Zibby:  The Sociopath and the Whistleblower is a four-part series. This marks Part 3 of 4. If you’re a new listener to Small Town Dicks, we recommend that you tune into this story from the beginning, which is Episode 11.

[music]

Zibby:  Previously on the Sociopath and the Whistleblower.

Sergeant Scott:  I called Robert.

Robert:  Who’s the victim. Is she wanting to be the victim here now, or is it that we’re running with it?

Sergeant Scott  This is just uncomfortable, you know that. I mean, you and I go back since you’ve been here, it’s just an uncomfortable situation, and I want to be honest with you, I don’t know how this is going to go.

 So, I started to look at Robert like a predatory sex offender with access to confidential computer systems. He runs this girl on the computer named Lisa. And I don’t know Lisa from anybody, but she fits the profile. I’m Sergeant Scott and I’m doing this investigation involving Robert. I notice he has a lot of phone calls to you. He seems to have a lot of contacts with you. I wonder what the nature of your relationship is with him. And she goes, well, “He’s my boyfriend.”

Yeardley:  Oh, God.

Zibby:  What?

Sergeant Scott:  So, she said when I would give him a blowjob, he would always force me. He would tell me to swallow his semen and he made sure that I did. And she said one time I kept it and I spit it on a pair of sweatpants. Dave’s like her curbside lawyer. And Dave says, “All right, here’s what we’re going to do. You can bring your lab people up here and you can cut the stain down the middle and we’ll keep our half and you can have your half.” We ended up with a match to Robert. As time went on, I found these phone numbers of his favorite girls. Robert would embed them into his notebook. I said, “I need somebody to help me with this.” The chief said, “Who do you want?” And I said, “Well, I want Dennis because I could see that this was evolving, right?”

[music]

Yeardley:  I’m Yeardley.

Zibby:  And I’m Zibby. And we’re fascinated by true crime.

Yeardley:  So we invited our friends, detectives Dan and Dave-

Zibby:  -To sit down with us and share their most interesting cases.

Dan:  I’m Dan.

Dave:  And I’m Dave.

Dan:  We’re identical twins.

Dave:  And we’re detectives in small town USA.

Dan:  Dave investigates sex crimes and child abuse.

Dave:  Dan investigates violent crimes. And together we’ve worked on hundreds of cases, including assaults, robberies, murders, burglaries, sex abuse, and child abuse.

Dan:  Names, locations and certain details of these cases have been altered to protect the privacy of the victims and their families.

[Small Town Dicks theme]

Yeardley:  Wow. So, enter Dennis, this retired detective who’s brought back into the agency to help out his buddy for one last job.

Zibby:  It’s like a movie.

Yeardley:  Incredible.

Zibby:  So you trusted him?

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah. And now you got to remember, Robert was on administrative leave.

Zibby:  Yeah. I really need to ask, do you know if Robert told his family why he was on administrative leave?

Yeardley:  Because obviously he’s home all the time now. He’s got to say something.

Zibby:  Yeah.

Sergeant Scott:  So, during this period of time when he’d been on paid administrative leave, I learned that he had not told his wife about it. So, he would leave at night with his police bag, like he was going to work and he would be gone all night long.

Yeardley:  Shut up. Where would he go? Do we know?

Sergeant Scott:  We don’t know. We never found out.

Dan:  He wants to make it look like he’s still going to work.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah. He doesn’t want to disrupt what’s going on at home.

Yeardley:  But one might be curious if he continued to contact other women other than the ones who are not talking to you, but we don’t know that.

Sergeant Scott:  We’re not sure. I mean, that was my concern, that he was out there trying to assess the damage. And, I mean, he was a guy who worked a lot with informants, and he probably had informants out there. And so, he was probably trying to get intel on what I was doing.

Yeardley:  Of course.

Sergeant Scott:  And I’m learning so much about this predatory sociopath guy, right? He’s a father of two boys, married, and I’m sure he doesn’t flip the switch and go from tyrant to loving dad, but he’s obviously taking care to isolate this investigation.

Yeardley:  I would think he would flip the switch if he’s that good. If he’s invested in still staying married and he’s doing all this stuff, one would think that he has an ability to compartmentalize that is supreme unlike most of us.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah. I mean, I was outgunned in a way that I guess is a learning experience. I’ve talked to law enforcement groups about this, because at this point in my career, I thought I knew everything and I had seen everything. And I had my own, as I mentioned, credibility scale and I was biased, right? In my agency, we hadn’t experienced this level of corruption, predatory criminal behavior, serial criminal behavior before.

