An Appeal to Justice : He was a respected doctor. Now he’s in prison on child sexual abuse convictions. A new ruling in his case may clarify this highly charged area of the law.

When Dee Romano met Mark Kitzman 15 years ago at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, the handsome, confident doctor “could have had his pick” of the women there, she said. Back then, she was the manager for the directors of cardiology, and, she recalled, “I tried not to be impressed. I let him chase me until I caught him.”

In March, she became Kitzman’s third wife--in a ceremony at the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem where he is imprisoned for sex crimes involving children. She is perhaps the most ardent of those who believe he is not a criminal but a gifted healer, ruined by hearsay, a small-town mentality and “the McCarthyism of the ‘90s.”

Anticipating his eventual release, she has decorated her Van Nuys home with pictures of her smiling, hirsute, muscular husband. Beneath his macho veneer, she said, lies an innocent, trusting man. “I almost feel like I have to protect him from the world.”

Meanwhile, here in Lincoln City, Doris Cline is among those who believe it is the world of women and children that needs protecting from Kitzman. Three years ago, Cline sat on the jury that convicted Kitzman of sexually abusing three children, including his own 6-year-old son and his former lover’s daughters, ages 3 and 8 at the time of the convictions.

“It was overwhelming evidence,” Cline recalled. Never has she doubted that Kitzman is guilty. She believes he is a physician who used his money and authority to “take complete advantage” of vulnerable women and their children. “He didn’t act like a victim. He acted like a very strong man,” she said. “Someone like that, I hate to think he might get out.”

Last year, Kitzman won an important legal round on a crucial issue that has yet to be fully resolved by the courts. An appellate judge overturned his convictions relating to two of the children, ruling that Kitzman was denied his constitutional right to face and question two of his three accusers. The Oregon State Supreme Court is expected to rule on the case in September, and lawyers are looking to that ruling to help clarify this highly charged area of the law.

The strange case of the handsome Dr. Kitzman exemplifies the most difficult among the complex and messy child sexual abuse cases that soared in the 1980s and have only recently begun to subside. Virtually unprosecuted 20 years ago, child sexual abuse reports reached a peak of 429,000 in 1991, according to the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse. Most involve family or friends. About a third of such reports are substantiated.

A tiny minority of cases reach criminal court. There, they encounter justice as a work in progress. Police and prosecutors are still refining their interview techniques; legislators and judges are still adjusting laws to accommodate the unprecedented surge of youthful accusers into a system designed for adults.

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The woodsy road into the seaside resort of Lincoln City (population 6,600 in winter) has been traveled by many hopeful Californians seeking clean air, safety, a good place to retire or to raise children. Sixty miles southwest of Portland, the isolated town is so small that locals say you can burp and the news will beat you home.

In September, 1990, Dr. Mark Kitzman and his second wife, Valerie, came with their son, looking for a fresh start for their troubled marriage.

The rural North Lincoln Hospital had recruited Kitzman, then 42, with an attractive package. The only concern hospital administrator Eric Buckland said he ever had about Kitzman was that he displayed “an L.A. kind of personality. A certain type of satirical cynicism. It was clearly different from the rest of the physicians, who probably come off as a little more boring.”

Los Angeles friends knew Kitzman as a gruff but kindhearted internist whose life and work were interchangeable. He seemed aptly employed at Good Samaritan Hospital, where he specialized in low-income and elderly patients. Kitzman kept himself fit and impressed others as youthful and intellectual, an Ayn Rand fan.

He liked women but his long-term relationships were marred by his difficulty communicating, said lifelong friend Neal Loeb, a Pasadena investor. A twin in a family of three children, Kitzman was raised by strong disciplinarians who rarely showed emotions, Loeb said. “The family dynamics are terrible,” he said. “The one consistent thing is that he loved children.”

In Lincoln City, Kitzman opened a practice near the hospital, joined the Rotary Club and quickly earned a reputation as “the new, hot doctor in town.” He developed a loyal following, particularly among the elderly, who found that he was one of the few doctors to accept patients on federal and state aid.

But by February, 1991, the Kitzmans’ marriage had disintegrated into a brutal divorce and custody battle. Valerie, an outgoing, athletic brunet who had shelved a high-paying career in marketing when they moved, had made friends in town. By then, Buckland recalled: “It was clear she hated Mark to excess.”

Others testified at his trial that Kitzman openly made death threats against his wife. They both had guns: Records show that he carried a semiautomatic 9-millimeter and a .44 magnum. His explanation was that he had been threatened by a former patient.

