Richard Walzer admits he's a sex offender and no saint. But that hasn't stopped him from doing everything in his power to try to see his son again.

By Jon Gaskell

If only that 15-year-old kid, the one who gave out sexual favors like candy back in the O.H. Youth Correctional Facility in Stockton, Calif., would have given Richard a taste - as promised. If only he hadn't made Richard stand post, on the lookout for the correction officer, while he did all the other boys before giving Richard nothing but a blank look.

"If only he hadn't made me take it," Richard Walzer, now 38, says blankly. "But it was prison. And there had been something for everyone else but me, and I wasn't about to do something for nothing. I was going to get what was coming to me."

Twenty years later, Walzer is still getting it. It was a slam-dunk. Guilty as charged. California penal code 288A sub B1, Forcible Oral Copulation of a Minor had the name Richard Walzer, at the time one week past his 18th birthday, written all over it. A year later he walked out of prison a registered sex offender - for life.

If only.

Dear Son: I only wish I could be there to tell you these things, but I can't. I have no doubt that you will be told of the things that the DHS (The Iowa Department of Human Services) thinks I did to you. Your mom no doubt will have something to say also. I won't try to convince you that I did or did not do these things. I only want you to know that I love you.

Walzer's son (who to Walzer's knowledge has never been read or even seen the portion of the letter printed here) is 4 years old. Walzer was found guilty on Jan. 27, 2004, of one count of Assault with Intent to Commit Sexual Abuse and three counts of Assault. The victim, concerning all four counts, is a minor. And after Walzer was sentenced and transferred to the Mount Pleasant Correctional Facility, his wife took her and Walzer's son to the DHS to be examined as a precautionary measure. The conclusions reached by that entity - founded allegations of child abuse, according to documents filed in Polk County District Court - led to Walzer being served with a no-contact order with regard to his son.

"They are hanging me on the deal from 20 years ago. It's killing me," Walzer says, who filed as a registered sex offender in Iowa last October when he was released after serving a year in Mount Pleasant. "If only..." Walzer bats at the air with his hand and says if it takes him until the day he dies, he'll make things right with his little boy, that his little boy will know the truth. "It's my son. I never laid a finger on my son." With the way the system is set up, though, with a state willing to act tough on sex offenders but not much when it comes to follow-through, there is little Walzer can do - and he'd do anything - to force any type of reunion.

Admittedly, Walzer is no saint. He started doing robberies as a kid in Des Moines, his father acting as lookout, because if he got caught, well, kids don't go to jail. When Walzer got older, 10 or 11, he started committing the crimes on his own. He had a temper to boot. Enough so that when the law caught up with him for the first time at age 13, he trashed the room he was locked in at Meyer Hall Juvenile Detention Center. He did 18 months in Eldora for theft and destruction of county property. At 15, his father took the family to California. A year later, Walzer was locked up in O.H. on a burglary rap.

For the next 18 years, he was in and out of trouble. In 1989 he tore a man's bottom lip off in a Los Angeles street fight, leaving the man with a large hole in his cheek. He served six months for possession of stolen property in the California Department of Corrections. And while working as a carny, Walzer developed a nasty little meth habit - one that would continue to add to his troubles, as he moved, first, to Pennsylvania with his first wife (Walzer has a 13-year old daughter with her whom he has not seen for 11 years) and finally home to Iowa in the mid-'90s, where he began drinking heavily. In 1994, he did a short stint for theft. In 1995 he met his second wife.

"I told her everything up front, everything about my past," Walzer says of his wife (who through her attorney not only refused to comment but asked not to be named). "Every time someone tried to warn her off about me (the warnings increased after he was charged with possession in the late '90s), or tell her something about my past, she already knew. No one wanted us to be together, but it was meant to be."

For the first time in what he describes as "forever," Walzer was happy. The two were married in 1999. A year later, his wife gave birth to their son. Walzer was on top of the world. "My boy was my entire life," he says before correcting himself. "Is... is my entire life."

