Convicted sexual predator Zane Loper
In a brief report on the trail of tears of a child who was raped by Zane Douglas Loper, a Scioto County Board Mental Retardation Developmental Disabilities (SCBMRDD) employee, Teresa Mollette wrote with an understandable sense of outrage, “It appears this child who was first raped while in the care of MRDD is now being raped for a second time by her own lawyer, Stan Bender, and the legal system . . .”
The SCBMR/DD is the Portsmouth-based satellite of the Ohio Department of Mental Retardation Developmental Disabilities, a state agency that has the following mission statement: “The mission of the Ohio Department of MR/DD is continuous improvement of the quality of life for Ohio's citizens with developmental disabilities and their families.” The current PR slogan of the Portsmouth MRDD is “Teamwork Makes the Dream Work.” Given SCBMR/DD’s recent nightmarish history, I think such a slogan is at best premature and at worst offensive. If a slogan is necessary, I suggest “MRDD Care Makes the Nightmare.”
Having talked to the child’s mother, Denise Yates, and having read disturbing and depressing legal material related to the rape case, I want to provide some background information to substantiate Teresa Mollette’s charge of a sexual rape being followed by a legal rape. The text of her charge and a distorted photo of the child in question can be found at (http://portsmouthcitizens.info/blog/?page_id=29).
The raped child, Denise Yates’ daughter, was born on April 16, 1991. When she was about three years old, she was diagnosed as being retarded. In 1997, her mother enrolled her in SCBMR/DD’s Vern Riffe School. It was a fateful enrollment, for in 1993 SCBMR/DD had hired Zane Douglas Loper as a teacher’s aide at the Verne Riffe school even though Loper was already known to have been sexually abusing children. Prosecutors would later charge that Loper’s sexual abuse of children had begun as early as 1984, almost ten years before he was hired at the Vern Riffe School. Denise Yates’ attorneys later formally charged that the “Defendants [SCBMR/DD, Superintendent Oakley, and Riffe School Principal Miller] actually and constructively knew of information which indicated that Loper had engaged in prior unlawful sexual activity with children placed under his care and Defendents knew or in the exercise of reasonable care should have known that if that information was not investigated Loper would continue to molest children in his position at the Vern Riffe School.”
Unlike other mothers of retarded Riffe School children who had been Loper’s victims, Denise Yates dared to accuse Loper of preying upon children while he was employed by MRDD at the Riffe School. She would pay a price for being so outspoken about the crime committed against her daughter. But if she had not publicly protested about Loper and if John Welton had not reported on the scandalous mismanagement at MRDD in the Shawnee Sentinel, possibly nothing would have come to light. Certainly if we waited for the Portsmouth Daily Times to do the kind of investigative journalism John Welton did, we would be waiting from here to eternity.
Welton reported that Superintendent Oakley knew, or should have known, that Loper, a former Shawnee State student, was a deeply troubled young man whose molestation of children at other venues was no secret in Portsmouth and West Portsmouth. In an online Sentinel story dated 15 July 2003, Welton wrote, “Portsmouth Police Officers met with the Sentinel last night and stated that rumors continue that the Superintendent of MRDD, John Oakley, had been made aware of Loper’s prior allegations of molestation of children in the care of numerous county agencies, including Scioto County Children’s Services and Shawnee Mental Health. Oakley still hired Loper after being warned that Loper posed a danger to the children at MRDD.”
Welton believed Loper’s family and political connections got him the job, because Oakely hired Loper as a favor to Loper’s stepfather, Todd Miller, a captain in the Scioto County sheriff’s office. If true, that would not be surprising, for at least some hires at public agencies in city and county agencies are based more on who those hired are related to or friends with rather than on their qualifications.
Oakley later claimed that MRDD had investigated Yates’ charges and found them to be without merit. But, under pressure, Loper resigned from MRDD in August 1998. That he was forced to resign was apparent when he took legal action against MRDD for his severance. Then, surprisingly, in spite of the troubles he had had at MRDD, and in spite of his reputation as a pedophile, Loper was hired as a part-time policeman in Peebles, Ohio, a small town in Adams Country. Was this another instance of a criminally inclined individual benefiting from political connections? If so, those connections could only do so much. Loper was subsequently arrested on 16 counts, including raping a child under 13 and possessing child pornography. He was charged with having raped Yates’ daughter a number of times in 1998, when she was seven. If convicted, Loper would have faced life imprisonment, but through plea bargaining he was allowed, on 7 May 2002 to plead guilty to the lesser charge of 5 counts of Gross Sexual Imposition. He received an 18 years-6 months sentence. Because he was classified as a sexual predator, he had to serve his terms consecutively.
