Whose fault is Bruce?
Whose fault is Bruce?
By JEFF WALSH
WILKES-BARRE — From his earliest memory, there was the Voice.
The Voice grew louder and angrier as Bruce bounced in and out of foster homes, after the alleged physical abuse by his mother and, finally, as he raped two young women.
But not until going to prison did he realize the Voice was just something in his head — and not a lifelong friend.
The Voice had betrayed him, much like the mother he says repeatedly abused and abandoned him, much like the child welfare system that was legally bound to protect and nurture him.
The child who would grow into a rapist was born into foster care, the son of a 16-year-old foster child.
But when he was sentenced, no one — not even the Voice — was with him. The system wasn’t there either.
This 19-year-old Wilkes-Barre man, serving at least 3 more years in prison, says his mother and the system should share in the blame. One of his rape victims agrees, and is planning a civil suit charging Luzerne County Children and Youth Services with negligence.
But, Luzerne County Juvenile Court Judge Chester Muroski, who certified Bruce to stand trial as an adult, believes Bruce is simply blaming the foster care system to cast himself in the best light.
“Bruce, in my view, is a classic Ted Bundy figure — intelligent and manipulating the system. Right now, you’re his puppet.”
In and out of foster care for 18 years, Children and Youth returned Bruce time and again to his mother for weekend visits and for brief periods of reconciliation. His father refused to play a role in his life.
His relationship with his mother spiraled into repeated episodes of mutual animosity and violence, according to allegations recorded in his Children and Youth records, which he released for this story, and his own testimony during his sentencing hearing.
She forced him to eat a bar of soap until he vomited, pushed his face into the vomit and pulled his hair.
He sat on top of her and hit her.
She choked him until he passed out.
He slammed her fingers in a door.
Bruce says he learned to keep his hair cut short so his mother “couldn’t grab it.”
His mother, who spoke and met with Times Leader editors several times, did not agree to be interviewed for this story but repeatedly denied her son’s allegations of abuse.
When the fighting escalated, his mother gave him back to foster care — but only temporarily. After weeks or months, Children and Youth would return the boy to his mother’s care again — until the next time she was unable to care for him.
He spent only 17 months of the first five years of his life with his mother, setting the pattern that would last throughout his childhood.
Bruce’s lawyer, John Pike, says the system and Bruce’s mother let his client down.
“There are two sexual victims here, but Bruce is also a victim of his own upbringing,” Pike says.
If the system had terminated his mother’s rights, would Bruce have been adopted and allowed to grow up in a two-parent home?
Is he a manipulative liar or a child with problems that weren’t adequately addressed?
If his childhood had been different, could Bruce have been saved?
In December, the former foster child entered a plea of no contest to two counts of rape.
Then, he would not admit committing the rapes.
Even now, Bruce claims not to know if he raped the women.
In an almost-empty courtroom in February, resting his head in his hands and blotting his tear-filled eyes with tissue, Bruce waited for his sentence.
A Bible lay within arm’s length.
Only two deputy sheriffs remained as courtroom spectators filtered into the hallway for a break.
As Bruce continued to cry inside the courtroom, the victims sobbed in relief outside in the hallway.
More than two years after their ordeals, the man who raped them at knife-point was going to prison.
Earlier, the females, ages 14 and 25, had told the court how the attacks shattered their lives. Bruce avoided eye contact with them, his hand firmly on his Bible.
After hearing his sentence, this gifted student and athlete left the courtroom in handcuffs, part of the corrections system. He now has no choice where he lives, no say with whom he lives and no way to leave until he serves his sentence.
But he is used to those conditions. He says that’s what life was like for him in the foster care system.
Bruce hears the Voice
The Voice first spoke to Bruce, he says, after his mother beat him.
“I started developing a friend, a voice that I would hear,” Bruce says. “It wasn’t really malicious at that time. It would just comfort me.”
Although records indicate his mother never wanted him out of her life, she apparently couldn’t cope with raising him and frequently relied on foster care. At one point, a Children and Youth caseworker noted the boy was confused by the number of “mommies” in his life.
One caseworker wrote: If given a choice, the child would choose foster care over his natural mother.
He told Children and Youth he wanted to remain with his foster parents, whom he called Mom and Dad. He did not want to return to his mother, whom he called by her first name.
Weekend visits with his mother agitated him, according to the foster family who cared for Bruce when he was 5 years old.
“Every time she’d get him for the weekend, he’d come back here and be really wired,” says the foster father, who asked that his name not be used. “He was a little rough on us, and then after a day or two he’d calm down and she’d get him the next weekend and it would happen all over again.”
Bruce says Children and Youth should have stepped in. “Too much power was in my mother’s hands.”
From age 6 to 12, while predominately in his mother’s care, Bruce says, he was sexually assaulted by other adults twice: Once at age 6, when he was fondled, and again at age 11, when he was raped.
That’s when the Voice began to challenge him.
“It told me to start getting revenge on my mother,” he says. “That’s when it started getting malicious.”
