A Case of Molestation: Schools Had Early Warning on Teacher

Long before teacher Terry E. Bartholome’s conviction in what probably ranks as the most shocking child molestation case in Los Angeles Unified School District history, administrators acknowledged that police were not contacted until more than a year after parents and students first complained about his lewd conduct in the classroom.

But ever since Bartholome’s well-publicized arrest in 1985, these officials have minimized the extent of allegations that began surfacing three years earlier, saying they lacked evidence then to build a case against him.

Recently unsealed police reports filed with the Los Angeles Superior Court and other documents obtained by The Times tell a far different story, however. They show that much more was suspected much earlier about Bartholome’s lewd behavior--and from a wider variety of sources--than the school district disclosed.

Indeed, the documents suggest that had school officials responded differently to earlier accusations that Bartholome was masturbating in front of pupils, fondling them and encouraging them to touch his genitals, the crimes for which he was convicted last July might well have been prevented.

The jury found him guilty of 19 felonies and 11 misdemeanors involving 13 third-graders at 68th Street School in South-Central Los Angeles. He was sentenced to 44 years in prison.

“I don’t think there’s any question that what happened at 68th Street School could have been prevented,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Rita A. Stapleton, who prosecuted Bartholome. “There were enough red alerts and enough signals given to people whose concern for children should have caused them to act immediately and definitively.”

Complaints against Bartholome, now 49, arose in 1982 while he was teaching sixth grade at 107th Street School in South-Central Los Angeles. But district officials said a parent who had lodged a complaint against him later backed off, making it impossible to put together a case and leaving administrators no alternative but to transfer him in 1983 to the smaller 68th Street School.

According to the documents, however, the allegations against Bartholome were much more detailed and extensive than what officials later described:

- Beginning in June, 1982, two successive principals at 107th Street School were told of specific sex acts Bartholome was alleged to have committed.

- That December, officials took statements from several children, one of whom said she saw Bartholome “pull on his private parts.” Another wrote that Bartholome had told his students, “My wife won’t give me none, y’all are going to give me some.”

- An administrator was alarmed enough to ask the school district’s internal police force to investigate. But the investigator’s report shows he interviewed only one child. And the same administrator called off the internal investigation after deciding that the case should be handled administratively--that is, that Bartholome should be transferred.

- Although school officials say the Los Angeles Police Department was contacted in 1982, the school police report makes no mention of the call. Nor, apparently, is there any other record that a crime report was made.

Court files also show that the district was aware when Bartholome was hired in 1967 that he had been arrested more than five years earlier for exposing himself to a group of nurses in Tacoma, Wash.

What went wrong at 107th Street School so that a man accused of molesting students was allowed to remain in the classroom? There is no clear answer, because most of the key players have refused to discuss the case on the advice of their attorneys.

Among the theories advanced by those who have watched the case are the absence of a cohesive parent community, a reluctance to believe accusations made by children, a shortage of teachers in the inner city, the deadening effects of working in a vast bureaucracy and the school district’s fear of bad publicity.

In the 20 months since Bartholome was pulled from the classroom, the Los Angeles Board of Education has not said whether any disciplinary action should be taken against school officials.

Board members, perhaps because of a $110-million lawsuit filed against the district by families of Bartholome’s victims, will not say anything specific about the case. Three of them said they are awaiting results of an independent investigation conducted by Charles G. Bakaly Jr. of the O’Melveny & Myers law firm. Bakaly is also representing the school district in the civil lawsuit.

“We’re all committed not to state anything on the record at this time,” board member Roberta Weintraub said in a recent telephone interview.

One administrator, Stuart N. Bernstein, was convicted last July of a misdemeanor for failing to comply with a 1981 state law requiring child-care custodians to report “reasonable suspicion” of child abuse to a child protective agency in writing within 36 hours. He was sentenced to two years’ probation and ordered to perform 400 hours of community service.

Bernstein, who as a regional administrator supervised 68th Street School Principal Alice McDonald, was the only district official charged with a crime, and the only one to receive an official reprimand. Four other school officials were given immunity and two of them, including McDonald, testified against him.

