Sex Offender Sought Forgiveness, Found Rejection, Then Suicide

In the dying hours of 1997, in the bleak and black Maine night, Thomas Varnum drank half a bottle of liquor, propped a shotgun between his legs and blasted off the top of his head.

There were few mourners.

“It may be a terrible thing to say, but I don’t think it’s a big loss,” said David Farley, a lobsterman who lives down the road.

Not that he knew Varnum well. Not many people around here did. Varnum had moved into the small apartment over Tim Butler’s garage in October, just a couple of months after he came to Mount Desert Island.

Nobody paid much attention until Dec. 29, when sheriff’s deputies arrived on Kelley Town Road with fliers bearing Varnum’s mug shot and his history: He had been convicted of gross sexual assault.

It didn’t say precisely what he had done. It didn’t say he had served his time in prison and had been free for a year and a half.

But in the spirit of Megan’s Law--the nationwide movement to ensure that no community should unknowingly harbor a molester--local officials publicized Varnum’s past.

Few residents saw the fliers. Most of them weren’t home when they were distributed. Farley says he didn’t learn about Varnum’s crimes until later, and the facts unnerved him; he has a 15-year-old daughter who often walked past the house where Varnum lived.

“I’d a killed him if he’d a touched my daughter,” Farley said. Of course, he was speaking theoretically. By that time, Varnum had killed himself.

Local interest came and went. “People die here all the time--by sickness, at sea, in accidents,” said Alison Price, chairman of the Tremont Board of Selectmen.

But no one had ever died by Megan’s Law--by the fear that they would be hounded forever for the crimes of the past.

If, in fact, that is what killed Thomas Varnum.

*

Mount Desert Island is best known as a summer playground--favored by the Rockefellers, renowned for the beauty of Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor.

But there is another side of Mount Desert Island, more typical of Downeast Maine. Many of the 10,000 year-round residents struggle. They lobster or fish, work construction, take odd jobs.

Richard Donovan runs Acadia Muffler and Brake. A bear of a man with gray-blond, shoulder-length hair and a full beard, he employed the 31-year-old Varnum as a mechanic on weekends. He was, he says, Varnum’s best friend.

“He loved it down here. He loved the island,” Donovan said. “He just liked the people down here. They left him alone.”

Is it true that you met in prison?

“I won’t talk about that. And I’ll tell you what I told another reporter: If you print that, I’ll sue you.”

An hour later, Donovan was talking all about how he was convicted of sexually assaulting a stepdaughter, a charge that he emphatically denies.

Yes, he says, he met Varnum in prison. No, he insists, he did not know Varnum was a sex offender--Varnum claimed he was convicted of passing bad checks and beating his wife. Donovan says he believed him.

When Varnum got out, in June 1996, he worked for a mechanic in Bangor but spent his weekends at Donovan’s shop in Tremont. He was alone. While he was in prison, his wife divorced him and moved to North Carolina with their daughter.

In August, Varnum took a construction job in Tremont and moved into Donovan’s house, next to the shop.

“As far as I’m concerned, he was a good kid,” Donovan said. “He never bothered anybody. He was a funny kid--a real comical kind of guy.”

With that, he came out from behind the counter and tracked down a battered photo album. Here’s a picture of Varnum sitting in a rear seat yanked from a car, a V-6 engine in the wheelbarrow in front of him. Here’s another of Varnum, feigning unconsciousness on the driveway, his head on a pompon, a cane on the ground next to him.

“All he was trying to do was to get on with his life,” Donovan said. “He made a mistake. Anybody can make a mistake. You can make a mistake.”

But can Varnum’s crimes be described as a single blunder?

“This wasn’t just a case where a mistake was made,” said Det. John Burke, who arrested Varnum in 1992 in Bowdoinham, 150 miles to the south. “It wasn’t a crime of opportunity, where, say, a drug user under the influence abuses a kid.”

The Varnum Burke remembers is not a lovable clown. The Varnum he remembers was a cunning sexual predator, a big guy--6 feet, 200 pounds--who lured two 9-year-old boys to his house by asking them to do yardwork.

