Details of Abuse, Written on Plywood, Lead to Pennsylvania Man’s Arrest

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/us/child-sexual-assault-william-thomas-bucks-county.html

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What became an expansive investigation into decades of child rape began last year when a man moving into a Pennsylvania mobile home found lurid descriptions of sexual abuse scrawled on a piece of forgotten plywood.

The authorities in Bucks County said on Monday that investigators tied the plywood to a handyman who had helped renovate the home, and later discovered evidence suggesting many more young victims stretching back about 40 years. The handyman, William C. Thomas, 58, was charged with 13 counts of various sex crimes; prosecutors said more counts were possible.

“We are merely scratching the surface of those conquests today,” the district attorney, Matthew D. Weintraub, said at a news conference. “To be blunt about it, this is a real-life boogeyman. This is your parents’ worst nightmare.”

Mr. Thomas repeatedly used his job as a handyman at mobile home parks to meet children as young as 2, prosecutors said. He would abuse the children and seize trophies such as photos and underwear that he would display in his own mobile home.

“The human race hasn’t come up with words to describe what we saw in that trailer,” said Lt. Henry Ward of the Falls Township police, which investigated and seized hundreds of photos. “It was horrific.”

The charging documents revealed that the authorities in Bucks County, north of Philadelphia, had received scattered reports over the years of sexual misconduct involving Mr. Thomas, a longtime resident of the area. But the documents make no mention of any past charges resulting from the complaints, and Mr. Thomas is not listed in the Pennsylvania sex offender registry.

According to the charging documents, officers investigated in 2000 after Mr. Thomas was accused of soliciting sex with a 9-year-old girl. In 2009, a man told the authorities that Mr. Thomas had abused him decades earlier when they were both children, but he did not pursue charges. And in 2010, a man who moved into Mr. Thomas’s old house told the police he had found a homemade child sex doll and graphic accounts of child sexual abuse written on drywall.

Jennifer Schorn, the deputy district attorney handling the case, declined to comment on the earlier investigations and on whether warning signs might have been missed. She credited Falls Township investigators for finding enough evidence to secure the search warrant that led to charges.

On the plywood that prompted the latest investigation, the police said Mr. Thomas bragged in detail about abusing two girls, one about 2 years old, another about 6 years old, who lived in the mobile home park. When the police revisited the scene of the 2010 report, they found detailed writings about sexual abuse on the walls of a shed.

“This man was a trophy collector and creator of monumental proportion,” Mr. Weintraub said. “He was a historian. He historically recorded all of his conquests.”

David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said it was not uncommon for abusers to keep detailed records of their crimes.

Professor Finkelhor said that as awareness of child sexual abuse has grown, cases like this one, where decades of crimes are suspected, have become less common. The three previous reports about Mr. Thomas should have raised red flags with investigators, he said.

The arrest of Mr. Thomas is the second high-profile sexual abuse case to emerge in Bucks County, population 627,000, in recent weeks. Last month, five people were accused of sexually abusing a teenage boy who the authorities said was forced to dress up in a tiger costume at “furry” parties and then molested over the course of several years.

In Mr. Thomas’s case, prosecutors said they hoped the publicity surrounding his arrest would prompt any additional victims to come forward.

“We fear there are more out there,” Ms. Schorn said.

Child abusers, she added, “perfect the art of manipulating, grooming, threatening and turning these children’s lives so upside down that oftentimes they don’t get reported.”