PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — When Richard Gillmore, aka The Jogger Rapist, is released from prison December 16, he will be placed in subsidized housing in Portland’s Old Town. But the public won’t be warned exactly where lives and he won’t come up on the sex offender website.
The Oregon Parole Board classified the serial rapist as a low level sex offender, sparking outrage and frustration among the public and his victims after learning the evaluation does not include a current psychological examination.
Previous KOIN 6 News stories — The Jogger Rapist
“He broke in through my parents’ bedroom window and dragged me out of my living room and then to my room,” Colleen Kelly told KOIN 6 News recently. She was just 13 when Gillmore attacked her in her Southeast Portland home near Powell Butte on her mother’s birthday in December 1980.
“I will never forget that voice. That voice is implanted in my head,” she said.
Colleen is one of the 8 or 9 victims Gillmore admits to attacking. Each is dealing with the knowledge Gillmore is about to get out of prison.
“I honestly believe the parole board doesn’t care anything about the victims. They just care about getting him out,” she said.
10 question assessment
Richard Gillmore was classified as a low level sex offender based on a 10-question assessment of his history by the Oregon Parole Board. The assessment, called the Static-99R, doesn’t penalize Gillmore for the prior crimes beyond his one conviction for a 1986 rape.
That conviction was for attacking 13-year-old Tiffany Edens while she was alone in her Gresham home. The statute of limitations ran out for the other victims — and those cases are not counted under the guidelines devised by the researchers behind the Static-99R.
“We actually know from the research is that one of the best ways and most predictive ways to measure someone’s criminal history actually isn’t the number of victims they’ve had. It is the number of times they’ve gone before a judge and been sentenced,” said Maaike Helmus, a forensic psychologist and vice president for SAARNA, the Society for the Advancement of Actuarial Risk Needs Assessment.
The Canadian non-profit is behind the Static-99R, which touts it as “the most widely used sexual recidivism risk assessment instrument in the world.”
The score sheet gives Gillmore a lot of credit toward being a low-level sex offender because of his age — he’s now 63.
“Even some of the most prolific criminals do tend to burn out at some point as they get older. And this is even more true of sexual offenses,” Helmus told KOIN 6 News. “This might be a function of testosterone decreases. So aggressiveness decreases, sex drive decreases with age. There’s also research that people’s personalities change with age, they tend to mellow out.”
Overall, Gillmore scored a 0 on the Static-99R, which is in the middle of the low-risk zone. To a lay person without the extensive training on how to perform the test, Gillmore would seem to score a 6 — high risk.
“It is meant to be a tool that can rank offenders pretty well on their risk to re-offend based on simple, straightforward criminal history and demographic information that’s easy to obtain in the criminal justice system. It’s not meant to be a comprehensive psychological evaluation of personality characteristics and risk factors,” Helmus said.
She said research shows the severity of the offense does not increase the likelihood that person will reoffend when they get out of prison.
“The scale works reasonably well. Obviously, no one has a crystal ball. There are so many things that can factor into environments and human decision making, so we can never predict with certainty who’s going to re-offend or not re-offend, but the scale works pretty well in identifying who’s higher risk, who’s lower risk, and kind of that whole range in between,” said Helmus.
The Static-99R is the only evaluation the Oregon Parole Board has used since 2015 when the legislature transferred the task of determining what risk level to assign sex offenders from the Department of Corrections. The Static-99R is a tool to try and cut through a backlog of thousands of sex offenders who needed evaluation.
The backlog currently sits at more than 20,000 — about two-thirds of Oregon sex offenders.
‘It changes your life forever’
But Colleen Kelly is bitter Gillmore’s release is even happening.
Originally, he was sentenced to twice as much time in prison until the parole board cut his sentence in half just a year after his 1987 conviction. She testified against Gillmore in court.
“I come home from work at night and I check every room in the house from top to bottom, make sure nobody’s hiding. It does change your life forever,” Kelly said.
A Multnomah County spokesperson told KOIN 6 News it will give Gillmore additional psychological testing and will place him on a high-risk supervision plan. He will have a strict curfew and regular check-ins that includes making him wear a GPS electronic monitoring device to restrict his movement within the community.
But they also said they will re-evaluate whether to continue that GPS monitoring every 30 days.