Felons, Freedom and Fear : Parole: Release of a notorious criminal like Charles Rothenberg raises community concern--and tough questions for society.

On a spring night in 1983, Charles Rothenberg poured kerosene around the bed where his 6-year-old son David slept in a Buena Park motel. He then lit a match and fled. Moments later the room exploded into flames; the little boy survived, but his body was seared with third-degree burns.

After repeated skin grafts, David, now 13, still bears scars on his arms, legs and face, and his fingers have been amputated to the first joint.

Today, he and his mother, Marie Hafdahl, who has since remarried, will enter another traumatic phase of their ordeal. After serving 6 1/2 years in prison for attempted murder, arson and other crimes, Charles Rothenberg, 49, begins a three-year parole at an undisclosed location.

With his release, Rothenberg joins a small group of criminals whose deeds have been considered so heinous that they have sent shock waves of revulsion through the country. When the penal system has attempted to place these ex-offenders in communities to serve their parole, residents have responded with virulent protests.

But to what extent is that protest justified? Do the people who live in communities where these offenders are released need to live in fear? While crime victims and the townspeople who must receive especially offensive criminals point to high recidivism rates, experts caution that a person’s prior criminal record and life style are better indicators of the potential for future crime than an individual act, no matter how heinous.

Criminal psychologists list crimes involving torture, rape and child abuse as those to which people are likely to respond the most emotionally. In California, such community reactions have been consistent in a number of notorious crimes.

* After he raped 15-year-old Mary Vincent, chopped off her forearms and dumped her in a canyon near Sacramento in 1978, Lawrence Singleton became one of the state’s most reviled criminals. At the end of an eight-year prison term, Singleton began a celebrated parole odyssey during which prison officials attempted to place him in 16 Northern California communities. In an exceptional measure, Gov. George Deukmejian ordered him to serve the 10 remaining months of his one-year parole on the grounds of San Quentin prison.

* Arthur Jackson, the deranged movie fan who stabbed Theresa Saldana 10 times outside her West Hollywood apartment in 1982, aroused fear and widespread protest when he was scheduled for parole last June.

After Jackson’s cellblock threats to complete his “divine mission” of murder upon his release, Saldana, the Los Angeles City Council, 60 members of the state Assembly and thousands of residents urged the state Board of Prison Terms to reverse its decision. On the basis of a window-breaking spree at the Vacaville prison, his parole was postponed until March, at which point Jackson will be deported to Britain.

* When Dan White, a former police officer, firefighter and member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978, he became the object of nationwide attention. When he was released from prison after serving five years on a manslaughter conviction, thousands of San Franciscans took to the streets in protest. (After a secretive year’s parole in the San Fernando Valley, White quietly return to San Francisco where he committed suicide 10 months later.)

Fueling community fears are statistics on violent crime and recidivism. According to a U. S. Justice Department report published last March, 62.5% of all inmates released from state prisons in 1983 committed a felony or serious misdemeanor within three years of their release.

Almost a third of those who served time for violent crimes were re-arrested for violent crimes.

“You find a degree of specialization among offenders. They’ve done it in the past, so they’re more likely to do it in the future,” says Justice Department statistician Allen Beck. (The report stated that 6.6% of convicted murderers murder again; 7.7% of rapists repeat the crime.)

Despite the statistics, however, psychologists and psychiatrists involved in the study of criminal behavior qualify the potential danger presented by the release of violent criminals.

“You read about a Night Stalker or a Singleton and you think the institutions are filled with these people,” says Saul Faerstein, a Beverly Hills forensic psychiatrist who examined Hillside Strangler Angelo Buono. “But institutions are filled with common thieves and forgers.” Adds Daniel Glaser, professor emeritus of psychology at USC, who specializes in criminology: “The fear of crime is not closely related to the rate of crime. It’s related to the publicity about the crime.” The chances of any one person being assaulted by a criminal with the notoriety of a Charles Rothenberg is roughly comparable, he says, to the luck of winning the state lottery.

