angelofnursing66 45yo Lexington, Kentucky, United States

A Coach Admitted To A Sex Crime On Tape. But When The Victim Died, He Walked Free.

BUY quality bulk Yahoo Twitter Hotmail Google Voice Facebook Accounts
sumpinspeshal 48yo Lumberton, North Carolina, United States

Emilie Morris turned on the digital recorder wedged into her sports bra. She pulled her SUV into the Saint Louis Galleria mall parking lot, where a high school running coach named Jim Wilder waited. The device picked up some rustling, a Rihanna ballad on the car stereo, a deep breath, and Emilie’s voice: “Let’s hope this goes well.”

It did, at least from the perspective of the St. Louis County Police Department, the owner of Emilie’s recorder. Seven weeks later, police arrested Wilder based on the contents of the tape: an 87-minute conversation in Wilder’s car centered around their sexual activities in the mid-90s, when Emilie was a 16-year-old cross-country star at Lindbergh High School, and he was her 29-year-old coach. Wilder was charged with six counts of statutory sodomy, each one punishable by up to seven years in prison.

Before the charges came, though — before she even gave police the recording — Emilie drove to her parents’ suburban home and wept. It had taken her more than 15 years to get there. At age 33, she’d pulled herself from a thicket of self-loathing and depression, bulimia and alcoholism, to come forward and report Wilder. Now she wanted him to pay for what he’d done. Wilder had been arrested once before, based on an allegation of sexual contact with another student, though he evaded charges due to lack of evidence.

But Wilder wouldn’t go to trial in Emilie’s case, either. Emilie was found dead in her apartment in November 2014, more than a year after the secretly recorded conversation, while her case against Wilder was ongoing. Without the victim alive to testify, prosecutors dropped the charges, leaving Emilie’s grieving family bewildered and furious. They had a tape of a man admitting to crimes that they say propelled a young woman into a downward spiral. It was evidence they felt couldn’t be ignored. None of that mattered.

Emilie Morris

Courtesy of the Morris family

When provided a detailed letter outlining the allegations in this story, Wilder referred BuzzFeed News to an attorney, who did not respond to requests for comment.

This January, as they watched the victims of former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar tell their stories en masse, the Morris family felt furious all over again. Their Emilie never had the chance to confront Wilder in court. Just as sporting officials failed to act on allegations against Nassar, Emilie’s family says Lindbergh school officials failed her. In 1996, Lindbergh’s principal conducted a “complete investigation” of possible inappropriate behavior between Wilder and Emilie and found only that Wilder was a “positive influence on his athletes.”

“What could have been different for her if Lindbergh officials had properly investigated when these warning signs first started?”

In 1996, according to state experts on child abuse, that principal was required by law to notify authorities — namely the Missouri Department of Social Services’ Children’s Division — of any suspected abuse. If authorities were notified, the Morrises never heard about it. Had the system worked, what would the rest of Emilie’s life have looked like?

That’s what Emilie’s mother, Joan Morris, and sister, Andrea, have been wondering. “What could have been different for her if Lindbergh officials had properly investigated when these warning signs first started?” said Andrea.

In response to what happened in 1996, Lindbergh Schools said it had no record of whether the information concerning Wilder and Emilie was reported to social services. The district further said its “responsibility is to keep students safe at all times,” and that outside of the principal’s investigation and Wilder’s two subsequent arrests, it didn’t receive any other complaints from parents or students during Wilder’s 22 years of employment. The principal, David Skillman, who left Lindbergh High in 2001 and has since retired, did not respond to requests for comment.

Every state has laws that require “mandatory reporters” — usually teachers, doctors, and law enforcement officers — to report suspected child abuse to authorities. In recent years these laws have tightened, particularly in response to the scandal involving Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, who was seen raping a boy in a campus shower by another assistant coach. Under the Pennsylvania law in effect at the time, the witness only had to report what he’d seen to his boss, not to authorities. This February, largely in response to the Nassar scandal, President Trump signed the Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act — the federal government’s latest attempt to force sports organizations to report any suspected abuse of child athletes.

Nassar’s bounty of victims may have faced years of abuse and silencing by a powerful man within a powerful institution, but in the end, the justice system worked for them. Nassar was found guilty and effectively sentenced to life in prison. Yet the same system made Emilie’s case disappear, allowing the man who admitted to sex acts with a minor to walk free, and holding no one accountable.

Emilie’s case may be an unusual one, but it’s one that reveals deep cracks in the system — crack after crack that she fell through. Since her death, her family has been left staring at them, wondering whether they’ll ever be filled.

