Boy Scout documents reveal decades of abuse

In August 1981, the father of three Boy Scouts in Colorado wrote in deep despair to scouting supervisors: A familiar local scout leader, referred to only as Joe, had sexually abused boys in his troop, including the writer's sons, and yet was still being allowed to have contact with boys.

Joe had been spotted at a big scout gathering, the letter said, wearing a leather name tag like all other scoutmasters. "Your assurances that Joe was out of scouting and would have no further contact with scouting have just become meaningless," he wrote. "Do you care about my distress over watching Joe insidiously get back?"

Regrets and recriminations about how the Boy Scouts of America have policed the ranks of its scoutmasters and other volunteers to guard against sexual predators -- and how they have often failed -- echo through the thousands of pages of internal documents, police files and newspaper clippings released here Thursday after a lengthy court battle.

The files were collected between 1959 and 1985, with a handful of others from later years, in states across the nation on 1,247 men. The release of the documents creates, for the first time, a public database on specific abuse accusations.

According to the data, 84 abuse complaints were filed in Minnesota since 1959. The most recent cases were filed in 2004 from unit 379 in St. Louis Park and unit 452 in Eagan. According to the Los Angeles Times, the dates mark when the Boy Scouts created the file, not when the incidents are alleged to have occurred. Of the 74 Boy Scout units listed in Minnesota, 10 had multiple complaints.

But the language of a institutional caution bleeds through, from scout leaders who seemed to be protecting the organization, or were suffused with the belief that a man who had admitted wrongdoing should be given a second chance.

"He recognizes that he has had a problem, and he is personally taking steps to resolve this situation," a scout executive wrote in 1972 about a leader who, only a week earlier, had admitted "acts of perversion with several troop members."

"I would like to let this case drop," the executive said. "If it don't stink, don't stir it."

Identifying a sexual offender in advance, before any damage is done, has never been easy. But human nature -- in a mostly volunteer institution that millions of Americans have revered for generations because of its values of setting goals, building character and promoting the outdoor life -- also led again and again to tragic results, senior scout officials now say.

"We definitely fell short -- for that we just have to apologize to the victims and the parents and say that we're profoundly sorry," said Wayne Perry, the president of the Boy Scouts of America.

Kent York, spokesman for the Northern Star Council, Minnesota's largest Boy Scout group, said: "Our focus is on the safety of our kids."

The council implements youth protection policies as well as abuse reporting procedures, York said. The council hasn't been able to review the files that were released yet, he said. "If there's anything that needs to be followed up on, we will using today's standards," he said.

The "perversion files," or "ineligible volunteer files," as they were also called, played a central role in a civil case in 2010 over the abuse of six boys by a scout leader in Portland in the 1980s. The judge ruled that because they were evidence, the files should be released to the public under the state's open records provision -- a decision upheld this year by the state Supreme Court. More than 1,200 files were posted online Thursday and are available for public search.

They do not suggest that scouting was riddled with sexual stalkers. Some memos discuss the struggles to be fair when there was little proof or the accusers would not tell the authorities or press charges.

Other sections seemed to describe psychological horrors, like the scoutmaster who, according to a 10-year-old boy's account given to the police, talked about the virtues of the scouting life even as he slid his hand down the boy's pants.

And sometimes there were simply failures in the system. One such case involved a man named Floyd David Slusher. In 1972, the files say, Slusher -- then an assistant scoutmaster in Troop 48 in Boulder, Colo. -- was fired from his job at a summer camp after a pattern of "overt homosexual activity" with underage boys was uncovered. His name was added to the "ineligible volunteers" file, although no criminal charges appear to have been filed.

Five years later, Slusher -- in a different troop -- was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault of a child. A Boulder County Sheriff's Department report quoted boys who said Slusher had threatened to kill them if they revealed what he did with them -- telling one that he would poison his food.

Staff writers Alejandra Matos and Nicole Norfleet and the Associated Press contributed to this report.