There are, however, certain types of people who are more likely to repeat crimes than others. Says Glaser: “The best predictor is their prior criminal record. If they have a history of prior crimes or alcoholism or drug addiction, they’re more likely to repeat than if the crime was an outburst of anger in the family.”

Adds Faerstein: “When you find a combination of psychosexual disorder and sadistic disorders, these people have a high likelihood of committing heinous crimes. But this is a very small percentage of cases, though they are the cases that make the newspapers.”

People who wear their crimes like a badge with no remorse are also more likely to repeat them than those who fear society’s ostracism, Faerstein says. “They have a need to attract attention.”

But without detailed study of the person, both experts say, it is difficult to predict individual behavior.

This is what worries Marie Hafdahl, her husband, Buena Park Police Lt. Richard Hafdahl, and their son, David.

In her Buena Park home, Marie and David are trying to stave off the fear that could envelop them.

David says, softly, but firmly, “I’m afraid. I don’t want to see him again.”

Hafdahl is more emotional. The words fly out like sparks from a fire, as she tells of her four-year marriage to Rothenberg and the incident that almost killed David. Rothenberg had taken his son on a trip to California after their divorce, and, when he did not return him to his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., at the arranged time, Hafdahl told Rothenberg by phone that he would never see his son again. The same day Rothenberg bought a bottle of kerosene.

Now Hafdahl sighs. “I’ll never get over the loss David’s had. It’s broken my heart.”

Nor can she get over Rothenberg’s act. “I live with it every day. You don’t hurt a child. You don’t hurt your own baby. And when he’s sleeping. It’s horrendous.”

Does she consider her former husband to be dangerous? “Yes,” she replies. “If you can do that to your own son, what would you do to a stranger?”

Fear, whether felt by an individual or a community, is fed by noted examples in which criminals terrorized communities after serving time for prior offenses.

Convicted murderer and rapist, Willie Horton, became a focal point in President George Bush’s campaign against Michael Dukakis after Horton violated his furlough from a Massachusetts prison, raped a Maryland woman and repeatedly slashed her boyfriend.

The conundrum facing communities and law enforcement officers was illustrated by the release of Jerry (Animal) McFadden, a three-time convicted rapist, to the tiny East Texas hamlet of Hawkins in the fall of 1985.

The following May, McFadden murdered three of the town’s teen-agers, raping one of them.

The town’s sheriff, Frank White, says he protested McFadden’s coming to Hawkins to the Texas Board of Parole and the Department of Corrections; but when McFadden arrived, White did not notify the residents.

“After I hit the ceiling and bounced off the wall, I didn’t do much,” he says, adding that he feared stirring up unnecessary panic (“You can’t hit the streets and say, ‘Lock up your daughters. We’ve got a sex fiend on the loose,’ ” he maintains). He adds, “I didn’t know where I stood legally as to further enhancing his (McFadden’s) bad reputation.”

As a result of the murders, however, Hawkins resident Janie Wilson led her community and the state in the formation of a victims’ rights group, “We the People,” which was responsible for the adoption last fall of a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing crime victims a more active role in the criminal justice process. Texas is one of five states, along with Washington, Rhode Island, Florida and Michigan, that have adopted constitutional amendments giving victims the right to be heard at parole hearings and sentencing.

But, says Wilson, the loss to a community struck by heinous violence cannot be legally mended. “He stripped us of our innocence,” she says of McFadden, now an inmate on death row.

Townspeople lock their doors at night and when they have to drive over rural roads to the local shopping mall at night, they go in twos and threes, she adds.

While communities feel threatened and helpless, it is often the victims who suffer the most anguish and outrage at the release of their assailants.

Says Linda Barker-Lowrance, program director of the National Victim Center, an information and referral organization in Ft. Worth: “They feel vulnerable and helpless. First the perpetrator takes their control away. Then the police take it through their investigations. Finally the prosecutor has control.”

Some victims resort to drugs and alcohol to alleviate the pain, she says. They develop such eating disorders as bulimia and anorexia, and are subject to migraine headaches, depression, ulcers and heart attacks. A vast number of victims also have thoughts of suicide.