Bernstein was accused of waiting two weeks before alerting school police on Dec. 17, 1984, that a confessed pedophile was teaching third grade. Evidence was presented to show that Bernstein was told of allegations against Bartholome as early as November, 1983, and again the following March and April.

But the charges in the Bernstein case were based only on his failure to act in December, 1984, because by the time the case was filed, the one-year statute of limitations had expired on any crimes that Bernstein or others may have committed during the earlier periods.

“There is evidence the (reporting) statute was violated by several people--but outside the statute of limitations,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Steven A. Sowders, head of the special investigations division, which brought the case to the grand jury last year.

Bernstein plans to appeal, based in part on the judge’s instruction to the jury that the school police do not constitute a “child protective agency,” as defined by the law.

He is bitter about being singled out. “Of all the people involved, I was the only one who took decisive action,” he said in a recent interview.

From the moment Bartholome was hired by the school district back in 1967, officials had reason to keep a close watch on him.

Arrested for lewd conduct on New Year’s Eve in 1961 while he was an Army national guardsman on active duty, Bartholome told Pierce County (Wash.) sheriff’s deputies, “Yes, I have had this problem since I was about 13 years old,” records show. No charges were filed, but he was ordered to undergo counseling.

After initially denying that the school district knew about Bartholome’s arrest when he was hired, Associate Supt. Jerry Halverson acknowledged last week that Bartholome “did indicate the arrest. We then took eight months . . . to review that and finally concluded that there was insufficient reason to exclude him.”

But Halverson took issue with assertions in court documents that the school district required Bartholome to undergo counseling at Camarillo State Hospital as a condition of employment. “I really doubt we did that,” Halverson said.

According to Halverson, school officials are now prohibited--as a result of a 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision--from inquiring whether a prospective teacher has an arrest record.

Teaching was only the latest of Bartholome’s many careers. He had sung professionally, played both professional ice hockey and baseball and worked as a carpenter.

During his first nine years in the Los Angeles school system, he taught in the San Fernando Valley.

In 1975, after parents and teachers accused him of anti-Semitic behavior, Bartholome was transferred from Platt Ranch School in Woodland Hills to nearby Canoga Park Elementary School, according to Donald Baer, former executive director of United Teachers of Los Angeles. School district spokesman Bill Rivera said he was unable to “find any verification” of such an episode.

The following year, Bartholome abandoned teaching to become manager and part-owner of an ice-skating rink in the Conejo Valley. In 1978, when the venture failed, he returned to teaching as a substitute and a semester later won a full-time assignment in the inner city.

In June, 1982, a neatly typed anonymous letter from “Concerned Community of 107th Street School” was sent to Phil Jordan, then superintendent for the school district region in which both 107th Street and 68th Street schools are located. The letter alleged that Bartholome “has been sexually abusing the students both on and off the school premises. We have learned that this has been going on for quite some time. . . . We are able to substantiate these charges.”

The letter, which did not describe the sexual misconduct or name any victims, was circulated to, among others, then-Associate Supt. William Anton and Richard W. Green, chief of the school police, court records show.

Jordan, now superintendent of Pasadena schools, asked the 107th Street principal, Michael P. Klentschy, to check out the accusations. Klentschy reported that Bartholome “denied, without any reservations, any and all ‘charges’ in the letter.”

When he appeared before the Los Angeles County Grand Jury in July, 1985, Klentschy said he and an assistant principal had interviewed most, if not all, of Bartholome’s pupils.

“Based upon the summary that we received from the children, . . . there was nothing out of the ordinary really that any of the children said about Mr. Bartholome,” Klentschy testified. “There were no specific allegations made by the children that he actually, in effect, did anything to them. . . . There was really nothing that was even general, as I can recall.”

Six months before his grand jury testimony, however, Klentschy was interviewed by detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Sexually Exploited Child Unit. In their report, filed in court, they said Klentschy recalled hearing children 2 1/2 years earlier make specific complaints about Bartholome, and “the nature of the allegations involved the suspect fondling the sexual organs of the children and the children fondling the suspect’s sexual organ.”

