Mary Vincent hitched a ride with a monster in 1978. The 15-year-old got into a truck with Lawrence Singleton, a retired merchant marine. The free ride nearly cost Vincent her life when Singleton raped her, bludgeoned her, cut off her forearms and threw her off of a cliff.
On March 29, 1979, Singleton was convicted of his crimes against Vincent and sentenced to a mere 14 years in prison. Singleton was paroled on April 25, 1987, after serving just over half of his sentence. He moved to Tampa, Florida, where he stabbed Roxanne Hayes, a 31-year-old prostitute and mother of three, to death in his home. He was sentenced to death for that crime on April 14, 1998.
In October 1984, 15-year-old Cheryl Bess was on her way to school when she was abducted by the maintenance man at her apartment building. Jack Oscar King, a repeat sex offender on parole for the rape and attempted murder of a 9-year-old girl, took Cheryl to the desert where he attempted to rape her, doused her face and arm with acid and left her to die. The attack left Cheryl blind, deaf in one ear and permanently disfigured.
Five year old Mari Luz Cortés walked the short distance from her home in the El Torrejón district of Huelva City in Spain on January 13, 2008, to a sweet kiosk to buy crisps. Mari Luz never returned. Her body was found 54 days later, on March 7, floating in the Ría de Huelva estuary. Santiago del Valle, a convicted pedophile, has confessed to killing Mari Luz. Although the confessed killer had been convicted of sexual crimes against children twice-including a conviction for sexually abusing his own five-year-old daughter- and sentenced to a total of 4 years and 9 months in prison for those crimes, he managed to avoid serving one day behind bars. In addition, del Valle was given a distancing order for attempting to arrange a sexual encounter with a 13-year-old girl over the Internet.
Shannon Matthews, a 9-year-old British girl, disappeared on her way home from school on February 19, 2008. She was found alive 24 days later hidden in a drawer in the base of a divan bed when police raided the home of Michael “Mick” Donovan, an uncle of her stepfather. Donovan, also known as Paul Drake, has been charged with kidnapping and false imprisonment. According to published reports, Donovan kidnapped his own two daughters, barricaded himself in a house with them and threatened to kill them. He was barred from seeing his ten and twelve year old daughters after teachers found graphic sex notes he had placed in their lunchboxes.
Clearly, society's failure to properly deal with the problem of sex offenders and kidnappers is placing children all over the world at risk. The despicable and heinous nature of the crimes committed by King and Singleton should have guaranteed that they would be put away for the life…the first time they committed their unspeakable crimes. They should never have been allowed an opportunity to claim another victim. Why would the criminal justice system have taken a chance that another child could be maimed, disfigured or blinded by these monsters? How is it possible that del Valle was able to avoid serving prison time? Why wasn't Mick Donovan dealt with more severely for kidnapping and making sexual advances towards his own children?
There are no good reasons for these occurrences. But if we want our world to be a safe place for our children to live and grow and thrive, we need to find ways to make sure that incidents like these never take place again. We can do this by: creating sentences for offenders that reflect the severity of their crimes and their potential for committing future offenses; placing child sex offenders under long term monitoring by law enforcement; performing court-ordered castrations on dangerous sexual offenders that are likely to commit further crimes; and ordering mandatory life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for individuals that commit sex crimes against children more than once.
Only when we as a society realize that the rights of children and law-abiding citizens should supersede the rights of dangerous criminals, and enforce our laws accordingly, will we truly be able to create a social environment wherein pedophiles and perverts can no longer declare open season on innocents.
