Obsession (54 page)

“Your Honor,” she began.

Stephanie is not only my big sister, she is also my best friend. All my life Stephanie stood by my side. She has always been there for me: to protect me and do everything possible to help me out. I wish I could have been there that horrible night on July first. I wish I could have protected her somehow. So today I would like to take this opportunity in the courtroom to help my sister.

I have sat down many times trying to think about what I want to say today. But I kept denying everything. I did not want to believe that I would never see my sister again. I did not want to believe she is dead. Nor did I want to believe that our justice system is also dead.

It was and still is difficult to say what I want, because I am very confused. I am confused because I cannot understand why my sister was brutally murdered. I do not understand how any human being could hurt another in such a terrible way.

Most of all I do not understand why it happened, knowing that our justice system could have prevented it from the start. This monster was already behind bars. Why was he released knowing he was a danger to society?

Ever since that night I found out Stephanie was missing, I kept reaching out for one last string of hope. That she would be okay and home again. Time went by and Stephanie was still not home. I still kept reaching for a last string of hope, but I was let down, Stephanie was found—dead.

I was let down continuously. I no longer have any dreams to reach out to. I always dreamt of the day I would be Steph’s bridesmaid, or the aunt of her children. Stephanie will not see me graduate from high school, she won’t be there to help me through college. I no longer have my sister to call in the middle of the night for advice, or just a laugh to make me feel better.

This horrible creature took Stephanie’s life, and mine! He destroyed our futures and our faith. Stephanie and I were both let down in faith of God, and most of all, our faith in the justice system!

My dad always told us that the government was there to protect the innocent. Yet this so-called justice system was more concerned for the well-being of some amoral creature like the one who murdered my sister!

Your Honor, I ask you to give me one last string of hope to hang on to. Please help restore my faith. Please make it so this coward never
comes in contact with another Stephanie. Please do not let me down.

The courtroom was deathly silent as she spoke.

Judge Brewster got the message and he came through, sentencing Gideon to life in prison for murder with a “hard forty,” meaning he would have to serve forty years before being eligible for parole. He added another 716 months—nearly sixty years—for the other charges, to run consecutively, which meant the thirty-one-year-old killer would have to serve eighty-eight years before he could be out on the street again.

“There’s nothing more the judge could have done,” John Bork commented approvingly. One year to the day after Stephanie’s murder, a new death-penalty statute passed by the Kansas legislature took effect.

In March of 1995, Gideon’s lawyers appealed the harshness of his sentence to the Kansas Supreme Court, claiming the judge may have been influenced by “inflammatory remarks by the victim’s family.” This was yet another example of the unfairness of a system that strives to totally depersonalize the innocent victim, while giving the guilty killer every opportunity to show what a generally decent guy he is. But in a ruling that affirmed the dictates of both justice and common sense, the high court in April unanimously rejected all of Gideon’s thirteen issues of appeal. In approving the court ruling, an editorial in the
Topeka Capital-Journal
referred to Gideon as a “poster boy for Hard 40.”

Peggy and Gene were no longer affluent Midwestern business people; they had become crusaders. “We had been doing advertising specialties across the United States,” Gene says, “selling everything from ballpoint pens to postcards to magnets, you name it. Most of our clients were real estate agencies and
schools and banks. We had done our semiannual business analysis. It had exceeded expectations and things were looking real good. That was June thirtieth. As soon as we were aware Stephanie was missing, we just put the business on stop. It wasn’t even slow down. All our efforts were focused on finding her.”

And they never went back. Living on their savings, doing just enough business to get by, they dedicated themselves to making people aware of the dangers they face from unknown predators and to changing laws to better protect the innocent.

Says Gene, “I think we were really impacted by those twenty-seven days when Stephanie was missing—at the number of her friends that reminded us so much of her. And friends of Jennifer’s that reminded us so much of Jeni. And once we discovered there was nothing more we could do for Stephanie, we knew that we had to keep on going and get this kind of horror stopped. That was our whole objective.”

