- [Interviewer] All right, Bill. - Hi. - [Interviewer] Bill, where'd you grow up? Where are you from, originally? - [Bill] I was born in Chicago. - [Interviewer] And tell
me about your family, you have both your parents growing up? - [Bill] Yeah, I grew up
in a typical middle-class, suburban home, good family. - [Interviewer] How would
you describe your childhood? - Chaotic. Abusive. - [Interviewer] What
kind of stuff went on? - Molestation, I was physically
abused, emotionally abused. Kind of every kind of abuse
there could be to a kid we were, but it was in the 60s and 70s, so that was just the norm, we thought. - [Interviewer] This was from who? - My parents. - [Interviewer] Your parents? - Yes. - [Interviewer] Both parents? - My father was the physical
and the emotional abuser. My mother sexually abused us, and there was a babysitter
that would sexually abuse us. - [Interviewer] So there
were other siblings that- - Yes. - [Interviewer] Went through this? And what kind of kid
were you in high school? - Kind of a loner, trouble. Always in trouble. Always just trying to
get out of everything. - [Interviewer] And how
did this affect your life as you got older? - Well, I never really picked
up on any of the social skills I needed to be like a
functioning member of society type thing. And as a result, I grew up an
old man that's still a loner. Still don't really like
a lot with society. Don't really trust a lot of people. - [Interviewer] Have you
ever been married or? - Yeah, I was married once. - [Interviewer] Do you have kids? - Yes. I have two sons that I never get to see, and I have a daughter, and a step-daughter that I'm very active part in their life. - [Interviewer] And what kind
of effects does this have on your life now, today? How old are you today? - I'm 60, well 58. - [Interviewer] And how
has this childhood trauma affected you now? - I've had a lot of treatments. So I've gotten to work
through a lot of it. - [Interviewer] Has that helped? - Oh yeah, absolutely. - [Interviewer] Therapy? - When I was, after prison they sent me to another special
prison for sex offenders. For what they termed; long term, indefinite control care and treatment. And I did about eight years,
eight and a half years of really intensive treatment there. - [Interviewer] How
often would that happen? Like weekly? Daily? - Daily.
- [Interviewer] Daily? - Probably six, eight hours a
day, four or five days a week. - [Interviewer] Really? - Yeah, I was, I mean, it was
an in-house, it was a prison. - [Interviewer] Yeah. - It was a prison that they sent us to. And you either went through
their treatment program or you stayed there for- - [Interviewer] What kind
of things would you work on? - Everything. I mean, everything's related
to your sexual offending. So it's from childhood all
the way up to the present day. And the things that you've experienced, and the way that shapes your thinking, and the way you make your decisions, and your problem solving skills, and your conflict resolution skills. You just starting to work on all of that. Your work on your arousal management. Mostly it's getting into all the things that contributed to, bringing you to a point where
you committed a sexual crime. All of the thinking errors,
and the emotional inabilities, and just everything that was just wrong about the way you handled things. It was pretty intense. I mean, I never wanted to be there, but I'm absolutely glad I was there. And I got everything
that I could from there. - [Interviewer] And do you
feel like you're a better, safer member of society now? - Absolutely. - [Interviewer] Yeah. - Absolutely, I've been out 12 years now. I got arrested once for, I
didn't register properly, but the registration laws can
be so confusing sometimes. So, I got a registration violation for not registering a
temporary address correctly. So they gave me five years
of probation for that, I got lucky. I didn't have to go back to prison. 'Cause if I'd gone back to prison, I probably would have had
to go back to the center. - [Interviewer] But does
the temptation exist still? - No, I've learned how
to deal with all that. I've learned what voids
I was trying to fill, what needs I was trying to satisfy. The sad thing is, as a human being we're, our sexuality is so hardwired
into who and what we are that to try to deal with,
you end up developing some, I mean, I don't wanna
put a light coat on it, but you end up developing
what we call an appetite. A desire. And some of those desires
may never go away, but you just have to learn
how to rearrange your life, relive your life, so that
you're not putting yourself in situations where there are temptations. I haven't thought about molesting a child. I haven't indulged in any
of the deviant fantasies that I've had prior. Because I've learned how to
address me, how to carry me, how to move myself forward
instead of living in the now. I learned how to look forward a little bit and not set myself up where
there could be a problem. It's like any other addiction. A sexual addiction is
like any other addiction. And you just, you gotta learn what it is that you were trying to fill, what void it is, what pain
you were trying to cover, or what thought, whatever it was you thought you were missing. Or whatever shortcomings you
thought you had to overcome, you had to learn to live
your life in such a way that those decisions
don't come back up, so. - [Interviewer] May I ask
what kind of offenses you had? - I have, my first offense was in 1990. That was for attempted
capital sexual battery, which is just a legal term for, I touched a less than 12 year old, or a girl that was under the age of 12. And then in 1996, I got charged with a lewd and lascivious battery, which is letting a child