“Courting was taking place, or at least the child’s trust was being won,” Burke said. Varnum gave the kids clothes, toys, friendship. At some point, Varnum conducted a “blood-brothers ceremony.” He and the boys pricked themselves and allowed their blood to intermingle. Later, after he was arrested, investigators found typewritten “contracts” listing the boys’ names and birth dates.

Over six months in 1992, Varnum repeatedly had sex with one of the boys. He was grooming the other boy, he later told Burke, but ran out of time.

When one boy told his parents, they went to police. Authorities already knew of Varnum. They described him as a “police wannabe” suspected of using bogus police equipment to pull over cars on the highway.

Burke confronted Varnum with the sex charges.

“I’ll give him some credit. He was truly ashamed and repentant,” Burke said. “He referred to it as a release of pressure. The pressure would build up, and it would go away when he did these things.”

On March 19, 1993, Varnum pleaded guilty to gross sexual assault and unlawful sexual contact. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison, six of them suspended.

He would serve three years and three months. In the Maine prison system, he would receive little counseling. With aging and inefficient facilities, there is not much money left for treatment, says Denise Lord, director of policy for the Department of Corrections.

At Down East Correctional Facility, Varnum’s home for two years, the 70 sex offenders are allotted 12 hours of individual counseling each week. That averages just over 10 minutes per week per prisoner.

Lord says studies show treatment can reduce the risk that sex offenders will commit more crimes. There is not enough money to track Maine’s record of recidivism.

On June 11, 1996, Thomas Varnum was released from prison and into six years of probation. He was a free man--within bounds.

*

Tim and Nancy Butler’s house is a work in progress; Tim has taken the original structure and built a wing that mirrors it, with a garage on the first floor and an apartment above it.

Mostly, they used the apartment for guests, and for a daughter from Tim’s first marriage. This year, for the first time, they decided to take in a winter tenant, and they settled on Donovan’s friend, Varnum.

They knew the two had met in prison. But the Butlers believe in Donovan’s innocence, and they believed Donovan when he told them that Varnum had kited checks and beaten his wife.

Had they known the truth, there was no way they would have rented to him, they say.

The reason is plain to see--in the tire that hangs from the tree out front, amid the cars and trucks in varying states of disrepair; in the bicycle and toys spread around the property.

They belong to Bryan, the Butlers’ 10-year-old son.

“If he’d ever come near my son,” said Butler, “he wouldn’t have had to commit suicide. I would have killed him.”

The Butlers didn’t see much of Varnum after he moved in last October. He worked a lot and came back to the room to sleep.

He was a good tenant. He didn’t drink. (“I don’t drink, because when I drink I get into trouble,” he told Butler.) He only once missed paying the $75-a-week rent, repaying the debt over the next three weeks. One time, he watched a video with Bryan, an “Ernest” movie with Jim Varney. They both laughed.

Then, just before Thanksgiving, the Butlers say Varnum’s probation officer informed them that their tenant was a sex offender. The Butlers, for whatever reason, say they assumed that he had been involved with an underage girl and were not unduly concerned.

Earlier, in late October, the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department had received a bulletin from the state: Thomas Varnum, a registered sex offender, had moved to Kelley Town Road. Local officials could decide what to do with the information.

Sheriff William F. Clark says action was delayed while an officer attended a seminar on community notification. He returned to interview Burke, the arresting officer, and Varnum’s probation officer. And then he proposed that, for the first time, Hancock County notify a community that a sex offender had moved in.

Why? Because Varnum was considered likely to molest kids again, because he had no ties in the community, because he had once been suspected of impersonating a police officer and he might use that ruse to lure children.

In 1994, New Jersey--enraged by the rape and murder of 7-year-old Megan Kanka by a neighbor, a convicted sex offender--passed the first Megan’s Law, requiring authorities to alert communities.

Forty-one states, including Maine and California, followed suit. But Varnum could not be “outed” under Maine’s version of the law; his conviction predated it.

Instead, an assistant state attorney general said the notification could proceed under an older law that allows authorities to distribute information about convictions.

