An Athens Boy Scout now grown and fighting demons of childhood victimization

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Alan McArthur wants to talk about his early teens.

He wants to talk about how he joined the Boy Scouts at age 12, how hugs from his scoutmaster turned into kisses, and how he can still smell the man’s aftershave. He wants to share how he initially cherished the day he thought he avoided the man by taking the bus home instead of accepting a ride only to find his rapist drinking tea with his parents at their house.

Alan McArthur, a 49-year-old Athenian with a successful business, wants to expel 35-year-old nightmares he says were induced by Ernest P. Boland, the man he alleges raped him for years when he was a teen.

“I need to speak the truth,” Alan said. “I need to take my power back.”

Today, Alan jokes about how much he hates camping, something for which the Boy Scouts of America are renowned.

But then, in the early 1970s, he rose through the ranks of dozens of boys in the troop to become the troop scribe. His parent’s picked Boland’s troop because of its great reputation: It was headed by a successful businessman and civic leader. At one point, a troop of his was profiled in Boy’s Life magazine and he ushered dozens of scouts to the Eagle Scout designation.

“He was a big man, not fat, just a big man, and he was hugging all the boys,” Alan remembers.

No one there seemed to know that Boland had left the scouts before under the suspicion of child molestation and allegedly forcing another scout, possibly multiple scouts, to perform sex acts. Alan just remembers being 12 years old and uncomfortable around the big man who insisted upon being called by his first name.

After being named scribe, Alan was told by Boland that they had some official Boy Scout business and the man picked him up from middle school. At Boland’s home, the boy sat on the couch, the man in a chair. Boland joined him on the couch and was strangely playful and affectionate, Alan remembers. He remembers the smell of the man’s aftershave when Boland first kissed him. He remembers Boland suggesting they get more comfortable before leading him into the bedroom.

“I remember that first car ride home,” Alan said. “I tried to push myself as far away from him as possible. If I could have crawled inside of that door, I would have crawled inside that door. I just didn’t want him to be able to touch me.”

Every time the man raped him, Alan remembers Boland telling him to go sleep with girls, only with more vulgar language. Boland told him that at least once a week, if not more, Alan said. He was still in middle school then.

From there, Alan said he mostly remembers specific incidents; the rest blurs together.

In another early incident, Alan saw Boland’s big, dull-gold Lincoln Towncar parked out front of his school and felt the need to escape. He snuck out another school entrance and got on a school bus instead of the passenger seat of the man’s car.

At this point in the story, the now-grown Alan looks toward the sky with clear emotions washing over him with the memory: Relief. Joy. Happiness.

Alan continues his story, pardoning interruptions, putting up with tangents in the conversation. His mind still focused elsewhere; still focused on when he got home from his sojourn on the school bus and when he saw Boland’s car in his parent’s driveway. Boland was drinking tea in the kitchen with his parents. Alan was ushered off with the man they thought to be his scoutmaster and nothing more.

“What was I going to say? ‘I don’t want to have sex today?’” the grown Alan said.

It was then, Alan recalled, that he felt his voice, his control of the situation, robbed. He was just an object for Boland’s use.

After that, after losing his power, he felt he had to go with Boland. At one point, they were driving down Broad Street. At Holman Avenue, the man told the boy that if he was good, “I’ll take you someplace special. A place I have set up for my art.”

They turned south on Milledge Avenue. They stopped at a long-term motel and apartment. Inside was a tiny easel, a small canvas, and no paint.

“It was at that point that I thought there were others,” he said.

According to an internal investigation by the Boy Scouts of America that led to Boland’s banning from the organization in 1977, a distraught father said his son, and up to a dozen others, had been Boland’s victims since the early 1960s. The investigator wrote that a local church pastor also knew about the apartment.

For Alan, the suspicion of not being the only boy was confirmed his freshman year of high school. He saw Boland’s car waiting outside. He walked up to it. He remembers Boland saying curtly, “I’m not here for you today.”

Alan doesn’t remember how old he was then. Maybe 14. He had been with Boland long enough at that point to feel something.

