Ex-Deputy Denies Coercing Child Witnesses in ’84 Molestation Case

A former sheriff’s deputy denied Tuesday that he had coerced children to testify falsely against an accused child molester who is trying to gain his freedom after nearly 20 years in prison.

Called by the prosecution in an attempt to keep John Stoll behind bars, Conny Ericsson denied that he had asked leading questions or harassed a half-dozen children to help convict Stoll in 1984.

“I never suggested,” said Ericsson, who now works for the state Department of Justice in Redding. In questioning a child, he said, “I asked what happened to him.”

Stoll, a carpenter who was engaged in a custody battle with his wife, was convicted of being the leader of a molestation ring that allegedly preyed on young children in his middle-class neighborhood. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison, but is now trying to win his freedom, claiming that overzealous law-enforcement officials botched the initial investigation. In January, four of the six alleged victims testified, some in tears, that Stoll had never touched them.

The alleged victims, all young adults now, said they had lied on the witness stand simply to make the prosecutors and Kern County sheriff’s deputies stop badgering and, in some cases, threatening them. The Stoll group was one of eight alleged molestation and child pornography rings identified by Kern County authorities in the mid-1980s. Though dozens of people went to jail, most were later set free after appellate courts reversed their convictions, citing prosecutorial misconduct and other errors.

The Bakersfield cases were the first in a series of alleged multiple-victim child-abuse cases in the nation in the ‘80s, predating the notorious McMartin prosecution involving workers at a Manhattan Beach pre-school.

Stoll’s public-interest attorneys presented their case in January. This week was the prosecution’s turn, and Ericsson was a key witness because he was the lead investigator in the case 20 years ago. During two days on the witness stand, he repeatedly denied having shaped the children’s testimony.

Stoll’s lawyers, from the California Innocence Project in San Diego and the Northern California Innocence Project in Santa Clara, challenged his memory and his failure to seek independent evidence of molestations.

“I didn’t think he could make up the things he told us,” Ericsson said of one alleged victim. “He would have to have experience.”

The idea that children didn’t lie about abuse was a popular concept in the ‘80s. It has since been challenged by many researchers, who say children are as able to lie about abuse as anything else, especially if they are given cues by authority figures as to what they should say.

The prosecution case was dealt a setback Tuesday when yet another person from the 1984 case recanted. This time it was a cellmate of Stoll’s, who gave a statement to detectives 20 years ago that Stoll had admitted the molestations to him. Prosecutor Lisa Green called him to court Tuesday but Terry Hammond, 48, informed her that he had lied in 1984 in hopes of getting a deal in his own case, so Green didn’t put him on the stand.

An attorney for Stoll, Justin Brooks, said Hammond had told him that he didn’t mind lying about Stoll in 1984, when he believed Stoll was guilty. After hearing of Stoll’s efforts to win his freedom, Brooks said, Hammond regretted his original statements and declined to testify against Stoll this week, despite pressure from local law enforcement officials in Ridgecrest, where Hammond lives.

Efforts to reach Hammond were unsuccessful. Green declined to discuss the case.

The hearing is to continue today with testimony expected from the prosecution’s star witness, John Stoll’s son, Jed, the only original child involved who still maintains that molestations took place. (The other alleged victim said he had no memory either way.) Stoll’s attorneys tried to prepare for the son by calling an expert witness, Dr. James Wood, who said that young children -- Jed was 6 at the time -- can be led to believe things happened that didn’t if they are questioned repeatedly in a suggestive way.

Among those in court this week has been Jeff Modahl, the alleged leader of another purported molestation ring who spent 15 years in prison before being freed in 1999. Modahl, who won a portion of a $4-million settlement from Kern County, now lives on a small farm in Nebraska. He said that when he heard Stoll was fighting for his freedom, he had driven 1,600 miles in 28 hours to be in court.

“A lot of people helped me,” said Modahl, a burly man of 50. “Any way I can help John,” he would, he said.

Modahl sat outside court Monday afternoon chatting with Ericsson, who was the lead detective in his case as well. Modahl, who said he still has nightmares in which he wakes up and expects to see a metal bunk above his head, said he didn’t hold a grudge against county law enforcement officials.

“If I sit and hold a grudge,” he said, “I’d be ate up.”