There have been many unhappy days in the life of Richard Walzer III. But Dec. 13, 2002, was one of the worst - the impetus for essentially all future difficulty, legal and otherwise. Walzer, at the time a licensed truck driver for Wylie Trucking and, free from the monkey that had sat upon his back for years, was hauling a load through a Colorado winter when it shifted, and the cab ended up on its side. The result was, according to a report done by a local surgeon for a workman comp claim by Walzer and obtained by Cityview, a back injury so severe that it keeps Walzer from climbing a flight of stairs.

Unable to work or even lift his small child, and with steroid epidural injections providing no relief, Walzer was prescribed two different pain medications and another to combat the depression and accompanying anxiety he was experiencing. He also began to drink again in an effort, as he says now, "to dull the pain." In his report, Jones wrote that he believed Walzer no longer had a "drug problem" when he saw him for treatment. But with the daily chemical cocktail his other doctors were feeding him after his accident, one was surely on the way.

On 9-29-03 at approximately 4 p.m., I was in the kitchen of my home at (location withheld) with (name of victim withheld), who is 15. I reached around her to put something in the microwave. I put my hands down her pants inside her underwear and placed my hands on her buttocks. I squeezed her butt - skin to skin. I then slid my hands under her shirt. I wasn't planning on them going under her shirt. I just did. I was having thoughts I shouldn't have about a 15-year-old. She was telling me to stop and started to walk away and I grabbed her by the thighs. But I let her go and she went upstairs.

Polk County Sheriff Detective Mary Beth Overton wrote down the above statement for Walzer after he surrendered himself, and Walzer does not dispute making the statement to her. As for whether he actually did what he said he did, he is unsure. He thinks so. But, for the life of him, he truly cannot remember.

"I was under the influence of so many drugs at the time, so how can I know for sure?" he says. "I'm guessing I did what they say I did, but if I did, it was because of the medication not because that's who I am."

Walzer also claims he was under the influence when Overton put on paper his remarks - a claim Overton tells Cityview is simply not the case - so they cannot be legally used against him. However, Walzer was in the Broadlawns Medical Center psychiatric ward for more than 24 hours after being diagnosed "suicidal," according to records obtained by this publication, so authorities claim he was not intoxicated at the time of either his arrest or his interrogation by Overton.

"I wouldn't have proceeded if he had been," Overton says. And psychiatric orders from Broadlawns back up Overton's claim, indicating nowhere that Walzer was intoxicated or on any type of narcotic when admitted, but rather had "an organized thought process" and a having a memory that was "intact." He was given two milligrams of anti-hallucination medication and 1 milligram of medication to combat his anxiety and insomnia in order to "manage his psychosis and agitation." But he wasn't drunk or high.

"Does that make sense to you? How can they say that?" Walzer asks. "They just made it all say what they wanted it to say. They knew my history as an addict." It should also be noted that Walzer has had Hepatitis C for more than a decade, which makes it extremely difficult for the body to break down large doses of medication.

Walzer and his attorney at the time told the court this information proves he wasn't responsible for his actions and his admission should be "thrown out." The authorities were having nothing of it, however, and went forward, charging Walzer with the four misdemeanors. And for the first time in what many would likely refer to as a storied criminal career, Walzer pleaded Not Guilty. His capacity, he and his attorney determined, had been diminished by his intoxication.

The Victim Impact Statements regarding the State of Iowa v. Richard Walzer are nauseating on the surface, staggeringly heartbreaking beneath it. They cannot be printed here, but it can be readily stated that people who should have been loving and trusting of Walzer were living in fear of him. There is intimation of sleepless nights, and when sleep did finally come, the screaming that is accompanied by only the most brutal of nightmares often interrupted it.

Walzer admits that, yes, there was some "strange" behavior on his part - he had taken to sleeping nude in the living room and had playfully tried to remove the swimsuit top of the same minor he was accused of assaulting, gave her wedgies, tickled her and told her once when he surprised her while she was showering that she "had a nice body" - but he attributes it all to the medication that he claims had taken over his mind.