Yeardley:  It must be quite demoralizing for the agency.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah. To have my world really flipped upside down. And knowing that for a period of time, Dennis and I, and the chief, and the DA had information that was going to just decimate our reputation with the community and alter permanently our relationship with the community.

Yeardley:  Hmm.

Sergeant Scott:  I work in a community where it’s a university town. It’s a very socially active, questioned authority, civil rights-oriented community. Prior to this, there had been opposition between the police and the community. There was a large segment of the community that was very suspicious of the police.

Yeardley:  Hmm.

Sergeant Scott:  And knowing that this was going to confirm all those suspicions of all of our detractors and that it was coming,

Yeardley:  Devastating, I should think.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah, completely.

Yeardley:  It taints everything even though most of you are good.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah.

Yeardley:  Most of the law enforcement in the world, I would think is well meaning. And then you get a situation like this and it taints the entire organization.

Sergeant Scott:  Completely, because we all think, Dan, Dave and I, that if you’re not occupied by a call for service, that you’re out looking for trouble or looking to help somebody, you’re well intended and you’re out there serving your public. Service means a lot to us. I mean, it comes from our soul, right?

Yeardley:  Yes.

Sergeant Scott:  And then to have this guy who is just rubbing your face in it right under your noses too, because he’d been doing this for like 10 years.

Yeardley:  I would be furious as well.

Sergeant Scott:  Oh, man. At one point, my reluctance and my resistance becomes prey drive.

Yeardley:  Prey drive.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah, because I’m like, “I’m going to get this fucker.”

Yeardley:  Sure.

Sergeant Scott:  I mean, both these guys.

Zibby:  They shattered your bias.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah. And of course, then you look at how many times I had made these confident, yet probably in retrospect, maybe uninformed decisions about outcomes of investigations when everything else is equal, pull out the computer and look at the criminal history and–

Zibby:  And draw a conclusion.

Sergeant Scott:  Right.

Yeardley:  Of course.

Sergeant Scott:  And so how many times had I been wrong? And so that was pretty disruptive to me personally, because here are these women that in many cases, not in all cases, but in many cases talking about, like with Lisa and Miriam, women who I may not trust to give change, to go feed my parking meter for fear that they’d go convert it to heroin.

Yeardley:  Sure.

Sergeant Scott:  And now I’m realizing that they’re telling the truth.

Yeardley:  And you need to be their champion. What a shift for you. I couldn’t have come easily.

Sergeant Scott:  I was reluctant. You know, being an investigator who scrutinizes their own people, they don’t talk about that in the police academy.

Zibby:  Right. Of course.

Sergeant Scott:  I mean, you don’t even think about that. And then suddenly you’re thrust into it and its high consequence because you know that the ripple effect is going to be everybody else who remains. Once Robert and Francisco have their consequences, everybody that remains is going to be scrutinized because of their behavior.

Yeardley:  Absolutely.

Zibby:  Right.

Sergeant Scott:  And we all have to overcome something that we didn’t have anything to do with.

Zibby:  Sure.

Sergeant Scott:  Right?

Dan:  Right. We wear the label because of their actions.

Sergeant Scott:  Exactly.

Dave:  Even as well intentioned as you want to be and try to put together good cases, this subject still comes up.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah.

Dave:  I know you guys are all crooked.

Sergeant Scott:  Yep.

Dave:  I remember that case from 15 years ago.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah, he’s a household name in our community.

[Break 1]

Sergeant Scott:  So, I started going down this investigative path at the same time working Francisco, but really the primary focus was on Robert.

Zibby:  And now with the help of Dennis.

Sergeant Scott:  And now with the help of Dennis. So, we started identifying through his phone records various victims. Women who were vulnerable all the time because of their lifestyle. Like Lisa and like Miriam. And then those who are just incidentally vulnerable.

Yeardley:  Can you give us an example?

