Thank God you were safe. Those poor other girls. How many women and girls did he come in contact with that later felt the same as you? It’s like not being killed by a lion because he’s already eaten. Nothing to do with you.
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What a horrible person. Victim blaming women for anything related to sex is so common among men. It’s so painful to see other women pick up the same attitude.
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I think everyone else has covered the "I’m not BUT … " thing quite well. I think that’s all cleared up as more or less an error of phrasing.
I’m just here to say, please, please, if anyone ever approaches you with this kind of information again, please go straight to believing them. It’s very painful to come forward to even the closest friends, to receive even the slightest whiff of disbelief is unbearably tragic. Support, on the other hand, is worth everything because it is so rare.
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We were never in any real danger for various reasons, mostly involving not being teenagers in a specific religious sect. We did find out from the news that he had been dishonorably discharged from the military though and I seriously question why they hadn’t incarcerated him, given what was implied about that.
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Predators work hard to hide their evil side from people.
You saw the person he wanted you to see.
You were not lacking the ability to see the evil, he had that hidden away so no one would notice it.
I think Farmpony is expressing something that is hard to express with out others, like you, pouncing on them for their confusion.
It is very hard to be the person who only knew the nice person and never would have guessed that person they knew was evil under there. It is hard to feel like you have been lied to all along. It is its own level of guilt and torture.
I knew a person, I thought well, during my late teens, that I later learned was molesting young boys.
It was so hard to balance out the person I knew with the person I was told he was.
That is not saying I do not believe he was evil. I totally believe that. It was just so hard to lose the person I knew to the person he really was.
To feel like I had failed for not realizing he was evil and horrible.
I am not Farmpony, but someone else on that side of a horrible situation (long ago), and I think people who want to hate on someone for hurting for not knowing are not helping either.
Defending is your word, describing how evil can hide in play sight is another way to describe it.
No, it is explaining, like I said above, how we were all lied to. A monster looks like a nice person when they are not being a monster.
It is not - not believing them - it is not believing yourself and what you saw with your own eyes and explaining out loud (or in this case in writing) how you feel so taken for not knowing, not seeing. Pouncing on someone in this position is not right either.
Thank you to the person who shared screen shots of that article. This wonderful woman who came forward is amazing.
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This is 2024, if you don’t immediately proclaim you have the only moral high ground and start attacking other people are you even on the internet?
and you are of course absolutely right in your call for people to actually read and listen. Predators insinuating themselves into a community and fooling everyone is a complex and nuanced issues and it needs to be talked about from all sides. They get away with it for so long precisely because people are afraid to share experiences. Open creeps are one thing but people who literally live double lives? are quite another.
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This.
Predators seem to have a sixth sense for knowing who they can go after without impunity, and who they can’t. They slowly push limits. Until somehow, it’s the victim’s fault for not stopping them, when in fact they were groomed for it from the start. Then, you get what we see with Shelton - they led me on, they wanted it, etc.
Dennis Rader (the BTK killer for those of you who don’t know) was a trusted member of his church community. A trusted member of his local neighborhood. His children still have trouble believing he was capable of planning and executing multiple murders, because they never saw that side of him. People who worked with him, who worshiped alongside him, never saw it. I can only imagine Shelton was the same way. If you didn’t fit into his ‘type,’ he wasn’t going to go after you; therefore, there was no reason for you to know he was a threat.
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Minor point of order.
It’s actually 2025. Which seems insane to me. But here we are.
Otherwise - yeah. Pouncing and posturing is a thing. Maybe this year we can all figure out how to pause a second before we pounce. That would be positive.
And with that… I award myself an “A” for all that alliteration!
I’ll see myself out.
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Plus I would imagine they also develop their skills with lots and lots and lots of practice.
The crimes described in the article happened more than 40 years ago. Does anyone think that was the first person he assaulted? Or the last person? Or even close to it?
I’m guessing he was probably developing his skills over 40 or 50 or 60 years. So it’s not surprising if he was very good at covering it up.
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I remember some years ago a mother walked into her daughter’s bedroom and caught the daughter and a boy having sex. The daughter was 16 and the boy was 17.
The daughter claimed that the boy had climbed through the window and raped her. The mother called the police and press charges. The boy was charged as an adult and prosecuted. He was found guilty and labeled to a sex offender.
About a year later, the daughter came clean and said that he had been her boyfriend and she had let him in and they were having consensual sex. They were both teenagers. They went to high school together and they were romantically involved. That boy’s life was altered forever because the mother believed her daughter. This has been a good 10 years and the mother has been fighting a battle to try to clear that boy‘s name. Because he is still listed as a sex offender.
You should never discount a victims claim. And you should never call them a Liar. You should never blame them for what happened to them. But to blindly believe somebody and automatically assume guilt of another is different. So no, I would never go straight to believing. I would never call the victim a liar and I would never publicly disagree with their claim but to automatically assume someone is guilty of a crime is also not OK.
Take the victims claim seriously? Yes. Absolutely. But to automatically assume someone is guilty without evidence? No. Take it seriously and allow the investigation yes. Be careful around the accused yes.
