Friday, February 25, 2000
Secrecy blamed in botched abuse case
Detective: County didn't protect kids
BY JANICE MORSE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Victoria Reden, a San Diego County Sheriff's dete4ctive, ecountered a "wall of secrecy" in Butler County in a child-abuse case.
(AP photo)
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HAMILTON — In the late 1980s, a half-dozen boys told Ohio authorities they were sexually molested and given drugs in Stephen Billand's Clermont County foster home, according to county and state records.
But it took more than a decade and a police detective from 2,200 miles away to bring the case to prosecution.
Detective Victoria Reden of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department launched an investigation that led to the indictment of Mr. Billand on dozens of sex charges. He had moved there from Ohio in 1991.
On Thursday, Detective Reden told Butler County commissioners that when she first came to Ohio three years ago to pursue the case, Butler County Children Services officials, who had placed a half-dozen boys with Mr. Billand, denied having any files on Mr. Billand. They eventually provided some documents, but most of the records, she said, came from Clermont County and the Ohio Department of Human Services.
Ms. Reden told 50 people who packed the commissioners' hearing room that she doesn't know whether Butler officials purposely covered up the alleged crimes. But she did say that the county's system for protecting children has instead hurt them. She says Butler County desperately needs to improve on record-keeping, investigative procedures and sharing information with other agencies.
“Butler County (Children Services), its juvenile court and prosecutor's office have worked in tandem to build a wall of secrecy,” she told commissioners. “(The wall was) so secure and closed that even a law enforcement officer ... found it difficult to penetrate.”
Her investigation of Mr. Billand began in 1997 when two teens said Mr. Billand, who had brought them from Ohio to California, had sodomized them at gunpoint. Ms. Reden searched Mr. Billand's home. She found 1,000 photographs of nude boys, including at least four who lived in his Clermont home in the 1980s.
Mr. Billand, 51, is in jail awaiting trial on 43 Clermont charges stemming from those photos. They include rape, gross sexual imposition and pandering obscenity.
He also faces 24 California sex charges, Ms. Reden said.
Butler County juvenile court officials did not respond to a call seeking comment. Kathy Vallance, acting director of Children Services, said her agency's ex-director, John McAninch, ordered staff “to fully cooperate in any investigation.” She said the agency has tried to make changes to better protect children and prevent someone such as Mr. Billand from becoming a licensed foster parent.
And Prosecutor John F. Holcomb blamed the so-called secrecy on a state law restricting release of Children Services information.
“Don't change Children Services people or assistant prosecutors or the police,” he said. “Change the law.”
But Ms. Reden said the law isn't to blame. She said investigative information was not properly pursued by those who already had it.
“Every kid that was in (the Billand home) at one point told somebody what was going on,” Ms. Reden said. Police in Clermont County's Union Township investigated. But a Clermont County judge allowed Butler County to take control of the case, “and that's where it died,” Ms. Reden said.
Butler County prosecuted a juvenile for molesting others in the home, she told commissioners, but never took action against Mr. Billand or his male companion — even though a Children Services memo says the agency had substantiated sex abuse.
If this case had happened in California, Ms. Reden told commissioners, children services workers would have lost their jobs and would have been prosecuted for failing to report suspected crimes to police.
Ms. Reden said that when she interviewed all the other boys who lived in the home, she found consistent stories and corroborating evidence. She said the boys described a two-way mirror that could be used to spy on them from Mr. Billand's bedroom and a locked safe that the boys said was used to store sex toys, weapons and pornography.
Butler County removed all six foster boys from Mr. Billand's home in April 1988. But the next month, the agency awarded him a certificate “in recognition of outstanding contribution to the children of our community.”
The audience gasped when Ms. Reden held up the certificate.
“I'm horrified. Everything about this shocks me,” said audience member Dennis Yavorsky, vice president of Parents Empowerment Coalition, a group that has actively crusaded for reform of the Children Services system.
Another Children Services critic, Butler County Commissioner Michael A. Fox says the case is one of the worst examples showing how secrecy crushes the truth out of child-abuse cases.
“It's appalling. Where was the active engagement of our agency? It's not every day that you find out one of your foster homes is a sex nest,” he said. “They should have been all over this.”
Mr. Fox vowed to use the case to pry open the closed system. The commissioners are appointing new members to the Children Services board — and insisting upon greater openness. But Mr. Fox anticipates that the prosecutor's office and juvenile court will fight to keep the status quo.
Steve Kemme contributed to this report.
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