'Life' sentence in teen sex case
Ex-counselor gets 100 years
By Mike Miller
July 18, 2006
A former counselor at a group home for
troubled boys in Madison was sentenced today to 100 years in prison
and 85 years of extended supervision for sexually assaulting teenage
boys and videotaping many of those encounters.
"I'm well aware this is a life
sentence," said Dane County Circuit Judge Daniel Moeser as he
sentenced Gregory Ledbetter, 39, who was convicted of 28 counts of
sexual assault or videotaping sexual episodes.
"The only way to protect the public
in the long run is to lock you up for a long period of time," the
judge told Ledbetter. "I don't see that you'll ever be safe to have
in the community again."
In both Indiana and Wisconsin,
Ledbetter had engaged in what he termed his "addiction" of sex with
teenage boys, and his undoing came last year when he became furious
with a youth he was having sex with after learning the teen also had
sex with a girl. The boy called police after Ledbetter became angry
about the situation.
That led to an investigation that
resulted in Ledbetter being charged with 92 counts of sexual
assault, child sexploitation and child enticement with 10 victims, including four
he met while working at the Spring House Group Home on Stoughton
Road. The victims ranged in age from 14 to 17, except for one man in
his 20s who has a mental deficiency caused by a childhood brain
injury, detectives said.
During the course of the
investigation, detectives executed a search warrant on Ledbetter's
home and seized 150 videotapes from a safe, most of which were
meticulously labeled with the name and age of the victim and the
date of the sexual encounter.
In two long letters to the judge,
Ledbetter said he was remorseful for the assaults, but also took
pains to say the victims were always willing participants in the sex
acts, a claim which was disputed by a 14-year-old victim at an
earlier preliminary hearing in the case. In court today, Moeser
called those letters a "desperate attempt to not be locked up for
the rest of your life."
Speaking before Moeser imposed the
sentence, Ledbetter said "I just want to say I am sorry to my
victims" as well as to his family.
Assistant District Attorney Robert
Kaiser argued for the lengthy sentence for Ledbetter, saying it was
the only way to assure he would not continue to violate teenage
boys, and that Ledbetter has never shown concern for his victims.
"The only thing that matters in his
life is his narcissistic self," said Kaiser. "His goal and purpose
was satiating his sexual desire."
Assistant State Public Defender
Dennis Burke said locking up Ledbetter for life would amount to
subjecting him to "a miserable existence, a long slow death." Burke
recommended a prison term of 20 years to be followed by 25 years of
extended supervision, and said a better plan would be to have him
declared a sexual predator immediately so treatment could begin.
But Moeser, citing the number of
crimes, the number of victims and the significant impact on the
victims, said Ledbetter would continue to be a danger and needed to
be locked away. He also decried Ledbetter's continued attempts to
manipulate the system in his letters to the court.
In his first letter to the judge,
Ledbetter said the suicide of a teenage boy who was his lover when
Ledbetter was a teen in Indiana was so upsetting that he was placed
in a mental institution. Ledbetter's sister, who also wrote to the
judge, said the loss of his teenage lover "affected him profoundly,"
and speculated that in his continual sexual pursuit of teenage boys
Ledbetter "may have been subconsciously trying to recreate that
experience."
After earning a bachelor's degree
with a double major in education and art at Purdue University,
Ledbetter began working with teenagers in his home state of Indiana.
He was charged in 1996 in Lafayette, Ind., with 43 counts of crimes
involving sex with teenage boys, but all of the charges were
eventually dropped when some of the boys began recanting their
accusations.
Ironically, in the police search of
his Madison apartment last October, some of the videotapes he had
cataloged including scenes of Ledbetter having sex with three of the
Indiana victims, but police in Indiana did not have that evidence at
the time his case was dropped there.
Ledbetter, in one of the letters to
Judge Moeser, said a logical question to ask would be why he
continued his activity when he moved to Wisconsin after the close
call in Indiana.
"The answer is I never really faced
the negatives of my actions in Indiana and when I tried to stop in
Wisconsin I tried it with no counseling, support or monitoring," he
wrote.
In that first letter to the judge,
Ledbetter also admitted to abusing his position of trust, but said
"I honestly cared about all my victims. I never wanted any harm to
come to them. I wanted to take care of them and make them happy."
Ledbetter suggested that he be placed
on electronic monitoring in a group home and given treatment for his
sex addiction, adding that he would "even be willing to accept
castration as part of my release back into the community."
But after seeing a pre-sentence
report in which Department of Corrections probation and parole agent
Steve Rice recommended that Ledbetter be put in prison for 100
years, Ledbetter wrote a second letter to the judge.
This time he complained bitterly
about Rice's report, and insisted that he was not the "selfish,
narcissistic person who only thinks about himself," as Rice
portrayed him. But he also seemed to realize that prison was a
certainty and the only question was how long the sentence would be.
In that letter, Ledbetter said a sentence of 20 years in prison to
be followed by 20 years of extended supervision would be sufficient.
"I know that I should go to prison
for a long time," he said. "To lock me up for the rest of my life is
more punishment than I deserve."
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