Klentschy also told police that “one complaint stemmed from the suspect wearing a pair of ‘tie-cord’ type of pants that would slide down in class,” according to the report. There was another allegation “about the suspect possibly having his students put their hands inside the pair of pants he was wearing. The suspect purportedly had holes where the pockets were supposed to be.”

Four days before they interviewed Klentschy, police had searched Bartholome’s home in Newbury Park, seizing three pairs of pants of the type the principal described, including one that had “holes at pockets,” according to a court document.

In July, 1982, a month after the anonymous letter was written, Klentschy was promoted out of the principal’s office, and last summer he went to work for Jordan in Pasadena as an administrator.

Asked about the contradiction between the police report and his grand jury testimony, Klentschy said: “My only response is that it (the police report) is not an accurate description as to what I told the police.” He referred all other questions to his lawyer, who did not return several phone calls.

District officials have said the next complaint about Bartholome was made by a parent in December, 1982, but that she later withdrew the allegation.

What they have not said is that the mother’s call prompted the principal who replaced Klentschy, Elaine Gourley, to question Bartholome’s female students, according to an account she gave police detectives in January, 1985, court records show.

Five youngsters “seemed to be really upset,” Gourley told police. Bartholome had fondled them, the children reported to their principal, and “would have the girls put their hands into his pants pockets and ‘stroke’ his erect penis.”

Gourley also told police she had taken statements from the girls but “cleaned out her files during the summer of 1984 and destroyed these statements.”

Copies of at least some of these statements eventually found their way into police files.

One child, for example, said the teacher was always asking one girl whether she loved him. “I asked him why he says things like that,” the child reported. “He said, ‘I don’t know. I can’t help myself.’

“I told him, ‘I’ve never in my life seen a teacher like you.’ ”

Gourley, now principal of Brockton Elementary School in West Los Angeles, declined to be interviewed by The Times. “I think the case is over, and it’s closed, and I don’t see any purpose in commenting at this time,” she said.

But Gourley was willing to talk to Bernstein when he called her two days after he had turned in Bartholome to school police. His notes, part of the court file, show that she told him about allegations that Bartholome “fondled himself when speaking to students” and “gave students money and expensive presents, ‘hush money.’ ”

In the fall of 1982, after the children complained to Gourley, she notified Norman Mathers, Bernstein’s predecessor as a regional administrator, she later told police detectives. On Dec. 3, Mathers asked school police to investigate Bartholome because of “a number of serious allegations.”

But five days later, Mathers called a halt to the investigation.

“Mr. Mathers informed (the) investigator that he had enough information whereby this matter could be handled administratively,” investigator Richard N. Wadlington wrote in a confidential report to his boss, school police chief Green.

Mathers said in an interview that Jordan, the regional superintendent, was apprised of every decision. “I kept him informed. I don’t think there’s any question that was done.”

In his report, Wadlington noted that he had scheduled an interview with the complaining parent, but the meeting was canceled by Principal Gourley. She told the investigator that the mother, whose twin daughters were in Bartholome’s class, did not wish to pursue the matter. (Recent efforts to locate the mother, who has moved from her 1982 residence, were unsuccessful.)

From his report, it appears that Wadlington did not talk to the twins, or to two other youngsters who had given statements either to Gourley or to the assistant principal.

His single interview with a child, conducted in the presence of the assistant principal, was inconclusive, and he did not contact the girl’s parents. The child acknowledged receiving gifts from Bartholome, including a watch, but denied that she had been molested.

Such denial is commonplace, prosecutors and others familiar with child molestation cases contend. They say special training is needed to get young victims to open up about their experiences, particularly since most children fear they will be punished. Wadlington does not specialize in sex crime investigations.

Jordan did not respond to a reporter’s phone calls, and Wadlington said he could not recall any details about the investigation.

Green referred questions about Wadlington’s report to his boss, Herbert Graham, director of police and administrative services. “At the time, we thought it was thorough,” Graham said of the report. “If I recall correctly . . . I would have looked at this report, I would have spotted the fact that the region office would have decided that they would handle the matter. I would not have second-guessed the region office.”

Mathers, the administrator who terminated the internal investigation, says he has no recollection of the detailed allegations mentioned in the police report.