Sergeant Scott:  There was one girl who was driving while intoxicated and had a passenger in the car with her. Robert pulled her over. He had seen this Janine and her friend walking to the car together. Noticed that they were hanging onto each other and wobbling downtown in a bar area. Robert waited for them to pull away from the curb with Janine driving. Pulled them over, had her do field sobriety tests. And her friend was in the car. She was watching her friend Janine perform these balance tests. And she was saying to herself, “Oh, my God, she is going to jail. She can’t even touch her nose. She’s wobbling, stepping offline and stumbling. For sure she’s going to get arrested.” And then she says to her surprise, Janine comes walking back to the car and she’s got Robert’s business card.

Yeardley:  Oh, my.

Sergeant Scott:  And she says, Robert told me I need to take you and drop you off at home. And then I’m supposed to go meet him downtown and we’re going to talk about it.

Yeardley:  Oh, my God.

Zibby:  No way. So, he sent her off to drunkenly drive her friend home.

Sergeant Scott:  Exactly.

Zibby:  Then drunkenly drive back downtown to meet him.

Dave:  Leverage.

Sergeant Scott:  Leverage. Yeah.

Dan:  Which is a huge gamble that he’s taking. Say she drives away. She’s hammered drunk, failed these field sobriety tests. Three blocks or a mile down the road, she causes an accident, could be fatal, things like that. Obviously, she’s probably going to say, “I just got pulled over by the police.” There are traces of evidence that are left behind that can tie him to this traffic stop, even though he didn’t call out on the radio. It’s a huge gamble.

Zibby:  Insane.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah. And so, then she went and met him. She was a single mom with kids, and she had marijuana in her purse. And she said that he saw all that, and he told her, I can notify Children’s Services Division, or you can come and meet with me, and we’re going to talk about it. And then from that point, he used that leverage from that incident to repeatedly sexually abuse her.

Yeardley:  Oh, God.

Zibby:  And you found out about that victim via Robert’s phone records.

Sergeant Scott:  Her phone number was one of those that he had embedded in his notebook.

Yeardley:  I still can’t imagine how he’s keeping this massive part of his life separate and secret from his wife and children.

Sergeant Scott:  Well, Robert’s wife, as it turns out, knew that he was promiscuous at least. He had been caught up in a couple of situations where she had found phone numbers and found out about a cell phone that he had that she didn’t know about. She told him he needed to get rid of the phone and stop having contact with whoever this woman was.

Zibby:  Did she think it was just someone that was a contemporary and like legit?

Sergeant Scott:  She thought it was just a you know–

Yeardley:  Just like a female neighbor down the road or something.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah. She just thought he was being promiscuous with someone.

Yeardley:  Right.

Sergeant Scott: And I still believe she had no idea what was really going on. But we later learned that he never got rid of that phone. We found that phone number. We got those records during the course of the investigation. And those records led us to Anna, another woman who had worked at a cell phone kiosk at a mall nearby.

Yeardley and Zibby:  Another woman?

Zibby:  How does he have the time?

Yeardley:  How did he blackmail Anna?

Sergeant Scott:  So Anna worked at the cell phone business. And she was a minor. She was, like, 17. And she had been interested in law enforcement and had encountered Robert in uniform at the mall. He chatted her up. She’s an attractive girl. And started talking about law enforcement. Weeks later, he happened to come across her at a minor in possession, an MIP party. A party with young adults consuming alcohol that are underage.

Yeardley:  Oh.

Sergeant Scott:  And had been called in by a neighbor.

Zibby:  How convenient.

Yeardley:  That’s another feature of policing in a small town, isn’t it? The girl that you flirt with at the mall one day is the same girl you run into at an illegal house party the next.

Dave:  That’s very true.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah. So, he meets her again, says, “Oh, hey.” And so apparently, according to reports later, he isolated her, kind of herded her off while the rest of his police team was issuing citations. He kind of let her go and let her get away. And they made an agreement for her to come in and do a ride along. And so, she came in and she signed a waiver and came out and did a ride along.  

Yeardley:  With Robert, I assume.

Sergeant Scott:  With Robert, yeah.

Zibby:  And Robert alone.

Sergeant Scott:  And Robert alone. And Robert didn’t process that request through his boss, as we later found out. And he let her come in and ride along quite frequently.

Yeardley:  Now, is there any rule that because she’s a minor, she has to have supervision of some kind by a parent or–

Sergeant Scott:  Supposed to be signed off by an adult.  

Zibby:  But because he didn’t process the request, it just never.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah, he just took her out for a ride along. So, when Anna’s interviewed later, she says that he was very flirtatious and very presumptuous and sexual. Talked about oral sex all the time. She was pretty assertive. And she just said, “I’m not down with that at all.”

