Apparantly the Missouri State Legislature forgot to make it illegal to escape from a sex offender treatment center. 
A legislative oversight
01/16/2004
BY KIM BELL
Of the Post-Dispatch
Long before he took off for a new life in Florida, sex offender Thomas Ingrassia knew Missouri had no law making it a crime for him to escape from its highly touted Sexually Violent Predator Unit.
"I had researched it," Ingrassia said, using a few old statute books left in a library at the mental health facility.
In a wide-ranging interview Thursday, Ingrassia told the Post-Dispatch that he knew about a loophole in the law before cutting a fence for freedom in 2001 at the civil commitment unit in Farmington. The unit holds Missouri's most incorrigible rapists and child molesters.
"Missouri's so quick to make up laws without researching whether it's proper," he said. "They're idiots."
From the St. Francois County Jail, Ingrassia granted his first telephone interview since his capture in October in Florida, where he had been living under an assumed name for two years. In the interview, Ingrassia:
Blasted the predator treatment program on which Missouri spends millions. He said he felt like a "guinea pig in an experiment."
Hopes he has a future with the flight attendant he married in Florida, even though she turned him in to police.
Admitted using his half brother's identity, "Dave Davis," during his two years on the lam in Florida but claims the real Davis, of Florissant, was unaware of it.
Ingrassia refused to discuss how he escaped or who, if anyone, helped him. He said talking about that now could hurt his chances with his current criminal case, a charge of felony property damage for cutting the fence.
Asked whether he had committed any new sex crimes while freed, Ingrassia answered, "Absolutely not." Neither Florida authorities nor investigators here have been able to link Ingrassia to any new sex crimes.
Ingrassia, 47, has been described by acquaintances as articulate and charming at times but prone to violent outbursts. In the interview, he sounded calm, but most of the information he provided was self-serving. Ingrassia is being held in lieu of $250,000 bail at the jail, a brownstone building across the street and about 100 yards from the Missouri Department of Mental Health's treatment program for sexual predators.
The property damage charge is all that prosecutors could throw at Ingrassia. That's because, when the Legislature enacted the civil commitment procedure in 1998, it neglected to change the escape law to include escape from a civil facility.
It's a crime in Missouri to escape from a jail or prison, and it's a crime to escape from a mental health facility if the escapee was sent there in a criminal process, such as found not guilty but insane.
Officials acknowledge the oversight. Meanwhile, the Missouri attorney general's office is drafting legislation to close the loophole this session.
St. Francois County Sheriff Daniel Bullock can see the section of fence Ingrassia cut, now repaired, from his office door. Bullock is amazed that the Legislature's oversight means that Ingrassia - the only person ever to escape from Missouri's predator unit - can't be charged with escape, even though the law is designed to lock up only those people thought to be unsafe for society.
"If he hadn't tore the fence up when he got out, there'd be nothing to charge him with," Bullock said. "When one of my officers who works in the sex predator unit told us he couldn't be charged, we were just flabbergasted.
"I guess we're lucky he didn't assault someone, that we know of."
Bullock said he has no doubt Ingrassia knew the law's shortcomings before escaping.
"Those guys know more about the law than we do," he said of the 70-plus people confined to the predator unit.
Unanswered questions
The escape intrigues the sheriff, and he has many questions. Among them: How did Ingrassia slip out undetected and cut a fence that is supposed to be armed with motion sensors?
"I don't know if they were on," Bullock said. "The state doesn't like to air its dirty laundry, so they don't tell me."
Prison workers sometimes turn off the motion detectors on the fence during heavy windstorms or rainstorms because they can be falsely triggered, said Tim Kniest, spokesman for the Department of Corrections. But he added that the fence sensors were indeed working the day Ingrassia escaped.
"The system was on and activated, and it registered when he hit the fence. They just did not see him make his escape."
The Missouri Department of Mental Health, which runs the treatment program, has refused to release to the Post-Dispatch the state's final report on the escape. Officials say they have taken unspecified steps to make the facility more secure.
What details authorities do know about the escape will probably remain secret longer. In the next few weeks, prosecutors plan to take Ingrassia's property damage charge to a grand jury, which meets behind closed doors, rather than hold a public preliminary hearing.
Sex offenders program
Like 15 other states, Missouri has a civil commitment procedure so sex offenders who complete their prison sentences can be held indefinitely in a mental hospital if they are considered mentally abnormal and likely to commit new sex crimes.
Ingrassia served 18 months for raping a woman motorist alongside Interstate 270 in 1975, then 17 years of a 25-year sentence for later sexual attacks on three women, in December 1977 and April and May 1978.
In 1999, two years after completing parole, Ingrassia was accused of stalking a woman in Lincoln County. That spurred Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon to pursue a civil commitment. A St. Louis County jury sent Ingrassia to the Sexual Predator Unit in April 2001 under the state's new civil commitment law. He escaped six months later.
