Escapes of a Sex Predator

RENTON, Wash. —  Even as a child, Edward Harvey Stokes was driven by dark urges that no one understood.

Some remember the adopted son of one of the town’s leading families as an outdoors lover who sold greeting cards door to door and swept floors in downtown stores for a quarter. Others remember an awkward loner with an explosive temper.

“He was a strange, strange lad,” said Jack Gannon, a former neighbor in this Seattle suburb. “When he was 12 or 13, I caught him stealing balls out of my golf cart. I chastised him and sent him home. He came back with a rifle. I jerked it away and busted it up and took him back to his dad.”

Anger was just the veneer. Beneath it, Stokes harbored a hunger for sexual violence that took root early, in encounters with younger boys that began, by his own account, when he was 9.

Stokes’ exploits would consume his family, especially his father, a respected funeral home owner. Time and again, Ned Stokes tried to help his son out of trouble, only to see him get in deeper.

In the late 1960s, the elder Stokes asked the owners of a lake resort where the family had vacationed for years whether his teenage son could work for them. Eddie was having problems, he said. Maybe a summer away from home would straighten him out.

One day, Eddie invited the owners’ young son up to his room, exposed himself and asked the boy to remove his pants. The child’s parents called Ned Stokes and told him to come get Eddie -- and never return.

Today, Stokes, 48, is known to authorities as one of the West’s most insatiable sexual predators. By his own count, he has assaulted scores of boys and young men over a generation. Prosecutors still hope to put him in prison for life.

What sets Stokes apart from other serial sex offenders is his ability to escape prolonged incarceration in an era of habitual-offender laws and minimum sentences. Though often caught, he has never been stopped.

Stokes has been convicted of felonies stemming from sexual assaults at least five times and has spent more than 20 years behind bars in four states. Yet each time, he has managed to avoid a lengthy prison term, get free again and find new victims. Along the way, he’s caught plenty of breaks: cases weakened by uncooperative witnesses and clouded recollections, cases dropped or plea-bargained by prosecutors.

“He appears to be like a giant teddy bear,” said Lynda Estes, a former Oregon sheriff’s detective who arrested Stokes in the early 1990s for allegedly sodomizing two teenage boys, and then watched as he plea-bargained the case to avoid a potential life sentence. “But he is evil to the core.”

California authorities thought they had locked Stokes up for life for molesting a teenage runaway whom he held captive in a motel near Disneyland. Then, in April, an appeals court overturned his conviction, setting him free. Stokes benefited from a single police oversight -- and the fact that his victim had killed himself, depriving Stokes of his right to cross-examine him about new evidence.

Within a week of his release, Stokes was back in jail in Oregon, arrested for allegedly providing false information on a driver’s license application. Prosecutors, determined not to let him loose again, filed sexual assault charges based on 8-year-old allegations. Stokes, who is being held without bail, is seeking to have the charges thrown out.

Psychiatrists have described Stokes as an angry psychopath who claimed to have been molested as a child. A husky 6 foot 2, he targets the weak: drug-addled runaways and teens in trouble with the law. He likes to pose as an authority figure -- a law officer, a paramedic or simply a benefactor.

He is a shrewd jailhouse lawyer who floods the courts with appeals for lighter sentences, mental health counseling, even a personal barber. In California, Stokes claimed poverty to qualify for a public defender while trading stocks from jail, according to a paralegal who worked on his case.

In 1993, Stokes assembled a catalog of 232 sexual partners beginning when he was in elementary school. With cold, bureaucratic efficiency, his “Sex Offense History” charts the number and type of encounter. Regarding 65 unnamed people, it notes that force was used and lists categories of coercion. Among them: “rape,” “alcohol,” “drugs,” “kidnap” and “fear.”

Stokes did not respond to requests for an interview. His first offense listed in public court records was in 1974. Then 18, he posted a flier on a junior high bulletin board inviting students on a camping trip. Among the boys who signed up was an eager 14-year-old.

Stokes arranged to show the boy how to rappel, invited him to sleep at his home the night before, and assaulted him, using handcuffs and a cattle prod.

“He said he was going to kill me,” said the victim, now 44, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Stokes was charged with sodomy, and his father came to his aid. Ned Stokes called the victim’s mother and offered her money not to press the case. He said he’d force his son to join the Army if she’d cut Eddie a break.

