Larry was in big trouble, and he knew it. For six months he’d been having sex with Laura, the 16-year-old daughter of his fiancee, with whom he was living in a town house in the western suburbs. It was mid-December 2000, 12 days before he and Joan were to be married. Laura was talking to Joan in her bedroom, and as he stood in the upstairs hallway he could hear his name being hurled back and forth. Uh-oh, he thought, and fled to the garage in a haze of fear and self-loathing.
“How could you?”
But Larry has also had trouble finding a place to live, and though he had a good job for a while, he’s now unemployed and is having a hard time finding work. He’s particularly worried about his long-term job prospects. He says he’s done everything society has asked him to do and hasn’t slipped up since his arrest. He wishes that society would someday let him lose the stigma of his crime.
Larry told his family. “I was in total shock,” says his sister Greta, who’s a nurse. “I didn’t think Larry had any inclinations this way. Can you imagine? Larry and Joan were supposed to be getting married. Lives were being destroyed here. We tried to support him, but it was depressing. When I first saw his face, it was like the aging you see in those pictures of the president at the beginning of his term and then four years later.”
Larry pleaded guilty. He could have gotten three to seven years in prison under state sentencing guidelines. But he had no other convictions, and in early May the judge gave him four years’ probation, which included five months in the Du Page County jail, and ordered him to cover Laura’s counseling bills. Because his victim was a minor, he was now labeled a “sexual predator.”
Larry was released late that October and began being supervised by the county’s probation department. Since 1995 it has run a special program for sex offenders modeled on one in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix. Larry is required to check in with a probation officer every two or three weeks and to submit to random home and work visits by the officer as well as random drug and alcohol tests. (So far he’s had five home visits and two drug tests.) He isn’t allowed to drink or look at sexually stimulating material, including that on the Web, and he has to take a polygraph test at least once a year. He’s also required to be in therapy until he gets off probation, in May 2006. (The Maricopa County program has even more requirements, including curfews.) He was handed a list of psychologists who were approved to direct his treatment and chose Michael Davison, who has an office in Arlington Heights near his father’s place.
