also a reluctance on the part of most parents to have their child go through that kind of ordeal.''
The victim in the Glen Ridge case had trouble recalling the sequence of events of her assault, said Laurino. Also, she was unable to let go of the notion that her attackers were her friends. Prosecutors countered these problems with expert witnesses who explained that these cognitive difficulties had nothing to do with whether or not she was telling the truth.
Like Betsy Richardson, the Glen Ridge victim had a history of sexual exploitation and had previously engaged in sex with one of her attackers. That sexual history was introduced as evidence at the trial. Such evidence, says Laurino, can both help and hurt the prosecution.
``On one hand, it shows that the victim is vulnerable to sexual abuse. On the other hand, a jury might perceive the victim to have their own sexuality. participant.''
Defense lawyers in the Glen Ridge case tried to aggravate the jury's possible discomfort with the victim's sexuality by portraying her as an eager participant who initiated the encounter. But jurors, deciding the woman was too ``mentally defective'' to exercise her legal right to consent, found three of the defendants guilty of sexual assault and convicted a fourth of conspiracy.
Three prosecutors and a full-time investigator spent a year preparing for the Glen Ridge trial, which lasted 23 weeks. Although no cost analysis was done on the case, the state paid tens of thousands of dollars to the three expert witnesses who testified about the cognitive abilities of the victim and about the trauma she endured because of the incident.
``You have to make a real commitment from the very beginning,'' says Laurino. ``And you have to be able to spend a lot of money.''
Laurino is preparing for another case in which the alleged rape of a mentally retarded woman by her neighbor became apparent when the woman's pregnancy began to show. He is also advising prosecutors in Statesville, N.C., in the case of five teenaged boys who videotaped themselves allegedly raping a 19-year-old mentally retarded woman with a broom handle, a pipe and a candle. That case is scheduled for trial on Jan 23.
There were no baseball bats or broom handles or shocking revelations about high school boys in Betsy Richardson's case.
One of the men who came to her apartment on April 29 was a homeless person whom Little had befriended minutes earlier at a Be-Lo food store. There was also no evidence of overt force. No weapons, no threats of harm.
Virginia's rape code prohibits sexual intercourse through ``force, threat or intimidation,'' or through ``use of a complaining witness's mental incapacity or physical helplessness.'' But Betsy Richardson herself had said that she was never threatened on the night of April 29, and that the men had ``talked'' her into participating.
To Virginia Beach Commonwealth's Attorney Humphreys, that meant there was only one angle left to pursue: that Betsy was mentally incapacitated to the point where she couldn't consent.
Mental incapacity, according to state jury instructions, ``means that at the time of the offense, the victim had a condition which prevented her from understanding the nature or consequences of the sexual act involved and the defendant knew or should have known about that condition at the time.''
Humphreys recommended that the Richardsons have Betsy evaluated by a forensic psychiatrist.
On June 23, Betsy spent one hour with Dr. Paul Mansheim. In a four-page report sent to to General District Court Judge John Preston in July, Mansheim said he believed Betsy's relatively mild degree of mental retardation did not amount to incapacitation.
``While it seems obvious that a person of higher intelligence would be unlikely to allow oneself to be talked into such a situation, I do not believe that Ms. Richardson's mental state can accurately be conceptualized as incapacity,'' wrote the psychiatrist.
``That basically ended the rape case,'' says Humphreys.
``She is not sufficiently retarded that she could not consent to sex under any circumstances. And, as Dr. Mansheim pointed out, she had a boyfriend.
``Given all those facts, I made a decision not to proceed on the rape charge. I don't know what could have been done differently in this case. The law currently does offer some protection for people in those circumstances, but they have to be very profoundly disabled.''
Humphreys also points to some of the same problems Laurino faced. Like the Glen Ridge victim, Betsy Richardson gave slightly varying versions of the event.
In Glen Ridge, prosecutors were able to counter the appearance of deception caused by such inconsistencies with testimony from expert witnesses. But according to Humphreys, Virginia law bans that tactic.
``It's inadmissible,'' he says. ``It would be speculative. And even if there were a doctor who could say she does this because she has a particular disorder, that yes doesn't mean yes in her case, the jury might say, `Well, how was the defendant supposed to know that?' ''
Another concern, says Humphreys, was Betsy Richardson herself:
``The defense would impeach her on the witnesses stand with her own statement. That would be a terrible ordeal for her.''