Eddie Stokes paid her a visit, too, said the mother, who insisted that she not be identified. “Kids like to do this stuff,” she remembers Eddie Stokes telling her.

Stokes’ attorney had him evaluated by a psychiatrist he had seen on and off since he was 14.

“I see Ed as a rapidly developing character disorder,” Dr. H. Bartlett Vincent Jr. said in a report filed with the court, “a psychopathic personality with [an] inability to control behavior, to feel guilt, or to learn from experience and punishment.”

Stokes pleaded guilty to sodomy. His 10-year prison sentence was deferred on condition he complete an in-patient therapy program for sexual psychopaths at Western State Hospital in Tacoma, Wash. When it was discovered that he was having sex with another male patient, Stokes was labeled untreatable and sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison.

“This man is quite dangerous,” wrote Dr. S. Harvard Kaufman, a psychiatrist who evaluated Stokes in early 1976, just before he turned 20. “He needs to be confined.”

He would be, but not for very long -- a recurring theme throughout his criminal career.

Stokes was paroled in March 1979 after serving about three years. Fourteen months later, he was cruising down Interstate 90 in a rural area east of Seattle, with a red police light atop his Ford pickup. He stopped to pick up a hitchhiker. Stokes told the teen he was a cop and that he’d shoot him if he didn’t take off his pants.

The boy bolted from the truck and ran across the freeway. Stokes turned on his red cop light and chased him down.

The sheriff’s deputy who stopped Stokes on a traffic violation a short time later found the boy in the passenger seat, his hands bound and a look of terror on his face.

No-Show Means Release

Stokes was convicted of unlawful imprisonment and spent four years in state prison. Paroled in late 1984, he was arrested five months later for alleged statutory rape, assaulting a 13-year-old female runaway in his apartment in Puyallup, south of Tacoma. When she disappeared, the charge was dropped.

While that case was pending, Stokes brought his truck into the suburban Seattle body shop where Michael Blakley, then 18, worked.

The idea that there are men who rape other men never occurred to Blakley when he was growing up in Cumberland Gap, a small town in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee. Blakley’s mother had moved the family to Seattle’s suburbs three months before Stokes showed up.

Stokes chatted with Blakley while he repaired his truck. Blakley remembers him as likable, talkative and anxious to strike up a friendship. A few days later, he took Blakley skiing at Snoqualmie Summit, an hour east of Seattle.

On the ride home, Stokes offered him a mixed drink known as Spring Water: vodka and Mountain Dew. After a few sips, Blakley felt dizzy. A minute later, he said, he felt Stokes reach into his pants and he blacked out.

“I remember very little,” Blakley said. “I remember waking up in his living room. There was a porno movie on the VCR.... The next thing I remember is, I woke up the next morning naked in his bed, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, what’s happened?’ ”

Stokes drove him home. Blakley slept the rest of the day -- and most of the next day, too.

Meanwhile, Stokes asked Virginia Blakley whether her younger son, 15-year-old Steven, wanted to earn a few dollars cleaning his house. At his rental condo in nearby Kent, Stokes offered Steven some Spring Water.

Over the next day, Steven awoke briefly and blacked out again and again. Each time he regained consciousness, Stokes was fondling, kissing or performing oral sex on him. When Steven finally came to, Stokes told him to take a shower. He handed him his clothes, which had been freshly laundered, and took him home.

Michael Blakley was still asleep, and didn’t wake up until later that evening. As he lay in the bedroom he shared with his brother, Michael suddenly heard Stokes’ voice asking whether anyone was home. Blakley grabbed a shotgun he kept under his bed and ran to the living room. He didn’t bother asking Stokes why he had returned.

“I stuffed the shotgun in his face and I was yelling at him, ‘What did you do to me? What did you do to Steve?’ ” Blakley recalled.

The case against Stokes had flaws. Because of whatever was in the Spring Water they drank, the recollections of Michael and Steven Blakley were fuzzy. In October 1986, a King County jury found Stokes not guilty of indecent liberties and second-degree rape, but guilty of third-degree statutory rape in the attack on Steven. Deemed a “nonviolent offender” by prosecutors, he was sentenced to a year in jail -- with credit for time served.

Stokes was out on work release in a month. Soon after, Steven Blakley swallowed a bottle full of sleeping pills in an unsuccessful suicide attempt.

He would leave less to chance the next time.

