Child Molester to Be Sentenced Today

He calls himself Captain Jack. His hero is Errol Flynn, and for years he has lived comfortably without working, thanks to his early success as an inventor of small tools.

By his own admission, Captain Jack, who is really Robert Lee Wurgaft, 54, of Anaheim has used all his free time to chase young girls. Girls as young as 6 years old.

This morning, Wurgaft is scheduled to appear before Orange County Superior Court Judge James O. Perez to be sentenced on 69 counts of child molestation and lewd conduct involving five girls between the ages of 6 and 16.

Wurgaft, who pleaded guilty to the counts on Aug. 6, could be sentenced to 3 to 91 years in prison.

The five girls are just a fraction of Wurgaft’s victims, the prosecution claims in its court papers. It estimates that Wurgaft’s victims number more than a hundred.

Admitted Molestations

Wurgaft admitted to an undercover policeman, posing as a fellow child pornographer, that he molested 24 girls, ages 6 to 13, besides the five involved in the charges against him, according to recordings the policeman secretly made.

“He is one of the worst pedophiles, if not the worst, to ever stand before this court,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Molko said in his sentencing brief to the court. “His is one of the most serious cases ever, if not the most serious, of sexual exploitation of children.”

Prosecutor Molko agreed to drop 12 of 81 counts--allegations that Wurgaft sexually molested his 6-year-old granddaughter and a 7-year-old neighbor girl--in exchange for Wurgaft’s guilty plea. But he did so only on the condition that he could still present evidence about those molestations to Perez at the sentencing.

Wurgaft has been convicted twice before on charges involving minors. But those were only misdemeanors, which do not carry a state prison sentence.

In one case, in 1977, he pleaded no contest to contributing to the delinquency of a minor. In the second, in 1979, he pleaded no contest to soliciting a lewd act from two minors. He got a suspended sentence in the first incident, and 33 days in jail in the second.

It was in September, 1983, that Wurgaft got in trouble again. Anaheim police received an anonymous tip that Wurgaft was dealing in pornographic pictures.

An undercover policeman, Charles Gentis, approached Wurgaft, told him he also was interested in sex with very young girls and that a mutual acquaintance had told him about Wurgaft.

“Us weirdos have got to stick together,” Wurgaft told him when they first met, according to a transcript of a tape Gentis was secretly making. “Glad to see there’s another one like me around somewhere.”

According to the transcript, Wurgaft volunteered that he had been chasing high-school-age girls most of his adult life. When he was 39, he switched to younger girls.

‘To Me, It’s Natural’

“To me, it is a natural thing; it’s society that’s screwed up as far as I’m concerned,” Wurgaft told Gentis.

Wurgaft and Gentis met three times. During these taped conversations, Wurgaft asked Gentis if he could have sex with the undercover officer’s 18-year-old daughter and admitted that he had not objected when he learned that another man had sexually molested his own preteen-age daughter.

Wurgaft told Gentis about his desire to take a trip to Mexico, like Errol Flynn, the late movie actor, whom Wurgaft idolized. Wurgaft also showed Gentis dozens of sexually explicit pictures of young girls, and told him about having sex with 26 who were pictured. On Oct. 4, 1983, soon after the conversations with the undercover officer, Wurgaft learned he was in trouble when police, armed with a search warrant, confiscated his sexually explicit pictures.

False Passport

On Oct. 8, the day his granddaughter and the neighbor girl made statements to police, he fled.

He was caught by federal authorities 18 months later, trying to use a false passport. He was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. Orange County officials placed a hold on him, and for the past few months he has been at the Orange County Jail on $500,000 bail.

Wurgaft’s attorney, Sylvan Aronson, was unavailable for comment Wednesday.

A national study group hired by Aronson to make a recommendation to Judge Perez recognized Wurgaft as a man with “a proclivity for young girls”.

Court files on Wurgaft’s case included a letter he wrote to his daughter (the mother of the 6-year-old), telling her he was sorry but, “In my mind I’ve done no wrong cause I harmed no one and never would. Does it make sense to give a man six years for murdering two people and me 40 years for petting two?”

But a sister and a son of Wurgaft have written to Perez stating that Wurgaft is now a born-again Christian and now understands that he did harm his victims.