Posters were distributed on Dec.29 along the 1.8-mile Kelley Town Road, and to the Tremont elementary school, more than four miles away. The Butlers didn’t receive one, but the neighbors called right away.

Tim Butler took Varnum aside and told him what was happening.

“He said, ‘Well, I guess I should be moving on,’ ” Butler recalls. “I said, ‘Tom, I would really appreciate it if you did.” He asked if I would give him 30 days, and I said I would, but I would appreciate it if he could do it sooner. He said he planned to move to Ellsworth.”

Two days later, Varnum drove to Ellsworth, 20 miles away, and bought a shotgun. That afternoon, he dropped by Donovan’s garage with belated Christmas gifts for Donovan and Donovan’s girlfriend and brother.

His gift to Donovan included two packs of Dorals instead of the Camel Light 100s Varnum had borrowed earlier. “Ha, ha,” the note read, “You didn’t get Camels.”

Varnum returned to the Butler home and asked to borrow an audiotape. They gave him an old Bob Dylan cassette to tape over. They thought he would use it to make some “funny Happy New Year kind of thing,” Nancy Butler said.

The Butlers left for a New Year’s Eve party. As they pulled out of the driveway, they could see Varnum pacing in the apartment above the garage.

They returned after midnight to find an envelope on their doorstep. The cassette was inside. The Butlers popped it in the stereo, expecting a laugh. Instead, Varnum was talking seriously--about how he could not live in a world without forgiveness, and how anyone who found his body could keep his possessions.

Tim Butler shot up the 13 steps to the apartment and shone a flashlight through the door. “I found him,” he said. “There was nothing left but the chin down.”

The ice storm that battered Maine in the next week prevented the cleaners from coming. It would be a month before all traces of Thomas Varnum would be removed from the house on Kelley Town Road.

*

Spring and mud time are approaching on Mount Desert Island. The days are growing longer, the cold more bearable.

But the bleakness remains. Acadia National Park is still barricaded. So many restaurants, motels and other businesses are shuttered that the island’s motto might be “CLOSED--please call again.”

Some people enjoy the island winter. But not everybody.

“This time of year, everybody’s devouring each other,” joked Price, the head of the Tremont selectmen. “The survivors are at each other’s throats. The winters are dark and cold and long.”

That, not the posters, is the key to Varnum’s death, Price says. “He was a flawed person. That’s eventually what killed him. It was cold, it was winter and Christmastime, and it all came together.”

There is reason to believe that Varnum did not kill himself simply because he felt hounded. Butler remembers Varnum’s collection of pictures of his daughter, so far away. And, he says, Varnum’s much-loved grandmother had died in recent weeks.

“The last week, he was acting strange,” Donovan said. He was more depressed than usual, and had refused to go to the Kozy Kove coffee shop with his friend.

In fact, Varnum had occasionally seen a therapist in Bangor, Donovan said. But a lot of the time, he didn’t have the money.

Still, everyone who knew Varnum agrees that the fliers were the last straw. And to those who oppose Megan’s Law, his death has larger meaning.

“Our public officials need to think about the implications of these laws,” said Sally Sutton, executive director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union. “When we talk about public safety, we’re talking about the safety of these offenders as well.”

But there is little appetite in Maine--or anywhere else, for that matter--for ending community notifications.

Was Varnum punished twice for what he did? “For what he did, he deserves to be punished twice,” said Butler’s neighbor, Farley.

“That’s the curse of being convicted of a felony,” said Michael Povich, Hancock County district attorney.

Povich--prosecutor since 1974, a cherubic figure who wears a tie featuring Daffy Duck and Tweety Bird--says he was saddened by Varnum’s death. Still, he is in favor of notification: “If you can’t control their impulses, make sure that they can’t get to the targets.”

But what about rehabilitation? What if Varnum had changed?

“The question is almost metaphysical,” Povich said.

“You’ll never know enough. If you could jump into the soul of a person, if you could be certain that his rehabilitation was perfect and profound . . . that he has all of his problems under control, then you don’t need Megan’s Law. The problem is, you’ll never know enough.”