“It was a very weird type of emotion,” he said.

Alan said Boland would tell him that the moment he wanted to end it, all Alan needed do was say so. The boy wrestled with it for weeks until he finally told the man, no, he didn’t want to keep doing this. Like that, it seemed to end.

“I thought, ‘If it was this easy I would have done this a long time ago,’” Alan said.

But then Boland would come around again, usually at the school, and be back in Alan’s life. No prior announcement and seemingly no choice but for the boy to go with the man.

Eventually, Boland’s ploy turned to money. Boland told Alan that he knew how the boy could make some extra money. He left out the specifics, Alan said. After they had sex, the man left cash on the bed.

With uneasy inflections, Alan said, “I was a 14-year-old prostitute, I guess.”

It wasn’t until Alan, about 15, was at Boland’s company through a high school work study program that it ended. Boland’s wife took over, saying that she wanted to straighten the place up. One day, she summoned Alan to Boland’s office. Before that, he knew them as a couple that constantly fought. Boland frequently threw obscenities at her, Alan remembers.

Alan went up to the office.

“She doesn’t want you around anymore,” Boland told him. “I’ve got to let you go.”

Alan went home and bawled.

•••

That was 35 years ago and the last time Alan McArthur saw Ernest Boland. He returned to Athens about seven years ago and started his business with a friend. He frequently worried about running into Boland somewhere: the post office, the grocery store, some community event. He saw Boland’s wife once and had to fight to avoid going up to her and asking, “Do you know who I am?” He learned that the man from his youth had become relegated to a wheelchair and gained some relief from it, figuring Boland couldn’t be a danger to other children. But when he learned Boland died Feb. 7, there was a feeling of frustration that the man died having the last word.

It was a theme in their time together, Alan said. The man never gave credence to his voice, making it harder to come forward with his story. After all, if he had gone so long as a youth without his voice carrying any weight, why would anyone bother to listen afterward?

After having some time to digest the death of the man who had such a tremendous influence on his life, Alan seemed to cement his prior feelings: Boland, he said, is a man who did what he did to an untold number of boys and without ever facing any meaningful legal recourse.

“He’ll never be held accountable,” Alan said. “The only place he was going to be tried was the court of public opinion. But now, the question is, what will his legacy be?”

Alan said he always knew he was gay, even before his time with Boland. It wasn’t until he was 25 years old and in therapy for depression that Alan realized that what happened to him as a young man was more than just being sexually active at a young age.

“I had already aged out (of the statute of limitations) and I didn’t know I had been sexually abused,” Alan said. “I never thought it was wrong or illegal or nothing like that. I thought it was something that had happened to me.”

After years of counseling, he told his parents what happened to him as a teen. What had happened decades earlier was far beyond Georgia’s statutes of limitations. Because of that limitation, Alan thought there wasn’t anything more he could do to find justice.

For 35 years he wrestled with demons that smelled of aftershave and drove a Towncar. Now, he wants to cast those into the light. He wants to be a voice for the abused, an advocate to show people, yes, they were victimized, but they don’t need to live as victims or keep their stories hidden.

But most importantly, he wants to do whatever he can to prevent child sexual abuse.

“I’m not embarrassed,” he said. “I’m not ashamed. The thing is, I’m pissed about it. I’m mad. I was failed.”

He joined the Boy Scouts expecting a certain level of protection. He received a scoutmaster who was long suspected of raping young boys, but who had at that point not had a police report filed against him or even been blacklisted from the Scouts.

“If they had filed a police report, I never would have met that man,” Alan said. “The other boys never would have met that man.”

He acknowledges even if he hadn’t died, Boland wouldn’t see his day in court. Though the statute of limitations was eliminated from crimes committed after July 1, 2012, crimes committed before that must be reported within seven years of the victim turning 16 or the last time the crime happened.

That didn’t stop Alan from joining with another victim a few weeks before Boland’s death and filing a police report stating the abuse, just so there would be a paper trail against the man. And it doesn’t stop him from hoping Georgia legislators pass a law similar to what Hawaii did in 2012 that gave victims of childhood sexual abuse a two-year window in which they could file suit against their abuser, no matter how long ago the abuse took place, so they might find the justice denied him.