The task force was in full operation. By December, they had written five proposed laws dealing with sexual offenders. In the process, they had realized that to accomplish what they felt needed to be done, both on a state and national level, they had to be politically active, something that would violate the Internal Revenue Service regulations regarding nonprofit—or 501 (c)3—organizations, which is how S.O.S. was classified. So they set up a separate Stephanie Schmidt Foundation. S.O.S., no longer a 501(c)(3), would become the name of the campus chapters they intended to establish. Their motto: Changing Laws, Attitudes, and Lives.

Gene testified frequently to try to get the task force’s bills passed. He and Peggy were determined to continue speaking out for Stephanie. During one appearance before a committee of the Kansas legislature,
he recalls, “One of the representatives continually referred to the fact that we needed to take ‘baby steps.’ I was so infuriated that when we were contacted by the
Maury Povich
show, I said, ‘Well, then, we’ll show them what baby steps are like and let them know that we’re serious.’”

Peggy and Gene and Jeni appeared on the nationally syndicated television program on February 15, 1994. With them were Jack and Trudy Collins, already respected national advocates of the victims’ rights movement, and Stanton Samenow. Also on the program were Shirley Gideon and her daughter Shannon. It was a memorable encounter. Before the broadcast, Povich had interviewed Don in prison. He accepted perfunctory responsibility for the murder, but there was no evidence of any genuine feeling. Like so many of these guys, the only genuine feeling he displayed was for himself and how he’d had “a problem” that no one was willing to fix.

“Do you feel any remorse at all?” Povich asked him.

“No comment,” Gideon replied.

“What?” Povich pressed. “How could you say no comment?”

“Because I got ninety-nine and a half years. You know. I mean, does it matter whether I have any remorse? I mean. I got ninety-nine and a half years.”

He recounted his troubled life, his repeated encounters with the law and incarceration, beginning in his teens. He seemed to place responsibility for his life of crime everywhere but in the choices he himself had made. Samenow listened to these excerpts of Povich’s interview with Gideon, then commented that Stephanie’s killer displayed the three traits he most associates with this kind of personality:

“One, a sense of ownership. You take whatever you want, regardless of the consequences. The second
point is these are people who have no concept of injury to others. In fact, they regard themselves as the victim because they have been caught, and they will then blame the victim after the fact. And the third is, they all know what can happen to them. They know right from wrong.

“Crime is a matter of choice,” Samenow explained to the studio and national audiences. “This man and others like him, after the fact, when they’re held accountable, they will blame anything and everyone. This man blamed the system. But you know, everything but the federal deficit has been blamed for criminal behavior. The facts of what these people are like and what their motives are, are radically different from what they tell others after the fact.”

Ironically, it was Shannon who expressed the feeling so many of us seem to have:

“You never think it can happen to you … but it can…. My brother won’t get to be there for my graduation, my marriage—anything.”

True. But as Gene pointed out, “Stephanie got the death penalty. There is a death penalty in every state, but it’s in the hands of the criminals.”

By April 1994, the Kansas State Legislature had passed four of the Schmidt Task Force’s five proposed laws under the collective heading of the Stephanie Schmidt Sexual Predator Act. The only item that did not pass was a requirement for employer notification of an applicant’s prior sexual offenses. Among the critical points in the legislation was a provision that after serving their prison term, offenders who have been psychologically determined to be sexual predators may be civilly committed to a mental institution while they are still deemed to be dangerous. Sex offenders released on parole must register. First-time offenders have to register for ten years, second-time offenders for life. This registration is public information, which
the media may publish. Lying about previous sex offenses on a job application became a felony rather than a misdemeanor. And the standards of incarceration time were lengthened for most predatory sexual offenses.