Yeardley:  Oh, yes.

Zibby:  Go, Anna.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah. Good for you, Anna. But I think she became sort of a conquest for him. And he paid a lot of attention to her because she was different. She’s young, and she had a certain spice about her. She was, like I said assertive.

Yeardley:  And not strung out. Not one of the vulnerable.

Sergeant Scott:  Right.

Dave:  She’s way out of his league.

Sergeant Scott:  And she’s also out of his league in a way that she’s risky because she’s probably somebody who would be taken as credible, right?

Dave:  Right.

Sergeant Scott:  So he had to find some leverage. So, we found that he had sent her flowers.

Yeardley:  Oh, my God. Her mother doesn’t go, who the hell is this dude, Robert sending you flowers?

Sergeant Scott:  She was living on her own, but she was a minor, so she had her own place, but she was like 17. And she said he paid his cell phone bill with cash. Remember, she works at this cell phone company kiosk, and he would pay with large denominations, sometimes up to $700 a month on this phone.

Yeardley:  Holy shit.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah. And she said he’d come in and pay cash, he’d always pay cash.

Yardley:  As a prepay?

Sergeant Scott:  That was the bill. And so, he was having the bill sent to a P.O. Box. He was using this phone for his extracurricular.

Dan:  Shady shit.

Sergeant Scott:  Yep.

Dan:  I’m curious. He sends her flowers. Love note, what is he.

Sergeant Scott:  That’s a great question. So, he sends her this card, and I found it. She had kept the card.

Yeardley:  Yes. Go, Anna.

Sergeant Scott:  So I talked about the business cards. The business cards became an item that a lot of these women that were victims had. Because he was very arrogant, like, “Call me some time,” and he’d give him the card. As his career evolved and his assignments changed, his business card would change as well. He’d go from police officer to field training officer to gang enforcement officer to narcotics, and so you could date those cards.

Yeardley:  Oh, my God.

Zibby:  Oh, wow.

Sergeant Scott:  And so we use that in a way to also establish credibility and timeframes for these women. So, he goes to this florist and he gives her this card. That is a commercially produced little card with flowers. And it says, “Hope you’re feeling better.” That’s the message that’s on the embossed card. And then he writes in his handwriting, “Think about my throat lozenge remedy.”

Yeardley and Zibby:  Oh no.

Sergeant Scott:  Signed Robert.

Yeardley:  No. [gasps]

Dave:  Classy.

Yeardley:  I can’t even.

Sergeant Scott:  Classy. To talk to her, and of course, that’s corroboration about what she’s saying.

Yeardley:  It’s really interesting that he is incredibly meticulous on one hand and then equally messy on the other.

Zibby:  Yeah.

Sergeant Scott:  Ultimately, he ends up sexually assaulting her. She refuses to perform oral sex and he rapes her.

Dave:  This is a forcible rape. I mean, given our laws, I know that there’s certain elements that are age associated, but there’s also the forcible compulsion, mental capacity. This is by forcible compulsion or threaten of force.

Sergeant Scott:  Yes, a threat of force and forcible compulsion. And also, he encountered her when she had been drinking. And so, he took advantage of her. He forced himself upon her, both orally and he raped her.

Dan:  He’s a fucking monster.

Sergeant Scott:  He’s a monster.

Yeardley:  So now he’s progressed from just blowjobs to actual vaginal penetration.

Sergeant Scott:  Right. And this is just. We are scratching the surface.

[Break 2]

Sergeant Scott:  So Janine is another woman, the woman with whom he most frequently offended against, and she reports sexual assaults. And this woman had been a law school graduate. She worked as a legal assistant. She had a degree. She came to our town and got hooked on heroin.

Zibby:  Oh, my God.

Yeardley:  Ah.

Sergeant Scott:  Then she started to make the-

Dan:  The decline.

Sergeant Scott:  -decline. She lost contact with her family. She got arrested. She got trouble and then she encountered Robert. And Robert did horrible things to her. She describes on one occasion that she was in possession of heroin. And while she was with her friends, he handcuffed her, put her in his car and transported her away. And then hours later, she came back to the hotel that she had been sharing with these two people she’d been walking with. And they said, “What happened? How did you get out?” And this is prior to when early release was routine. This was back when possession of heroin would keep you in over the weekend at least, you know. So, it was remarkable to them that she had gotten out. And she said, “Well, we worked something out.” And she didn’t want to talk about it.