A Decision to Adopt

Ned and Jeanne Stokes couldn’t conceive children, so they adopted: first a girl and then, in 1956, a blond boy just a week old.

They were a civic-minded, churchgoing, country club couple. She was the refined daughter of a Georgia judge who spent days planning parties. He was a former U.S. Navy pilot who raised funds for the Episcopal Church and was a member of the Masons, Rotary, Elks and Eagles.

The Eagles Lodge next door to his funeral home is where Ned liked to drink. His love of whiskey was an open secret in Renton. Less known was that Jeanne Stokes had a mental breakdown when Eddie was a boy, spent two years in the hospital and underwent shock therapy. The Stokeses, a psychiatrist noted later, were undemonstrative parents and poor disciplinarians during their son’s early years.

After a heart attack in the early ‘70s, Ned Stokes quit drinking. From then on, he would always be there for Eddie, hiring attorneys when he was in jail and helping him financially when he got out. He’d visit him in prison, even if it meant driving for hours.

“Susan, your brother’s been picked up again,” Ned said to his daughter after each arrest.

Ned Stokes had helped Susan, a 50-year-old elementary school teacher in suburban Seattle, when she was struggling financially. In return, he asked her to help him with her brother.

Susan Stokes’ job was to clear out Eddie’s home -- wherever it was -- and haul his stuff to a rental unit or her parents’ garage. The stacks of gay pornographic magazines she said she always found went in the dumpster. A dresser filled with boys’ clothing spent years in Ned’s garage, she said.

Once, Susan said, her father begged her to dispose of a pair of handcuffs. She said she drove to a bridge spanning the Green River and dropped them into the darkness.

“If I do enough for this kid, he’ll stop making bad choices,” Susan Stokes remembers her father saying.

When Eddie was 33, Ned sought to give him a fresh start. According to Susan, Eddie said he wanted to become a ski patrolman, so her father bought a house for him in Leadville, Colo., near several winter resorts.

She said Eddie bought a used Harley-Davidson motorcycle equipped with a red police light and headed east.

There, in June 1989, he met Dwayne Lobberding, a cocky 17-year-old who had walked away from a Colorado juvenile jail with another teen named James. When the pair were arrested in a Denver suburb for breaking into a car, James said he had done odd jobs for a guy in Leadville who would bond them out.

James gave Stokes a call and he came right away.

He told the boys they’d have to work at his house to repay him. Lobberding testified that Stokes handcuffed their wrists and shackled their ankles for a time, saying he didn’t want them to run away.

“I thought it was weird,” Lobberding recalled. “But then I thought: He did me a favor. I didn’t feel like I had anything to be afraid of.”

When they got to Stokes’ place, he told Lobberding to take a hot bath to soothe a bad cold. Stokes brought him orange juice and the teenager gulped it down. He said he noticed what remained of two dissolved pills at the bottom of the glass. Suddenly, he felt drowsy. That night, Stokes sodomized him, Lobberding said.

“I wanted to strike out at him, but I couldn’t move,” Lobberding said in a recent interview. “He kept telling me, ‘Just relax and it’ll be OK.’ And that I’d like it. He said that over and over.”

Eventually, the boys escaped. Stokes was charged with first-degree sexual assault and faced a maximum 32 years in prison if convicted.

Terrified of testifying against Stokes, Lobberding sought the help of a psychologist. She advised him not to take the stand. When he didn’t show up for Stokes’ preliminary hearing, Judge Richard Hart dismissed the case, saying there wasn’t enough evidence to proceed to trial.

Later, prosecutors tried to revive the charge, arguing that Lobberding was now capable of confronting Stokes in court. At a hearing in early 1990, Lobberding described his ordeal.

“He testified that he was tied to poles in the basement and that he would have to learn to accede to [Stokes’] wishes,” the judge noted in a ruling upholding his dismissal of the case. Hart said was there no reason Lobberding couldn’t have testified during the earlier hearing.

Prosecutors challenged Hart’s ruling before the Colorado Court of Appeals -- and lost.

A Plea Bargain’s Price

Stokes returned to the Northwest and in 1990 settled in rural Clackamas County, east of Portland, where he took a job driving a bus at a ski resort. He answered an ad on a grocery store bulletin board placed by 11-year-old Trevor Waugh, who was seeking yardwork.

“He was real nice,” recalled Waugh, now 26, a community college student living in suburban Portland. “Down to earth.”