Andrea and Joan Morris

Carolina Hidalgo for BuzzFeed News

Joan kept everything that belonged to her daughter: all the papers, artwork, photo collages, and private journals that Emilie didn’t destroy or discard herself. She kept the quilt Emilie was tucked into when her lifeless body was found. She stored it in her basement, where the rabbit Emilie adopted the summer before her death also lives. Emilie named him Honey Bunny, but her 66-year-old mother calls him Big Bunny now.

As a kid, Joan said, Emilie was “crazy funny,” fast, and sharp. “She could have been a stand-up comedian. When she was on her game her timing was perfect.”

Emilie was an honor-roll student and an artist like her father, whose oil paintings of landscapes and still lifes speckle the walls of the Morrises’ living room. But she also had daredevil tendencies, whether on her bike or rollerblades or diving board or the trampoline in her backyard. In middle school, her math teacher — James Bliss Wilder III, then new to the school district — encouraged Emilie to channel that energy into cross-country running, Joan said. He coached the sport at Lindbergh High School.

Lindbergh was a public-schooling gem of St. Louis County, at one time the largest high school in the state. (In more recent years, it was named a National Blue Ribbon School, and ranked in Missouri’s top 10 best public high schools.) As coach of the Lindbergh Lady Flyers, Wilder was “Mr. Wonderful,” Joan recalled, dedicated to the team and personally invested in his athletes. “He was sincere. He would look you straight in the eye when he would talk to you.” With Wilder’s coaching, Emilie became an exceptionally good runner, often earning the best times on her team.

By the time Emilie entered her junior year at Lindbergh, in the fall of 1995, she and Wilder had developed a close mentor-mentee relationship. She had shoulder-length blonde hair, clear skin, and warm blue eyes, but she thought of herself as a nerd. She would open up to her then-29-year-old coach about boys and her social life, and he would give her advice.

The first time Wilder crossed a line, they were at a cross-country team practice at Bohrer Park, about two miles from Lindbergh High, Emilie told police. The team was playing capture the flag. Emilie was on the sidelines; she forgot her workout clothes that day. She approached Wilder, who was standing behind a tree, and began telling him about a boy at school who wanted her to play “chicken,” a supposedly playful test of how far he could go, or how far she’d let him go, running his hand up her leg.

Bohrer County Park in St. Louis County, Missouri.

Carolina Hidalgo for BuzzFeed News

Wilder then asked Emilie if she wanted to play chicken with him, she told police. He pulled his hand up her leg and stopped at her thigh, but when she called him a chicken, he went higher, placing his palm on her crotch, over her jeans, Emilie said. He pulled away when a boy on the team ran past them. After practice, Wilder drove Emilie home at her parents’ request. Emilie invited him into her empty house. On a blue ottoman in the living room, she said Wilder removed her pants and underwear and performed oral sex on her. After a few minutes, he asked if she wanted to stop. She did. They went to the backyard and jumped on the trampoline.

From that point on, Emilie performed oral sex or another sex act on Wilder about once a week, including on school property, she told police, though they never had intercourse. She was 16, one year under the age of consent in Missouri, and at the time she thought of their situation as a relationship, a top-secret affair — Wilder was married with a child. But they were reckless with their secret.

Once a passerby caught them in the men’s bathroom of a park. Another time, while they were driving around town together, Wilder saw a fellow teacher and told Emilie to get down, pushing her head into his lap, Emilie told police. They would meet in private in the wrestling room at Lindbergh, Emilie said, but occasionally another teacher or administrator would approach, and she’d jump into a box of uniforms to hide. At the state cross-country competition in Jefferson City during Emilie’s junior year, team members went to see the movie Seven. Emilie masturbated Wilder over his track pants while another coach sat on the other side of him, she said.

Emilie Morris and Jim Wilder

Courtesy of the Morris family

But the closest they came to getting caught was in March 1996, the spring of Emilie’s junior year, when Lindbergh’s principal, David Skillman, called Emilie’s parents to discuss information he said he’d received, and investigated, regarding inappropriate behavior between the coach and athlete. Joan recalled the way Skillman phrased it: “‘Emilie has been accused of having an affair with a teacher.’” She was incredulous. “Emilie has been accused. What?”

Emilie’s parents requested a meeting with the principal, Joan said. Emilie and Wilder were there, too — “stone-faced” for the duration of the roughly 30-minute meeting. They both swore nothing had happened. The adults concluded that the rumor had been invented by someone jealous of Emilie’s success on the cross-country team, Joan said. Joan asked Skillman for a letter exonerating her daughter, and she got one.

By then, though, the rumor was widespread. Emilie had confided in at least one teammate. Others were aware that something was going on, said Christine Lieber, a classmate who later became one of Emilie’s closest friends. “Everybody in high school knew what was going on. ... Parents and other cross-country people had seen them in the woods,” she said. But Wilder was young, handsome, and popular. “None of us thought there was anything wrong with that,” Lieber said. It was “what he’d always done.”

