Dumfries Police Put in Personal Time, Travel 'to Protect the Kids'
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Northern Ohio is a long way from Northern Virginia, and it is especially off the beat for John Chapman, a police officer in the tiny Prince William County town of Dumfries.
Yet Northern Ohio -- a small town called Monroeville, to be precise -- is exactly where Chapman needed to go on a case a few weeks ago. Problem was, his bosses couldn't afford to send him there.
Chapman had just started a unit to use the Internet to investigate crimes against children. In fact, he was the unit, working on his days off or grabbing time between police calls to enter chat rooms, where he posed as a 13-year-old boy. Before long, he had struck up a conversation with an Ohio man, who sent him lots of nude photographs of young boys. It was time to make an arrest.
But the Dumfries Police Department, with just 15 officers including the chief, doesn't have its own dispatcher, much less an extensive travel budget. So Chapman finagled $150 in gas money from the town, and he and his partner, Detective Charlie Gardiner, climbed into Gardiner's red pickup and made the 400-mile trip through the night to Ohio. To save money, they stayed with Gardiner's parents and mooched food off local police.
"I was going to do everything in my power to catch this guy," said Chapman, 41. "If that meant spending my own money, so be it."
To call Dumfries small in the world of law enforcement would be an understatement. A town of 1.6 square miles and about 5,000 people, Dumfries straddles Route 1, about 30 miles south of Washington. The police department is in a tiny, almost ramshackle office in the basement of Town Hall.
Someone hoping to find it must drive to the parking lot in the back of the building, where the police entrance has cracked white paint around the door.
Around town, the chief, Calvin L. Johnson, is known by his first name. His 14 officers handle the usual traffic crashes, fights and domestic violence calls, but anything more serious -- homicides, robberies -- is sent to Prince William police. County police also investigate all sex crimes.
Chapman vowed to change that.
A burly man with speckled gray hair and an easy smile, he has two loves in life: police work and kids.
"I love working with kids," Chapman said in a recent interview. "I'm the type of person who, if I'm driving down the street and I see a lemonade stand, I'll buy the lemonade. If kids come to the door selling candy bars, I'll buy 20. It drives my wife nuts."
Chapman and his wife, Susan, have three children, ages 3 to 12. He manages his older daughter's soccer team, speaks at school career days and, in his spare time, helps train foster parents in Stafford County, where he lives.
Chapman started his career with the Arlington County Sheriff's Office, then worked for the Dumfries Police Department in the early 1990s before joining Prince William police in 1992. But he missed the small-town environment of Dumfries and came back in April.
So, with support from the chief, he attended a one-week training course run by the Northern Virginia/Washington, D.C. Internet Crimes Against Children task force, which helps local police fight Internet predators.
When he returned in July, he told the chief he'd work part time and come in on his days off. All he needed was a laptop.
"We thought it was a great idea," Johnson said. "We know that the biggest wave of the next horizon of crime is Internet crime, but as a small department, we can't designate someone to do this full time."
Chapman was issued a blue Toshiba laptop, and he set up shop on his desk in the corner of the squad room, known as "the bullpen." In July, he went online, posing first as a 14-year-old girl. He was inundated with propositions from older men.
Sometimes, Chapman has to leave in mid-chat. "If I'm on the computer and a call comes in, we're going to shut the computer down and take care of business," he said. "I'll say, 'I gotta go,' and then hopefully I can find the person online again."
Chapman met one man in a Pokemon chat room who said he was 20 and from Ohio. Soon, Chapman said, the man sent him photographs of nude boys in various sexual poses. The man gave Chapman the password to his Hotmail account, where Chapman said he found more than 200 additional child porn images.
The man also gave Chapman his name and sent a picture of himself in his high school graduation gown. "It had an eagle on the back, and I could barely make out the letters 'ville,' " said Chapman, who quickly discovered the suspect lived in Monroeville.
It was time to go to Ohio. But when Chapman was told that his department couldn't send him, he turned to the Prince William Commonwealth's Attorney's Office.
"We don't have any independent funds for investigations like that,'' recalled Tom Seaha, a prosecutor who had been tracking Chapman's investigation and said he was sorry he couldn't help. Seaha said he admired Chapman's enthusiasm, but he urged him to turn over the case to Ohio authorities.
"I gave up. But they found a way to go," Seaha said of Chapman and Gardiner. "When everyone told them there was no money, they found a way to go."
Legally, Chapman didn't have to go to Ohio. But he felt a need to eyeball the suspect in the case he had begun. Plus, he said, going might enable him to collect evidence for his investigation of the suspect in Virginia.
The benefactor, of sorts, turned out to be the Dumfries town manager, Dave Whitlow, who responded to the police chief's pleas for help with $150 from the town coffers for gas and tolls.
Driving in the pickup that his partner uses for gang cases, Chapman and Gardiner left at 3 a.m. on Aug. 29. They drove seven hours straight, their only food a bag of chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin cookies that Gardiner's wife made.
Arriving in Monroeville at 10 a.m., Chapman and Gardiner spent the day with Ohio sheriff's investigators typing up an affidavit and getting a search warrant. "It was necessary for them to come here," said Detective Sgt. Dane Howard of the Huron County Sheriff's Office. "I would have been hard-pressed to draft a search warrant on the statements of an officer I had never met."
Ohio officers treated their Northern Virginia colleagues to lunch, and Chapman and Gardiner then drove an hour and 40 minutes that afternoon to Gardiner's parents' home in Concord, Ohio. They put them up in a spare bedroom and cooked them dinner.
Gardiner, 42, said Ohio officers had offered to put them up for the night if his parents hadn't come through. "Yeah, we work on a shoestring budget," Gardiner said, "but I think you'll find that law enforcement helps law enforcement, no matter where you're at."
Their creative financing might have paid off. With help from Ohio sheriff's deputies, they arrested a man, Matthew Hohler, on charges including raping a 12-year-old boy. Prince William and the FBI are investigating the case, said law enforcement sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.
An attorney for Hohler, 20, said his client will enter a plea of not guilty. "At this point, I don't know what the allegations are other than the bare-bones charges," said the attorney, K. Ronald Bailey. "I did hear something to the effect that it had something to do with a contact down in Virginia."
At a time when attention is focused on the growing sexual exploitation of children through the Internet, law enforcement officials said Chapman and his partner went above and beyond the call of duty.
"Those officers . . . who were willing to give up their personal time and money just to make this case, that's a big thing,'' said Howard of the Huron sheriff's office. "Cops are dedicated, but I don't know that every officer would have done what they did."
The total out-of-pocket expense for the trip: about $20 apiece for Chapman and Gardiner.
These days, Chapman is back on his laptop, balancing three active child porn investigations with the demands of patrol and police work. He is determined to soldier on, he said, because "we're here to protect the kids.''
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