EDITOR: Bill Keisling’s memo to us below contained such pertinent observations that we sought and received his permission to publish it as a preface to Part Two.
Robert,
I am back at work, and working hard at this.
I can’t underscore enough how screwed up this case is, and how screwed up the transcripts are. (Everything is out of order, as if intentionally meant to confuse.)
How many victims are there? Is there an overlap in the time frames of the victims? I have no idea until I finish going through the testimonies, and writing the narratives.
We’re doing now exactly what we have to do: pulling out the individual testimonies, and writing these first-person narratives.
The more I compile these narratives, the more I am struck by the stunning repetition.
I know we said we should try to eliminate the repetition in the stories, but now I’m not so sure.
Every kid who gets into Sandusky’s car gets felt up. They go to Penn State, and then Sandusky’s home. First there’s weight lifting, and then there’s a shower.
This story is like a reverse Rashomon, the Kurosawa crime drama where everyone is interviewed and tells a different story.
Here the repetition is a powerful indictment of Corbett and the investigators on this case. It’s not as if Sandusky is going to a foreign city to victimize each boy in a different fashion, making it difficult or impossible to investigate: Bangkok, in a taxi. San Francisco in a shower room, etc.
As I proceed, it becomes apparent the cops and the AG agents have monumentally screwed up this case (intentionally or not), and failed to complete what should have been an easy investigation. Were the investigators incompetent, or where they deliberately failing to gather witnesses or clues?
It also becomes obvious that there are certainly many more victims out there that the AG’s office simply failed to find.
Anyway, the problem I have here is that I have to complete the rest of the victims’ narratives before I can edit.
You have several choices. The best is to publish these narratives as they are. They stand on their own, are compelling and important, and drive home the scope of the crime(s). I also don’t think we should cut out elements of one’s boy’s story because they same thing happened to the boy(s) before.
These narratives are running about a thousand words a boy, and I don’t think that’s too much to dedicate to each victim, in their own words, considering what they’ve had to go through with Sandusky, and then Corbett.
As well, I think you’ll be surprised how many readers appreciate raw narratives like these. (For years, in my own books, readers have been asking me to reproduce the raw materials I’m working with.)
These narratives also appear no where else, and as such are a public service.
The second option is to hold the Part 2 narratives I just sent you, and wait for me to compile the rest of the narratives. It takes me about a full day to do each individual narrative, and I believe there are four or five victims left.
Once we have them all in front of us, we can then edit down the narratives, and truncate them, and ad pithy comments if you wish (though now I think that’s a mistake.)
Better idea is to publish these narratives in their repetitive completeness, and then go back and summarize it all in later pieces, referring to these narratives.
The heart of the Sandusky case are the stories of these victims. These stories have not been told by these young men in their own words. That’s what we’re now trying to do
Now the danger is that we’re attempting to work too fast, and to edit and present material before we know all the elements, and the message(s) to relate from the whole.
Bill
Sandusky victims in their own words, Part 2
Editor’s note: Part 1 of this series, featuring the stories of Matt, Dustin, and Brett, can be read here.
Zach and Brandon 1998
Jerry Sandusky’s next known victim was a talkative 11-year-old named Zach.
Zach first met Sandusky at a Second Mile picnic in Spring Creek Park in the spring of 1998.
By this time, Sandusky had been molesting Second Mile kids for at least ten years.
“I was a huge football fan then,” Zach remembers.“I kind of grew up in a Penn State fan house. My sister went to college there and I’ve been following the football program. (Sandusky) was a part of the start of The Second Mile. Anything to do with Penn State, I just wanted to be a part of it.”
“I made my way up to (Sandusky) after some of the activities were done. I went up to him and I think I introduced myself to him, because I was really excited to meet him,” Zach says.
Sandusky suggested he’d take Zach to “work out” and “lift weights” on the PSU main campus.
As with the other boys, Sandusky personally made arrangements to call Zach’s mom to ask permission to collect and spend time with the boy.
Sandusky, Zach explains, “invited me to work out at one of the Penn State facilities and confirmed it with my mom. She allowed that to happen. He came to pick me up.”
On the evening of May 3, 1998, Sandusky drove over to Zach’s house.
What happened next would be familiar to Sandusky’s other victims. Sandusky’s modus operandi by this time was already well worn and time tested.