But Bruce says he resisted the Voice until he was sexually assaulted a third time — this time a rape by another youth.
When, once again, his mother couldn’t control him, Bruce was sent to Friendship House, a group home in Scranton. After staying at the home for about 10 months, Bruce says, he was raped by a fellow resident.
In a psychiatric evaluation several months after the third assault, the 12-year-old boy told a doctor that although he was “coerced … it was more like a seduction than being physically frightened.”
Shortly afterward, he submitted to the Voice.
“I listened to everything the Voice told me to do,” he says. “I’d be walking around doing things and not know why I was doing it.”
Problems at an early age
Bruce says he might not have listened to the Voice and might not be in prison now if he had received appropriate therapy at an early age, when it first became apparent he had problems.
“Since the age of 5, he has had sexual offending characteristics,” Dr. Paul Gitlin testified at Bruce?s sentencing. Gitlin, who was hired to do an evaluation for Bruce’s defense, said Bruce’s problems as a boy were never addressed in therapy, despite available treatment programs.
As a 5-year-old, he wanted to bathe with his foster family’s daughters, who were 6 and 12, and couldn’t understand why that was a problem. He also urinated on one of the girls and onto the bed of the other.
The only therapy he received was family counseling to help him reconcile with his mother, he says. “If they gave me counseling, this might be a different story. Children and Youth had no regard for my well-being.”
In early 1993, Gerald Zimmerman, Ph.D., a psychologist at the Wiley House residential group home in Bethlehem recommended Bruce be treated for “sexual behaviors” after he was accused by GAR High School officials of having sex with and making lewd comments toward several girls.
“The risk for him to commit a criminal offense may be higher if treatment is not provided,” the doctor wrote.
Bruce refused treatment then, but now says he shouldn’t have had that option. Ten months after the psychiatrist’s recommendation, while still in foster care, Bruce raped the two young women.
Judge Muroski says there was nothing the system could do when Bruce refused treatment.
“What do you do with someone who won’t participate?” asks Muroski. “Time and time again, he was afforded treatment and refused it.”
The judge, animated, agitated, and flailing his arms when talking about Bruce, seemed shocked when asked if the foster child-turned-rapist might be an example of how the system sometimes doesn’t work.
“Of course, the system works,” Muroski says. “Are you going to judge a whole system that’s gone on for decades because of Bruce?”
Bruce, a former gifted high school student, track and football star, says he received academic and athletic scholarships to schools such as Brown and Vanderbilt universities.
Muroski says the teenager is using his intelligence to shift the focus away from himself as a rapist and put the blame on his mother and Children and Youth.
“Why not look at Bruce as an evil person who has done dastardly acts and is responsible for them? It’s too easy to Monday morning quarterback Bruce and say we should have done this or that. He is a terrible, evil person that has to be analyzed in a category all by himself.”
In defense of the system
In his office at Children and Youth, Executive Director Gene Caprio sits next to a foot-high stack of Bruce’s records. He won’t comment specifically about the former foster child’s case because of confidentiality laws his agency must follow.
He does say Bruce?s case is indicative of services provided by his agency.
“The agency offered every available service,” he says, placing his hand on the pile of records. “This record reflects we offered every available service.”
Caprio says Children and Youth has a two-fold mission: Protect children and reunify families. But he acknowledges, “The answer isn’t always to keep children with families.”
In 1981, the agency tried to terminate the mother’s parental rights, citing her repeated failure to care for him, but later pulled the paperwork and Bruce remained in his mother’s custody.
Janet Neuman, a court-appointed “guardian” lawyer who looks after the best interest of the children in such cases, says generally every termination case is different and difficult, and clear and convincing evidence must be presented by the agency requesting the termination.
“You’re taking away a fundamental serious right and you have to make sure it’s in the best interest of the child,” she says.
Neuman said a new state statute allows an agency to terminate parental rights after one year, if the natural parents are not complying.
Muroski says Bruce now has the best of both worlds: He won’t admit to committing the rapes, but if he did them, Children and Youth is to blame.
The judge asks, “Should every kid that comes into the system be psychoanalyzed to see if they might commit a crime?
“No system, and I don’t care who runs it, can be expected to predict you’ll have an inherently terrible person like Bruce.”
He `clearly’ made choices
If his childhood had been different, could Bruce have been saved?
Maybe, but not necessarily.
The first three years of a child’s life are the most critical in determining whether the child learns to relate to other people, according to the Association for the Treatment and Training in the Attachment of Children.
“If he were bounced around in those three years, then it likely laid the foundation for his inability to relate in a healthy way, if he hadn’t been treated effectively since that point,” says Dr. Michael Pines, president of the Dallas, Texas-based association.
But Pines stopped short of blaming the rapist’s crimes on his childhood. He pointed out that Bruce “clearly made choices along the way.”
Pines says a child whose “trust cycle” is constantly interrupted grows up angry and suspicious of the world.
“When they come into adolescence feeling that empty and that rageful, they can become predators,” he says.
