Westbrook Police Detective Assaults 12 Year-Old Girl
Adult Web Site "Reds-Realm" Made Him Do It
Updated September 9, 2003Tuesday morning, July 8th, my brother-in-law Ed, who was visiting from Florida, woke me to tell me that there were two police detectives in the kitchen who wanted to talk to me. They said they had a complaint about my web site.
My web site is "Red's Realm of Romantic Restraint." It's about bedroom tie-up games for loving couples. It includes adult material, but it is not obscene or pornographic. It won an award for being the best of its kind in the world two years ago.
The detectives, Steven Lyons and John Desjardins, demanded to see my web site, so I took them through the length of the house to the back bedroom, which is my office. Along the way, they noticed my 12 year-old granddaughter and her cousin, who are also visiting from out of state, sleeping in another room.
I unlocked my office, let the detectives in and closed the door behind us. Detective Lyons, became agitated when he saw that my website had photographs of women tied up -- some of them fully dressed, but some of them not. He was shocked by the images and demanded to know how much money I made. When I told him, he was furious that I made more money than he did selling "nasty porn." He told his partner to keep me there while he went to talk to the children.
He woke the girls from a sound sleep by shouting at them to get up. The girls were terrified at being dragged out of bed by a strange man in plain clothes shouting at them like a madman. He showed them no identification. They assumed he was a dangerous intruder on drugs.
Detective Lyons herded them, frightened and shaking, into the yard and demanded to know who they were. When they told him their names and home addresses, he called them both liars and accused them of being runaways. In full view of the neighbors, he interrogated them on their sexual histories and their involvement with me in making "kiddie porn." One girl asked for a lawyer three times, but he ignored that. The other burst into tears and insisted she was a virgin.
That wasn't what Detective Lyons wanted to hear. He threatened to have them both locked up. If they didn’t start telling him the truth, he said, neither of them would ever see their families again.
Heather knows my office is off-limits to her because it contains adult materials. Christina only knows that my office is off-limits. Neither of them knew any more about my business until Detective Lyons described it to them in graphic detail.
Click Here to Read Heather's Account of Her Interrogation.Click Here to Read Ed's Account.
Detective Lyons was so upset that he drove off, forgetting that he had left his partner behind.
My brother-in-law Ed took the girls to the mall where my wife Pat and her son Jimmy (Heather's father) were working.
When Detective Lyons came back for his partner, he promised to return and shut down what he called my "nasty little home porno business" and make sure those children were taken away from me. When he asked me to explain who the girls were and who their parents were, I tried to do so. All of my attempts to answer one detective's questions were cut off by more questions from the other detective, though. Most of their questions were insulting and offensive. Detective Lyons, especially, was much more interested in asking about "kiddie porn" than the identities of the girls or their parents.
That evening, as we were preparing to go out to eat, Officer Thomas Roche, Jr. of the Westbrook Police Department pulled into the driveway. Earlier that week, he had helped us when a car had hit Heather’s dog. He said he had returned to see if the dog had recovered. Pat told him the dog had died and they were leaving on vacation and taking Christina home. Officer Roche wished them a safe trip.
Pat, Jimmy and the girls left later that night. The next day, several members of the Westbrook Police and the DHS came out to the house to talk to the girls. I told them the girls were not at home and asked them to leave.
The next morning, Ed and I were pulled over by the Westbrook Police. They asked if I minded if they searched the car for weapons. Not wanting my private things scattered around the car by strangers, I objected, and they became angry. They gave us thick bundles of paperwork filled with the most outrageous lies sworn to by Detective Lyons. There was a court order granting custody of the children to the State of Maine. They insisted on taking us back to the house so the DHS workers with them could take the children into custody.
Click Here to Read the Lies Detective Lyons Swore to Under Oath and Our ResponsesWe returned home and several police officers, including Officer Roche, Captain Roth and a detective in plain clothes with a video camera, along with two DHS workers, searched the house for the children. Naturally, as Officer Roche already knew, they were not there. Even though there were six witnesses to his conversation with Pat the night before, he denied telling her there would be no problem with her taking the girls on vacation.
Ed and I both asked that our home not be videotaped, but they said they didn't need our permission to tape.
One officer insisted that we wait in the kitchen while the rest fanned out to search the house. They soon learned that my office was locked, however, and ordered me to unlock it. Before I did, I asked the officer with the video camera to be sure he recorded the fact that I had to unlock it for them, but he refused. There were too many of them for us to be sure that no one took anything or left anything behind.
When they were finally convinced that the girls were not there, they gathered around us and demanded that we tell them where to find Pat and the girls. We insisted, truthfully, that we did not know where they had gone or when they would be back.
They threatened to arrest and jail us for obstruction of justice if we did not give them my wife's cell phone number. We told them we didn't have her number. Instead, we gave them numbers to contact Christina's parents in North Carolina and Heather's mother in Florida. Within minutes, the police and DHS had verified the girls' identities and that they were visiting here with their parents' full knowledge and consent. Meghan Lyons of the DHS lied to Christina's parents, telling them that she had Christina in custody.
The detectives then told the girls' parents that I was being investigated for running a "kiddie porn ring" and demanded the phone numbers of other friends and family members. They also told the girls' parents they were being investigated for "abandoning" their children in a dangerous situation and would probably have them taken away permanently. They concluded their calls by saying that Pat was wanted for kidnapping the girls and anyone who failed to help them locate her would be arrested for "obstruction of justice."
