Tragic ‘Transfer’ to Montana: Mass. Sex Offender Charged in Boy’s Death

It is known in some circles as the geographical cure. Pack up your child molester and ship him far away.

Montana maintains--and Massachusetts does not deny--that this is what happened in the case of 43-year-old Nathaniel Bar-Jonah.

The hulking Massachusetts native now is charged with kidnapping and murdering 10-year-old Zachary Ramsay. The child lived in Great Falls, Mont., where Bar-Jonah was sent by the state of Massachusetts after spending 12 years in a treatment center for sexual offenders.

“Obviously, we’re pretty irate about” his transfer to Montana, Cascade County’s attorney, Brant Light, said Monday. “The way it was done was pretty remarkable.”

Bar-Jonah is to be arraigned Thursday in Great Falls on charges of murder, kidnapping and child molestation.

Along with explicit photographs and other evidence found in Bar-Jonah’s residence, Great Falls police discovered a list that officials say links him to at least 54 cases of child abduction and molestation in several states. The handwritten document, with names and dates, prompted police in Bar-Jonah’s former hometown of Webster, Mass., to pursue at least eight possible incidents. Bar-Jonah already had been convicted of assaulting four boys in Massachusetts.

Investigating the new leads, Webster Police Officer Michaela Kelley said it was “embarrassing” that a known child sex abuser had been sent to another state.

“That’s just unbelievable to me,” Kelley said. “It’s just an awful, awful thing.”

Connie Isaac, executive director of the Assn. for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers in Beaverton, Ore., said moving a convicted sex offender from state to state “has absolutely nothing to do with the treatment of the offender and has nothing to do with public safety. It’s a good way for one jurisdiction to wash their hands of the problem and say it won’t be my kid and I don’t know anyone in Montana.”

Montana authorities said they became suspicious of Bar-Jonah when residents reported him lurking around a Great Falls elementary school. Police said they found him carrying a fake police badge and dressed to resemble an officer.

Then known by his birth name, David P. Brown, Bar-Jonah had used that approach as early as 1975, when he picked up an 8-year-old Webster boy on the way to school. Two years later, he employed the same disguise when he kidnapped two boys in another town in Massachusetts.

After pleading guilty in both cases, Bar-Jonah was given an indefinite sentence at a Massachusetts treatment center for the sexually dangerous. A report from a therapist who treated him at the facility said his “bizarre” sexual fantasies “outline methods of torture extending to dissection and cannibalism.”

While at the treatment center, Brown changed his name.

Although several evaluations had deemed Bar-Jonah a risk to society, two psychologists testified in 1991 that he was no longer a threat. One month after he was released from the treatment center, Bar-Jonah was arrested in the attempted kidnapping of a 7-year-old.

Bar-Jonah avoided jail by agreeing to two years of probation--and promising to move to Montana with his mother.

That decision by Massachusetts officials was “a bad move,” said Rob Freeman-Longo, an expert in sexual abuse prevention education in Summerville, S.C.

“Treatment’s great, but to throw someone into a brand new environment, with no . . . follow-up--that’s a real problem,” Freeman-Longo said.

Repeated, escalated behavior on the part of sex offenders often is typical, but it is “less likely with treatment,” Freeman-Longo stressed.

Months after arriving in Great Falls, Bar-Jonah was charged with molesting an 8-year-old boy whom he was baby-sitting. The charges were dropped when the boy’s mother refused to let him testify.

Bar-Jonah’s former probation officer in Great Falls said Massachusetts “set up” Montana by exporting a multiple sex offender. “Those prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges ought to be ashamed,” Mike Redpath said.

In 1996, Zachary Ramsay disappeared on his way to school. Three weeks ago, Bar-Jonah was charged with his kidnapping and murder.

After Bar-Jonah’s arrest, authorities revealed their belief that he ate the boy’s remains and fed them to unsuspecting friends and family.

Light said bones of a child from 8 to 13 years old were found in Bar-Jonah’s garage. After DNA tests failed to link them to Zachary, Light said, many agencies from other states contacted his office to see whether the bones match the DNA of other missing youths.

The lack of a body makes prosecution difficult, Light said. He added that because of intense publicity, the trial will likely be moved out of Great Falls.