"If I wanted to rape her, I would have raped her," he says. "But I didn't."

Wouldn't such sentiment mean he was in control?

"Yes and no," he says. "It doesn't make any sense to me now."

However, Frank Severino, an assistant Polk County Attorney, says there is no doubt that Walzer knew exactly what he was doing. And says when Walzer asked for a psychiatric evaluation and was granted one (one of Walzer's rare legal triumphs), the physician, Dr. Michael Taylor, told the court that Walzer was not suffering from any psychiatric maladies due to being overly medicated. Walzer was back behind bars.

A few months later his lawyer told him about the charges leveled by the DHS regarding his son, which resulted in the no-contact order. Roger Munns, public information officer at DHS, would not comment on any specifics of that case, but did say that the court had not made a mistake in its ruling. Walzer says the claims by DHS are "unbelievable." The accusations made, according to Walzer, claim multiple partners and friends of Walzer's participated in the abusing of the boy.

"Just like in California," he says. "They took my past and made it the present."

Walzer appealed his criminal conviction last March, and proclaimed within the first few minutes of meeting him "it is one of my last hopes of ever getting to see my son again." What he did not know was that on April 28 of this year his conviction was affirmed. Walzer, to say the very least, was devastated when he learned.

He had devised a plan that, in his mind, gave him three opportunities to earn visitation rights with his son. Overturning his criminal conviction was the first one.

"It makes me want to destroy something," he says now of this opportunity failing. "But I can't. I wish it would be over. But it isn't. I have to stand here and fight. Guilty people run. Innocent people stand where they are and fight."

Walzer quotes a verse from the book of Romans. Then he quotes the American Journal of Psychiatry about the different levels of intoxication and to what extent they make individuals delusional and/or responsible. Still, he says, he figured this was coming. So he has filed an appeal with the DHS, as well as the Iowa Supreme Court, petitioning for the right to see his son under supervision as his second opportunity, and is hopeful the system will work for him.

This story, he says, is not over.

"I will do anything to see my son again. I don't want pity. I just want to see him."

Walzer has filed motion after motion - a few of which, he agrees, are bordering on nonsensical (such as one in which he has asked the court to remove his son from his wife's care because she knowingly invited a sex offender to live in her home, i.e. Walzer himself), and realizes that this harms his credibility somewhat. But he says time and time again that he is not going down without a fight. Not to mention, what he is no longer, at least according to state officials, is a danger to society. There is no more probation. There is no more monster. Even the attorney general's office says it's true: Richard Walzer is unlikely to re-offend. He is clean. He is sober. And one might think this would be his best shot at spending time with his little boy, right? Think again.

The State of Iowa has court-ordered the chemical castration of only three individuals through injections of Depo-Provera, including one inmate who is just beginning the slow, scientific process that is based on a person's height, weight and both the level of sexual desire and level of aggression that accompanies said desire. Only nine other states employ the method, and in those states it is used with very little frequency due to an extremely limited number of physicians who will perform the procedure.

"The judicial district has difficulty finding the doctors because of the liability," says Fred Scaletta, spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Corrections. "They don't actually order it themselves, so they don't want to be responsible for the results."
Still, as his third, and what he sees to be his final opportunity for having a chance to see his son, Walzer has lobbied state judicial officials for the procedure to be performed on him. Despite his being viewed as a non-threat, he says he will take this drastic step in order to have just a little controlled time with his son.

"Then they can be sure I won't do whatever it is they think I've done," he says. "It's that easy. Whatever it takes."

Realistically, though, there's nothing easy about it.

In a letter to Walzer from Behavioral Health Resources, which is affiliated with Eyerly-Ball Community Mental Health, Dr. Laura R. Mutchler writes: "Dear Richard, I am writing to provide you some referral sources for sex offender treatment. As I discussed with you during our meeting on 11-16-2004, your circumstances make it difficult to find a program that you could enter or afford."

Therein lies the problem.

