One autumn night when their son was 7 years old, Rita and Norm Holthouse were at their best friends' dining room table, laughing and playing a board game -- most likely Scrabble -- while one of the cruelest things a person could do to a child was being done to theirs in a basement bedroom beneath their feet.
They only know this now, 26 years later, because they discovered their son's childhood diary. If they hadn't, he would never have written his story. A man would likely be dead, and David Holthouse would be shouldering the load of a second oppressive secret. Or facing life in prison for premeditated murder.
But once his parents discovered the truth, he was free to tell the world what happened to him that night. David's parents honored his decision to tell it all, to write of being brutally raped and the ways it altered his life.
They've known for nearly a year now. Still, it's a daily struggle to live with.
"One of the more horrible thoughts is, I wonder when it was happening if David could hear our voices, because we were just overhead," said Rita, fighting to keep her composure. "We were such a finite distance from him and yet such an infinite distance. That's what comes to me in the middle of the night."
David's father, now retired, was executive director of technology and management systems for the Anchorage School District for more than 20 years. His mother, a lifelong activist, is a former school board member and retired principal of East High School. They've always been more than aware of the violence people are capable of inflicting upon children. Rita, especially, dealt directly with such realities in her work.
"It's one thing to deal with it there and another to have it be your own child," she said.
David's story, "Stalking the Bogeyman: Coming to grips with the killer inside me," was published in Westword, a Denver alternative news weekly, this month. After getting through the story, Rita dug through a drawer in her home office and found the little wooden car he mentions in the aftermath of the attack, the one the perpetrator -- the teenage son of their dearest friends -- had built for him, scripting "David's Delight" on the side. She and David's father took it to their lower Hillside driveway and, with a sledgehammer, smashed it to bits.
As good as that felt, it didn't last long. Nor did the relief she got confronting the man who did this to her son.
The night before David's story came out, she left a message on the man's answering machine, telling him to call, making it clear that if he didn't, she'd be flying to Denver, showing up at his workplace and that they'd be having a conversation there.
He called.
" 'Rita, I'm so sorry,' " he told her. " 'What can I do?'
" 'Cease to exist,' " she told him.
"He was like 'Oh, Rita this, and Rita that.' I finally told him not to use my name because I couldn't stand hearing it come out of his mouth.
"I just raged at him. I called him names. I swore at him and I just ...
"I told him, 'A pedophile, that's what you are.' I told him that I have read too much about pedophiles to doubt for even one second that David was his only victim. I also wanted to let him know I'd spend the rest of my life trying to find the others.
"I do things every day toward that end."
She's spending a lot of time on the computer these days, and making a lot of calls. She's even hired a private investigator.
"If I'm understanding correctly, talking about the crime of abusing children, the statute of limitations in Alaska is now 30 years. But I think that passed in 1987, and at that time they grandfathered it back to 1982. David was raped in '78. But any rapes this man (may have committed) as a young adult in the state of Alaska would fall within that."
Although she cut off contact with the man's parents, her heart goes out to them, and she's told them so.
"It's very hard to have a son who has been raped. It's also hard for them to have a son who did the raping. I think their hearts are as broken as ours.
"They were wonderful parents. They were supportive of him. They were interested in his activities. They spent a lot of quality time with him. He's just a bad seed. I truly believe in the existence of that now."
She believes in a lot of things she once didn't. She believes it's dangerous for males to be baby sitters or for kids to have sleepovers, because there's no way of knowing who might show up at the house.
She worries whether children in public schools are getting the information they need to stay safe. She worries if children in private schools and those being home-schooled are getting any information at all. She worries about single moms with new boyfriends and coaches and cousins and ministers and neighbors and people who endear themselves to parents because they're so good with kids.
"It's not the strangers to beware of, although you need to do that, too. But it's the people you know. They live among us. And with us.
"There's obviously no way we can prevent the existence of pedophiles. There are a certain number of them, they are always going to be among us, evidently. The only thing we can do as parents is just to become almost paranoid about it."
