The Child Protection eNewsletter

Roger Clemens apologizes but denies affair with 15-year-old Mindy McCready… 

Roger Clemens carried on a decade-long affair with country star Mindy McCready, a romance that began when McCready was a 15-year-old aspiring singer performing in a karaoke bar and Clemens was a 28-year-old Red Sox ace and married father of two, several sources have told the New York Daily News.  Read More

The revelations could torpedo claims of an unsullied character that are central to the defamation suit Clemens filed January 6 against his former personal trainer Brian McNamee.

Vivid details of the affair could surface in several media projects that McCready is involved with—including a documentary that begins filming today in Nashville, a new album and a reality show.  McCready, who lives on a quiet, tree-lined street in Nashville, is attempting a career comeback following a string of legal and personal woes.

Contacted by the Daily News Sunday through his lawyer Rusty Hardin, Clemens confirmed a long-term relationship but denied that it was of a sexual nature.

"Even though these articles contain many false accusations and mistakes, I need to say that I have made mistakes in my personal life for which I am sorry," Clemens said in a statement issued by spokesman Patrick Dorton.  Read More  "I have apologized to my family and apologize to my fans.  Like everyone, I have flaws.  I have sometimes made choices which have not been right."

"I cannot refute anything in the story," a tearful but resolute McCready told the Daily News.

Catastrophe tourists descend on Austrian “House of Horrors”… 

The Austrian authorities have complained that "catastrophe tourists" are descending on the house where Elisabeth Fritzl was imprisoned in a cellar for 24 years—while new evidence revealed that her father raped her in front of their first two children when they were toddlers.  Read More

Ursula Puchebner, the deputy mayor of Amstetten, said that increasing numbers of German and Austrian sightseers appeared bent on getting a first-hand glimpse of the so-called "House of Horrors" where the incest ordeal went on for nearly a quarter of a century.

"These people are using Amstetten's proximity to Austria's main motorway to make a detour to the house where they indulge in what I call catastrophe tourism," she said.  "I find this shocking and I do not understand their motivation.  It shows no respect for the victims."

Meanwhile, Austrian police have revealed that Josef Fritzl spent years planning the labyrinthine bunker in which he imprisoned and raped his daughter, and that eight doors including two massive electrically operated steel hatchways separated the complex from the outside world.  Read More

Franz Polzer, of Lower Austria's criminal police said 73-year-old Fritzl, who has confessed to holding his daughter, Elisabeth, captive for 24 years and fathering her seven children, appeared to have had an "obsession" about locking her up that began at least six years before her underground ordeal began.  "He planned her incarceration and prison in minute detail with the objective of keeping his daughter captive for a long time," said Mr. Polzer.  "This goes some way towards explaining how he was able to conceal his actions from the rest of the world for so long."

Police believe Fritzl, 73, may have kept his granddaughter Kerstin, 19, as a sex slave in the windowless dungeon he constructed under his house in the town of Amstetten, west of Vienna.  Read More  Medics and detectives have been unable to speak to Kerstin who is in a coma and has suffered multiple organ failure after spending her whole life underground.

Fritzl’s lawyer Rudolf Mayer, who visited him in prison yesterday, told the Daily Telegraph:  "He's ashamed.  He regrets what he has done.  He wants a psychiatric expert to look into his soul.  He is ill."

Dr. Mayer said his client would plead insanity.  Fritzl is refusing to come out of the cell he shares with another prisoner, who is accused of drug offences, after other inmates threatened to kill him.

Austria is to consider introducing stricter punishments for sex offenders while making their criminal records widely available to social services in response to the Josef Fritzl dungeon case.  Read More

MPs will debate tomorrow how new laws might work after it emerged Fritzl was a convicted sex offender but was still allowed to adopt three of the children after convincing authorities that they were his grandchildren.

According to Austrian law, records on sex offences become outdated after 15 years, when they are no longer available to social services or even the police.  Fritzl served 18 months in prison in 1967, when he raped a woman in the city of Linz.  He was also charged with an attempted rape and indecent exposure in public, as well as for arson in an alleged insurance fraud.

In other news… 

INTERPOL is asking for the public’s help in identifying a man pictured sexually abusing children in a series of images found on the Internet and retrieved from the computer of a convicted pedophile.  Read More  The man, whose name, nationality and location are unknown is featured in approximately 100 images in a series of around 800, which are believed to have been taken in Southeast Asia and depict the sexual abuse of at least three boys aged between six and 10 years old.  The first pictures of the man were originally discovered by police in Norway in March 2006.  "The law enforcement community around the world has done all it can to find this man who clearly presents a danger to young children, and we are now asking the public to help identify this predator and protect other potential victims from abuse," said INTERPOL Secretary General Ronald K. Noble.