There is a photo of Betsy Richardson as a child, crouching in the grass outside a Vermont preschool. Her large eyes gaze at the camera with an expression of resigned sadness rare in the faces of children so young.
``That sort of is Betsy as she was then,'' says her mother. ``There's a melancholy feel to it. A little lost-soul quality.''
Pat Richardson remembers a small girl whose inability to hear left her frustrated, infuriated and hard to reach. Whose tantrums and demands for attention frightened people. Who couldn't speak until she was 5.
But there was another side to the child Betsy. She was fearless. She climbed huge Vermont spruces, disappearing into their branches, forcing her mother to spend hours calling up to her, coaxing her to come down. She hung upside down on the monkey bars, and swung wildly, skipping two and three bars at a time. She never fell.
Once, during a school ski trip to Rutland, Vt., she sneaked away and took the ski lift to the top of a mountain, leaving her schoolmates on the bunny slope.
``She still is that way, really,'' says Pat Richardson. ``Fearless and adventurous of spirit.''
There is a price for that. For people like Betsy Richardson, that price can be very high.
The Richardsons and Betsy's counselor believe strongly that what happened to Betsy on April 29 was a crime. Her behavior was so extreme during the months following the incident, her parents feared she would have to be committed to a mental institution.
``There's no question Betsy has been used by men in the past,'' says Dan Richardson. ``She's always been like that, and she's had several bad relationships. There are times when Betsy was sexually exploited, and Betsy was a willing participant. . . . But that is not what happened this time.''
Dan Richardson says there should be laws to protect people like his daughter.
``If society agrees that disabled people should live among the rest of us - and I believe they should - then we have some obligation to protect them,'' he says.
But where should such a line be drawn? Should mentally impaired people be told they have a right to make their own decisions but only as long as society agrees that those decisions are wise and moral?
Sol Gordon, a professor at Syracuse University Medical School who has written several books about the mentally disabled, believes that anyone who entices or seduces a disabled person into having sex should be considered a rapist.
``Enticed, seduced, talked into - to my mind that's exploitive seduction equivalent to statutory rape,'' he says. ``Legally, that's what it should be.
``Because these people are vulnerable. They can't take care of themselves in a sufficiently mature way.''
But how would such a law be enforced? And what about instances in which the impaired person doesn't want to be protected from seduction?
Some advocates feel that someone should step in whenever an impaired person engages in dangerous behavior. But they argue about the term ``dangerous,'' which could cover everything from smoking to unprotected sex to murder.
Some experts say the problem can only be solved with explicit and ongoing sex-education classes geared toward impaired adults. Virginia Beach offers such courses, but their effectiveness is far from guaranteed.
``You can't even count on people who are not mentally retarded to make wise decisions in that area,'' notes Jay Lazier, director of the Mental Retardation division of the Virginia Beach Community Services Board.
Betsy Richardson's parents and the mental health workers who help her with the everyday details of living are torn about what should be done. They want Betsy to lead her own life, to make her own decisions and to live by her own value system. But they also want her to be safe.
``We know how meaningful it is to her to have somebody in her life in a permanent kind of way,'' Pat Richardson says of her hopes for Betsy.
``Someone she can feel secure with and care about and enjoy. And so we want that for her. . . . I think mainly happiness and security. A happy life and a satisfactory life. One that has meaning for her and makes her feel useful.
``I wish for Betsy just what I wish for all our children.'' ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
A NOTE TO READERS
As a matter of policy, The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star
does not identify victims of sexual attacks. Though no one was
convicted of a sex crime in the case of Betsy Richardson, she and
her family members believe she was sexually assaulted. For the
purpose of this story, Betsy Richardson and her parents wanted her
name used.
Color photo
TAMARA VONINSKI/Staff
Betsy Richardson and her boyfriend Al Lassiter are mentally disabled
and share an apartment in Virginia Beach. Richardson and her parents
allege that she was sexually assaulted by three men last spring.
Photos
Courtesy of the Richardson family
``When I didn't have a boyfriend, I was sad all of my life. My life
wasn't so good,'' Betsy Richardson says of her relationship with her
boyfriend, Al Lassiter. Both are mildly mentally retarded.
Richardson is shown, left, in Vermont at age 4.
TAMARA VONINSKI/Staff
KEYWORDS: SEX CRIME ASSAULT MENTAL RETARDATION
ROBBERIES by CNB