under the age of 16 see my genitals. So those are my charges. - [Interviewer] And so
therapy worked very well, sounds like for you. - Absolutely. When I went into therapy, I
was absolutely a psychopath. There's actually a test for that. The Hare PCL-R test. And I scored psychopathy off the charts. A normal person is somewhere 12 to 18, I scored in the 30s. But through the treatment and through the work that I was able to do, got myself back down to a normal score in the mid teens, low teens. And again, it's just as a sex offender, and I think as a human being, we can't cause harm to another human being without giving ourselves
some kind of a justification, some kind of a permission. We have to convince ourselves
in some kind of way, although it's irrational, that it's okay to do what we're doing. And, as a result of that, you
lose what they call empathy. You're not able to emotionally
connect with other people. And that's what allows you
to harm another human being. Well, learning how to
reconnect with people at an emotional level was,
it was a long and hard trip. It took a lot of work and it was not, I can't say that any
step of it was pleasant, but the end result was that,
I'm one of the fortunate ones that got to get plugged
back into the human society. - [Interviewer] Are you happier now? - Much happier. I've gotten to a point where
I can put all the trauma and the mistrust and all the
stuff that happened to me as a child and as a young adult, I can put all that away
and just live in the now. And I'm far happier with who I am, the direction I'm going, what I've become. I've become a giver, not a
taker and I'm happy with that. - [Interviewer] Do you ever have, what emotions do you struggle with still? Depression or anger,
anxiety, anything like that? - Sometimes I've struggled with anger. Depression, not so much,
because life is what you see. And I have, there's so many
things that make me happy. There's so many things that I'm so happy are part of my life, I have
beautiful grandchildren. I have an amazing daughter
and a step-daughter that are just wonderful, wonderful people. So I tend to focus more on the, what's good instead of what's wrong. And then that keeps me in
a positive frame of mind. So, I'm not looking to overcome anything, I'm just looking to enjoy it. - [Interviewer] How is your relationship with your family, been through all this? - With my children or my- - [Interviewer] Both. - My children are fine. With my parents, I haven't
spoken to my parents in decades. - [Interviewer] What about your siblings? - None of them. - [Interviewer] You don't talk to them? - No. - [Interviewer] Do you know if
your siblings are struggling with some of the same stuff? - I wouldn't know. I have, I mean, I was pretty young when I was kicked out of the house. And I've never turned back and I don't have any interest in it. It's, I don't wanna go
back to a situation where, through all the treatment I went through, I've learned to see not
just my shortcomings, but things that contributed to it. And a lot of it falls
into the way I was raised and the atmosphere I was raised in. And I just have no desire
to go back to it, at all. - [Interviewer] It sounds
like you take a lot of the responsibility for what you did. - [Bill] I made my decisions. Nobody, I'm not one of
these ones that like say, "Oh my mommy took my
pacifier away too early, so I turned out all
screwed up," and all that. I did what I did, I made the decision, I created the problems,
I committed the actions, I did all that, that was me. Nobody did that and it's nobody
else's fault, it's my fault. But that's a static thing,
you can't undo that. All I can do is figure
out, why did I do that? What contributed to that? What was the cocktail that all the conditions were right
to make that happen? And then make sure that those
conditions don't happen again. And so, there's just no need for me, I'm much happier without my family. I don't want to be a part of their lives. And as far as I know, they don't really wanna be a part of mine. - [Interviewer] And what's
the most important lesson you feel like you've learned? - [Bill] My most important lesson? To be honest with myself, you know what? You don't have to be perfect. Everything doesn't have to feel good. Sometimes there's just bad feelings. Sometimes things aren't
perfect, and that's okay. You try to hold yourself up to
such a standard of perfection that you can't possibly
meet, and as a result, you end up trying to nurse
your emotional wounds of falling short of who you
think you're supposed to be. And I found some pretty
screwed up ways of doing that. - [Interviewer] It's almost
like you re-parented yourself after you started all this therapy. - I absolutely did. I mean, my, the clinical
staff at the center was phenomenal. There's so many people
there that are just, they're gonna fake it till they make it. They're just going through the motions, so they can get out the gate. And I can't lie, I wanted
to do the same thing. I wanted to get out of there, but I was never, ever, ever
happy in my life, ever. Even when I had everything
that you could want, I was never a happy person. But when I went to the center
and I realized, you know what, here's a chance to actually, I mean, I'm here, I'm not going anywhere, they're not letting me out, and I have a chance to
actually work on some things and start digging into some things and start looking at some things, because there's nobody left to blame. I'm sitting here in a cell by myself. There's nobody left to blame it on. So, once they saw that I