His mother, Annie, had the same first impression. “I feel so stupid,” she said.

Stokes paid Trevor $2 an hour to mow his lawn and stack wood. Annie invited Stokes to dinner, and he brought a woman he introduced as a girlfriend. Stokes asked if he could attend church with the family. They proudly introduced him to fellow congregants.

With Annie’s permission, Stokes took Trevor skiing in Utah. There, Stokes allegedly fondled him in the hotel room they shared. Weeks later, Trevor slept at Stokes’ house so they could leave early the next morning on a camping trip. Stokes gave Trevor a soda that tasted strange. Waugh said Stokes was sodomizing him when he woke, according to court records.

Months later, police contacted Annie Waugh while investigating another case in which two teenage boys had accused Stokes of drugging and sodomizing them. Trevor, who had told his mother nothing about his own experience, was reluctant to talk to police but eventually gave a statement.

In the meantime, Stokes cut a complicated plea bargain with the Clackamas County district attorney in the case involving the two teenagers. First, he pleaded guilty to second-degree sexual abuse and furnishing alcohol to a minor and was given a year in prison -- with credit for 11 months already served. Stokes then pleaded no contest to being a former convict in possession of a firearm. For this, he was sentenced separately to 30 months in prison.

By avoiding a sodomy conviction, Stokes sidestepped Oregon’s dangerous-offender statute, which could have put him away for 30 years. As part of the plea bargain, prosecutors agreed not to pursue at least eight other cases that were under investigation. Trevor Waugh’s was among them.

“I was just livid,” said Estes, the former sheriff’s detective. “I remember picking up all my files and slamming them down and walking out of the D.A.’s office.”

Terry Gustafson, the prosecutor who approved Stokes’ plea bargain, sees it as “pretty lenient” in hindsight. But the case was flawed, she said. The victims were scared and “emotionally vacant” -- not likely to make a good impression on a jury. Their memories were blurred by the drug that authorities believe Stokes slipped into their drinks.

“He seems to sense those who will be vulnerable,” Gustafson said of Stokes. “You take a child who’s extremely doped up ... and you can easily attack their credibility. It makes for a perfect victim. Mr. Stokes could have only done better if he had killed them.”

Stokes was paroled in July 1992. Within weeks, he met a 17-year-old boy and promised to buy him a car. Stokes invited the teen to his home east of Portland, fondled him and threatened to rape him, according to court records.

“If I wanted to do this, this is how I would do it,” he told the boy, then let him go.

The boy went to the police but didn’t want to cooperate with prosecutors. Stokes had his parole revoked. Back in an Oregon prison, he sought counseling as a sex offender.

A seven-page essay he wrote, titled “Commitment to Treatment,” offers a window onto how Stokes wanted others to see him: “an uncontrolled monster but not unchangeable.”

“For the past 26 years I have used and abused the small, helpless, and weak,” he wrote. “I am tired [of the] Joshuas, Eric[s], Marks, Glenns, Kyles, Mikes, Bobbys; of the Aarons, Steves, Ricks, Joes, Toms and all of the other names known and unknown that I have hurt and left behind. I need to change and my need to change is now.”

Stokes claimed 212 victims -- from infants to adults, including neighbors, classmates and friends.

“What do I see -- a monster.... There have been no signs at the door ... that would tell the normal teenager, hitchhiker or college student that I am dangerous -- it was my responsibility and choice not to warn them because I wanted them for sex ... that could screw up their minds for the rest of their life.

“If just five percent of victims” became molesters themselves, he wrote, “then in two victim cycles there could be as many as 21 new offenders in the community and countless other lives affected.”

Despite his successes in court, Stokes was aware that “the times of nickel-and-dime prison [terms] have ended for me.”

“In many ... states I would be considered a habitual offender,” he wrote. “I want to break the victim cycle, eliminate the secrets that have been so much a part of my life and eliminate the lies.”

The Essay Resurfaces

Ned Stokes sold the funeral home in the mid-’80s for about $750,000 and retired to a life of golf. When Jeanne stopped throwing parties, friends assumed Eddie was the reason.

“It just destroyed their lives,” said next-door neighbor Cecilia Erickson.

Jeanne died in April 1995. Ned, battling emphysema, asked Susan to come to Renton to discuss his will. Among the documents he gave her was Eddie’s “Commitment to Treatment” essay and the chart he had made detailing his sexual history.

