Part 1: A Pedophile Mind
A Pedophile Mind: As sentencing approaches, priest pours out sexual history hoping for probation, gets notoriety instead
Fr. Van Handel felt he was “a failure with nothing to live for” soon after news broke that he molested choir boys, his therapist said. Facing justice, the pedophile priest wrote out a history of his sex life and gave it to the Court while requesting probation, answering questions about what is wrong inside the Church, inadvertently, and the role of priests that led to this nationwide epidemic of pedophilia.
His sexual outpouring did not earn the felon priest probation, he was sentenced to 8 years, served four in prison, four on parole, and since his release has lived close to his therapists outside Santa Cruz. Today at City of Angels we look at the state of Van Handel’s mind between arrest and sentencing and how his cooperation got his sexual autobiography into the public record.
He wanted to tell it to the world
The arresting officer wrote, “Van Handel made it clear he wanted full disclosure of his acting-out history.” His therapist wrote: “Full disclosures to the best of his ability to recall has a therapeutic effect which outweighs the risk factor associated with the actual sentencing.”
As we read through his “sexual autobiography” and the Probation Report, an image appears of a nervous priest who knows in 1994 that any day he will be named as one of the pedophiles at St. Anthony’s. Once accused, Van Handel jets off to St. Luke’s in Maryland where he spends thirteen months doing a seven-month program with 32 other sexually charged priests
Van Handel watches as more news is released about St. Anthony’s seminary in Santa Barbara. Before his sentencing, I sense almost Stockholm Syndrome in the way Van Handel agrees to cooperate with the police, telling them everything, almost like this sick priest saw in the detectives the father confessors he’d always been looking for in the Church.
Whatever his motivation for writing out the 27-page single space typed document, so much is revealed in it about life behind the cloistered doors of the seminary, the secretiveness, the totally inexperienced adult men teaching boys about sexuality. We will write more about Van Handel’s strange mutation from a freshman who wouldn’t dare touch his genitals to the choir director who rubbed and tickled the genitals of hundreds, picking freely from a steady stream of 8 to 14-year olds at his disposal.
By the way, we are not on a bounty hunt for the head of Van Handel on a stick. He is just one of six thousand, one of the perhaps ten thousand Catholic priests who turned out to be pedophiles ravaging children of parish families in the last sixty or so years in the USA, six thousand that we know of. Believe it or not, Van Handel’s crimes and just one more installment as the stories slowly come out about the pedophile epidemic in the Catholic Church.
Here, today, we’re exploring what was going on in the mind of this perpetrator priest the weeks before his arrest as he waited for the “crisis to hit,” and the way his life changed after the arrest and conviction, including what I feel is pampering at treatment centers, especially when you compare the treatment this convicted pedophile priest gets to what was done to the lives of pedophile priests’ victims, and where many of us are today.
Many readers have queried, how did the sexual autobiography end up in the public record in the first place?
The arresting officer, Mike McGrew of the Santa Barbara Police Department, describes getting the sexual autobiography into evidence, in his report attached to the Probation Report:
“When I arrested Van Handel, I served a search warrant in his room at the St. Francis Retreat in San Juan Bautista, California. I recovered several pieces of evidence which included various correspondence, letters written by Van Handel, a diary, (January 1993 to March 1994) written by Van Handel, and an autobiography written by Van Handel.” Where “he describes his pedophile feelings and mentions