Some men who have granted interviews after being confined to the facility have expressed anger because their commitment is indefinite. They can't be freed until a judge is convinced they are no longer a threat to society. Ingrassia is no different.
"They didn't care about you," he said. "They just wanted to be on that bandwagon of all the other states. It's as stupid as witch hunts in Salem and as stupid as slavery."
Ingrassia said he refused to take part in the treatment offered there. "I knew I didn't need it," he said.
Apparently only one other state, Florida, has experienced a high-profile escape, but it was short-lived. In June 2000, an escapee scaled a fence at the Martin Treatment Center and boarded a helicopter, which crashed in a nearby orange grove. The escapee was captured 26 hours later and charged with escape.
In Farmington on Oct. 7, 2001, Ingrassia hid bedsheets under his covers to make it appear he was sleeping. He cut the window screen in his room and lowered himself from his second-floor window using a sheet. He cut through two razor-wire fences. To make the property damage charge a felony, prosecutors have to show the amount of damage exceeded $750.
According to a police report, the staff says he escaped between 7 a.m. and noon, when they went to awake him for lunch. Tracking dogs followed his scent to a road behind the prison grounds. Police wondered whether a sport utility vehicle seen near the prison with at least one woman inside was Ingrassia's getaway car.
A property damage conviction carries a penalty of up to four years in prison, but Ingrassia could serve up to seven years if prosecutors prove he is a persistent offender. After his prison term is up, authorities assume he would return to continue serving his civil commitment.
Hoping for a reunion
Meanwhile, what of the life Ingrassia left behind in Treasure Island, Fla.? While assuming the identity of Dave Davis, Ingrassia got construction jobs and married flight attendant Katia Stocksdale. Her suspicions about his real identity caused her and her ex-husband to research his background, and detective work on the Internet led them to Ingrassia's true identity.
Ingrassia said he has written Stocksdale a few times since he was caught. She said he has asked her to remarry him under his real identity. Ingrassia said, "I don't know if we ever were married" because of the false name. Asked whether he wanted a future with her, he said, "I'd love to."
Stocksdale has been paid by a British magazine and a German television show to tell her story; she still holds out hope for a book deal. As for the man she knows as "Dave," Stocksdale says she no longer wants anything to do with Ingrassia.
"Every day when I think about it, I'm furious about what he's done to me," she said. "I'm having a chance to really heal. I'm seeing through him, how he used me and never loved me."
Reporter Kim Bell
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 314-340-8115
A legislative oversight
01/16/2004
BY KIM BELL
Of the Post-Dispatch
Long before he took off for a new life in Florida, sex offender Thomas Ingrassia knew Missouri had no law making it a crime for him to escape from its highly touted Sexually Violent Predator Unit.
"I had researched it," Ingrassia said, using a few old statute books left in a library at the mental health facility.
In a wide-ranging interview Thursday, Ingrassia told the Post-Dispatch that he knew about a loophole in the law before cutting a fence for freedom in 2001 at the civil commitment unit in Farmington. The unit holds Missouri's most incorrigible rapists and child molesters.
"Missouri's so quick to make up laws without researching whether it's proper," he said. "They're idiots."
From the St. Francois County Jail, Ingrassia granted his first telephone interview since his capture in October in Florida, where he had been living under an assumed name for two years. In the interview, Ingrassia:
Blasted the predator treatment program on which Missouri spends millions. He said he felt like a "guinea pig in an experiment."
Hopes he has a future with the flight attendant he married in Florida, even though she turned him in to police.
Admitted using his half brother's identity, "Dave Davis," during his two years on the lam in Florida but claims the real Davis, of Florissant, was unaware of it.
Ingrassia refused to discuss how he escaped or who, if anyone, helped him. He said talking about that now could hurt his chances with his current criminal case, a charge of felony property damage for cutting the fence.
Asked whether he had committed any new sex crimes while freed, Ingrassia answered, "Absolutely not." Neither Florida authorities nor investigators here have been able to link Ingrassia to any new sex crimes.
Ingrassia, 47, has been described by acquaintances as articulate and charming at times but prone to violent outbursts. In the interview, he sounded calm, but most of the information he provided was self-serving. Ingrassia is being held in lieu of $250,000 bail at the jail, a brownstone building across the street and about 100 yards from the Missouri Department of Mental Health's treatment program for sexual predators.
The property damage charge is all that prosecutors could throw at Ingrassia. That's because, when the Legislature enacted the civil commitment procedure in 1998, it neglected to change the escape law to include escape from a civil facility.
It's a crime in Missouri to escape from a jail or prison, and it's a crime to escape from a mental health facility if the escapee was sent there in a criminal process, such as found not guilty but insane.
Officials acknowledge the oversight. Meanwhile, the Missouri attorney general's office is drafting legislation to close the loophole this session.