For Marie Hafdahl, the symptoms have appeared as stomach disorders and chest pains. She attends stress control sessions with a psychologist, and, she says, she and David have taken self-defense classes.

She is sure Rothenberg will try to contact her son. “He’s obsessed with David. He views him as his possession. I don’t think he’ll let things be. They’ll start eating away at him. It’s just a matter of time.”

But she says, as if coaching herself, “I cannot let my fear overtake me,” and she adds with a rush, “I can’t run away from this, even though I would like to.”

Prison officials and criminal experts point out that thousands of violent criminals are regularly released into public life without the public’s knowledge.

Placement of parolees is typically known only to local law enforcement officials. Says California Department of Corrections spokesman, Tipton C. Kindel: “It’s not something the public needs to know. We want to give ex-offenders a fair chance to reintegrate into society.” Law enforcement officials are free to inform the public of a former criminal’s whereabouts, and, concedes Kindel, “It may happen in this (Rothenberg) case, but we hope not.”

In extreme cases, when notorious criminals have been identified in communities, reaction has at times reached lynch mob hysteria.

When Singleton was suspected of being in a motel in the Bay Area community of Concord, a crowd of several hundred gathered outside to protest. The town’s police chief, George Straka, recalls that even people who had known him for years didn’t believe him when he said Singleton was not inside. “They shut down rational thought,” he says.

Assistant Sheriff of Contra Costa County, Warren Rupf, similarly remembers how “everybody--the public, the county officials, the politicians--got hysterical” when Singleton was discovered living in an apartment house in the little township of Rodeo.

Even the police officers, who were called in to remove Singleton from the apartment house where an angry mob had gathered, felt a dual pull of emotions. “It was extremely frustrating,” says Rupf, who brought Singleton to the safety of the sheriff’s office. “Our officers were in a position of having to defend a person they felt deserved more severe punishment.” When they brought him out of the apartment, Rupf says incredulously, “he was smiling.”

On the other hand, criminals say society cannot lock them out forever. It must give them a chance to change their behavior.

“It would be crazy for a town to say, ‘Oh, boy, are we glad to have you back.’ They don’t know if the person has changed or not,”’ says Donald Weindorf, 55, who runs the Nebraska branch of the International Seventh Step Foundation, a Canada-based criminal counseling network, employing ex-offenders.

However, says Weindorf, who served nine years for armed robbery in Illinois, “People look at offenders as animals. If you’re going to hassle them all their lives, you might as well just kill ‘em.”

The best way to reduce recidivism, say Weindorf and others who work with former prisoners, is through rehabilitation programs that work to change the attitudes of ex-offenders. According to Weindorf, in the last four years only two out of 214 ex-cons who came through his program have been re-arrested.

Normally, says Weindorf, criminals experience street shock, stress, fear and ostracism after their release and, without help, are “a big screw-up. When they can’t handle a situation they tend to fall back into old patterns.”

A former rapist and Seventh Step veteran, who spoke on condition of anonymity, points out the extent of alienation a criminal can typically experience.

“I was a pretty sick guy,” he says. “Crime was my cry for attention.” During nine years in San Quentin, he says, “there were damn few times when I felt human.” When he was freed, he states, “I had no more idea why I raped that woman.” Each time the parole board would ask him, he says, “I’d go out and find the answers. I told them what they wanted to hear so they’d let me out.”

It is this type of image of criminal behavior that haunts Marie Hafdahl when she thinks of her former husband. Rothenberg has sent her a letter saying he would not harm her nor David and has spoken of helping other parents who commit child abuse.

But, Hafdahl says, “He’s just trying to build up his image so people will loosen up. I know him. He’s so mixed up, it’s impossible for him to be rehabilitated.”

She says that, although he has refused interviews before his release, Rothenberg has agreed to appear on the “Oprah Winfrey” and “Larry King Live” shows; both programs have invited her to appear with him. She is appalled at their audacity (“Do they expect to have a family reunion?” she exclaims) and snickers dryly, “Charles loves publicity. He actually thinks he’s going to be a TV celebrity.”

But, pondering the question no one can answer, she adds darkly, “I wonder what will happen when the publicity dies down.”