In his car Sandusky would immediately place his hand on Zach’s leg. They’d drive over to the PSU campus, “work out”for a few minutes, and then Sandusky would take Zach into the coaches’ locker room for a shower.
Zach remembers it like this:
“I was really excited that day to go see Jerry, to work out at the building and just enjoy the day, the events,” Zach says. “(Jerry) came, knocked on the door. I was all ready to go in my workout clothes, just like a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and he and my mother talked for a few minutes, just how the program was doing at Penn State, the team.
“And after the conversation was over we walked to his car, which was right outside, got in his car, put seatbelts on, and I was sitting in the passenger seat. He reached over and put his hand, like, right next to my knee, leg, knee, on the top part, and I remember just feeling that it was a little bit odd, and I kind of pulled it away just a little bit towards the passenger door. And I believe that it just remained on there, so I just kind of rolled with it.
“I don’t remember what happened in the car. We just kind of made small talk. Got to the building next to Holuba Hall. We entered. He was showing me some of the players’ equipment. I believe he let me try on some of the helmets and shoulder pads, maybe Curtis Enis or some of the notable players that I knew. I remember they were huge for me, a lot of wiggle room with the shoulder pads. I could move my head and the helmet would just float around.
“Then we moved on to the coaches’ locker room. He showed me the offensive coordinator’s locker. He showed me his, JoePa’s. I was really excited to see his. He gave me a pair of his socks. I was thrilled with that. He gave me a little bit more of a tour, and then it was time to start some of the activities.”
Sandusky invited Zach to play two indoor games of Sandusky’s own invention, which the coach called “Polish soccer and Polish bowling.” These were played with a ball made of rolled-up tape.
“I remember playing those games in the hallways,” Zach says. “After the bowling, the soccer, then I believe we wrestled a little bit on the carpet. He was showing me how to — how to pin. He would, you know, pin me and say this is how you pin, and we were just kind of rolling, doing a few wrestling moves. He was just showing me some moves.
“I felt uncomfortable with it, but it was Jerry Sandusky. So I didn’t want to make him mad. It was just a little — slightly uncomfortable, because I didn’t really know him and it was just close.”
From there, as with Brett a few months earlier, Sandusky suggested they lift weights.
“I think he gave me a pair of workout clothes, some shorts and maybe a shirt. I just kind of remember thinking I kind of came dressed for that, to work out,” Zach says. “And so I put them on and they were a little larger. I remember pulling the drawstring all the way out to keep it up. We went to the gym, which was down the hallway. He was introducing me to some of the machines, the equipment, kind of helping me out, showing me how to do it. He was watching me do it. He was kind of helping me, I think, with the mechanics.”
As with the other victims, the “workout”lasted only a short while, perhaps 15 or 20 minutes, before Sandusky suggested they take a shower.
“I remember him saying, ‘Okay, now it’s time to shower, to rinse off,’ and my immediate thought was, ‘I’m not even sweating yet.’ It was only 15 or 20 minutes, but I didn’t want to be awkward to him about it, so I said, politely, ‘Okay,’and we left the gym area. He let me un-change in one of the locker rooms. I think it was the coaches’. He went in a different room and I started to really get uncomfortable as I’m taking my clothes off.
“No one, you know, besides my parents have ever seen me like that, without clothes on. So I think I put a towel around me, walked towards the shower. He was already in there, waiting, with his shower going. I believe it was straight ahead, maybe off to the right a little bit. And he had a shower right next to him going, and I immediately walked in and went to the left and turned on a shower across the room. I didn’t want to be right next to him in the shower and it just felt really awkward.
“Once I turned on the shower across from him, on the other side of the wall, he said, ‘Why don’t you come over to the shower?’ next to him, because he had already warmed it up for me. So I said okay. I really didn’t want to. That even made it a little bit more hard, and I went over and he made a lot of jokes to, you know, make me laugh, and it was just joking around a bunch and he started to kind of tickle me.
“I think he said he was the tickle monster. He started to tickle me, like, on my — underneath my arms and on my stomach and chest area. And I believe at some point he, you know, grabbed me from behind, gave me a big bear hug and, you know, kind of lifted me up and just said, ‘I’m going to squeeze your guts out,’ like in a playful manner and just, you know, squeezed and made a growling sound.