 But she told me that night he had gone to a park and gotten her out of the car. And this was a ghetto downtown park that was just in terrible condition. And took her to the bathroom. The floors were dirty. The sewage had regurgitated onto the floor. So, she describes this tile floor that’s just covered in feces and toilet paper and gross. And she’s wearing flip flops, and he’s in uniform, and he makes her perform oral sex. And she’s begging for him not to. She says, “I know who a dealer is. I can give you this guy who’s a dealer. Please, not now, not tonight.” She goes, “I’m sick.” And he goes, “You’re fucking dope sick. Get on your knees.” And her mouth is dry. She’s dope sick. She can’t hardly swallow. And she says while she’s performing oral sex, she throws up. And he says, “Go wipe your fucking mouth and finish.”

Zibby:  Oh God.

Yeardley:  Ah.

Sergeant Scott:  So, because of her background, she’s smart. She’s savvy also. So, she confides in a friend and starts talking about what’s been happening to her with this guy Robert. And he gets word. He suspects that she’s a possible leaky gasket, so to speak. Somebody who might spill the beans on his activities.

Yeardley:  You mean Robert suspects this?

Sergeant Scott:  Right. So, she says one night, he storms into her hotel room again in uniform with his gun out. There’s a guy in there with her. He runs this guy off. He locks the door, pushes her back on the bed, and he sticks his service weapon inside of her vagina and threatens that I’m going to blow you up from the inside if you say anything.

Dan:  So she’s convinced?

Sergeant Scott:  She’s convinced.

Dan:  Yeah. I mean, that’s so over the top. If I saw it in a Hollywood movie, I’d say, “ Uh-uh, come on.”

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah.

Dave:  No way.

Sergeant Scott:  Dennis and I would call them dragnet moments where we would sit in the car and look at each other and just silently shake our heads, like just when we thought we had heard the worst, here comes something else.

Zibby:  Yeah, I get it. I mean, I feel speechless hearing this.

Yeardley:  It’s. I can’t. Ugh. What do you do with the information about the gun?

Sergeant Scott:  So we seized his firearm. And because there’s lots of small crevices, this front sight blade could have cellular matter.

Yeardley:  You’re looking for Janine’s DNA?

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah, we’re looking for DNA.

Zibby:  And did you find anything?

Sergeant Scott:  It was clean. There’s nothing on it. In fact, the lab tech that processed the firearm said that the weapon was so remarkably clean, they had found what they believed was dishwasher detergent residue on the firearm. That’s not the standard way of cleaning firearms, but it would be a good way to get rid of any evidence.

Zibby:  You don’t put any gun in the dishwasher?

Sergeant Scott:  Not typically.

Zibby:  Okay, great. No, I just wanted to make sure.

Sergeant Scott:  Not on the spin cycle or whatever, right?

Yeardley:  Wait, you’re saying he actually put the gun in the dishwasher?

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah.

Zibby:  Oh, I thought you were speaking figuratively, not literally he put it in the dishwasher. Oh, my God.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah. The lab tech concluded that this was dishwasher detergent that was kind of baked on, and so the presumption was that it had gone through the actual dishwasher. He was diabolical in the way that he conducted himself. I mean, I talked about the computer records and his field training process when he was shadowing the recruit, where he would be supposedly on computer one place and he’d go another. His use of the computers. He would log on and run people’s names under somebody else’s sign on.

Yeardley:  Right.

Sergeant Scott:  He was very deliberate in calculating that way.

Yeardley:  It’s so awful with each victim, the story gets worse and worse.

Zibby:  I know. And why do I get the feeling there are more victims?

Dan:  Wasn’t there a woman who reached out to you from prison about Robert?

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah. So, this is before a lot of electronic communication. They didn’t have the social media, and email was new-ish. Prisoners certainly didn’t have access to email at that time. And so, I get a letter from a woman at a prison in the area, and she says, I saw the newspaper article, the local newspaper article about this case, and I have a story I want to tell you about Robert. So, I call up to the prison and I arranged to go meet with Jessica. She was in a minimum-security prison where they had a day room, sort of an environment, and the prisoners intermingled and a lot of them were from this region. So, it was kind of a local women’s prison. So, I get there to see Jessica. The guard says, “You have nine other women who want to talk to you.”