“Why are these laws protecting the abuser?” he asked. “Lawmakers need to ask their conscience.”

It’s one of many signs that point to how the culture has changed in the past 35 years, Alan said. There are advocates for victims of child sexual abuse and the subject is not as taboo as in the past.

“I feel we are called on in this life to do something,” he said. “I want to be a voice for those other men.”

Ernest Boland: Pillar of the Athens community and alleged child rapist

Read on OnlineAthens.com

Editor’s note: In October 2012, after a lengthy court battle to keep them private, the Oregon Supreme Court ordered the Boy Scouts of America to release files naming nearly 1,200 volunteers accused of child molestation.

Among those listed is Ernest P. Boland, a prominent businessman active in the Athens community for decades. He recently passed away at age 88.

In the following four-month investigation by reporter Nick Coltrain, some of the abused speak publicly for the first time about the failings of a culture and system that protected a predator and others like him.

The story also examines the changing culture of sexual abuse and what safeguards are in place to protect the innocence of children.

Forty years ago, Ernest P. Boland, a successful businessman, on-again-off-again Boy Scout troop leader, and overall pillar of the community, kept a group around called Boland’s Boys.

They were barely teenagers and a shared interest in motorcycles brought them to his white-pillared home, said some of those who belonged to the group. And it was there Boland allegedly raped at least two of them.

But these accusations, as documented in a police report filed Christmas Eve and in interviews with victims and family of victims, would have likely gone no further in the legal process, even if the accused was still alive and even as these alleged victims and others come forward to tell eerily similar stories of boyhood victimization by Boland.

Boland, who died Feb. 7 at age 88 and was wheelchair bound, started sexually assaulting boys decades ago, according to court-released documents and victims. So much time had passed that the state statute of limitations prevented Boland’s prosecution, even though his alleged acts haunted the victims into adulthood.

“Probable cause may now be established, based on a reported and documented history of similar accusations against Boland from within the (Boy Scouts of America) and within a similar time frame,” an Athens-Clarke officer wrote in the police report filed in December. “However, in light of (the accuser’s) account, the crimes ... are not prosecutable at this time. Said offenses do not fall within even the widest limitation on a time period for which prosecution is allowed.”

Since the Christmas Eve report, another victim, Alan McArthur, filed a police report as well — also without hope of it going further than that. But for him, like the other, having it documented was as much justice as they could hope to get.

Banned but unreported

The earliest incident supposedly took place in 1961, when as a scoutmaster Boland forced a Boy Scout to perform oral sex on him. He allegedly continued to rape that victim until 1963, according to an internal Boy Scouts of America investigation written in 1977.

That report was released by order of the Oregon Supreme Court in October as part of a trove of documents, dubbed the Perversion Files, which the BSA kept to track those banned from volunteering with the organization.

Calls to Boland’s home upon release of the documents were not returned, nor was a note requesting comment left on his door when no one answered several knocks.

The Boland family attorney, Ed Tolley, said two days before Boland’s death that the alleged child rapist would not comment on the allegations.

The accusations of rape in the early 1960s came to light a decade after it allegedly happened, with the father saying his son first reported it during psychiatric counseling. Boland, with a different troop then, resigned before a troop committee could ask him to step down, according to the internal Boy Scout investigation. He cited health reasons.

The scout executive at the time hoped the resignation would resolve the situation, though “there was strong evidence that Boland had been involved with several Scouts.”

But when Boland wanted to establish a new troop three years after that resignation, all a scouting official wrote he could do was discourage the man. Boland had not been placed on the confidential file — the blacklist for the organization — or otherwise reported for his alleged actions. And it was between the two troops that he had Boland’s Boys. Among them was Mike, the boy who as an adult filed the Christmas Eve police report. According to that police report, he was sexually abused until 1975, when Mike and his family moved away from Athens.

According to the police report, Boland would “often expose (Boland’s Boys) to sex by showing the boys sexually explicit materials and by telling them about Boland’s own sexual activities.” The man started isolating Mike as a boy, calling him handsome and telling him he loved him, according to the police report.

