How One Registered Sex Offender Profits from His Crime

What would you do if a registered sex offender moved in down the street from you and your children? Someone who had gone to prison for molesting small children, not once but repeatedly? Would you be concerned about your kids? Would you forbid them to play with his children or go over to their house? Would you keep them inside, never to play outside again, at least as long as he lived there?

Would you band together with other concerned neighbors, setting up volunteer patrols to keep an eye on the convicted criminal's comings and goings? Would you try to put pressure on him to leave? And would you, when even as a group you could not convince him to move away, be willing to pay him to leave? Would you be willing to go that far?

That is exactly what one group of people in an affluent neighborhood did, just about four years ago. This man had served his prison sentence for molesting several young children. He had been released. He remarried - a younger woman with three small children from a previous marriage, apparently trusting that her new husband was truly reformed. A successful businessman before his incarceration, he still had the means to buy a home in an upscale neighborhood, amid doctors, lawyers and CEOs. And so he moved into a lovely million plus dollar home and went about his business.

But, uncomfortable with a child molester in their domain, his neighbors were not as trusting as his new wife, at least not where their children were concerned. They tried repeatedly to convince this man to move away, but it was not until they offered to buy him out of his house at a substantial profit that he finally agreed. In 2003, this man and his family bought a bigger, newer home and proceeded to remodel the kitchen and put in a pool with the money he made on the appreciation in his home in that affluent neighborhood along with the $100,000 that the neighbors collectively paid him to leave. Understandable as his neighbors' actions were, ironically the end result is that this man profitted by taking the innocence of several small children.