Case Against MD Saddens, Shocks Town

When word spread through the country town of Ramona that one of its longtime favorite physicians, Dr. John DeKock, had been arrested on accusations of child molestation, the reaction was swift and sure.

“It may be true that he has a problem,” offered Andrew Palleson, who has known DeKock since the early 1960s. “But I feel terribly deprived, because I’ve lost who I consider to be an exceptional family physician.”

“He has a fantastic following here,” Ellie Whitcomb said. “I’d be willing to say, if they’d allow him to come back to his office today, things would go along like they did before all this happened.”

Said another patient, Fran Gefken: “I’d have no qualms going back to him today.”

This outpouring of support from longtime friends and patients of the 62-year-old general practitioner--some of whom knew of his background--came despite growing allegations that DeKock, a registered sex offender who was convicted of molesting a young boy in 1961, has not changed his ways.

DeKock pleaded innocent May 8 to 23 counts of molesting, sexually exploiting and having oral copulation with a minor. The alleged victim is an 11-year-old boy, a relative of DeKock’s who looked upon the distinguished older man as a grandfatherly figure, even though there is no blood relationship between the two. On May 11, after being held for nearly a week in County Jail downtown on $250,000 bail, DeKock put up $600,000 worth of property as collateral and went home.

But, as sheriff’s detectives pored over the evidence they had taken from DeKock’s home and office--as they compared more than 20 scrapbooks containing hundreds of pictures of naked or scantily clad young boys, as they viewed hours upon hours of videotapes, as they leafed through such books as “Show Me,” “Tender Cousins” and “Boys Will Be Boys,” and as they turned page by page through the doctor’s diaries listing boys’ names--others began coming forward to tell police that they too had been molested by the town doctor, authorities say.

“He is a pedophile. There’s no doubt about it,” said sheriff’s Detective Michael Radovich, who is investigating. “I’ve seen people with those characteristics, but Dr. DeKock is a true pedophile. You don’t need to be a psychologist to realize he’s got serious problems. He’s a danger to all children in the community.”

Neither DeKock nor his attorney, Jack Phillips, responded to requests for interviews.

Since news of the doctor’s arrest hit the town, more than 10 people, including the alleged victim’s own father, have added their voices to the prosecutor’s case. Eight are adults who say DeKock molested them as children. Two are preteen boys. A few callers were so distraught that they could not bear to give their names. Detectives say these allegations may lead to more charges against DeKock.

Each additional allegation has put more strain on the relationship DeKock had so carefully nurtured with his townspeople, many of whom knew his past but decided to look the other way.

To this day, however, many continue to rally to his side. The reason: They say DeKock, a quiet and unassuming man who is one of five local doctors in Ramona, possesses qualities of caring, warmth and generosity that are sometimes lacking in modern medicine.

“We were all aware of his record, but, you know, second chance and all that,” said Thelma Stansbury, a longtime Ramona resident. “But, you know, he never molested women, so I didn’t personally worry. Is that awful?”

Indeed, to many Ramonans, it was no secret that, in 1961, state physicians diagnosed DeKock as a “sexual psychopath.” Indicted in El Cajon on three counts of oral copulation with minors and two counts of child molestation, DeKock had pleaded guilty to one count: fondling a 7-year-old boy in his medical office. A psychiatric examination revealed that DeKock, then 33, “readily admits to homosexual interests,” which he said he first developed in 1953, court records show.

DeKock told doctors he had had sexual contact with other small boys, ages 7 to 9, but never forced himself on children. He said the alleged incidents had been blown out of proportion. He knew he had a “psychological problem,” but said he was involved in psychotherapy and that he believed he would “never commit any such offense in the future.”

The first two state doctors who examined DeKock concluded, “In view of this man’s obvious pedophilia, homosexuality, he should be considered a sexual psychopath.” But later, another state doctor reversed that finding, saying DeKock was “without mental disorder.”

DeKock was disciplined by the state medical board and placed on 10 years’ probation. Under the terms of his probation, he was not permitted to associate with minors under the age of 18 unless he was accompanied by a responsible adult. He was forbidden from drinking alcohol and required to continue his psychotherapy. And he was told to move out of the El Cajon area “as soon as possible.”

Scorned and carrying one of society’s greatest stigmas, he moved from El Cajon to the North County hamlet of Ranchita--a blink of a settlement on the way to Borrego Springs--and his patient list was dominated by the Indians and backcountry folk of nearby Warner Springs and Santa Ysabel and Julian. He soon married Bea Crawford, his fiancee of 18 months. Crawford told investigators that, despite his conviction, DeKock had “all the qualities she wanted in a husband.” Her young son and daughter from a previous marriage had become devoted to him, she reported.