They proceeded to contact every friend, family member and business associate of mine they could locate to tell them all the same thing. As a result, most of my family, former friends and former business associates will no longer speak to me. Most of them hang up when I call. The detective even contacted the places where some of my friends are employed to tell them that their involvement in my "kiddie porn ring" was being investigated.
The police and DHS workers hung around for hours after completing their search, hoping my wife would return with the girls. At one point, Meghan Lyons of the DHS told me, "All this could have been avoided if you hadn't defied us when we first wanted those kids."
Later, I was on a cordless telephone to a lawyer I knew in another state. Officer Roche demanded to know who I was talking to, and when I took the phone away from my ear to answer him, he snatched it out of my hand and yelled, "Who is this?" into it. He handed the phone back to me shortly afterwards saying, "Your attorney doesn't scare me." I was afraid to continue the conversation because Officer Roche persisted in standing close enough to hear every word. He followed me out into the driveway, and when I hung up, he shook his fist in my face and called me a "motherfucker" for "using that sleazy lawyer to tip off your wife not to come back here."
It was well after dark when they all finally left after promising to be back every three or four hours to see if my wife had returned. They also promised to be watching my telephone line in case she called and to arrest me for obstructing justice if I failed to report any call I got from her.
The next three times Ed and I left the house on brief errands, we found doors and windows, which had been closed and locked when we left, standing wide open when we got back. Once, we returned to find the disk drive on my PC, which was less than two months old, had crashed. (My disk drive is heavily encrypted and cannot be read without several passwords.) We reported this to the Westbrook Police, but heard nothing about it. In fact, six separate complaints have been filed with the Westbrook Police with no results.
Pat took Christina home to her parents in North Carolina. The DHS in North Carolina came out to the home of Christina's parents and said that they were there as a personal favor for a friend in Maine. The DHS in Maine had offered to expunge the whole thing if Christina's parents would submit to an inspection of their home and an interview with Christina.
Christina's parents agreed, and the next day the DHS in North Carolina faxed a glowing report on Christina to the DHS in Maine saying they saw no problems.
The next afternoon the DHS in Maine faxed a set of 26 pages of paperwork to the DHS in North Carolina. They demanded that Heather and Christina be interrogated again.
The DHS in North Carolina interrogated Heather and Christina and sent the results to Maine. They were shocked and appalled when they heard Heather and Christina's stories of being woken by a strange man shouting at them, ordering them into the yard, accusing them of lying, threatening to take them away from their families and demanding to hear their sexual histories and their involvement in making child pornography. All the while, Heather was crying, and Christina was asking for an attorney. The DHS in North Carolina said that the DHS in Maine had lied to them.
I retained a local attorney, Janet Kantz of Vincent, Kantz and Ruffner, but after a month, all she did was remove my name from the orders of child protective custody, so that, in the interest of protecting the children's confidentiality, I would no longer be allowed to attend future hearings to determine their fate. She considered that an appropriate resolution of the situation, since "the children have DHS to represent their interests." I have already gotten her final invoice. At this point we have no legal representation.
My house is for sale, because I am not willing to continue living here under the threats of vengeance I have received from the Westbrook Police Department.
August 16 Update:
On August 12th, my wife and her brother (Christina's father) went to see the head of the local DHS, Rosemary Whitaker, with a briefcase filled with sworn, notarized statements proving that all of the allegations against us were lies. After two hours of reviewing the documentation of misconduct on the part of the police and her office, she reluctantly signed off on the paperwork dismissing the orders of protective custody. Two days later, we got a letter from her threatening to take Heather into custody again and interrogate her further if she ever returned to Maine.
August 28 Update:
We have contacted several lawyers. After days of gathering information, most of them told us they had a conflict of interests, because they already represented someone on the Westbrook City Council or in the Westbrook Police Department on other matters. The few who didn't wanted exorbitant amounts of money in advance just to begin working on a case. The ACLU says they don't have enough money to help us. We still have no legal representation.
The news media says there is no story until we get a lawyer and file a suit.
An "independent" outside investigator was brought in by the City of Westbrook to look into the incident. We taped our conversations with him. His qualifications are twenty years of working for the Sheriff's Office in a neighboring county. He admitted to me once that he had been called in to "whitewash" the whole thing and another time that he was here to "dig up dirt" on the people complaining. He is so obviously biased that he also admitted that he would have done the same thing Detective Lyons did, after hearing our complaint and before even talking to Detective Lyons or reading his report.
Our efforts to get copies of the outside investigator's report or the reports filed by any of the officers regarding any of the incidents spanning the three days of July 8 - 10 have all been stonewalled. Both Mayor Esty and his assistant were out sick every day for over two weeks that we tried to see them.
September 9 Update:
We have been doing research and discovered court records from the last two years in which a judge scolded Detective Lyons twice for changing his story too many times and swearing to testimony that was too inconsistent to be credible. We also discovered that he is already being sued by another man for acting without probable cause, false swearing and using excessive force. Pat brought those facts up at the last city council meeting and asked why he is still on the Police force and who is covering up for him. The Mayor said it was "under investigation."
Robert E. (Red) Daly
PO Box 88
Westbrook ME 04098-0088
EMail: red@reds-realm.netReds-Realm of Romantic Restraint
Reflections on the Allure of Damsels in Distress
http://www.reds-realm.net/City of Westbrook's Web Site
EMail the Mayor of Westbrook
Cumberland County Officials