Dean Arthur Schwartzmiller

I'm pretty good about being on top of crime news, so I don't know how I missed this story from about ten days ago.

Despite being arrested at least nine times for molesting boys, Dean Arthur Schwartzmiller managed to avoid lengthy prison terms, coach youth football, move in with another convicted sex offender - and be suspected by authorities as being one of the most prolific child molesters in history.

Schwartzmiller's criminal record began 35 years ago, but he never registered as a sex offender and spent just 12 years in prison. In his time on the outside, police suspect he molested children as many as 36,000 times in several states, Mexico and Brazil.

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A search of Schwartzmiller's San Jose home last week turned up spiral-bound notebooks with notes on more than 36,000 encounters with children, in categories such as "Blond Boys," "Cute Boys" and "Boys who say no" - together with codes appearing to indicate how he abused them, San Jose Police Lt. Scott Cornfield said.

...

Schwartzmiller called on Kevan [one of his lawyers in the 70's] for help when he was facing trial in Idaho in the 1970s on charges he molested two 13-year-old boys.

"I said, 'You've got to tell me what's going on.' He told me everything," Kevan said - outlining a history of molesting boys from Alaska down the West Coast.

Even then, Schwartzmiller had been keeping notebooks of his victims, with "a couple hundred" boys' names, followed by numbers that described each boy's anatomy, Kevan said.

"The investigators didn't know what they meant. They didn't even take them," Kevan said. "I told him to get rid of them."

I don't have any comment here, except that if it's true, even to a minor degree as the detective said, it's grossly disturbing and frightening that someone could have perpetrated such evil to such a large degree. I can't wrap my mind around how he possibly could have molested 36,000 kids in addition to spending 12 years in jail, and I'm skeptical of such an enormous number. However, even 360 kids would make him one of the worst child molesters in history and numbers in the thousands would be mind-boggling. There needs to be some serious investigation into why someone whose name was known to police was able to molest youngsters so prolifically with no detection.

This is exactly the sort of person prison justice is meant for. Sadly, that's not nearly enough in this case.