THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 25, 1995 TAG: 9506250158
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: [LAURA LAFAY]
LENGTH: Long : 210 lines
RODNEY ALMOND
Growing up, Rodney Almond was the fat kid.
The subject of taunts, the butt of jokes, the last kid picked for teams at recess in the small, North Carolina town where he went to school. When he expressed his love for a girl in fifth grade, her response was simple and direct. ``You're too fat,'' she said.
His mother dismissed all this. ``They're not picking on you because you're fat,'' she told the oldest of her three children. ``They're doing it because of your father.''
Almond's father had a reputation for alcoholism and extramarital promiscuity that caused pain and embarrassment to his wife and family. As an adolescent, Almond avoided sex. It wasn't hard. He was fat.
But by the time he was finishing college, he says, he had become obsessed with the idea that he was asexual.
``I said, `I can't leave college a virgin.' So I went on a date. But when it came time for the intimate moment, I couldn't perform,'' he remembers. ``It was so embarrassing. So I just said, `Forget it.' I mean, sex was a bad thing anyway. My father had done so much of it.''
Bent on wholesomeness, Almond became a camp director for the Boy Scouts of America. In 1988, he began what he describes as ``a great relationship'' with a woman whose religion forbade sex before marriage. The two became engaged.
But soon afterward, Almond was offered a job as a program and camp director for the Virginia Beach-based Boy Scouts of America Tidewater Council. Within months of Almond's move to Norfolk, his girlfriend broke it off.
Almond was crushed. ``There was a part of me that said, `You're an ugly, horrible human being. You're fat. You're horrible. No one's ever going to want you for a husband,' '' he says.
A year later, in November 1991, Almond says a 15-year-old Scout initiated a sexual relationship with him.
``I had shut off my sexuality . . . and then, all of a sudden, there was someone attracted to me. And I just went for it. Like a moth to a flame.''
Almond pleaded guilty to sodomy charges in Norfolk and Virginia Beach and got a total of 10 years. He also pleaded guilty to a charge in Surry County, but insists the scout who accused him there invented the charge to help the Boy Scouts punish him.
``They thought I was some kind of serial Boy Scout molester,'' he says. ``They wanted to put me away.''
Looking back, Almond says, he had a responsibility as an adult to discourage his victim and to seek help for him. He also wishes he had owned up to the incident from the very beginning, instead of denying it.
The community at Bland, he says, has helped him understand what he did, and why he did it.
``Things are not always as black and white as we in society try and make them,'' he says. ``What happened to me is a lot more complicated than the fact that I had sexual relations with a 15-year-old.''
BOB OGDEN
When Bob Ogden joined the therapeutic community for sex offenders at Bland in August 1993, he was serving a seven-year sentence for sexually assaulting a 12-year-old. But after learning about the kind of trauma such crimes inflict on children, he owned up to eight more victims, and gave the Augusta County Commonwealth's Attorney a list of their names. He did it, he says, because he wanted them to get help.
Ogden pleaded guilty to seven new counts of oral sodomy and fondling and got 200 years. Now 60, he knows he will never leave prison.
``It had to be done,'' he says. ``Because I couldn't live with it. I would have liked for it to have worked out better for me. But I would do it again.''
A small, bearded man with graying hair and aviator glasses, Ogden worked 30 years as a psychiatric aide at Western State Hospital in Staunton. ``I was sicker than they were,'' he says now of the patients he cared for.
Ogden says he never touched a child until he was 47. The father of a 36-year-old son and 7- and 12-year-old boys, he never molested a child of his own. All his victims had been entrusted into the care of his wife, who babysat to supplement the couple's income.
Through therapy at Bland, Ogden discovered that his pedophilia is rooted in childhood when, at the age of 6, he was taught to perform intercourse by a 12-year-old neighbor girl. Their relationship continued until he was 12. At different times, he says, his male cousins joined them. And once, the two brothers of the girl participated.
Until Bland, says Ogden, it never occurred to him to think of the episodes as other than idyllic.
``I didn't consider her a perpetrator,'' he says of the girl. ``I thought of her as a girl who thought enough of me to have sex with me. . . . There were other boys - all older than me - who were saying, `Boy, I'd sure like to get a hold of her.' And it made me feel special. Because I already had a hold of her.''
Once he figured out he himself had been a victim, Ogden began to think of the children he victimized.
``When I found out how I felt, I found out how they felt,'' he says. ``And I wanted them to get help.''
CLIFF ROBERTS
At 19, Cliff Roberts walked up to a woman in a bowling alley parking lot in Fairfax and forced her into her car with a gun. He made her drive around the block. He made her perform oral sex on him. And when he couldn't ejaculate, he made her drive him back to the bowling alley. Then he got out of the car and ran.
``At first, I was angry. I was frustrated,'' says Roberts, who was sentenced to 36 years for the crime. ``I thought: `I can't even do this right.' I just wanted to get away. I wanted to pretend I didn't do it.''
Roberts pretended for 11 years. He told no one behind bars what he had done. Occasionally, he would try to figure out why he did it. But ``I never really could come up with a reason why,'' he says. ``In my mind, I blamed it on drugs and alcohol.''