The report lists the potential charges as aggravated child molestation, aggravated sodomy, enticing a child for indecent purposes and sexual battery.

According to the internal Boy Scouts investigation, Boland started lobbying to form the new troop in 1973. The scout executive wrote that he was able to discourage Boland until 1975, which is when Boland reportedly asked point blank, “Is my name on the Confidential List of B.S.A. and can you prevent me from becoming a scoutmaster?” The executive wrote that he continued to discourage him, but “had to admit that I could not prevent his registration.”

The new troop was chartered in 1975. About six months later, the father of the alleged victim from the 1960s reiterated his accusations, according to the Boy Scout files. He had also stated as many as 12 boys were involved, “but in every case, parents had determined not to come forward because of the potential for harm to their sons who were now adults with families.” The father ultimately made the same decision, given his son was 30 years old and a dentist at the time.

The Boy Scout’s investigator wrote “there was still concern that we could place charges that would hold up in a court of law.” It is unclear if it was an option they were seeking to pursue or concerned the parents would pursue such charges. The investigator could not be reached for comment. Public records requests to area law enforcement agencies turned up no records of law enforcement investigation or charges from the matter.

The Boy Scout investigator turned up more allegations, including that Boland had raped a 12-year-old who was a ward of his through the Clarke County Juvenile Court, according to the BSA documents. The investigator wrote that he never accused Boland outright, but the man nonetheless resigned a final time before being added to the blacklist. In a letter to his troop committee, Boland cited problems with his business.

Rev. Dr. James N. Griffith, pastor of Beech Haven Baptist Church, which sponsored Boland’s troop at that time, reportedly told the investigator that Boland had kept an apartment away from his home and without his family’s knowledge. Boland, an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, also provided two scouts from broken homes with plane tickets to Maryland to spend the week with him in a motel, Griffith reportedly told the investigator.

In a recent phone interview, Griffith said his memory was shaky.

“It’s pretty hard to remember anything from 30 years ago,” but “something was done about (the reports) right away,” he said.

It was handled as a church matter and by church leaders, Griffith said, adding that pastors try to help people, not hurt them.

“They handled it in the correct way, as far as our church was concerned,” he said. “I’m sure they did the right thing for the church.”

When asked if they did the right thing for the victims, he said, “I’m sure they did that, too.”

He couldn’t say why law enforcement wasn’t involved and said the brunt of that responsibility should have fallen on the Boy Scouts commission. But he did think that Boland, after all these years, would want this matter from four decades prior buried.

“I would certainly think Mr. Boland, being a good man, I mean a churchman with a fine family, doesn’t want that noise disclosed,” Griffith said.

He’s not alone in that. A woman who answered the phone number listed for Mrs. Perry Sentell Jr., who was one of the people on the troop committee notified of Boland’s final resignation after he was blacklisted, said it wouldn’t help anyone to drudge up these demons.

“I think if it were just ignored at this point it would help a lot more folks,” the woman said before hanging up.

The other eight people on that list either couldn’t be reached or said they didn’t know anything about the accusations.

In an email shortly after the release of the confidential file in October, a spokesperson with the Boy Scouts of America noted that it mandates reporting suspected abuse to law enforcement. They also wrote that the “BSA believes confidentiality of the files helps to encourage prompt reporting of abuse.”

Slipping through

It does not seem law enforcement was entirely without suspicion of Boland. However, current law regarding accusations of child molestation make it impossible to know through public records requests just how much may have been known or what may have stopped any investigations before they developed into charges.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation apparently looked into Boland about two decades ago, but wouldn’t confirm or deny it. The Department of Human Services, Division of Family Children Services, through which Boland apparently took in foster children, likewise would supply no records.

Both requests, made through the state open records law, asked for any record referencing Boland. In denying the requests, both agencies cited Georgia law that exempts records from public disclosure if they pertain to child abuse.