Walzer, a sex offender, is no longer seen as a true threat by the state, so if he wants treatment, even if it's the basic Sex Offender Treatment Program (S.O.T.P.), that is essentially therapy without medication, he has to foot the bill. Walzer is indigent, often unable to make his monthly rent at the Randolph Hotel and eating on $149 a month in food stamps or when meals are provided to him free of charge. Medication that would curb his perceived sexual appetite is even more expensive. And monthly shots of Depo-Provera? Well, each case is situation specific, but as Scaletta says, "It isn't cheap."

Therapists like Mutchler (who would not comment to Cityview regarding any medical matter) are seemingly sympathetic. In her letter she writes to Walzer that she hopes he pursues getting sex offender treatment and gives him three places he can seek help - for a fee. Walzer says another psychiatrist as well as a therapist have told him the same thing.

"But they can't do anything more than that," he says. "If I want to get it done, the chemical castration, I have to have a court order."

So, Walzer has tirelessly written to judges, pleading for help. So far, though, no one has offered.

"They treat me like I'm some sort of monster on one hand, yet on the other hand they turn me loose on the streets and ignore my requests that would make me less dangerous," he says. "Am I worth more to them if you're afraid of me? That's the only thing I can think of."

However, it's less sinister than that.

"It's economics," says State Rep. Ed Fallon, flatly. "We have these get-tough laws for sex offenders, but we've put very little money into the rehabilitation aspect of it. It's knee-jerk politics at it's worst."

Fallon says the way Iowa Legislators have set up the current system - in the glaring spotlights following the murder of young Jetseta Gage - will make the laws more harsh on sex offenders and help fill up the prisons, but ignore the fact that nearly all sex offenders will be free again at some point in time.

"What good are we doing them? And, in turn, what good are we doing ourselves?" Fallon asks.

Walzer, in prison, for one year and six days following his latest sex offense, wasn't eligible to be apart of a S.O.T.P. in prison because his sentence wasn't long enough. Two years ago, the program took 18 months to complete, so he just bided his time until his release. The program now takes only one year to complete.

"I have nothing I can point to that makes me rehabilitated other than the time I served," Walzer says. "So that gives them the excuse to keep me from my son. And now that I will do anything it takes to get rehabilitated and want to be rehabilitated, they won't give me the chance because it costs too much."

Walzer drinks his morning coffee from a stainless steal cup that is rarely anywhere but in his hand. He stands in front of the Des Moines Public Library downtown wearing the same grimy clothes and holding the same painful stance he wore the day before, waiting to go inside to "do my research."

"I'm tired," he says, "of it all," his experience literally exhausting him.

When reminded that he has stated numerous times that this story is not over, that he's not going down without a fight, he shrugs and admits that it's probably close to being over and that sometimes he actually wishes it were.

"I've offered everything I have, everything I can think of," he says of his fight to get his son back. "But they want him to hate me." Walzer has even offered to have his penis and testicles surgically removed, but this is not a feasible option.

The fact of the matter is that he understands he needs to start thinking about a life where there does not exist the possibility of having any type of relationship with his son. That he needs to, as painfully as it is for him to admit, move on.

"They're going to do everything they can to stop me - fair or not."

Lynn Heuss, who runs the Connection CafŽ where Walzer eats lunch a few times a week, says it's sad but true that people like Walzer get treated as if they have "the black plague."

"Would you trust him? Would you hire him?" she asks. "He's bright and capable, but he's wearing that scarlet letter. There is no exoneration. Nothing will ever free him - ever. And the worst part about it is that, as a state, we're not even addressing what our society is truly scared of. He wants to be non-threatening. Hello. Isn't that what we all want?"

Heuss says Walzer failed himself, and the system has ensured that he will fail again and again by writing him off.

"He really doesn't stand a chance," she says.

After lunch, Walzer finishes an unfiltered cigarette and flicks it to the sidewalk.

"You know the only way that I can get the help they say I don't need, don't you?" he asks, nodding his head slowly.

The answer is pretty clear: re-offend.

"Now is that messed up or what?" CV

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