The rumor lingered for years, still circulating even by the time Emilie’s sister, Andrea — younger by six years — got to Lindbergh High and joined Wilder’s Lady Flyers team. Andrea said that among her classmates and teammates, it was like Emilie and Wilder were the “butt end of a joke” that she never quite understood. By the end of his first decade with the school district, Wilder had become such a beloved coach that he earned a special recognition from the Missouri House of Representatives, complete with a banquet thrown in his honor.

Emilie Morris's senior-year scrapbook.

Carolina Hidalgo for BuzzFeed News

Emilie may have raised red flags about Wilder herself in her teenage journals, but they’re only red in retrospect. In a scrapbook she compiled in 1997, the year she graduated, Emilie wrote, “I admire Coach Wilder for his warm heart and compassionate ways. His ability to be both an incredible coach and a great friend.” She cut out pictures of the two of them at practice or meets and pasted them into the book. She wrote that her most “unforgettable” moment of high school was “Bohrer Park. Bawk bawk bawk baaawk! Between capture the flag. Chicken!?” Out of context, it reads like a harmless inside joke. In another secret notebook, Emilie wrote more cryptic poems about a torturous, unrequited, forbidden love — but so did a lot of other teenagers.

This was the problem Emilie’s family faced as they watched her deteriorate throughout high school: Was this normal teenage angst, or something more? Instead of the funny, carefree, and outgoing girl they knew, Emilie was becoming angry, secretive, and self-conscious, Joan said. She struggled to complete tasks. A former springboard diver, she now refused to be seen in a bathing suit. “I remember her crying and crying before she’d go to high school because her bangs weren't right,” said Andrea, now 32. “I wish that I had someone telling me or my mom at the time, ‘This is what's happening. She needs help.’”

Joan recalled the way Skillman phrased it: “Emilie has been accused of having an affair with a teacher.”

Joan sent Emilie to therapy, she said, but she still wouldn’t open up. And it wasn’t just Emilie’s family who sensed her changing. A friend from high school told Emilie years later in a Facebook message that he “for sure noticed a change [in] high school. You were such a close friend then you fell away.” He said it was like a light switch. “Always wondered what had happened.”

Of all the dark periods in her short life, college would be Emilie’s darkest, marked by depression, suicidal thoughts, and increasingly severe bulimia. In conversations with police and friends years later, Emilie would trace her eating disorder back to Wilder’s criticism of her body. In high school, he once told her to get liposuction, she noted on the back of an official team photograph of herself in her Lady Flyers uniform.

Getting Emilie through college was “just a mess,” Joan said, but in 2001, she graduated from Lindenwood University with an English degree. By 2007, she was married with two children and happy, for the first time in years, her family said. Which is why, in December 2008, when Wilder was arrested based on a report that he had sexual contact with a current female student, Emilie stayed out of it. She’d poured herself into her marriage and babies and “she didn’t want to rock the boat,” Joan said.

Besides, the charge against Wilder didn’t stick. In February 2009, the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office announced it had no “credible evidence that any sexual contact had taken place” between Wilder and the anonymous minor. (The woman who brought the allegation against Wilder in 2008 declined to speak to BuzzFeed News for this story.) Cleared by prosecutors and social services, Wilder returned to his job, telling a reporter the experience was an “absolute nightmare.”

“You're just walking down the street and it comes out of the blue,” he said.

One of Emilie Morris's cutout photos for her scrapbook.

Courtesy of the Morris family

By the time Emilie decided to come forward with her own allegations against Wilder in 2013, she’d been struggling with alcoholism for at least three years. She and her husband divorced in 2012, and he was granted sole custody of their two children.

During these years, Emilie tried to get better — through therapy, rehabs, and medication — but her efforts never stuck. Her drinking broke her parents’ hearts and dominated their lives. But her drinking is also what finally brought Emilie’s high school secret to light. While drunk, she would tell her parents everything she’d done with Wilder. She’d blame them for not doing enough to stop it. Suddenly, Emilie’s life — that downward spiral — made more sense to Joan.

“Her drinking literally had everything to do with the fact that she hated herself. She hated who she was, she hated the things she had done,” Joan said. “She wanted to annihilate herself.”

In the summer of 2013, amid another effort to get better, Emilie told her parents she was thinking about going to the police, but she was hesitant. A part of Emilie thought she loved Wilder once, and she didn’t want to ruin his life.

“I said, ‘Emilie, he’s ruined your life,’” Joan recalled. She told Emilie to think of her own daughter, then 7, and imagine a teacher grooming and abusing her. “That just lit a torch.”