Yeardley:  [gasps] Ah.

Zibby:  Oh my God, I can’t handle this. The hair on the back of my neck is standing up.

Sergeant Scott:  And of course, they’d seen it on the news. And then these girls started sharing stories.

Yeardley:  Oh, geez.

Zibby:  This is making me emotional.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah, so it was. Yeah, yeah, emotional for me too. It’s like, “Where does this stop?”

Zibby:  Yeah.

Yeardley:  So, as you continue to make all of these shocking discoveries about the assaults on these women, who do you report to?

Sergeant Scott:  So there was a time during the course of this investigation where at my agency we had a new captain that came in from another agency. She was overseeing the investigations division at the department. And so, I began reporting to her. And at this point it was public now that Robert was a criminal. And shortly thereafter, Francisco was revealed. So, it was a double strike against us with the community. It was really dark times for this community and for the police department. It was just terrible. This new captain.

 She was from a big city. And the city that I worked in, the dynamics were really complicated, very political, as I said, civil rights oriented. It’s a university town, so you had a big transient population of students. And it was already dicey to begin with. It was a hub for anarchist activity and domestic terrorism even. It was kind of a crazy time. This captain came into this organization and it’s a different climate. I don’t care where you’re from, there ain’t no place like this place, really. She asked, “Hey, can you give me an update on the case with Robert?” And I said, “Well, it’s crazy. Yesterday, I left the office at 9 o’clock and Dennis and I went to go follow up on a couple leads, and I came back three hours later and I had 12 messages, voicemails from separate women who were victims.” And she shuts the door and she says, “You know, at some point it seems like we need to stop looking.”

Yeardley:  Ah.

Zibby:  I’m sorry, what?

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah, not knowing her really well, I said, I kind of laughed and I’m like, “Yeah, well, I guess that’s one way to deal with it.” And she said, “Well, you know, I’m serious. This is going to have a price tag at some point.” I mean–

Yeardley:  Oh, my God.

Sergeant Scott:  He’s going to get prison and he’s going to get fired. So, at some point we should probably stop looking.

Yeardley:  Oh.

Sergeant Scott:  And of course, that’s just even more offensive. Right?

Yeardley:  Sure.

Zibby:  And also, I’m sorry, she’s a woman.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah.

Zibby:  There’s something particularly bone chilling about that coming from a female.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah.

Zibby:  For me, from my perspective.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah, it’s really offensive. I already talked about. I had gone from skeptic to prey-driven hound. I’m on this plus I’m now an advocate for the weak. To me, I feel like this is a totally foreign role for me really. When you work persons crimes, you do advocate for victims, but it’s like a personal attachment. And so, to me, it was like, this was just ridiculous. It was like, “seriously?”

Yeardley:  This isn’t what we stand for. How could you possibly suggest that?

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah. So and she just kind of got up and left. And of course I was by myself. And I told Dennis, I’m like, “You’re never going to believe this shit.” He’s like, “You’re kidding me.” And so, then we knew, “All right, well, there’s one we can’t trust.” So, the information flow stopped with her.

[Break 3]

Dave:  I’ve got a question. You’ve got an indictment. How many victims have crimes associated with it?

Sergeant Scott:  We got a grand jury with 14-.

Dave:  Okay

Sergeant Scott:  –different women.

Zibby:  14 women.

Sergeant Scott:  14. Yeah.

Dave:  The warrant comes out.

Sergeant Scott:  It’s a 42-count indictment.

Zibby:  My God.

Yeardley:  Wow. So, does each assault on these 14 women count as one count? So, like if he’s assaulted Janine 12 times, that’s 12 counts?

Sergeant Scott:  Correct. So, there’s 12 different charges. Potentially, with Janine, there were 15 or 16 different charges, ranging from sexual penetration with a foreign object to rape to sodomy to official misconduct.

Dan:  This goes to trial with the 14 victims on the original indictment or does that list grow eventually?

Sergeant Scott:  It goes with the 14 victims on the original indictment, and they were chosen by the district attorney because we had evidence that would corroborate their stories, whether it was physical evidence, proximity evidence. And by that I mean, for instance, there was one woman who said, he picked me up in the patrol car, put me in the backseat and drove me around. And before he compelled me to perform oral sex, he ran my name on his computer. And she said, “I saw, it said that I was biohazard HIV positive, and it was highlighted in red on her record.” So, of course, when we contact her and she tells us about that, we consult the record, and sure enough, it’s there and it’s highlighted and she described it. And that’s not information that she’s supposed to have. That’s criminal justice information that she’s not supposed to have access to.