In the early 1960s, word of DeKock’s medical practice--of a qualified doc who didn’t seem to care that much about being paid on time and who would make a house call any time of day or night--had spread down the highway to Ramona, which sometimes had no local doctor its several thousand residents could call their own.

DeKock built up his patient list among Ramonans, and relocated to the town, which seemed to welcome him with open arms. Even those who knew of DeKock’s admission of child molestation just a year or two earlier lined up at the front door of his Main Street office, next to the old hotel.

Here was a town with a grapevine as nourished as any, where secrets were shared as long as the next person promised to keep it a secret . . . and the next person, and the next.

One old-time Ramona real estate agent, Jim McWhorter, known as Old Jim to distinguish him from his son, said knowledge of DeKock’s 1961 conviction preceded him when he established his practice in Ramona.

“I always felt bad that they’d spin this story before the guy even moved here,” McWhorter said. “It was like they were prepared for this children’s ogre. They were afraid of him.”

Overall, however, the paucity of medical care in Ramona worked to DeKock’s benefit. “People were just so pleased to have him here as the doctor,” recalled Don Haught, the school district superintendent, “they didn’t ask a heck of a lot of questions. And those who knew decided to let bygones be bygones.”

Soon enough, DeKock’s skills and charming bedside manner won him fierce allies.

“You probably wouldn’t be talking to me today if it wasn’t for John DeKock,” said McWhorter, who said that when he suffered an apparent heart attack during a vacation in Florida, it took DeKock to properly diagnose the problem after he returned home.

“John has an intuitive ability to tell when people had a medical problem. He’d worry about them. He’d stop my wife and kids on the street, just to ask how I was doing. . . . People all over town will tell you they’re alive because of John DeKock.”

Palleson agreed. “My own wife had a problem with cancer, and she went through the entire process--from the cancer clinics in Tijuana to snake oil peddlers, from Laetrile to horse’s urine,” he said.

Throughout the frightening procedures, DeKock was there to offer counsel, Palleson said. “Here was a local physician who cared as much as anyone, who would even just listen to us, who would sit down with us and even cry with us.”

Palleson first met DeKock when he sold him his office building. Then he became DeKock’s patient, and next became his friend. Even back then, he said, he knew DeKock’s background. “But I never talked to him about it. I felt that the regulatory bodies--the courts and the medical profession--had looked at it and levied whatever punishment or chastisement that was necessary.”

According to court records, the punishment DeKock received did not impede his professional and personal progress. In 1962, less than a year after his conviction, the state Board of Medical Examiners allowed DeKock to resume his practice. Three years later, at his psychiatrist’s recommendation, the San Diego County Superior Court allowed DeKock to stop his psychotherapy sessions. Probation-related travel restrictions were lifted in 1967, and then, in 1969, his probation was terminated altogether--nearly two years before the 10-year term expired.

Looking back, some Ramona residents say the short-lived punishment wasn’t appropriate.

“If you’re licensed to practice as a physician, that establishes a sense of trust between you and the public,” said Dan Plough, a member of the Ramona school board and an educator at El Capitan High School in Lakeside. “You wouldn’t think you’d have to ask your doctor, ‘Have you ever been convicted of child molestation?’ But now you have to wonder.

“Why was the man still allowed to practice medicine? If a teacher gets in trouble that way, he never gets to teach again. But here’s a physician, convicted of this, who was still practicing.”

Ron Cooke, a regional supervisor for the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance, which reviews doctors’ licenses and conduct throughout the state, said he could not say why DeKock was allowed to resume his practice.

“I can’t speak for the 1961 board,” Cooke said, pointing out that at that time, the board was structured differently. “In 1961, it was the Board of Medical Examiners. Things operated under a different set of rules.” But if DeKock were convicted today, Cooke said, “there’s a high probability that there would be a revocation” of his medical license.

Instead, DeKock’s practice grew comfortably. He did extensive volunteer work, helping give cursory physical examinations to Boy Scouts at Camp Mataguay, their summer camp between Santa Ysabel and Warner Springs. (Conducted in the presence of a nurse, these examinations were judged not to violate his probation.)

For several months in 1964, he signed on as the medical director of the Rancho San Felipe School for Mentally Retarded Boys, but he resigned after the probation officer pointed out that, given DeKock’s record, “any publicity regarding him acting as medical director for a boys’ school . . . would be extremely poor for all concerned.”

