When a Baton Rouge Boy Scout leader slipped out of the state in the summer of 1986, he didn't bother with a goodbye to Robert Walker, a Scout who had, for a time, considered him a father figure. For the next 26 years, Walker wondered what happened to the man.
He had questions for him: about the vodka parties they'd had when he was 14, about the pornography they'd watched together, about a night in the backseat of a van when he says he pretended to sleep while his Scoutmaster fondled him. He told no one. And while he kept his secret, the Scouts were keeping one, too. ...
His 26 years since have included two suicide attempts, a failed marriage, and an adulthood of self-doubt and self-blame that he attributes, in part, to the abuse he claims he suffered at the hands of his Scoutmaster.
"He made me feel special; he was like a father."
To a certain extent there was almost a love involved," he says now. "So I felt like maybe I had done something to deserve this. Maybe I asked for this and it was my fault."
Walker had been an awkward teenager, with few friends and distant parents, and the Scoutmaster had been the only adult to take an active interest in him. He felt he had no one else to turn to.
"If adults would have told me he had done this to other boys, that it wasn't just me, if the police were contacted, it would have totally changed everything," Walker says now. "It would have totally changed my life."
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kestrel9 ago
http://archive.is/Z5ScE http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/12/70_louisiana_cases_among_the_b.html