“And I remember seeing his chest hair right next to my face. I’m like, ‘This is just — this is icky.‘ I didn’t want to. So I, you know, tried to get out of his grasp. But at the same time I’m trying to be in a joking manner with him so I wouldn’t make him upset.
“Just more of the tickling occurred. (He) made a bunch of jokes and (was) you know just trying to tickle me and lighten the mood up. And then time to wash up.
“So I was putting soap on my body and he said, ‘Here, let me help you with your back, where you can’t reach.’ He took soap and, you know, lathered it onto my back and shoulders and all. And at that point it just — it was just — it just would escalate, the uncomfortableness of it–. But I was at the same time just trying to not make him feel mad that I was kind of feeling a bit awkward about it.
“Then he took me, put his hands around my waist like this –“ he demonstrates “– and lifted me up to the showerhead to get the soap out of my hair, and I believe my chest was to his chest. I don’t — I can’t remember — I don’t think it was touching, but I just remember going into the showerhead and having to close my eyes so the soap wouldn’t get in my eyes.
“And that’s the last thing I remember about being in the shower. It’s just kind of black.”
For Zach it would almost be like an alien abduction. He remembers little after the moment Sandusky lifted him to the showerhead. The running water. The showerhead. The echoing shower room. Sandusky lifting him high.
“I got home somehow and everything else is just blackout. I just don’t remember it,” he says.
To this day Zach can’t remember much. He remembered that Sandusky said he’d take him to the movies. Sandusky said Zach could come over to his house, where the coach said he’d let Zach sit on his lap and the two of them would look at the Internet on Sandusky’s computer.
Sandusky also promised Zach he could sit on the bench at Penn State football games. Zach asked if his mother could come along, since she also liked football. “No, just you,” Sandusky told him.
Other than that Zach doesn’t seemed to remember much else about his ride home
“I don’t believe he walked me to the door.
Zach says he had a friend named Brandon, who also was in the Second Mile in the same time period. Zach said he’d asked Brandon if he’d ever gone into the shower with Sandusky.
Brandon told Zach that Sandusky also wrestled with him, and had squeezed him in the shower too.
That summer Ryan attended a five-week Second Mile camp at Penn State’s main campus, where he stayed in the college dorms.
He met Sandusky that summer.
Sandusky “was in the outdoor swimming pool. He was going around introducing himself to people.”
Nothing happened between the coach and the boy that year.
The next year, in the summer of 1998, when he was 11, Ryan again attended Second Mile’s camp at PSU.
“The second year I met Mr. Sandusky in the pool again,” Ryan says. “He came up from behind me. (He) swam under in between my legs and went to lift me up on his shoulders. He stuck his hands up the front of my swim trunks. Mr. Sandusky reached his hands up the front of my shorts and grabbed a hold of my genitals.”
Later, that fall, Sandusky, Ryan says “contacted my guardian at the time. (He) told them that he wanted to come pick me up and take me to a football game.”
After the game, Ryan says Sandusky took him back to the Sandusky’s house. In the car, Ryan says, Sandusky “had his hand on my inner thigh.”
Once at the house, he says, Sandusky took him down into the basement.
“We were wrestling, and (Jerry) pinned me to the ground. He pulled my shorts down and started performing oral sex on me. I freaked out. I got nervous. I got scared.”
Sandusky “told me that if I told anybody that I would never see my family again.”Later, Ryan says, Sandusky “apologized for saying that. Told me that he didn’t mean it and that he loved me.”
In 1999, his third year at Second Mile camp, Sandusky took him shopping at the Nittany Mall, Ryan remembers.
“He bought me some shoes, some clothes for school. He bought me a video game.”
After the shopping spree, he recalls, Sandusky took him back to the basement of the house. Sandusky again performed oral sex on the boy, “And vice versa,” Ryan says.
After this incident, Ryan explains, he no longer wanted to go to Second Mile camps. Nor did he want to again see Jerry Sandusky.
Jason 1999
In 1999 Jason was 12 and living with his mother and his little brother in Moshannon, Pennsylvania. He attended Mountaintop Elementary, and met Jerry Sandusky through a Second Mile camp.
“I met Jerry Sandusky Casino Night at The Second Mile,” Jason says. “One of the counselors brought me up to him, introduced him — introduced me to him — and we talked for a while. And then he asked me if I wanted to go to his football camp. I agreed.”
“Jerry drove me (to football camp),” Jason says. “Jerry drove me, and it was in Latrobe.”