In a public statement dated 1 August 2003, Superintendent Oakley wrote that though Loper had been convicted, it had not been proven that his “wrongdoing,” one of several euphemisms Oakley used to refer to Loper’s heinous crimes, “that no such wrongdoing occurred during his work time as an employee of the Board.” Since there was no trial, all that Loper did and when and where he did it will probably never be known. But by “during his work time,” Oakley implied Loper’s crimes were extracurricular, that none of them of had occurred during the work day at the Riffe School. Loper worked at the school from 1993 to 1998, and in all those years, Oakley implied, he had not molested children while at the school. If Loper had molested Yates’ daughter, Oakley suggested, it was only when he was “babysitting” her for her mother.
In a 2004 deposition, Denise Yates made it clear, under oath, that Loper had never babysat for her, and Loper and she had never dated, which was another of the rumors that were circulating, possibly to try to discredit her testimony and make her appear an unfit mother. Denise Yates said, under oath, that her daughter described two molestations by Loper when they were alone in the Riffe School bathroom. Denise Yates said in sworn testimony, “She [Yates’ six-year-old daughter] had talked about him [Loper] taking her in the bathroom another time and making him perform – making her perform – oral sex on him and making her eat what came out of – as a result” (Page 98 of deposition). On a Riffe School overnight camp-out, Loper, according to more than one observer, had slept alone in a tent with Yates’ daughter and another little girl. During the night, Yates’ daughter had gone out with Loper to use the bathroom, but afterwards, she said, “he wouldn’t let her put her pants back on and he made her lay on the ground and he rubbed himself on her private and he took his hand and rubbed her private and then used his mouth and told her not to tell anybody, that it was their secret, that some day he was going to marry her and she would be his wife, and that’s what husbands and wives do” (Page 92). On another occasion in another location, Loper was alleged to have instructed those same two little girls how to have lesbian sex with each other.
Denise Yates later decided to file suit against MRDD and Superintendent John Oakley and Principal Tony Miller, but based on what she knew about Portsmouth politics, she had decided it would be unwise to hire any Portsmouth lawyer to represent her. She knew that because of politics in Portsmouth, local lawyers are not likely to even want to take a case if it meant having to take on any of the over-privileged of Portsmouth or of suing any of the public agencies on which Portsmouth’s pork-supported economy are dependent. Yates engaged a Chillicothe attorney, but he turned around and engaged a Portsmouth attorney, Stanley Bender, who represents Clayton Johnson in the Marting mess, as his associate. What she feared about Portsmouth lawyers came to pass. Bender and her Chillicothe attorney, her own lawyers, succeeded in taking away her rights as her daughter’s legal guardian, claiming she is too emotional and cannot be “objective.” In a letter to Yates (30 Aug. 2005), Bender wrote, “Your obvious disgust with MRDD and its employees over the way your daughter and you were treated is understandable. However, Tom [Spetnagel] and I believe you are allowing this to cloud your objectivity.” If it was a father, a male, who was refusing to settle, would he be accused of having his objectivity clouded, of his being too emotional? Denise Yates is a professional, with a career in law enforcement herself and a mind of her own. She doesn’t need to be patronized by those in suits and robes at the County Courthouse. In any event, Probate judge Kirsch appointed a third Portsmouth lawyer to be the child’s ad litem legal guardian.
What is behind all this legal maneuvering? Ms. Yates declined to accept an offer from the other side to settle. Yates made the judgment that the offer was insufficient considering how much of it would be taken by lawyers in contingency fees. It is not a question of how much Denise Yates herself will get, because she will get nothing. The statute of limitations ran out for her some time ago. Whatever money her daughter is awarded would be put in a trust fund.
Ms. Yates’ lawyers want to settle now. One of the reasons Bender gave for settling now was that as more time goes by the heinousness of Loper’s crimes and of the criminality of MRDD’s neglect are being forgotten. “The longer this [case] continues,” he argued in his letter to her, “the more the notoriety of these events subsides. In other words, our claim loses value” (30 Aug. 2005). Portsmouth’s only daily newspaper has priorities that place support of Clayton Johnson and the Marting Foundation and the denigration of the reform movement much higher than justice for a mother and her raped child. With cover-up/kiss-ass journalism, the shelf-life of a story that justifies the Marting’s sale lasts as long as is necessary and a story that protects the over-privileged of Portsmouth never “loses value,” but the story of the sexual and legal rape of a child is out-of-date rape.