 So again, it corroborates her story. And she’s somebody who’s not credible. And she’s the one who says, “One night he bought me a bottle of booze. I was in his police car, and there’s a computer console in between the two of us, and he’s forcing me to perform oral sex. And all of a sudden, he shoves me down into the floor on the passenger side and throws his coat over me and sticks his gun on me.” And she says, “I hear a car pull up next to us and it’s another police car.”

Yeardley:  Oh.

Sergeant Scott:  So she’s down on the floor and he’s got his gun to her, and he rolls his window down and goes, “Hey, what’s up, dude?” And she hears a short conversation. He goes, “Hey, man, I’m beefing with my wife on the phone,” and rolls his window back up.

Dave:  The typical face to face, car to car meeting.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah. So, cops do that driver’s side to driver’s side, you’ll see them pull up next to each other and take turns napping or whatever they’re doing. Usually exchanging criminal intelligence information.

Dave:  That’s correct.

Sergeant Scott:  And so– But yeah, so this other patrolman unwittingly rolls up on him and says, like, “Oh, there’s Robert. Hey, what’s up?” But you think about that, and this is a topic that I’ve talked about to other law enforcement groups is what happens if you pull up on Robert and you’re the just unwitting, “Hey, buddy.” And you see he’s got a girl in there at gunpoint, and he sees. Now that you see you’re a witness, there goes his entire life. Well, I think more likely scenario is he shoots that officer and kills her and makes it look like it was a gun battle.

Zibby:  Right.

Sergeant Scott:  But I mean, those are the kinds of things that you don’t think about that we don’t see as a threat, but Robert isn’t the first predatory sex offender that’s worn a uniform.

Dave:  Right.

Sergeant Scott:  Unfortunately, these guys are out there. It’s like a teachable moment. I got to prepare for snipers and I got to prepare for the unknown threat, and now I got to prepare to protect myself against my own guys.

Dan:  Okay, so I have to ask. Now we have a 42-count indictment out for Robert. There’s a warrant for his arrest. How did taking him into custody go down?

Yeardley:  Yeah.

Zibby:  Yeah, how the hell did that go down?

Sergeant Scott:  Myself and a contingent of SWAT officers surrounded his house, really not knowing what to expect from him. He’s up against a wall and he’s looking at what I see at that point as the rest of his life in prison. And common sense tells you that that makes a person dangerous and that he’s a flight risk and all the above.

Dave:  And he’s got training with firearms.

Sergeant Scott:  He’s got training. I mean, he’s got tactical training. He knows the ins and outs of hostage negotiations and SWAT operations and you name it.

Zibby:  So this renders him potentially one of the most dangerous.

Dan:  He’s got nothing to lose.

Zibby:  And so there’s– Already no one’s as dangerous as someone who doesn’t have anything to lose, but he’s also armed with so much intel.

Sergeant Scott:  Exactly, but he’s got a lot to lose. And you’re eliminating the sociopath factor, because-

Zibby:  Oh, right.

Sergeant Scott:  -that’s something I didn’t really pay attention to. This actually puts him center stage. This is kind of where he wants to be.

Zibby:  Oh, God.

Sergeant Scott:  So it’s really from a tactical standpoint, you don’t really know what to expect from a guy like that. So, we surround his house and we call. I called.

Zibby:  You mean like a bunch of cars surround the house and it’s the whole team. I mean, how many people surround his house?

Sergeant Scott:  Well, and see, that’s a good point because it’s sort of a undercover tactical presence.

Zibby:  Oh.

Sergeant Scott:  Because here we are still trying not to create a scene with this guy because he’s one of ours. I mean, if this is anybody else, it’s the alert five aircraft and Blackhawks and tac teams and, raid the neighborhood and evacuate, this is a big scene. But in this situation, looking back on, I hadn’t thought of that, but we had our unmarked units stuffed with lumpy SWAT guys and we had a perimeter and we had the place surrounded and we’re ready to go tactical, so to speak, but we were low keying it, which really, if you look at him on a sort of a threat matrix, that’s nonsensical.

Yeardley:  Yeah, you should have been like, we’re here, like it or lump it this is what we’re doing.

