Police Report Details Multiple Sexually Abused Children by Religious Leader

By Jay Field
MPBN
August 3, 2012

http://www.mpbn.net/Home/tabid/36/ctl/ViewItem/mid/3478/ItemId/23087/Default.aspx

A former religious and civic leader in Bangor sexually abused several multiple children over the last forty years, according to people interviewed in an investigation by the Maine State Police.

The Reverend Robert Carlson jumped to his death from the Penobscot Narrows Bridge last November, shortly after learning that he was the target of a probe. A final police report on the now-closed case, obtained by MPBN, suggests people were concerned about Carlson's behavior as far back as the 1970s. It also raises questions, and provides few answers, about why people didn't do more to investigate their suspicions or report them to law enforcement.

Last month's scathing report on Penn State's handling of allegations against Jerry Sandusky highlights what appears to a pattern of looking the other way that's all too common in sexual abuse cases.

Nothing in the Maine state police report suggests anyone who was suspicious of Carlson did anything wrong.

And the Carlson and Sandusky cases have little in common.

But some of the interviews described in the report do suggest that opportunities to stop Carlson's predatory behavior may have been missed.

Maine State Police Lt. Chris Coleman oversees major crimes investigations from Brunswick to Ft. Kent.

"I understand there are a lot of unanswered questions that this report points to," Coleman said.

Here's one unanswered question: last December, investigators interviewed Bob Welch. He's a former Bangor police officer and now works for the police force at the University of Maine.

In an interview, he told investigators that in 2004 and 2005, he began noticing Carlson's Crown Victoria parked, several nights a week, in the dark areas of a parking lot near his house. Welch thought it was weird. He told investigators that one night he saw Carlson leave the parking lot with a young child.

According to the report, Welch talked to a Bangor police detective about putting up surveillance cameras, but they decided it was too dark to get good pictures.

Bob Welch did not respond to a request for comment left on his answering machine at UMaine.

The section in the report immediately following the description of this incident is redacted.

So it's unclear whether Welch ever attempted to go see what was going on in Carlson's vehicle or formally reported his suspicions to police.

"The reason this is different from a normal investigative report is that after his death we weren't seeking prosecution," said Coleman.

So Lt. Coleman said there will naturally be many more questions more than answers.

A few others relate to Carlson's time at Husson University, where he served as volunteer chaplain, worked with the football team and was interim head of security for a time.

In 2005, according to the report, a minister in Vermont called his friend, then Husson president Bill Beardsley, and warned him that Bob Carlson wasn't who he appeared to be.

Beardsley, who now heads the Maine Department of Conservation, said he also got a call in 2006 from someone unaffiliated with the university.

The caller told Beardsley that Carlson had had a sexual relationship with a third-party, years ago.

"And in that conversation I said, Is there anything to do with any students at Husson, anything to do with minors, with children any of those kinds of things?" said Beardsley.

The caller said no, but demanded that Beardsley confront Carlson with details of the phone call and threatened to go public with the allegations if he didn't.

"So I conveyed it, I repeated what the conversation was, and he chose to, within hours, I can't remember if it was overnight or later that day, he tendered his resignation," Beardsley said.

In the police report, an investigator writes about allegations of abuse by two Husson students under the age of 18, one of whom reportedly sent a third person to alert Beardsley's office.

But Beardsley said that never happened.

"The one bottom line is that, to this day, I have no knowledge whatsoever of Bob Carlson being involved in illegal or unlawful behavior," he said. "No knowledge of any relationship sexually with any students, anybody at Husson University or outside Husson University, other than what I've learned from the media."

The gender, names and ages of Carlson's vicitms are redacated in the report, as are the details of what Carlson allegedly did to them.

"We were hoping to have victims feel they had an avenue to come forward, if they chose, to tell their story," Coleman said. "During the time the report was open, the investigation was open, we received information from people that points to several victims."

But the investigation is closed now and Lt. Chris Coleman said authorities will likely never know exactly how many people Reverend Bob Carlson abused.