was willing to do the work and I really wanted to make
some changes in my life, they went all out for me. They are, the people at the
Florida Civil Commitment Center, the clinical staff are amazing people. They, one example, there's a doctor there. I hadn't cried. When I was a kid, my parents would beat us and to stop us from crying, there's actually a physiological, you can swallow and stop
yourself from crying. If you're ever crying,
swallow, you'll stop. And my parents used to beat it into us, swallow it, swallow it. And so, as a result, I became
absolutely unable to cry. I could not cry. Well, one of the doctors in Arcadia would literally take me
personally to her office, one night, every week and work on trying just to get me to cry. And it took a long, long time. And when we finally had a breakthrough and I finally started
crying, it was an ugly, ugly, ugly, cry. But she did that on her own. That wasn't part of her curriculum. That wasn't part of her job. That wasn't part, she just did
that because she saw a need that would benefit me. A way to express myself, a
way to release my emotions, a way to handle that, without
having to stuff it all in. 'Cause you just, nothing's big
enough to handle all of it. If you keep stuffing things in, eventually it's gonna blow up. - [Interviewer] Would
you consider yourself one of the very few that's
broken out of this behavior? - Yeah, absolutely. - [Interviewer] It's not
very common, I assume. - Not from a psychopathy, no. The sexual desires, it's
like any other addiction. It's, there's a lot of
people that have overcome it, that don't wanna be sex offenders. I never met one sex offender and I've been doing this for 30 years. I never met one sex offender that wanted to be a sex offender. Never met one sex offender that was happy with what they were doing, that thought what they
were doing was right. I mean, everybody knows it's wrong. It was just, we couldn't stop ourselves. Because it's an addiction. And just like any other addiction, you're gonna put yourself
in temptation's way and you're going to fold eventually. But as far as the whole
learning how to think and feel and all that, yeah. I don't
think there's a lot of people that come back from that, I think- - [Interviewer] What was
the hardest part for you? - Accepting myself the way I am. Accepting myself as imperfect. 'Cause I grew up in a household
where you had to be perfect. There was no room for error. There was, you didn't
bring home any but an A. You just had to, everything
had to be just perfect. And so accepting myself as
imperfect and having problems and being able to accept it. "Hey, here's something that
needs to be taken care of. Here's something that needs
to be looked at or addressed." That was really difficult 'cause I just wanted to put my blinders on and just go through life,
I'm good, everything's good. - [Interviewer] Were drugs
or alcohol ever a part of your life? - Absolutely Not alcohol. I mean, that's only a tolerance thing just because I can't drink. I just don't have the tolerance for it. But drugs, yeah, absolutely. - [Interviewer] And did that
play a part in the instances that you- - Absolutely. Absolutely. - [Interviewer] And what advice
can you give to anyone else who's struggling with
something, thoughts like this or desires like this? - I would say talk to somebody. Understand that it doesn't
have to be the way it is. You can talk to somebody
and you can figure out, there's something behind
what you're feeling. There's something behind
what you're desiring. And you're not gonna find it
acting out on those desires. That's just a- - [Interviewer] There's
another level to it. - Yeah, it's just a band-aid
that you're gonna put on it. Behind it all, there's
something that you're missing. There's something that you need. And talk to somebody that can help you find out what that is. I think a lot of, a huge part of the whole sex
offending cycle is the secrecy. It's such a burden to carry around. It's such a load that you
have to carry with you that you're gonna fold underneath it. And if you could find someplace that, where you could talk to somebody, and let all that out, and not carry it around with you. Sadly our system isn't set up for that. There's very few places in
this country where you can go and say, "Look this is what I'm feeling," and not get into some problems. But find somebody that you can talk to. Before you act out, before
you act on the issues. And unload it, don't
carry it around with you, 'cause it's not gonna go anywhere. All it takes is the introduction
to some rational thought and to understand how to handle it. It's not really that difficult to handle once you're willing to do it, once you're willing to be honest about it. But it's funny, you hear society talk
about the sex offenders, the boogeyman, the child molester, the bush jumpers, whatever. And yet nothing that they ever say or do is nearly as harsh as what
you judge yourself as. Nobody ever judges you as
harshly as you do yourself. And it's kind of hard to face the fact, "Hey, look I'm a sex
offender, I molested a child." It's a really hard, hard
portrait of yourself to look at. Until you get to that point
where you can look at it and objectively and honestly address it, you're just gonna be spinning your wheels. But once you get to that point, once you really get to
a point where you're, "I don't wanna do this. This isn't right, I can't do this." You can figure your way through it. But you gotta get to that point. - [Interviewer] Excellent. Well, Bill, thank you so
much for talking with me. - My pleasure. - [Interviewer] I'm
happy, I'm happy for you. - 30 years. - [Interviewer] That's great, thank you.
