Release of predator risks children’s lives
It is always women and children who suffer the most when progressive sensibilities creep into the criminal justice system.
Unfortunately, Massachusetts has seen many of the most appalling crimes against our most vulnerable. Sometimes our system fails in crime prevention and at others in the resolution, as witnessed this week in the case of Wayne Chapman, a serial child rapist who is set to be freed as soon as he can secure a place to live.
The state Department of Correction determined Tuesday that Chapman was no longer sexually dangerous. He’d been convicted of raping two boys in Lawrence in 1976. He admitted raping dozens more. Chapman was convicted of offenses in three states and named as a suspect in the 1976 disappearance of a 10-year-old Lawrence boy.
Chapman’s release was based on testimony in Suffolk Superior Court from psychologists Gregg Belle and Katrin Rouse-Weir, who found him to no longer be sexually dangerous, officials at the Department of Correction said.
I guess we’ll just have to find out. In Massachusetts, not surprisingly, we’ll know whether or not a predator is still a predator once he has preyed again.
This is a disgrace and it is astounding that we are taking the prognostications of psychologists over the real, tangible, predatory track record of this fiend in determining whether he goes free. He has admitted to raping dozens of children. Do we really need to overthink it?
Chapman is a suspect in the disappearance of 10-yearold Angelo “Andy” Puglisi Jr., missing from Lawrence since August 1976. In 2009, then-Lawrence police Chief John J. Romero told the Herald that Chapman was a “strong” suspect in the unsolved Puglisi case, “given his history.”
Chapman’s preferred method of assault was to lure young boys into wooded areas under the ruse that he was looking for his lost dog. Once there, he assaulted them.
We cannot begin to calculate the damage he did to these children and, subsequently, to their loved ones and the community.
Wayne Chapman spent his prime years of freedom as a prolific sexual abuser of children. According to court records, he embarked on “a 10year history of child abuse in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania.” When he was incarcerated and kept from children, the abuse stopped. Now he’s resuming his life as a free man.
And take note that though Chapman is thought to have abused up to 100 children, experts in the field estimate that only one in 20 cases of child sex assault is reported.
What is the public good that comes from having a serial sexual abuser released from confinement? There is no moral case to be made that anyone is better served with Wayne Chapman living among us as a free man.
It is shameful for us in the commonwealth of Massachusetts that anyone — trained professional or private citizen — would advocate for this wicked person to be freed into society. Perhaps those cheering this decision on the release of Wayne Chapman, who, according to court records had an “Attraction to blond, blue eyed hairless boys, 10 or 11 years of age,” would welcome him to their neighborhood.
Too often, after the police do the good work of arresting society’s worst, the avenues of opportunity open up for criminals. Sometimes it takes months or years and sometimes decades. All they’ve got to do is be patient and eventually someone with a big, framed diploma and little common sense will set them free.
This must stop.