The Unquiet

“It’s pretty simple: it’s a sop to voters that will do more harm than good. Look, of every hundred allegations that get reported, about half will end up with law enforcement. Of that fifty, forty will get charged. Of that forty, thirty-five will plea bargain, five will go to trial, and from that five, there will be two convictions and three acquittals. So, out of that initial hundred we have maybe thirty to forty sex offenders that we can register and of whom we can keep track.

“In the case of mandatory sentencing, there will be no incentive for alleged offenders to cop a plea. They might as well take their chances in court and, in general, prosecutors prefer not to go to trial on abuse allegations unless they have a solid case. The problem for us, as I told you when we last met, is that it can be very difficult to provide the kind of evidence necessary to secure a conviction in criminal court. So, if you introduce mandatory sentencing, there’s a strong possibility that more offenders will slip through the net. We don’t get them on the register, and they go back to doing whatever it was they were doing until someone catches them at it again. Mandatory sentencing allows politicians to appear tough on crime, but it’s essentially counterproductive. Frankly, though, I’d have a better chance of making a chimp understand that than I will of convincing Harkness.”

“Chimps aren’t concerned with reelection,” I said.

“I’d vote for a chimp over Harkness anyday. At least the chimp might evolve further at some stage. So, Mr. Parker, have you made any progress?”

“A little. What do you know about Gilead?”

“I assume you’re not testing my knowledge of biblical trivia,” he replied, “so I take it you’re referring to the Gilead community, and the ‘children of Gilead.’”

He gave me a potted history, similar to what I already knew, although he believed that the scale of the abuse was greater than had previously been suspected. “I’ve met some of the victims, so I know what I’m talking about. I think most of the people in Gilead knew what was happening to those children, and more of the men participated than was acknowledged at first. Then the families scattered after the bodies were found, and some of them were never heard from again. Others, though, cropped up in relation to other cases. One of the victims, the girl whose evidence led to the conviction of Mason Dubus, the man believed to be the ringleader of the abusers, did her best to keep track of them. A couple are in jail in other states, and the rest are dead. Dubus is the only one left alive, or the only one that we know of; even if others of whom we’re not aware have survived, they’re old, old men and women by now.”

“What happened to the children?”

“Some were taken away by their parents or guardians when the community disintegrated. We don’t know where they went. The ones that were rescued were put in foster homes. A couple were taken in by Good Will Hinckley.”

Good Will Hinckley was an institution close to I-95 that provided a home and school environment for kids aged twelve to twenty-one who had suffered molestation, were homeless, or had been affected by substance or alcohol abuse, whether directly or as the result of the addictions of a family member. It had been in existence since the late nineteenth century, and graduated nine or ten seniors every year who might otherwise have found themselves in jail, or in the ground. It was not surprising that some of the children of Gilead had ended up there. It was probably the best thing that could have occurred, under the circumstances.

“How could it have happened?” I asked. “I mean, the scale of it seems, well, almost incredible.”

“It was an isolated, secretive community in a state filled with isolated, secretive communities,” said Christian. “From what we now know, it seems to have been the case that the principal families involved had known each other prior to their arrival at Gilead, and had worked together or maintained contact for a period of some years. In other words, there was already a structure in place that would have facilitated the kind of abuse that went on there. There was certainly a clear division between the four or five core families and those who arrived later: the women didn’t mix with one another, the children didn’t play with one another, and the men kept their distance as much as possible, apart from those occasions when work forced them together. The abusers knew exactly what they were doing, and were possibly even attuned to those who might share their tastes, so there was always new prey for them. It was a nightmare situation, but there was something about Gilead -bad luck, bad timing, bad location, or, hell, let’s call it a touch of evil and have done with it-that exacerbated it.

“You also have to take into account the fact that people weren’t as aware of child abuse issues then as we are now. It wasn’t until 1961 that a doctor named Henry Kempe wrote a paper called ‘The Battered Child Syndrome’ and started a revolution on child abuse, but that paper concentrated principally on physical abuse and, even in the early seventies, when I started my training, sexual abuse was hardly mentioned. Then came feminism, and people began talking to women and children about abuse. In 1978, Kempe published ‘Sexual Abuse: Another Hidden Pediatric Problem,’ and the realization that there was a real issue to be confronted probably stems from about then.

“Unfortunately, it could be said that the pendulum swung too far the other way. It created a climate of constant suspicion, because science hadn’t caught up with the desire to deal with the problem. There was enthusiasm, but not enough skepticism. It led to a backlash, and decreased reporting in the nineties, but now we seem to be approaching some kind of equilibrium, even if we still sometimes concentrate on sexual abuse at the expense of other kinds of abuse. It’s reckoned that twenty percent of children have been sexually abused by the time they reach adulthood, but the consequences of long-term neglect and physical abuse are actually much more severe. For example, a child who has been physically abused and neglected is much more likely to grow up to engage in criminal behavior than a child who has been sexually abused. Meanwhile, from data we know that sexual abusers of children are more likely to have been abused themselves, but most pedophiles have not been sexually abused. There,” he concluded. “You got the lecture. Now why the curiosity about Gilead?”

“Daniel Clay was interested in Gilead too. He created paintings of it. Someone told me that he even interviewed Mason Dubus, and he may have intended to write a book about what happened there. Then there’s the fact that his car was found abandoned in Jackman, and Gilead isn’t far from Jackman. It also appears that one of Clay’s former patients was abused at or near Gilead by men wearing bird masks. All of that strikes me as more than a series of coincidences.”

“Well, it’s probably not surprising that Clay was curious about Gilead,” said Christian. “Most people in our field who work in Maine have at some point examined the available material, and a number of them would have interviewed Dubus, myself included.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t recall any descriptions of Gilead in the case reports relating to Clay, although there were mentions of rural settings. Some of the children caught sight of trees, grass, dirt. There were similarities, too, in their descriptions of the place in which they were abused-bare walls, a mattress on the floor, that sort of thing-although most of the victims were blindfolded for much of the abuse, so we’re talking about snatched glimpses and nothing more.”

“Could these men have been drawn to Gilead because of what happened there in the past?” I asked.

“It’s possible,” said Christian. “I have a friend who works in the area of suicide prevention. He talks of ‘clusters of location,’ places that become sites of choice for suicide, largely because others have successfully committed suicide in those locations. One suicide facilitates another, or provides a stimulus for it. Equally, it might be that a place synonymous with the abuse of children could prove attractive to other abusers, but it would be quite a risk to take.”