At the same time that the Schmidts and their colleagues were working so hard to pass this legislation, the Schmidts also had to face an agency of the same state government over the specifics of their own case. It was hideous enough that Don Gideon could try to shift the blame onto Stephanie for her death. But when the Schmidts essentially found the Kansas Department of Corrections trying to pull the same stunt, they were outraged. In December of 1994, frustrated by the answers they were getting and the fact that they felt the same thing could happen to another young woman, they filed a civil suit against the Kansas Department of Corrections and Gideon’s parole officer, Robert Schirk. Then friend and neighbor Jim Adler, an attorney with offices in Kansas City, agreed to represent them. Jim had known Stephanie for many years. She and Jeni used to baby-sit the Adler children.

The suit got to the heart of the matter: Are dangerous people routinely being let out of prison before serving their full sentences, and if so, who is then responsible for them and for keeping the public safe?

Court documents reflect Schirk’s knowledge of his department’s policy that if a parole officer determined a specific group of people, such as co-employees, to be at risk, he had to notify that group. Schirk indicated that the waitresses at Hamilton’s were at risk but he failed to notify them. Why? Because he thought notification might cause Gideon to lose his job.

Even after Gideon had been working at Hamilton’s for several months and had a good track record there,
when Schirk admitted he no longer feared for his client’s job, he still failed to notify the establishment.

In defending themselves against the suit, the Department of Corrections stated that American correctional policy over the past fifty years has turned away from the concept of vengeance and toward rehabilitation, and that knowledge of a criminal record is a serious handicap against the rehabilitation of an ex-offender. But is it not also a serious handicap against the safety of innocent people with whom he comes in contact?

Interestingly, Adler notes Kansas’s position in this case seems to be different than the position it took in the highly publicized sexual registration case (which went to the Kansas Supreme Court) and the sexual predator case (which went to the United States Supreme Court). In those cases the state argued (and the courts agreed) that the public has a right to know and needs to know when convicted sex offenders are in the area and that sex offenders often are not reformed in prison.

In this suit the state seems to blame the Schmidts for Stephanie’s death. The state’s theory seems to be that since they knew that Gideon had been in jail for beating someone up, they should have taken precautions and perhaps not have allowed Stephanie to work at Hamilton’s. But how does the Schmidts’ limited knowledge compare with what the state knew? Aren’t the correctional departments supposed to be the experts on criminal behavior?

It’s worth noting here that a restaurant that employs attractive young college coeds could, and should, be considered a collecting point for Gideon’s victims of preference. Whether or not Mr. Hamilton would have hired him had he been truthful on his employment application or if Robert Schirk had alerted Hamilton is a matter of speculation. But it is certainly fair to
say that once Gideon was on the job and Hamilton’s valued him as a regular, full-time employee, it would have at least increased the safety odds had Tom Hamilton been informed as to Gideon’s status and could therefore both be on the lookout for disturbing behavior and/or inform workers one-on-one.

Of course, the old argument can be—and was—brought up that future violence is difficult to predict. But consider the following exchange during the deposition of April 27, 1995:

ADLER: In June of ’93, would you have wanted your twenty-year-old daughter working with Mr. Gideon in a restaurant, not knowing he was a convicted rapist?

SCHIRK: No.

ADLER: You allowed Stephanie Schmidt to be in that situation, didn’t you, sir?

SCHIRK: Yes.

ADLER: And why is it you wouldn’t have wanted your twenty-year-old daughter to be working in a restaurant with him in June of ’93?

LISA MENDOZA (Schirk’s and Corrections Department’s attorney): Object. Calls for the witness to speculate. Assumes facts not in evidence.

SCHIRK: Preferably I wouldn’t want my twenty-year-old daughter close to anyone like that anywhere.

The parole officer did not notify Hamilton’s as to Gideon’s background. Court documents indicate that bells and whistles were going off that Gideon was a walking time bomb. They also show that Gideon’s mother reported that his family was afraid of him and did not want him living with them any longer and that Gideon was having other problems—fighting at a bar, throwing a woman’s purse down some stairs, slapping one woman, and insisting that another have oral sex with him.