In a recording outlining his wishes upon his death, Ned Stokes admonished Susan to be fair with Eddie, to whom he was leaving half his estate.

When Ned died in September of that year, Eddie, who had recently been released from prison in Oregon, gathered up the two decades’ worth of stuff his father had kept for him. His essay wasn’t there.

Stokes served his sister with a subpoena in an attempt to get the document back. Instead, Susan gave it to prosecutors after her brother was arrested in 1996 for molesting the teenage runaway in Orange County.

At her father’s insistence, Susan had long been her brother’s enabler. Now she became his adversary.

Stokes tried unsuccessfully to prevent the essay from being used in court against him, saying its release would violate his privacy. He also alleged that his father molested him as a child.

“I think it’s something that Eddie made up to explain his own behavior. Eddie’s been a great liar for a long period of time,” said John Schaeffer, retired rector at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Renton, who has known the Stokes family since the 1950s. “There was a genuine love there that Ned had for Eddie. There were times when he was disgusted with him or infuriated. Still, he felt ‘this is my son and I have to take responsibility.’ ”

And he never lost hope. A few weeks before he died, Ned told Susan, “I think this time he’s learned his lesson.”

He hadn’t.

In early 1996, Stokes traveled back to the Seattle area, where he was arrested for violating his parole by leaving Oregon. Before he could be extradited back, he bailed himself out with $25,000 in cash, part of his $250,000 inheritance from his father.

Stokes headed to Seattle’s University District, a magnet for young runaways. He soon met Blue Kartak, a 16-year-old product of a broken home. Stokes told him he was in legal trouble -- he didn’t say why -- and was about to go to prison for a long time. He wanted one last hurrah, and offered to take Kartak to Disneyland. They drove to Anaheim in the Ford Thunderbird that Stokes’ father had left him.

Kartak told police and prosecutors that Stokes gave him LSD and forced him to drink shots of tequila, then bound him with chains and told the boy he’d abandon him in the desert unless he performed oral sex.

Kartak eventually escaped from the Little Boy Blue Motel in Anaheim while Stokes took a shower. A few days later, police arrested Stokes in Reno. He had $19,020 in a fanny pack.

Charged with kidnapping and sexual assault, Stokes again faced a potential life sentence, this time under California’s “one strike” law for aggravated sexual assault convictions. He fought the charges hard, running through half a dozen public and private attorneys.

“I have had to call my doctor because of elevated blood pressure and dizzy spells,” one attorney wrote the court, seeking to withdraw from the case. “This has all been attributable to my constant conflicts with Mr. Stokes.”

Stokes papered the court with dozens of requests, for things including special meals and a private barber. He petitioned the county to reimburse him after guards lost his tennis shoes.

“He was the boss running the show,” said Stokes’ court-appointed paralegal, a longtime prisoner rights and gay rights activist who legally changed his name from Andrew Exler to Crusader. “It was all Ed, all of the time.”

Crusader endured Stokes’ tantrums for more than a year. He found him to be intelligent, well-versed in the law -- and not the poor, unemployed hazardous-materials technician he claimed to be.

“He had no problem playing the stock market from jail,” said Crusader, adding that Stokes was generous with stock tips.

Stokes said in court filings that Kartak was a willing sex partner, a delinquent who “drank alcohol, didn’t work and did what he wanted.”

Kartak’s life was indeed a shambles when he met Stokes. The encounter plunged him into a deep despair. There was a mistrial, and the case was refiled and then delayed. Kartak was haunted by the prospect of testifying.

In 2001, five years after Stokes set his sights on him, Kartak was found in his mother’s garage in Colorado with the car running, his lifeless body in a cloud of carbon monoxide.

Put Away -- Not Quite

After Kartak’s death, Stokes went to trial again. He was convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to 19 years to life. Police and prosecutors along the West Coast were relieved, as were Stokes’ other victims, many of whom had followed the case closely.

But on appeal, the discovery of a supplemental police report that contained inconsistencies when compared with Kartak’s version of events became the key that would unlock Stokes’ prison cell.

The California 4th District Court of Appeal last year overturned Stokes’ conviction, ruling that his constitutional right to confront his accuser in court about this new information had been compromised by Kartak’s suicide.

When the state Supreme Court, in April this year, declined to hear the case, Stokes was free after eight years in prison.

