17 Alleged Victims : Teacher Faces More Molestation Charges

A former track coach and physical education teacher for a private Corona del Mar grade school now faces child molestation charges involving 17 victims after additional charges were filed Wednesday in Harbor Municipal Court.

One alleged victim was a young girl, and the rest were boys between 11 and 14 years of age, authorities said.

Prosecutors told the court that police are still interviewing witnesses and that more charges could be added when the defendant, Alan Thomas Rigby of Irvine, is arraigned on Oct. 16.

Rigby’s case involves more victims than any child molestation case in Orange County history, according to prosecutors. But the nature of the sexual misconduct alleged is not as serious as in many child molestation cases, according to court or police records made public so far. For example, Rigby is charged with 31 counts, none of which alleges sodomy or oral copulation with any of the youngsters, common charges in many pedophile cases.

“What makes this case so serious is the number of victims, and his position of trust as a teacher,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Lewis R. Rosenblum said.

“These charges do include several acts of serious sexual conduct,” he said, but declined to specify.

Rigby, who turns 40 today, was in custody in lieu of $200,000 bail at Wednesday’s court appearance. He smiled at his pregnant wife, Cathy, as she blew him a kiss from the back of the courtroom.

Deputy Public Defender William G. Kelley said Rigby is more worried about his wife, who is due to give birth to their second child next month, than he is about his own situation.

Kelley said Rigby claims that he does not know why so many youngsters have made accusations against him. But last October Rigby told police that some youngsters were falsely accusing him of illegal sex acts to “nail” him for trouble he had with them in his neighborhood.

Rigby had been under investigation for a variety of sexual misconduct allegations last October, a month after he was hired to work in the physical education department at the Harbor Day School in Corona del Mar.

He was not arrested, but Irvine police brought a case against him to the Orange County district attorney’s office last December. Prosecutors refused to file charges against him then “due to the unlikelihood of conviction,” court records show.

More Boys Interviewed

However, Rigby was arrested two weeks ago after another group of young boys--unrelated to the boys and girls in the 1986 investigation--were interviewed by the police. Rigby was charged last week with offenses involving 11 victims.

The charges added Wednesday raised the number of alleged victims to 17. Court records show that some of the charges against Rigby are incidents that date back to the case in Irvine last October.

They include 18 felony counts of lewd acts with a minor under the age of 14 and 13 misdemeanor counts of annoying or molesting children, or indecent exposure. Three of the counts involve allegations that force was used, and eight others involve allegations of “acts of substantial sexual conduct” while he was a teacher. The complaints date from October, 1986, to March, 1987, while Rigby was still at Harbor Day.

Rigby was track coach at Harbor Day School, where he also taught physical education to all classes, kindergarten through eighth grade.

Rigby was fired from the school last March, but school Headmaster John F. Marder Jr. said the termination was unrelated to the investigation. School officials believed that Rigby was not using proper safety procedures in his physical education classes, Marder said.

In fact, school officials were unaware that Rigby had any history of sexual problems or that he had been under investigation by the Irvine police during the 1986-87 school year. The school, as required by law, had done a routine criminal check on Rigby with the state Department of Justice, Marder said. But the check showed no criminal background for Rigby. One spokesman for the state Department of Justice said that was probably because Rigby’s criminal background included only two misdemeanor convictions.

New York Arrest

Rigby had been arrested in New York on charges involving sexual misconduct with a minor. Rigby assertedly told Irvine police investigators that police in New York accused him and others of “horse play” with minors but that the charge was reduced to an alcohol violation.

He was arrested in 1979 in El Toro on suspicion of child molestation. But he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of disturbing the peace and was placed on one year’s probation. However, part of the plea-bargain was that he seek counseling.

Before the Harbor Day job, Rigby had been an assistant track coach at UCLA for two years, specializing in the hurdles. Before that, he had been a track coach in the Saddleback Valley Unified School District, and he also worked at various health clubs and was involved in judo classes.

His attorney, Kelley, said Rigby is upset, partly because of his wife’s condition but also because of the number of charges against him. “He doesn’t have a clue why he’s charged,” Kelley said. “He doesn’t even recognize the names of some of these victims. He’s maintaining his innocence all the way.”

But when he talked to police last October, Rigby said he wasn’t surprised at the accusations, according to a transcript of that police interview.

At that time, Rigby was under investigation for lewd acts in front of young people who lived in the neighborhood or who came to the house to visit Rigby’s 8-year-old son.

When police confronted him with complaints from two of the boys, Rigby answered that he had caught them breaking into his house when the family was gone and that after he grabbed one of them, the boy threatened to accuse Rigby of being a child molester.

Questioned About Girls

Police then asked him about three young girls who are alleged to have said they saw Rigby lifting weights in his garage in the nude and to have said that he had encouraged them to look at him while he conducted lewd acts.

Rigby’s answer was that he had chastised at least one of the girls for climbing up on her roof to catch him sunbathing in the nude in his backyard and that the girl was obviously trying to get back at him.

Rigby said his family had been the target of eggs and other items thrown at their home because of rumors spread about him by the boys that he claimed had broken into his home.

Rigby told police last October that he thought some of the youngsters were out to get him, adding about the accusations, “This doesn’t surprise me a bit.”