Sergeant Scott:  On the loud hailer, “This is the police,” or whatever, but once we got situated and everybody got in their positions, then Dennis and I were standing next to each other with a couple of uniform officers and we made the call into his house on a cell phone. And he answered and I said, “Hey, we got a warrant for your arrest.” And he said, “Well, come to the door.” I said, “Why don’t you come down?” He goes, “What the fuck, you guys got a SWAT team here or something?” And I see him look out the back window, so he’s assessing what’s happening, and then he comes out, we handcuff him and he’s like, “Man, you got to do this shit right here?” And I go, “Yeah, we got to handcuff you.” And he’s looking at everybody in the face kind of like, you traitor.

Yeardley:  What’s his house like?

Sergeant Scott:  It was kind of sparsely furnished and he was living way outside his means. And we got an inclination early on that he was probably what we call skimming drugs and drug money from people.

Zibby:  I wonder about that every now and again.

Sergeant Scott:  I mean, we had that definite indication.

Yeardley:  When the women said he would pay with big bills and things.  

Sergeant Scott:  Right. And he’s paying cash for cell phone bill. He was paying cash, we learned later for sports equipment, home gym. He was paying cash for items.

Zibby:  Oh, boy. Was his wife there when you–

Sergeant Scott:  Wife was at work? His wife worked at the same organization, not at the police station, but she worked within the city. And so, we knew where she was, we knew where the kids were, and so we arranged to take him off, so to speak, to arrest him when he was by himself.

Yeardley:  Did anybody post bail?

Sergeant Scott:  Yes. His family paid a security amount and he got released on house arrest. So, he had N ankle bracelet and he went back home.

Zibby:  Were you satisfied with that or was that a little nerve wracking for you?

Sergeant Scott:  No, it was terribly tragic, I guess, because you’ve just notified the community that this guy is a serial offender and there’s 14 victims-

Yeardley:  -that we know of, and now we let him out.

Zibby:  That couldn’t have made the agency look good, right?

Sergeant Scott:  At all. And then so what, this guy because he’s a cop, he gets out on house arrest. Who else gets out under house arrest, right? I mean, that resonates, but that was the sentiment from the community, and there was a real uprising about that, and understandably so.

Yeardley:  What about you? Were you nervous for your own safety now that he was out?

Sergeant Scott:  I’d been a cop for a long time, and I’d never really been afraid or worried necessarily about anybody that I’d arrested. And I’d arrested some real desperate characters. But, when I play forward a little bit, when I left that organization a few years ago and was turning in equipment, I turned in two shotguns that I had grabbed during the course of this investigation, and I fortified my house with them. Because I didn’t go anywhere without a gun then, and I’m not wearing a gun today. I don’t typically carry a gun.

Yeardley:  But you had become afraid?

Sergeant Scott:  I was. Yeah. I was worried about my family.

Zibby:  Because now you’re on the inside of what this man is capable of, and there’s no measurable limit to what he’s capable of doing to you.

Sergeant Scott:  Sure. And as I see it, I’m the one common denominator. I’m in the way.

Zibby:  Right.

Sergeant Scott:  Because these girls who wouldn’t talk to anybody are talking to me and only me. That they wouldn’t talk to anybody else. They’d come down to the station and look for me. And if I wasn’t there, they wouldn’t talk to anybody else.

Yeardley:  And where’s Francisco in this, now that you’ve arrested Robert?

Sergeant Scott:  So Francisco, shortly after this, he was arrested. He was charged with less crimes. There were less women, but there were still like nine in his case.

Yeardley:  Oh, my God.

Zibby:  That’s a lot.

Sergeant Scott:  Yeah.

Zibby:  How old is Francisco?

Sergeant Scott:  He was in his 30s. He had been a cop for about two and a half years. And Robert had been a cop for 10 years. And as near as I can figure, that entire time he had been offending.

[music]

Yeardley:  The Sociopath and the Whistleblower will return next week with the finale.

Zibby:  Small Town Dicks is produced by Zibby Allen and Yeardley Smith for Paperclip, with editing from Logan Heftel and Yeardley and Zibby.

Yeardley:  Music for the show was composed by John Forest.

Zibby:  If you like what you hear, please subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever else you like to listen to your podcasts.

Yeardley:  And follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter @smalltowndicks. Also visit our website, smalltowndicks.com, for more information and to leave questions and comments for the team.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]