As with the other boys, Jason says, “I think the hand on the knee thing happened, like, right away. That was a big thing for Jerry, rubbing the knee and the inside of the leg and tickling me and stuff like that.”
After football camp, Sandusky took Jason to a Penn State Blue and White game. “It’s in Penn State. It’s at the big stadium.”
“It was awesome. I loved it. I hadn’t been to a Penn State blue and white game before that. I hadn’t been to any Penn State game before that. That was my first Penn State game.”
“After that I stayed at his house pretty frequently, and we also went to Syracuse, New York. He was there to give a motivational speech, I believe, and he drove us up and we stayed in the hotel. It was just me and him.”
“I stayed at his house frequently, like I would say 50 times over a three-year span. He was like a father to me.”
Jason slept downstairs in the Sanduskys’ house.
“It was during the week most of the time,” Jason remembers. “I would go to high school and then he would pick me up — well, it wasn’t really high school at the time. It was middle school, but it was attached to the high school, so I went to the middle school and he would pick me up from there, drive me over to his place or the gym or racquetball or Holuba Hall or wherever we went at that time, and then he would drive me back to his place. We’d have dinner and then I would sleep over.”
“I always slept downstairs. Well, I slept upstairs once whenever, I think, Matt was home or something like that. Matt, his son.
“You go downstairs and to the left. There’re pool tables and shuffleboard and stuff like that. We played shuffleboard. I wasn’t into pool at the time.”
And then there’s a room (with) a big waterbed. That’s where I slept.”
“I didn’t really think it was weird at the time, until later on, but he would come in and he would have his shirt off. I would be in all my clothes, and he would ask me why I would want to sleep with all my clothes on. So eventually I would strip down to my underwear.
“So I’d be in my underwear to sleep in and he would be in shorts and no shirt, and he would sit on the edge of the bed and he would talk to me and make me laugh or something like that. Whenever he made me laugh, he got excited and jumped into bed with me and started tickling me.
“And he would start rubbing my stomach, blowing on my stomach and pelvis. He would also touch my penis.
“It was frequent, pretty frequent. He had a big thing for grabbing your kneecap and tickling it and then working his way up your thigh.”
Jason didn’t complain, he says, because “I was enjoying the things that I was getting too much.”
Sandusky began to take him to the gym to “work out.”
“Then we would go back and get a shower.”
“The first time we took a shower I went into the shower room and I was nervous because I had never showered with another man, let alone a grown man before,” Jason says. “I was kind of nervous about taking off my clothes and stuff like that, and he coaxed me and forced me into taking off my clothes, and he went over and turned on the showers.
“He turned on his shower and one right next to him. I came in and I turned on a different shower that was further away from him because I was kind of uncomfortable at the time. I didn’t — I’d never done that before. So I would come in. I would turn on a showerhead further away and he would make me feel bad about it, like — like I didn’t love him or like I was afraid of him or something, that I was showering too far away.
“And so he would get me to move closer to him, where he would wash my shoulders, my butt, my back. He would pick me up and bear hug me, like give me a real big hug while — toss me in the air both with my back to him and my front to him.”
This happened “every time we went to the gym.”
In bed, meanwhile, for the next several years, through 1999, 2000, and 2001,Sandusky would touch his penis.
“He would touch me and rub me and grab me, and he gave me an erection. And at that time I would roll over and try to get away from him, and that’s — that’s pretty much where it would stop. I wouldn’t let it go any further.”
“I knew that I wasn’t supposed to have one from a man. I mean — I mean, I was a kid.”
Still, Jason didn’t tell anyone about this abuse for years.
Sandusky “made me feel like I was a part of something, like a family,”Jason explains. “He gave me things that I had never had before. I just didn’t want to give any of it up…. Sandusky told the boy he “was like extended family, (and) unconditionally loved.”
“I loved him,” Jason says.
“The reason why I broke it off with Jerry is because I had to go away,” Jason says. He robbed an old man and got in trouble with the law. “I got sent away to a group home, to two different group homes and then in foster care, where I eventually graduated out of. I had no further contact (with Jerry) after that point.
“I would pray he would call me and maybe find a way to get me out of there, adopt me or something. That never happened.”
Sandusky, he says, “never contacted me, never. My mom never even heard from him to find out where I was.”
“I’m infuriated (with Sandusky) right now,” Jason says.