In April, a new patient came to see Kitzman. Yvette Gordon, a 27-year-old mother of two girls and a boy, was another California transplant in a rocky marriage. Pretty, blond and soft-spoken, the homemaker described herself as a confused woman with low self-esteem at the time. She recalled that Kitzman asked for details of her personal life so that he could better diagnose her complaints of dizziness. “He wanted to know what I needed in a man,” Gordon said.

Kitzman determined that she was suffering from hypertension due to her recent separation. She said he also told her that he was getting a divorce himself, that she was beautiful, that her children were beautiful, that her husband was crazy. “After a few visits, I found him very attractive, very charming, the most understanding person I thought I’d ever met in my life,” she said in an interview.

By August, the two were spending almost every night together, either at his apartment or her home, according to court records. Her children were there, joined occasionally by his visiting son. “He’d even offer to take the kids for a night here and there to give me a break,” she said.

The children adored him, she said. “Mark spent tons of time with them. I mean, he was there all the time. They played ball, hide and go seek. Read stories. Just some quality time they didn’t ever get with their father.”

He also gave Gordon a job in his office, a credit card and a car. But by the end of the summer, Gordon said, the blindfold of romantic love had begun to slip. He became harsh and impatient with the children and with their pets.

In October, Gordon’s 2-year-old began acting strangely. She had reverted to needing diapers day and night and had screaming tantrums. “She’d pull up her legs, rock and rock, and say ‘I want my mommy. I want my mommy.’ I’d be yelling ‘I’m here, Mommy’s here.’ It was the most awful thing I’d ever seen.”

She said her 8-year-old girl also had a recurrence of bed-wetting and complained of stomach pain. “Of course, I was taking them to Mark about it,” she said. “I never had them checked by anybody else. I trusted him as a physician more than anything else,” Gordon said. Kitzman, she said, determined the behavior was caused by divorce-related turmoil.

She began spending less time with him, took up with a younger man and became pregnant. She said Kitzman showered her with jewelry and suggested they marry. Instead, Gordon obtained an abortion, temporarily reconciled with her husband and returned to California.

There, the older daughter told her mother that Kitzman had been raping her. Gradually, the girl began to tell her some of what she would later tell police, the district attorney and the members of a jury in greater detail:

Over five months, on occasions when her mother was away, Kitzman would force her to undress. At least three times, she said, he instigated intercourse, was interrupted a fourth time when her mother came home with groceries, and once told her to touch his penis and pinch his nipples. She said he threatened more than once to kill her parents if she told.

She also said she once happened upon Kitzman as he was fondling her naked sister, then 2. One night when his son was staying over, she said she was awakened by the boy’s cries and, peeking through a bedroom doorway, saw Kitzman touching his son’s genitals and forcing him to touch his.

Gordon called Valerie, the doctor’s wife, immediately, and flew back to Oregon to file a report with authorities.

That evening in February, 1992, when Valerie hung up after talking with Gordon, she could not sleep. “The first thing in my mind was, ‘How could this happen?’ The first feeling is, ‘I don’t want to believe this,’ ” she recently recalled. “But then that night I laid there in bed and I thought about how many times [my son] had come home and said he had secrets he couldn’t tell me. How many times he came back and he had diarrhea and said his butt hurt. And I never in my mind had ever thought, it never crossed my mind. . . .”

Two months later, she said, her son volunteered that his father “comes in at night and hurts me.” He then provided more details to his therapist, saying the abuse happened “48 times.” Eventually he told his story to the police, to attorneys and to a doctor. Around that time, Valerie recalled, she and Kitzman were in the courthouse in Newport, fighting over child support, when the grand jury met to consider the child abuse accusations. “They indicted him, came up and handcuffed him and led him out,” she said.

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During the investigation, both Yvette Gordon’s older daughter and Kitzman’s son recanted. Then, encouraged by her mother to tell the truth, the girl went forward with her original story at the trial. The boy told a judge he simply didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

Judge Charles P. Littlehales, after hearing a therapist say the boy would be traumatized if forced to testify against his father, excused him. The judge also ruled that the preschooler was too young and excused her also.

In June, Kitzman pleaded not guilty as about 20 supporters gathered outside the Lincoln County courthouse with placards reading “Oregon Unfair to Dr. Kitzman” and “Where Do I find a Doctor Now?” Acquaintances prepared to testify on both sides. “It stirred this community up a lot,” recalled juror Cline, the owner of Cline’s True Value Hardware.

The trial took less than a month. Three dozen witnesses testified, including Kitzman, who said, “I have never sexually abused, fondled, or anything else to any child anywhere, any time, any place.”

To Cline, the most persuasive evidence was precisely that which Kitzman and his supporters say was the weakest--the physical evidence.