St. Francois County Sheriff Daniel Bullock can see the section of fence Ingrassia cut, now repaired, from his office door. Bullock is amazed that the Legislature's oversight means that Ingrassia - the only person ever to escape from Missouri's predator unit - can't be charged with escape, even though the law is designed to lock up only those people thought to be unsafe for society.
"If he hadn't tore the fence up when he got out, there'd be nothing to charge him with," Bullock said. "When one of my officers who works in the sex predator unit told us he couldn't be charged, we were just flabbergasted.
"I guess we're lucky he didn't assault someone, that we know of."
Bullock said he has no doubt Ingrassia knew the law's shortcomings before escaping.
"Those guys know more about the law than we do," he said of the 70-plus people confined to the predator unit.
Unanswered questions
The escape intrigues the sheriff, and he has many questions. Among them: How did Ingrassia slip out undetected and cut a fence that is supposed to be armed with motion sensors?
"I don't know if they were on," Bullock said. "The state doesn't like to air its dirty laundry, so they don't tell me."
Prison workers sometimes turn off the motion detectors on the fence during heavy windstorms or rainstorms because they can be falsely triggered, said Tim Kniest, spokesman for the Department of Corrections. But he added that the fence sensors were indeed working the day Ingrassia escaped.
"The system was on and activated, and it registered when he hit the fence. They just did not see him make his escape."
The Missouri Department of Mental Health, which runs the treatment program, has refused to release to the Post-Dispatch the state's final report on the escape. Officials say they have taken unspecified steps to make the facility more secure.
What details authorities do know about the escape will probably remain secret longer. In the next few weeks, prosecutors plan to take Ingrassia's property damage charge to a grand jury, which meets behind closed doors, rather than hold a public preliminary hearing.
Sex offenders program
Like 15 other states, Missouri has a civil commitment procedure so sex offenders who complete their prison sentences can be held indefinitely in a mental hospital if they are considered mentally abnormal and likely to commit new sex crimes.
Ingrassia served 18 months for raping a woman motorist alongside Interstate 270 in 1975, then 17 years of a 25-year sentence for later sexual attacks on three women, in December 1977 and April and May 1978.
In 1999, two years after completing parole, Ingrassia was accused of stalking a woman in Lincoln County. That spurred Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon to pursue a civil commitment. A St. Louis County jury sent Ingrassia to the Sexual Predator Unit in April 2001 under the state's new civil commitment law. He escaped six months later.
Some men who have granted interviews after being confined to the facility have expressed anger because their commitment is indefinite. They can't be freed until a judge is convinced they are no longer a threat to society. Ingrassia is no different.
"They didn't care about you," he said. "They just wanted to be on that bandwagon of all the other states. It's as stupid as witch hunts in Salem and as stupid as slavery."
Ingrassia said he refused to take part in the treatment offered there. "I knew I didn't need it," he said.
Apparently only one other state, Florida, has experienced a high-profile escape, but it was short-lived. In June 2000, an escapee scaled a fence at the Martin Treatment Center and boarded a helicopter, which crashed in a nearby orange grove. The escapee was captured 26 hours later and charged with escape.
In Farmington on Oct. 7, 2001, Ingrassia hid bedsheets under his covers to make it appear he was sleeping. He cut the window screen in his room and lowered himself from his second-floor window using a sheet. He cut through two razor-wire fences. To make the property damage charge a felony, prosecutors have to show the amount of damage exceeded $750.
According to a police report, the staff says he escaped between 7 a.m. and noon, when they went to awake him for lunch. Tracking dogs followed his scent to a road behind the prison grounds. Police wondered whether a sport utility vehicle seen near the prison with at least one woman inside was Ingrassia's getaway car.
A property damage conviction carries a penalty of up to four years in prison, but Ingrassia could serve up to seven years if prosecutors prove he is a persistent offender. After his prison term is up, authorities assume he would return to continue serving his civil commitment.
Hoping for a reunion
Meanwhile, what of the life Ingrassia left behind in Treasure Island, Fla.? While assuming the identity of Dave Davis, Ingrassia got construction jobs and married flight attendant Katia Stocksdale. Her suspicions about his real identity caused her and her ex-husband to research his background, and detective work on the Internet led them to Ingrassia's true identity.
Ingrassia said he has written Stocksdale a few times since he was caught. She said he has asked her to remarry him under his real identity. Ingrassia said, "I don't know if we ever were married" because of the false name. Asked whether he wanted a future with her, he said, "I'd love to."
Stocksdale has been paid by a British magazine and a German television show to tell her story; she still holds out hope for a book deal. As for the man she knows as "Dave," Stocksdale says she no longer wants anything to do with Ingrassia.
"Every day when I think about it, I'm furious about what he's done to me," she said. "I'm having a chance to really heal. I'm seeing through him, how he used me and never loved me."
Reporter Kim Bell
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 314-340-8115