Pines, who has specialized in child attachment issues for 12 years, says Bruce’s upbringing could also account for the Voice.
“Kids that have been traumatized early are prone to disassociative episodes where they literally split from themselves and develop unhealthy ways of dealing with the trauma, such as hearing voices,” Pines says.
Pines said building a healthy adult is similar to building a house.
“If a house has a bad foundation, no matter how solid you build the second and third floors, you’re going to have problems.”
Nightmares are reality
Bruce’s only indication he might have raped the women is a recurring nightmare that seemed to change after the rapes occurred.
Before then, the dream was nearly the same each time: “I would come upon a rape and the next thing I know I would be involved in it. The only thing I could make out was my mother’s face. I was attacking my mother.”
Bruce claims to have suffered “blackouts” at the times the rapes occurred. He only knows the rapes as nightmares, bad dreams that usually followed fights with his mother.
In his dreams, he raped his mother between two houses on South Franklin Street, 20 feet from the sidewalk. In reality, a 22-year-old Wilkes-Barre woman told police a man followed her to that location, threatened her with a knife and forced her to have sex. She later identified Bruce as her attacker.
In his dreams, Bruce raped his mother in Hunlock Creek, near the home of a 12-year-old schoolmate. In reality, the girl identified Bruce as the rapist who forced her at knifepoint to have sex.
Bruce was initially charged with raping the younger girl. But while out on bail, he applied for a job where his 22-year-old victim worked, which led her to identify him as her attacker too.
Bruce says he sometimes wondered if he might be the rapist described in the newspaper. But the Voice always shifted his focus to something else.
“The Voice used to make me not dwell on it. It told me — don’t care about it, just keep doing what I’m doing.”
Now in prison, Bruce says he has started remembering more of what happened before and after his blackouts. He recalls the Voice feeding him negative images of his mother.
“The Voice was showing me things that I did, times she would beat me,” he says.
The Voice would taunt: Time to stop it. Be a man. Take things into your own hands.
Hearing the victims’ stories has convinced the convicted rapist his dreams were their reality.
“There are two people hurting and crying,” he says, “and their story matches my dreams.”
He finds future in faith
As he talks about being fondled as a 6-year-old, Bruce’s eyes drop toward his Bible. His hand kneads the cloth bookmark. This pattern is repeated each time he discusses a difficult part of his childhood, quickly followed by eye contact to ensure his point was made.
For as much as his Children and Youth records document his troubled past, Bruce is optimistic the Bible will serve to chart his future.
He began reading the Bible in August 1994, and has continued during his incarceration. Bruce, now a Jehovah’s Witness, says he is seeking answers.
“I prayed something would happen,” he says. “People would always say `God is love,’ but I always wondered what does it mean, `God is love?’ All I know is pain.”
Bruce says he has developed a conscience while in prison. He says he has learned he can love other people.
Prior to finding religion, the inmate says he had a “negative outlook” on life. He rooted for Saddam Hussein to win the Persian Gulf War. He cheered for the Branch Davidians to win their standoff with federal agents in Waco, Texas.
“I didn’t feel for society, because I felt society had wronged me,” he says. “I never had love and affection. I never developed it, received it or gave it. You can’t develop it in a foster home. Fosters are just getting paid.”
A relative, who asked not to be identified, says she has noticed a change in him since he found religion.
“Before, he used to be more self-centered. It was always him,” she says. “Now, he’s trying to actively be involved in religion. It’s become a main focus in his life.”
Although he has trouble believing he could rape someone, Bruce’s religious beliefs led him to enter no contest.
“Knowing what I know about the Bible, I cannot get up on the stand and say I didn’t do it, because I don’t know what happened,” he says.
Seeing his victims “hurting” in court made Bruce resolve his case as quickly as possible, he says. His decision to enter the pleas came about due to Revelations 21:4, which reads “… he will wipe out every tear from their eyes, and … neither will mourning nor outcry nor pain be anymore. The former things have passed away.”
The convicted rapist says he recognizes the victims’ pain, understands it and wants to do all he can to stop it.
“I realized I couldn’t subject them to any more pain, whether the crime is true or not,” he says. “I pray they get comfort and Jehovah can provide them with the means to overcome this situation.”
Bruce is a liar, says Assistant District Attorney Dave Zekoski.
“His story changed on this as the noose tightened,” he says. “That’s why I doubt the blackouts and such. He never mentioned it before. I find it hard to believe.
“I don’t doubt bad stuff happened to him. But no matter what happened to Bruce, we can’t go back and change his past.”
Naming his demons
The relative stands behind Bruce without asking questions about his crimes.
“The only people who know what happened are Bruce, the women and God,” she says.
But if the Voice really existed, it knows, too. And it isn’t talking. Not anymore.
From behind the glass that separates prisoners from visitors, Bruce sits alone and stares. With one hand clutching the phone and the other on his Bible, he reveals the identity of the Voice, stripping away the last negative influence from his youth.
“It was Satan.”
Originally appeared in the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader – April 21, 1996.