Dr. Jan Bays, a Portland pediatrician who directs a child abuse program at Legacy Emanuel Hospital, had examined all three children. Recalled Cline: “On the 2-year-old girl, she could not tell anything. The [older] girl had no penetration but the skin was removed in the pelvic area. That impressed me.” The doctor said the boy had an anal tag, a polyp that by itself does not indicate abuse. But its position, she said, was “very unusual.”

In the end, Kitzman was convicted of 14 counts of rape, sexual abuse and unlawful sexual penetration.

But the fight had just begun. Nat Dershowitz, a New York attorney who along with his better-known brother Alan is representing Kitzman, called the case “extraordinarily suspicious.” He noted that the older girl had a friend who had been raped. Imaginative children can have stories repeated to them, and repeat them so often, they come to believe them, he said.

Kitzman’s first wife, with whom he had one child, said she never saw any signs that he was a molester during the eight years they were married. “Do people start doing this when they’re 40?” she asked.

In a telephone interview from prison, Kitzman maintained his innocence, stressing the legal and medical details. “Even I cannot do the impossible,” he said. “It’s not possible for an adult male to rape somebody five times and [for the victim to] have a normal physical examination. In the state of Oregon, if the penis goes past the labia, it’s a definition of rape.”

He claimed that he was the victim of a small town that distrusted outsiders. “I was a big-city doctor from that four-letter word, California,” he said, “and I was Jewish.”

Last August, the Oregon Court of Appeals reversed the convictions relating to Kitzman’s son and the younger girl. The appellate court ruled that Kitzman’s constitutional right to confront his accusers was violated because he was banned and his attorney silenced during the pretrial hearing by the judge trying to protect the children.

In a written decision, the court said: “The procedure denied defense counsel of all opportunity for effective cross-examination at any time.”

Prosecutors argue that putting a child across a table from a suspect to determine whether or not he will be traumatized is anathema to statutes protecting children. If the boy had testified, defense attorneys believe jurors might have reached a different verdict because the boy would have said his father was innocent. Prosecutors have agreed, claiming the boy at that time would have told any lie to keep his father from going to jail.

Legal experts agree the issue is a matter that goes to the heart of the American justice system. “The Sixth Amendment guarantees two things: face-to-face confrontation and cross-examination,” said John Myers, professor of law at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, an expert in sexual abuse cases who was not involved in the Kitzman trial.

While some very young children are still considered too incompetent to testify in court, experts say children as young as 2 have been put on the stand and cross-examined. “Certainly by the time they are 5 and 6 they are routinely permitted to testify,” Myers said.

At the same time, many states have taken steps to protect particularly fearful children, who often falsely deny that they have been abused, from having to publicly confront their accused molesters. Thirty states, including Oregon and California, have passed laws exempting them and allowing hearsay evidence instead.

The issue was considered in 1990 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that closed-circuit televised testimony could solve the problem. But prosecutors say they rarely take advantage of it because child witnesses are more convincing in person.

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Those most affected await the next court ruling with hope and fear.

If the justices rule in Kitzman’s favor, he will be presumed to be innocent, and prosecutors must decide whether or not to retry the case.

“If we don’t retry, he walks,” said Gordon, the mother of the girl who testified. But she doubts whether another trial would be worth the pain of reliving the events. “Our whole goal is to heal, to put this behind us.”

At first, she said, she felt embarrassed and guilty. She began drinking too much. “I wanted to run my car off the road or kill Mark.” But she decided her children needed her. Gordon moved back to California and remarried. The children’s father has moved to Costa Rica, she said, and “won’t accept what’s happened.”

There are no more photographs of Kitzman in her home. The children tore them up and scattered them around their back yard.

Likewise, Kitzman’s son, his mother said, took a pair of scissors to all pictures of his father. Then, under her supervision, the 9-year-old burned them all, took the ashes to an isolated hillside near Lincoln City and shot them with a revolver. The boy still has nightmares of his father getting out of jail and “getting us because of him telling,” she said.

Sitting at the dining room table, reaching for his mother’s hand, the boy said the only way he would ever want to see his father again is “if he’s in the electric chair and I get to pull the switch.”

For her part, Romano, six months after her jailhouse wedding to Kitzman, believes that this marriage will be different from his others because they grew to know each other over 15 years of having lunch and discussing mutual interests, books and music.

They are trying not to think too far ahead, she said. But Kitzman said, “I’d love to practice medicine. I happen to be good at it.” According to the Oregon Board of Medical Examiners, Kitzman voluntarily surrendered his license in November, 1992. His California license expired in 1994.

“We want a normal life like everybody else,” Romano said. She’s 45 and he’s had a vasectomy. But yes, she says to the inevitable question, “I’d adore to be the mother of his children. They would get the most incredible dad.”

* (ORANGE COUNTY EDITION) Coming Thursday: A Special Report on the Struggle to Prevent Child Abuse in O.C.