Years passed, and Roberts became eligible for parole. Each time he came up for consideration, he swore to the interviewer that he would never hurt anyone again. But ``inside,'' he says, ``I wasn't sure.''
Last year, after 12 years in prison, he was accepted into the treatment community at Bland. The program, he says, made him look at himself and his life in a way that would never have occurred to him otherwise. He thinks about sex now and what it has always represented to him. He thinks about the woman he terrorized and the misery he has caused her.
``I looked to sex to build my self-esteem,'' he says.
``As a teenager, I'd go to parties and brag about getting this girl or that girl. And I saw the guys that could get any girl and I envied them. . . . I wanted their respect. That's sick.'' In the months before he abducted his victim, Roberts was involved in a motorcycle accident that knocked out most of his teeth. For months, he walked around with only a few of them. He felt like a loser - hideous, victimized, deprived and rejected by women.
To make himself feel better, he says, ``I got into material things. I got into debt. I told myself I needed money.''
He committed an armed robbery. That's when it dawned on him: he could get what he wanted. He could just take it.
After a year of therapy, Roberts says, he feels good about himself for the first time in his life. He knows he has choices, and he knows he has the power to make the right ones or the wrong ones.
``It hurts me to see the program end,'' he says.
``And it hurts me to think about all the new victims that will be made because other guys don't get the chance for this help. Because if you don't get down and deal with your issues, if you don't change your way of thinking, you're going to do it again. No amount of prison time is going to change that.''
WILLIE ANTHONY JONES
Willie Anthony Jones grew up in Richmond, the son of a strict, religious mother and a largely absent, irresponsible father. Furious at her husband, Jones' mother took it out on her son. Throughout his childhood, she beat him.
When he was 12, she pressed a hot iron against the side of his face. When he was 17, she grabbed his head, jammed it between her legs, took a scissors, and hacked off all of the newly plaited cornrows in his hair. Then she dragged him into the bathroom and slammed his face into the mirror.
Jones left the house, grabbed the first woman he saw and hit her over the head. As she lay on the ground, he began kicking and beating her.
The woman, who had been waiting for a bus in the rain, struggled to her feet and ran. Jones ran after her. Catching up with her behind a church, he forced her at gunpoint to undress and to perform oral sex on him. He raped her twice, hitting and kicking her while she wept, hitting harder when she begged him not to kill her.
``I felt satisfied and in control,'' Jones wrote of the incident.
``I pulled up my pants, took all her money, watch and rings. She kept asking me if I was going to kill her but I didn't answer her, I wanted her to think of the power I had over her. She promised she wouldn't tell anyone. I kicked her in the face as she laid there on the ground, and said, `All you bitches are alike.'' Then I told her if she ever told anyone she would be in big trouble. I took her ID card and ran off.''
Jones was sentenced to 42 years for his crime. Now 36, and in the 19th year of his sentence, he has spent more of his life in prison than out. For years, he says, he denied his crime and blamed everyone else for his predicament.
Then he was raped.
Four men came into his cell at the Powhatan Correctional Center and put a knife to his throat.
``They said, `We hear you're good at taking things from women,'' he remembers. ``I said, `What do you mean?' And they said, `We can show you better than we can tell you.' ''
``It's painful,'' Jones says now. ``The thought of someone forcing something on you, taking something from you that's not theirs, stripping your pride and your ego and everything.''
About a month after he was raped, Jones was lying on his bunk thinking about the incident when it dawned on him: ``I said, `Damn. The same thing they did to you, you did to someone else.' ''
Jones started ordering books on psychology. He even approached prison counselors to talk about his crime. ``But they'd all say, `I know. You're in on a rape charge. What about it?' ''
When he heard about the program at Bland, he says, he grabbed at the chance.
``I need this program,'' he wrote, underlying the word, `need' in his letter of application. Not for parole . . . but for my own welfare and the safety of the public as a whole. . . . I could make parole next year, but if I am accepted into the program, I am willing NOT to be released until I've completed the program. . . . I do not want to victimize another female, ever.''
The program at Bland, Jones says taught him empathy for others.
``I never learned that,'' he says.
``I grew up in a household that didn't nobody care about nobody else. . . . My dad taught me violence. My mom taught me violence. Anger was a part of my household. And you learn what you see.''
``It's not just our sex crime we deal with here. It's our low self-esteem, our feeling of inadequacy, our childhood. You can't do that sitting down at Greensville (a prison in Jarratt).''
Jones says he is part of a cycle of violence. And he knows that, by victimizing another person, he has played a part in perpetuating it.
``The cycle just go on,'' he says. ``She (his victim) could have a son, and being that she was raped by a man, she could have a lot of anger towards men in general and abuse and beat him like my mom did me. And then he could grow up hating and being angry at women and it just go on.
``But somehow, somewhere, somebody's got to break that cycle. I hope it's me.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos
VICKI CRONIS/Staff
KEYWORDS: SEX CRIMES SEX OFFENDERS TREATMENT PROGRAMS by CNB