Rapist’s release raises specter of re-offenders
Do you suppose those Middlesex Superior Court jurors who last Friday set free serial child molester Wayne Chapman ever heard of David Brown, a Worcester native with a similarly savage taste for young boys?
Perhaps not, because Brown would change his name to Nathaniel Bar-Jonah, though he never changed the darkness roiling within him, writing of “little boy pies” and “little boy stew” in a journal he maintained.
Like Chapman, who once boasted of raping “100 little kids” while incarcerated for attempting to rape two, Bar-Jonah would find favor here in the coddling commonwealth of Massachusetts after spending a dozen years in a Bay State treatment center for sexually dangerous predators.
Determining he was no longer a threat to anyone, a Massachusetts judge, oblivious to the reality there is no geographic cure for madness, released him with the proviso he move to Montana where his mother lived.
That was also where a 10year-old boy lived until he crossed paths with Bar-Jonah, who chopped his body into little pieces and stirred them into a spaghetti sauce which he then served to neighbors.
Did Massachusetts have that boy’s blood on its hands? What do you think?
Do you think Chapman’s jury ever heard of Daniel Tavares Jr., who served a 12year stretch here for murdering his mother with a carving knife? He was next heard from in Seattle where he met and killed a popular newlywed couple named Brian and Beverly Mauck.
“Tell me,” Brian’s distraught boss asked in a column that ran here at the time, “how can someone who butchers his mother at 25 be free to kill again at 41?”
What would you have told him?
At one point in his wretched journey, Chapman told authorities, “I need help because I cannot help myself from doing these things.”
Yet 14 months ago, even as his defense team was pleading for his release, Chapman was charged again for exposing himself and masturbating in front of his prison’s nursing staff. A jury acquitted him of the charge on Friday and according to his defense team, he’s now OK to roam your streets.
Remember Melissa Gosule, a fabulous young teacher slain by a savage masquerading as a good Samaritan when her car broke down?
He had been previously arrested 22 times and jailed 17 times.
She’s on a long list here of great people including Alexandra Zapp (who was killed at a rest area in Bridgewater in 2002) and Trooper Mark Charbonnier (who was killed while performing a traffic stop in Kingston in 1994), whose lives were taken by predators who never should have been free.
Keep Wayne Chapman’s name in mind; the guessing here is that we’ll be hearing from him again.
As Peter, Paul and Mary soulfully asked, “When will we ever learn?”