“If I’d had any specifics, I would have done something about it,” said Mathers, who retired from the school district in August, 1983. “The only thing I can remember is a telephone call with the assistant principal. The mother that I remember said her daughter was lying.”

Mathers also remembers that he had called someone at LAPD’s Southeast Division, only to be told he had no case.

“I can’t remember the name but (it was) something like ‘Stuttle’ or something,” Mathers told a district attorney’s investigator in July, 1985, according to a transcript of the interview. “I kind of ran it through them. What if the parents didn’t (back up) the girls. Did we have anything we could do? And he said, ‘No.’ ”

Detective Kena Brutsch, who was supervisor of detectives at Southeast Division in 1982, cannot recall anyone working under her with a name resembling “Stuttle.” And she bristles at the suggestion that police might have taken such a call lightly.

“If there was a report made involving a crime against a child, a crime report would have been taken,” Brutsch said. “I’d bet money on it.”

In January, 1983, Bartholome received a memo from principal Gourley notifying him that he was being transferred, at his own request, and reminding him of advice she had given him earlier.

“I recommended that you refrain from using such familiar language and inappropriate placement of your hands on girls as well as remaining alone in the classroom with a girl after school,” the principal wrote.

At Stuart Bernstein’s retrial (jurors at his first trial were unable to reach a verdict), Mathers was asked to define an “administrative transfer.”

“It’s good for the district, good for the teacher, good for everyone concerned, I think.”

A former teachers’ union official, who requested anonymity, had another explanation: “The teachers used to joke that there was an official game. It was called ‘pass the trash.’ Rather than dealing with problem teachers, they would just transfer them.”

School district spokesman Rivera, however, said it is “good personnel practice” to transfer teachers if allegations cannot be substantiated “to make sure that the person is given a fair shake, as well as the kids in the school.”

During a recent visit to 107th Street School, most teachers said they were shocked to learn about the charges against Bartholome when the story first appeared in the press.

But a few remembered that there had been talk about him soon after he left their school.

Second-grade teacher Patricia E. Merrill recalled that she heard from other teachers that children were accusing Bartholome of “messing around” with kids while he was at 107th Street School. As his friend, she wanted to dispel these rumors, she said, so she went to Principal Gourley.

“ ‘Leave it alone,’ ” she said Gourley told her.

By that time, the final chapter of Bartholome’s teaching career was unfolding at 68th Street School, where he was assigned to a combined class of first- and second-graders. Giving some insight into the thinking behind the transfer, Principal McDonald later wrote in a memo to the school district’s legal adviser:

“He (Bartholome) stated he had been accused of molesting sixth-grade students at 107th Street School but it was the region’s feeling he would not bother the younger children. Mr. Mathers said to keep my eye on him and contact the region if incidents should occur.”

Regional Administrator Mathers and his boss, Regional Supt. Jordan, made a point of stopping in Bartholome’s classroom when they visited 68th Street School on separate occasions in the spring of 1983. McDonald, who had only slightly more than a year’s experience as a principal, assured them there were no problems, court records show.

”. . . I at that time felt very comfortable that maybe what had gone on was behind him and things were working pretty well,” Jordan told a district attorney’s investigator.

The first indication that “what had gone on” was not behind him apparently came several months later, in November, 1983, when a parent complained to McDonald that Bartholome, by then teaching third grade, had “rubbed his private against the backside” of one of her daughter’s classmates and paraded around the classroom with his hand inside his pants.

Additional accusations followed the next March and then in April, when a group of sixth-graders approached the principal. They reported, for example, that “Mr. B.” had “displayed his privates and stated, ‘I should make you suck it’ to a third-grade girl,” according to a memo McDonald wrote that was addressed “to whom it may concern.”

Just why police were not called until the following December, after a new round of allegations, has been hotly debated.

Bernstein, who joined the region office a month after the November, 1983, incident, accuses the principal of not conveying a sense of urgency about Bartholome and of failing to keep him adequately informed.

Daniel Austin, the region administrator who temporarily handled personnel responsibilities between Mathers’ retirement and Bernstein’s arrival, recalls that McDonald told him about the November, 1983, complaint but said she did not believe it was valid.