The number of New York City teachers yanked from their classrooms because of accusations of wrongdoing has doubled in four years, and some spend years collecting their salaries while awaiting disciplinary hearings, a newspaper reported.  Read More  Their pay costs the nation's largest public school system an estimated $65 million a year, not including the cost of hiring substitutes or renting space for the so-called "rubber rooms" where accused teachers spend their work days, the Daily News reported.  Read More Accused of offenses ranging from excessive lateness to sex abuse, an average of 700 teachers at any given time read magazines, play cards and nap in the "rubber rooms"—officially, Temporary Reassignment Centers, the newspaper reported.  As of January 29, one teacher accused of sexually abusing a child had been assigned to a rubber room for five and a half years, the newspaper said.  The average accused teacher waits four months for investigators to decide whether to bring formal charges.  If they do, it takes an average of nine more months for a hearing and another six months for a decision.  School officials said teachers are pulled from classrooms only if evidence suggests they are dangerous to children, and state laws and teachers' contract rules make it difficult to speed the disciplinary process.

Breaking with standards widely followed by the mainstream news media, the celebrity Web site TMZ posted a story about a 14-year-old who's a movie star's son and an alleged sex crime victim, and it ran the boy's picture.  Read More  The story said the boy was in a relationship with a 22-year-old woman, whose ex-boyfriend tipped off police that she was having sex with a minor.  Police have opened an investigation, the story said.  Almost all news organizations refrain from identifying sex crime victims, let alone show their picture, because of the stigma often attached to it, said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the journalism think tank Poynter Institute.  TMZ is owned by Time Warner Inc., the media conglomerate which also owns Time Warner Cable, Warner Bros., the magazine publisher Time Inc. and a group of cable channels that includes HBO, CNN, TBS and TNT.  A Time Warner spokesman referred calls on the matter to the company's Telepictures division, and a spokeswoman for Telepictures did not immediately return a call for comment.

Police discovered the bodies of three babies in a freezer of a single-family home in western Germany, and their mother is the only suspect in the case, authorities said.  Read More  The freezer was in the cellar of a house in the city of Wenden, and the babies appeared to have died shortly after birth, police said.  Police officials in North Rhein-Westphalia told reporters a woman turned up at a police station in Wenden to tell authorities about the corpses.  She admitted all three of the dead babies were her children, and said she "possibly" was the person who put the babies in the freezer.  The woman, 44, her husband, 47 and their three children, ages 24, 22, and 18, live in the home.  One of the children found the corpses by chance when opening the freezer to look for food.  The child noticed the freezer was cluttered and decided it needed to be cleaned, then found the corpses wrapped in towels and newspapers and placed in three plastic bags buried under piles of items.

American children take anti-psychotic medicines at about six times the rate of children in the United Kingdom, according to a comparison based on a new U.K. study.  Read More  Among the most commonly used drugs were those to treat autism and hyperactivity.  In the U.K. study, anti-psychotics were prescribed for 595 children at a rate of less than four per 10,000 children in 1992.  By 2005, 2,917 children were prescribed the drugs at a rate of seven per 10,000—a near-doubling, said lead author Fariz Rani, a researcher at the University of London's pharmacy school.  The study is being released Monday in the May edition of the journal Pediatrics.  By contrast, an earlier U.S. study found that nearly 45 American children out of 10,000 used the drugs in 2001 versus more than 23 per 10,000 in 1996.  See  vol4_iss25.

The District of Columbia has made several changes to its troubled child welfare agency since four girls were found dead in a row house in January, including more training and the reopening of cases, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty said.  Read More  The changes come after U.S. marshals serving an eviction notice found the decomposing bodies of Banita Jack's four daughters in a southeast Washington home.  Jacks has been charged with murder.  A school social worker initially raised concerns about the family in April 2007 after she visited the home and thought Jacks was holding the girls hostage.  But an investigation was closed weeks afterward because child welfare officials thought the family had moved to Maryland—even though the family was never located.  See  vol6_iss3  and  vol6_iss4.  The agency has worked with other organizations to review all 306 cases that were considered incomplete and closed last year.  Of those cases, 84 were reopened, including six that were immediately referred back to workers because officials believed there was a risk to the children's safety, said Sharlynn Bobo, the director of the Child and Family Services Agency.  "The message that we want you to get is that we paid attention; we are learning lessons from this tragedy," she said.  "We moved quickly to improve our procedures.  Our investigators cannot, cannot anymore close an investigation without ensuring that children have been located."

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