My comment was only to try to explain How easy it is for people to manipulate their surroundings to hide bad. It worked on me. What I saw was a good man. But as I have stated multiple times, I never dismissed the victims claims. I took them seriously even though it was hard for me to see.
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Well, aren’t you a delight.
There is a difference between believing what your friend says and automatically assuming someone is guilty by law. Figure it out before you hurt more people in your friend circle.
As far as the mother who walked in on her daughter? That’s on her. The mother I mean. If the mother hadn’t had unreasonable expectations/head in the sand about teenage sex/head in the sand about the maturity level of her daughter/hadn’t made it clear that there would be giant parental punishments for having sex, there would likely have been no problem and no lies needed on the part of the daughter.
Oh yes, and then we have the whole respect thing - WALKING INTO HER 16YO DAUGHTER’S BEDROOM? No, just no.
That whole story is a lovely illustration of how not to raise children and NOT about how a 16 year old young woman ruined her lover’s life.
Step away from the patriarchy.
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Everyone is entitled to a defense. Even a guilty defendant. Even a defendant guilty of something awful. The system doesn’t work if we pre-determine who is worthy of having their constitutional rights protected and afford only a worthy person what they’re entitled to. Just because a defendant is guilty or a bad person, it doesn’t alleviate the prosecution’s duty to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and someone needs to hold the prosecution to their burden.
And to be clear, when I handled criminal cases it was on the prosecution side. But I could not do my job without defense counsel and I am very appreciative for good, knowledgeable defenders/defense counsel. Even though I would never bring a case unless I was convinced the defendant was guilty, I still wanted to be held to my proofs. Always. I couldn’t sleep at night thinking I secured a conviction improperly.
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I briefly worked for a guy that I thought was great. We got on really well, he was a very good supervisor. He had a heart attack and had to retire. One of the other supervisors told me he was glad he was gone because one of the guys daughters had let slip at a company party her dad could not be trusted with little kids. The guy telling me this said it was all he could do not to “kick his a**”. 
Like that’s going to help the munchkins.
This was in the early 80’s and nobody talked about such things. His kids just all knew to not leave the grandkids with him. I wonder if they were molested when young too.
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The either were or they witnessed it first hand 
Adults are remarkably obtuse about signs and even hints. If they’ve been through it though, they take extra precautions.
Predators groom their character witnesses as carefully as they groom their victims.
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Then there are adult women blaming teen girls for being too promiscuous and “sophisticated”.
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Anyone who has ever been in foster care can tell you what it’s like to be targeted. Some of the worst stories I’ve ever heard came from foster kids. The predators know these kids have less recourse.
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Yes, you are just reiterating the explanation for your point of view that you explained before. I got it the first time. As I read it, you are subtly minimizing the allegations and adding information that controverts a confession.
On your chiming in with your impression. Why does your experience of this guy as “nothing but a gentleman” matter if he confessed it? Surely, rapists and pedophiles don’t reveal their evil side to everyone.
And the “it was different then” is similar kind of statement: It’s true but so what? And how does restating that help anyone who was or is now being abused?
IMO, Americans are pretty bad at handling any shameful chapter of their history. We just don’t seem to be have the epistemic tools for accepting accountability for bad things those in power actually did in the past… so we find face-savings “yeah, but’s” or “well, I didn’t see it” (as though your sample of 1 matters, or ought to compete for factual legitimacy or import vis-a-vis a confession). We could take a lesson from Germany in this regard. Could we, for a minute, allow the pendulum to swing far to the other side and support victims?
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During the 1970’s Ted Bundy had a long-time girlfriend named Elizabeth Kloepfer that he lived with during 6 years of his sexual predations. For a long time she had no idea. Later in their relationship she had suspicions, did take them to police, but they went nowhere. She found out when he was arrested in Florida and called her, confessing to everything.
Kloepfer visited Bundy on death row, after she was aware that he had married another woman who was essentially a sort of courtroom groupie.
She wrote a relatively short book in the early 80’s under the pen name Elizabeth Kendall about her experiences with Bundy. It never garnered much attention and seems to have been out of print for years.
Kloepfer’s book is an insider tale of how someone can portray themselves as being a much better person than they really are, even to those closest to them.
Bundy hid his true nature from the world behind a glib and polished persona that people readily believed in. His girlfriend was one of those people, even though their relationship wasn’t always smooth. After he was in jail in Florida and had confessed to Kloepfer, he told her that he had avoided her when he felt the urges to assault and kill.
Kloepfer describes herself in the book as a shy, insecure and lonely single mom, divorced and struggling with alcoholism, when she moved from Ogden, Utah to Seattle to try and change the course of her unhappy life. She desperately wanted to be loved and married, and have a father for her young daughter, Tina. Bundy became those things to her, even though he sometimes struggled to keep his true nature hidden from her.
For whatever it is worth in this discussion. Predators groom those that they don’t assault, that they want to keep in their lives, along with the grooming of their victims.
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The recent thread on COTH of a convicted sex offender who is working as a trainer for a family barn, I think in Virginia, is a classic example. Predators need those happy faces surrounding them to keep their access to their chosen victims.
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