No Advice This Time, Just a Call to Police

It began like a typical letter to Dear Abby. A young man was having difficulty relating to women his age. They all seemed to have an agenda, he wrote. He did have one nice relationship in his life, with a 10-year-old girl. She liked him for who he was, he said, and she and her 3-year-old sister trusted him. The problem was he had sexual urges toward the girls--daughters of a female friend--and he didn’t know what he should do.

For a day or so, neither did Dear Abby. He had signed his name and the city in which he lived. Jeanne Phillips, who took over the bulk of the column from her mother, Pauline Phillips, 10 years ago, had never read a letter like it. None of her standard ways of offering advice--phone calls, personal letters, publication in her column--seemed appropriate.

“I thought, well, I could write to him and tell him to get help,” she said, “but who knew what would happen then? I really felt for the man, and he had reached out to me for help, but all I could think of was those girls and the line where he said they trusted him. I realized an intervention had to be done.”

So instead of telling the man to “seek professional help,” last week, Phillips called the police in Milwaukee, where he lives.

“I told them what the letter said and I asked them if they could please just do some checking,” she said. “The detective said he would get back to me.”

He didn’t, and Phillips, who lives in Los Angeles, subsequently flew to Washington, D.C., to attend the Gridiron dinner and meet with the Department of Navy about the success of OperationDearAbby.net, a Web site for Americans to write to the troops deployed in Afghanistan. Then on Tuesday, her assistant called to tell her that the Milwaukee police had arrested Paul Weiser, 28, based on her tip.

When visited by local investigators, Weiser had admitted writing the letter but denied having ever acted on his urges, according to Milwaukee Asst. Dist. Atty. Paul Tiffin. Weiser cooperated with the police and allowed them to take his home computer, which he said in a statement contained pornographic videos and images of children. He was later arrested and charged with three counts of possession of child pornography. He was released on $10,000 bail and ordered not to use a computer or have unsupervised visits with anyone younger than 18. A preliminary hearing has been set for March 24.

“The police went to talk to him, and he talked,” said Tiffin, adding that in his statement to the police, Weiser said he’s known he has had a problem since he was 16. He said he’d tried to get help from four doctors in the past but had been told he was fine. “He said he never acted on his desires,” Tiffin said, “but that he felt there was a monster inside him and he wanted to get help.”

“Dear Abby was his last hope, I guess,” said Phillips, who had been told by police that Weiser felt “relieved” by his arrest.

This is not the first time Phillips has contacted authorities on behalf of a child’s welfare--whenever she gets a letter from an abused child, she will call the appropriate child services in the area. And she once received a letter from a hired killer who was experiencing doubts.

“He felt that the person he had been hired to kill did not deserve to die,” Phillips said. Although she had no names to go on, she had a town, and so she called the police and gave them all the information she had gleaned from the man’s letter. “They told me it was remarkably similar to an anonymous tip they had received.”

No arrests were made in that case, but Phillips said the police assured her that no murder had been committed either. “I think [the police] made their presence known so whoever was behind it changed their mind.”

Although many of the thousands of letters Dear Abby receives each day are confessional in nature, very few include details of criminal activity. A letter might accuse someone “of being such a louse he cheats on his taxes,” Phillips said, “but I’m not about to follow up with the IRS.”

Phillips said she felt bad about betraying the man’s trust but added that Dear Abby is not bound by the anonymity of the church confessional or a psychiatrist’s office. She in turn had hoped that her participation in the case would be kept confidential. Since the story appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Tuesday, the Dear Abby office has been inundated with calls from the press. “I do feel a bit betrayed,” she said. “I think it would have been better if it had been done quietly.”

She said she hopes all the attention doesn’t change people’s attitudes toward the column. “I was just doing my J-O-B,” she said, “and my job is to help people.”

At first, she said, she was mystified at the amount of attention the story got. “But now I think it has something to do with the girl [Danielle Van Dam] who was killed in San Diego and all the problems the Catholic Church is facing now. People are very aware now of this problem.”

And in a week in which the headlines have been full of children brutalized at the hands of adults, hers was the only story with anything like a happy ending.