Word: whitsett
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They had met 12 years earlier in church on the east coast of Florida, a region that has become known for its pedophilia networks, where runaways drawn to the fun and sun often get caught in a web of drugs and sex. Burkhart was 11, Whitsett 16. When Burkhart finished high school, they moved in together. The relationship troubled Burkhart's mother Susan; Whitsett had been kicked out of the Navy for sexual misconduct. Her son seemed obsessed by his companion. Says Susan Burkhart: "It wasn't a friendship between equals...
...gated, genteel Cobblestone Country Club, 35 miles northwest of West Palm Beach, Fla., received some unusual visitors last Tuesday. Steven Whitsett, 28, of Pembroke Pines, and Clifford Burkhart, 23, of Hollywood, Fla., were drenched and dirty, having crawled out of the waters of a canal at the club's north end. For 26 hours, the duo had slogged through mosquito-infested swamps inhabited by wild boar, alligators and rattlers. Now they were facing arrest after a dramatically botched helicopter escape from a nearby "treatment center," where Whitsett, a convicted child molester, had been detained under a controversial Florida law. Burkhart...
...wasn't a monogamous relationship either. At 22, Whitsett was arrested for soliciting sex from a 16-year-old; he got six months' probation. A few months later, as a psychology student at Nova Southeastern University, Whitsett gained entry to a treatment center for teen sex offenders, ostensibly to study whether pedophiles seek out children who are the same age as they were when they were first molested. The research was legitimate, but the liaison he formed with a 15-year-old patient was not. The nude Polaroids, and the sex, landed Whitsett an eight-year prison term...
...prison time was shortened for good behavior, and he would have been released last year. But Florida had changed the rules in 1998 with the Jimmy Ryce Act (named for a nine-year-old Miami boy kidnapped, raped and murdered by a sexual predator). The statute meant that Whitsett could be held and "treated" until he was no longer considered dangerous. That could mean forever. He was placed with 100 or so of Florida's worst convicted and "released" sexual predators in the Martin Treatment Center, a converted county jail, where he awaited a civil hearing...
...fences laced with razor wire (but without watch towers or sharpshooters) surround the center. Inside, there are no corrections officers, only "therapeutic assistants" who must guard the detainees using pepper spray, not guns. Whitsett roomed in an open "pod" with 15 bunks, not a cell. The staff offers intense psychological treatment but cannot force participation. The Jimmy Ryce Act is so constitutionally murky that Whitsett could not even be called an inmate. He was, rather, a "resident...