How in the world can a parent not get paranoid reading these files?
In camps, cul-de-sacs, basement meetings and cars on the ride home, Boy Scouts were stalked and assaulted by grown-ups they trusted: their scoutmasters and troop volunteers.
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The Boy Scouts of America “perversion files”— a compendium of pedophiles and how they operated from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s — were released by court order last week. I swear, they are the scariest reading around today.
Pick a state or home town or place you once passed through on a cross-country trip, and I’ll bet you’ll find a case there among the nearly 15,000 pages of horror.
I read through at least 60 files from troops in Virginia, Maryland and the District — letters from scoutmasters detailing suspicions about other volunteers, letters from parents, court records, arrest reports and heartbreaking accounts of abuse handwritten in awkward boy penmanship.
In Maryland, the documents introduce us to Eric A. Griffin, an assistant scoutmaster in Arnold who was booted from the organization in 1974 for allegedly taking nude photos of boys. The Scouts red-flagged him, and that kept him out when he tried to volunteer in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1976. But two years later, he managed to get back into Scouting in Pennsylvania, according to the files, and was accused of messing around with more boys, including the son of the troop’s scoutmaster.
Griffin, who didn’t respond to my calls seeking comment, was convicted of lewd and lascivious conduct with a child under 16 in Pensacola, Fla., in 1984. Florida prison records indicate that he served 30 days for that crime.
Then there is David McDonald Rankin, an Adelphi troop leader who pleaded guilty in 1987 in Prince George’s County Circuit Court to making boys perform sex acts to get into his special Scout club called “The Rowdies.” Rankin, who also didn’t respond to my phone calls, was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
But no charges were ever brought against a troop leader who sent graphic letters to the Scouts he molested in Michigan in 1979. He then tried — unsuccessfully, thank goodness — to rejoin Scouting when he moved to Maryland. The handwritten letters in the court files are stomach-churning, with lots of detail and instructions to rip them apart and throw them away.
The parents, according to the file, never went to the police. I tracked the guy down but couldn’t find any criminal charges against him or any appearance on a sex-offender registry. I doubt that means there haven’t been more victims.
The release of the files has been an embarrassment to the Boy Scouts, which in 2010 finally adopted a policy of requiring local Scout leaders to report sex-abuse allegations to police.
“There have been instances where people misused their positions in scouting to abuse children, and, in certain cases, our response to these incidents, and our efforts to protect youth, were plainly insufficient, inappropriate or wrong,” Wayne Perry, the national president of the Boy Scouts, said in a statement last week. “Where those involved in scouting failed to protect, or, worse, inflicted harm on children, we extend our deepest and sincere apologies.”
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