Stokes wrote a letter to church workers he met in prison and people who had worked on his defense. “I am being given another chance,” he wrote, “and I do hope to use it to further my education and learn to blend into the community without further incidents.”

Then he disappeared. Law enforcement officials tried frantically to learn his whereabouts to ensure that he registered as a sex offender.

Ten days after emerging from behind bars, Stokes pulled a rental truck into the parking lot at Chambers RV Storage east of Portland.

Stokes told the owner he ran a company that helped stranded motorists, and he needed an ambulance. Stokes paid $9,000 for a used van equipped with emergency lights and a siren.

While transferring his belongings to the van, Stokes asked a salesman whether there were any “lot boys” available to help him run the rental truck back to Portland.

Two 17-year-old boys were working nearby. The salesman told Stokes they didn’t do that sort of thing.

The Ultimate Toll

Dwayne Lobberding, now 32, works as a mover in Colorado. Afraid to testify against Stokes in 1989, he confronted him in court in the Kartak case.

“I was scared to do it, but my life didn’t take a change until after I testified,” said Lobberding, an expectant father. “I wanted to finally face him. Immediately after I walked out of that courtroom, there was this feeling of relief. I got rid of a lot of hatred.”

Still, the anger and fear are never far away. Told of Stokes’ release from prison in California, Lobberding was speechless. That night, he barely slept.

Trevor Waugh spent most of his teens in trouble -- skipping class, running away, stealing cars -- until he finally opened up to a Christian youth counselor. Knowing that Stokes had been put away for life in California gave him comfort. Learning that he had been released brought the old emotions back to the surface.

“I thought I would never have to deal with it again,” he said. “Then I opened up the paper and there’s his picture.”

Steven and Michael Blakley never spoke about what Stokes did to them in 1986.

“Both of us tried to forget,” said Michael Blakley, 36, a married father of three who builds irrigation equipment in Nebraska. “I guess I did a better job of it than he did.”

After his overdose attempt, Steven Blakley moved on. He stayed in the Seattle suburbs, did auto body work, got married, had a son. But the marriage soured. Steven’s wife left him and took the boy. Steven began drinking heavily.

In early 1994, Steven put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He wrote of Edward Stokes in a note he left behind.

The day after the just-released Stokes bought his ambulance in Oregon, police arrested him at a coin laundry. Authorities had been searching for him after he allegedly falsified information on a driver’s license application.

A Multnomah County grand jury subsequently indicted Stokes on sodomy and sexual abuse charges stemming from two attacks in 1996. The statute of limitations in Oregon for the crimes is six years. But prosecutors argue that the clock stopped when Stokes left for California with Blue Kartak.

Stokes has mounted a challenge. “There’s a quick and speedy trial issue,” he said at a recent court hearing. Then he was taken back to jail, where he is being held without bond.

For now, at least.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

A journey through the criminal justice system

Edward Harvey Stokes’ known criminal history:

1974: Stokes, 18, is convicted in Washington state of sodomizing a 14-year-old boy. After being thrown out of a treatment program for sexual psychopaths, he is sentenced to 71/2 years in prison.

1979: Stokes is paroled.

1980: Convicted of unlawful imprisonment after abducting a teenage boy hitchhiking near Seattle. Sentenced to prison.

1984: Paroled again.

1985: Arrested on suspicion of statutory rape against a 13-year-old female runaway in Washington. The case is dismissed when the girl can’t be found for trial.

1986: Convicted of statutory rape in an assault on a 15-year-old boy in suburban Seattle. Sentenced to a year in prison, with credit for time served.

1989: A charge of first-degree sexual assault against a teen he had bailed out of jail is dismissed after the distraught teen fails to appear at a preliminary hearing.

1990: Suspected of sodomizing two teenage boys in Oregon, he pleads guilty to lesser sexual-assault charges and a firearms charge and, under a deal with prosecutors, is sentenced to 30 months.

1996: Meets a teenage runaway in Seattle and drives him to Anaheim, where he allegedly assaults him sexually. Convicted and sentenced to 19 years to life.

2003: A California appeals court overturns this conviction, ruling that the alleged victim’s suicide compromised Stokes’ right to question him about new evidence.

April 2004: The California Supreme Court refuses to review the ruling, and Stokes, 48, is freed. Two weeks later, he is arrested in Oregon, where he remains in jail on charges from 1996.

*

Source: Times research