Testifying under a grant of immunity, Austin said he informed Bernstein shortly after the new administrator’s arrival that questions had been raised about Bartholome’s conduct. After that, Austin said, he was out of the picture.

Bernstein, however, testified that the conversation never took place.

Also testifying under a grant of immunity, McDonald said she took her instructions from the region. It was Bernstein, she said, who told her in April, 1984, to meet with the teacher and be “very firm” with him, according to her testimony. Bernstein denied that the principal had consulted him. She must have talked to Austin, he testified.

When McDonald met with Bartholome, she noted afterward in a memo, she advised him, among other things, to “keep doors open,” “keep blinds open” and “avoid all compromising situations.”

One of the many mysteries about the case is what happened to the memos that the Bartholome allegations engendered. Bernstein testified that when he finally saw Bartholome’s file in December, 1984, all that it contained were two copies of the anonymous letter that had been sent to Jordan in June, 1982.

Whether anyone ever looked for the file before December, 1984, may never be known.

In mid-summer 1985, two months after Bartholome was arrested, the district attorney’s office asked the grand jury to determine if there were grounds for an indictment on felony conspiracy to violate the reporting law. “The evidence did not show that such a conspiracy took place,” said Deputy Dist. Sowders, head of the special investigations division.

Just before the grand jury investigation, Ron Apperson, legal adviser to the district, spoke with the potential witnesses.

“What did Apperson tell you about talking to us?” a district attorney’s investigator asked retired region administrator Mathers, according to a transcript of the interview.

“That we should not be talking to you. That’s all,” Mathers replied.

Apperson himself, on the advice of his attorney, refused to answer any questions before the grand jury, citing the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.

Apperson was unwilling to be interviewed. But Rivera, the school district spokesman, said Apperson had never intended to thwart the investigation--only to ensure that everyone involved had enough time to obtain the services of an attorney.

Why school officials did not move more quickly against Bartholome is a matter of speculation among those who have followed the case.

Most seem to feel that parents in a more affluent, stable neighborhood would have exerted more pressure, and their children would have been more readily listened to.

“If this had happened in Santa Monica, with the parental pressure, the closeness of the community, they (school officials) wouldn’t have been able to hide it,” said a former teachers union official.

Some critics of the school district say the chronic shortage of teachers in the inner city may have been a factor. Bartholome, by most accounts, was considered a good teacher.

“At that time, we were lucky to get teachers,” police quoted Klentschy, the 107th Street School principal, as saying when they interviewed him early last year. Bernstein, police said, told them the district was “hard up for teachers, but we’re not going to put up with it anymore.” (Bernstein contends he was falsely quoted.)

Other people argue that vast bureaucracies like the school district encourage officials to pass the buck. “One of the real downsides of a bureaucratic system is that nobody feels he individually has to make a decision,” prosecutor Stapleton said.

Still others cite testimony suggesting that the district was trying to build a case against Bartholome so he could be fired--quietly.

“They treated it like a personnel matter, instead of a criminal matter,” said Deputy City Atty. Mary E. House, who prosecuted Bernstein. “That’s the bottom line, and that’s pretty frightening.”

Said Wayne Johnson, president of United Teachers of Los Angeles: “The one thing they (district officials) hate like poison is bad publicity. . . . I am absolutely convinced that there was a concerted effort to keep the lid on but it got out of hand on them.

”. . . .I hope to God they just didn’t understand the gravity of it.”

Indeed, Chief Green of the school police cited this image-consciousness when he was interviewed last year by a district attorney’s investigator.

”. . . I think you may also understand the sensitivity of the community . . . toward a schoolteacher being involved in a crime,” Green said in that interview. “Most of our community out there feel that teachers don’t do those kinds of things, and it would certainly have an impact on the community’s image of the district if that be so.”

Despite 2 1/2 years of complaints, Bartholome’s confession to a teacher’s aide is what finally did him in.

McDonald relayed the gist of the conversation to Bernstein, saying Bartholome had admitted that he was a pedophile, “that he had this problem with young girls and that they excited him,” according to her testimony.

It was time, Bernstein decided, to pick up the phone.