Being raped at 7 and terrified into secrecy has affected her son in more ways than she can know. One way she does know is that David had planned his own suicide. If what the experts say had come to be -- that those abused are likely to become abusers -- David's plan was to die in the mountains. He had couloirs on Flattop and Ptarmigan Peak picked out.
"I was terrified I was going to become a molester myself, and that was far more traumatic than the rape," David said. "I made a pact with myself the first time I felt any sort of sexual desire or any desire to hurt or have sexual power over a child, I would kill myself, and I don't doubt I would have done it.
"Frankly, I feel like anybody who does have those feelings, they owe it to the world to kill themselves."
Until the truth got out, David had also planned to settle up with the man who raped him by following him into the vacant field where the man takes his nightly walks and shooting him first in the crotch, then in the back of the head. Now his mother wants revenge too. She wants this man in prison.
But at this point, David isn't so sure. Because when he finally got that chance to confront him, it didn't go at all the way he expected.
He admitted what he'd done, David said. He cried. He "apologized profusely." He swore he'd never done it before or since.
"I can't know for certain he was telling the truth. I want to believe it in the same way I want to believe in God. And I have a really hard time with both."
People keep telling David how courageous he is to have written his story. As an investigative journalist for alternative newspapers, he's put himself in the middle of gang wars, infiltrated underground neo- Nazi assemblies, has been shot at and received death threats he's taken seriously enough to leave the country awhile. Once his parents knew and he could no longer protect them, writing of being raped did not feel courageous. It felt obvious.
The hardest part was deciding whether to identify the man. His editors at Westword weren't sure, either. The confrontation didn't take place until two days before publication deadline. David had a hidden microphone in his backpack when the man admitted what he'd done. Once David had that on tape, his editors gave him the green light to use the man's name.
David agonized over it until the very last minute, writing two endings for his story. One was the ending that ran. In the other, the last line of the story was the man's first, middle and last name.
"Does he deserve to have his life ruined for one time? I decided not," David said. "He deserved a second chance if he was telling the truth.
"I also thought of his children, who have done absolutely nothing to me. If it was going around school, how hard that would be for them when they're completely innocent.
"But if he's lying ... we will put his face on the cover of Westword as a child molester, as a kiddie rapist, if any other victims come forward."
The response to David's story has been phenomenal. He's received more than a thousand letters and e-mails, at least half from people with stories similar to his own. After feeling so alone for 25 years, that he didn't expect.
"After meeting your attacker, do you feel somehow at peace?" one writer wanted to know.
"I do now feel the best I have ever felt in my adult life," David said. "I don't want to use the word 'peace.' I don't feel at peace."
The scope of this social sickness is way too big for that.
"I definitely feel avenged," he said. "He took a lot of power from me when I was 7 years old, and I've taken it back."
Daily News reporter Debra McKinney can be reached at dmckinney@adn.com.
Postscript
The Daily News left phone messages on the Colorado answering machine of the man Holthouse confronts in his story. The man never called back, but he made contact with the Daily News through his Anchorage attorney, Sidney Billingslea.
Billingslea disputed the depiction of the rapist as an older teenager. The original account printed May 13 in Westword, a Colorado alternative newspaper, said the rapist was 10 years older than Holthouse. The Daily News story characterizes him only as a teen.
"My client's year of birth is 1964, which would not make him 17 in 1978. It would make him 14.
"It's a big difference to say a 17-year-old child rapist is running around raping children versus a skinny little 14-year-old on a one-time incident," Billingslea said.
The incident, had it been reported in 1978, would have been treated in juvenile court, she said, or maybe even "adjusted with counseling." If it happened today, it would be a misdemeanor.
"It was a catharsis (for Holthouse), and I think it was probably a good thing for him to meet my client," she said. "My impression is, it was good for both of them.
"(My client) wanted to do this, He just didn't have the courage."
-- Kathleen McCoy, features editor