Still, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, DeKock volunteered as the team physician at Ramona High School and was a common fixture along the sidelines, ready to tend to sprained ankles or winded athletes.

Haught, who became superintendent of the school district after DeKock quit serving as the high school volunteer physician, said he’s “been asking around, to see if anybody has any complaints about him, and I can’t find any,” Haught said.

Throughout these years, adults and children alike sought DeKock’s care in his storefront office on Main Street, with its small lobby decorated with pictures of military aircraft circa the Korean War. This was a family place; his second wife, Louise, and one of his stepdaughters worked the front counter. They did the bookkeeping, the reception, the office management. In one of three or four small examining rooms, usually with either his wife or his nursing practitioner present, often with the doors of the examining room wide open, DeKock would care for patients.

Most patients never even saw the inside of DeKock’s personal office, which was hidden behind a door that appeared to lead to the back parking lot. It took sheriff’s investigators two inspections of the premises to realize that behind that door was another door--one that opened onto an office and its safe, allegedly full of scrapbooks and videos documenting his liaisons.

Investigators say they have not yet completed their review of all the scrapbooks’ pictures, or the contents of videocassettes they retrieved from DeKock’s office and the home where he and his wife live in San Diego Country Estates. But already, investigator Radovich says, he has catalogued several scenes of young boys, either naked or clad in bikini trunks, posed in various suggestive positions. On the videos, Radovich said, DeKock’s voice can be heard.

“In reading his diaries, you saw he had a real craving for boys,” Radovich said. “If he went more than a few days without them, he became very depressed. He used that word-- depressed --several times.”

Radovich said he is frustrated in trying to track down some of the possible adult victims--whose identities he has learned through the evidence seized so far--because some have moved out of state. But, in talking to others, he said, he learned of DeKock’s method of winning the boys over.

“Sometimes he’d take them outdoors, into the backcountry, anywhere he could get away with it,” Radovich said. “But his favorite place seemed to be his office, usually when no one else was around.

“He would befriend these kids. Sometimes he offered them money. Sometimes it was just the companionship,” Radovich said. “In hindsight, the victims said they probably could have stopped it. But at the time they were children, and they were used and manipulated and controlled by Dr. DeKock. He had built up a position of trust with these children, and they had no control over what was happening to them.”

“They said DeKock took pictures of them, too--but we haven’t found those pictures yet.”

Three weeks ago, the 11-year-old boy came forward, and law enforcement officials say the boy seemed eager to tell how DeKock had promised to buy him gifts in return for sex, how DeKock made him promise not to tell anyone “our secret” and how he had forced himself upon the boy for four years--since he was 7 years old.

“I think he was relieved to have said what happened, and relieved that this wouldn’t happen again to him,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Eugenia Eyherabide said of the boy. “It’s my feeling that (the boy) did this out of love. There apparently wasn’t any coercion or force. But as he got older and started making his own decisions, he probably started to realize, ‘Hey, I don’t know if I should be doing this.’

“You’d be surprised why victims of molestation don’t talk,” Eyherabide said. “Especially boys. They’re supposed to be macho. They’re embarrassed.”

To school board member Plough, the allegation that DeKock took advantage of that childlike tendency is troubling.

“Anyone who violates a child--especially if it’s a teacher or a doctor--is unforgiveable,” he said. “But there are two types of people in Ramona--the old guard, who have a different outlook on this, and the new people--people like me, who have lived here for 10 or 15 years or less--and among us there is outrage.”

Palleson acknowledges that the news of DeKock’s arrest sent him looking for someone else to blame. “First I was angry at the Sheriff’s Department because they’ve destroyed the guy in the media. . . . Then I got mad at the school officials because they all seemed to be trying to cover (themselves), saying, ‘Well, he wasn’t the team physician when I was around.’ ”

But now, Palleson said, he is no longer looking for a scapegoat. “If these things are true, that he (DeKock) did these things, then I can’t get mad at anybody but him.” He paused. “Society can’t tolerate the loss of a child’s innocence. And I can’t.”

But Fran Gefken, a longtime patient and family friend, said the allegations don’t change her affection for the man who has ministered to her children and grandchildren for years. “I had heard the rumors about him before, but I chose to ignore them,” she said. Indeed, she said, she sent her own children and grandchildren to DeKock for medical care.

“I was very upset when I heard the news,” she said. “Very upset. How did I deal with it? Well, I hate the disease, but I love the man.”