GBI’s open records officer initially said a possible file had been found. But the final response to the records request states that it “does not confirm or deny any investigation of Ernest Boland. If an investigation alleging child molestation did exist, it would be exempt from release.”

The written request submitted to the GBI made no mention of child molestation.

Alan A. Cook, director of the University of Georgia’s law school’s prosecutorial clinic and a former district attorney, said he believes the policy reason for the law is to protect children making the accusations from having their names disclosed and also to protect adults who are falsely accused.

“If that is readily available to the public, some people might assume where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” he said. “... It’s hard to unring a bell.”

He noted that the law allows disclosure once charges are filed. Cook, who prosecuted 34 child sexual abuse cases, also drew from personal experience where allegations didn’t seem truthful. He said people should be protected from that, considering how easy it is to make a false claim. But more often, he said, it was the evidence that was lacking.

The law cited by GBI and DHS allows for a “laundry list” of agencies and individuals that would have access to the files even if they weren’t public, he said. It is unclear if GBI’s and DHS’s records would be related to each other. Cook said that when allegations of abuse against an individual do surface, it’s routine to look into that person’s background for similar allegations.

Mandated reporter laws also change the landscape, with it now being a crime for adults, through their job or volunteerism, in routine contact with children, such as coaches and teachers, not to report suspicions of abuse, he said.

“That’s another check and another safeguard,” he said.

But such a law didn’t exist at the time Boland allegedly abused boys in his charge.

It appears Boland had gone before a judge in Franklin County for allegedly showing boys photos of male sex organs while camping at Lake Hartwell, a former probation officer there, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said. However, no records detailing the charges showed up during a thorough search of the courts in Hart County. It is possible the documents were sealed.

The probation office there confirmed Boland had been on probation, though documents could not be released, a clerk there said. But the case stuck out to the former officer, especially after another probationer said Boland molested him as a boy. The officer also remembers it well because of Boland’s minor punishment.

“Basically nothing,” the officer said. “One year of unsupervised probation.”

Cook, the law professor, said it sounds like Boland possibly struck a deal under the first offender law, which allows defendants who plead guilty and complete probation to not be considered to have a criminal conviction. It would have still required the guilty party to register as a sex offender, though it’s unclear if charges would have been before registration was required or if the charges would have required it.

The law “does insulate the offender,” Cook said, and he would be surprised if it was used in the case described.

“It’s rare that it would be used in an adult public indecency case,” he said.

The probation officer said Boland’s reputation helped him secure it. Boland was a former chairman of the Athens-Clarke County Commission when it attempted unification in the early 1970s, a prominent business owner and was a member of the Advisory Board of the Clarke County Board of Education. The 1977 report blacklisting Boland from the Boy Scouts of America notes “the complicated part of this matter deals with the image the man portrays” to the community.

“He wouldn’t have gotten that deal anywhere else,” the probation officer said.

Boland’s attorney at the time was Nick Chilivis, an Atlanta lawyer whose accolades include successfully defending former federal Office of Management and Budget Director Bertram Lance against federal charges and successfully representing the University of Georgia Athletic Association in a trademark infringement dispute.

When the family of one of Boland’s alleged victims, also described as one of Boland’s Boys, confronted the man in about 2000, Chilivis wrote them a letter saying they should not contact Boland, whom he described as “my good friend whom I have known for 50 years.” They should also “seek advice concerning the Georgia law involving defamation,” Chilivis wrote.

In a brief phone interview, Chilivis said he has no recollection of that exchange.

The alleged victim died later after a life rife with substance abuse issues, which his mother alleges began after Boland used alcohol to seduce him.

According to a letter the mother and her victimized son wrote to Chilivis, the young man dramatically changed after the abuse started. The victim, who is not being named to protect his children and family, went from being “a son any parent would have pointed to with pride” to one who was admitted to a hospital for troubled teens because of his self-destructive behavior.

“This was the beginning of years of counseling and hospitalization for him, both for depression and alcoholism,” they wrote in the letter to Chilivis. “Because of the embarrassment, he never admitted to any of his counselors what his deep-seated problem was. This did not happen until many years later when he revealed it to us after he had been in a treatment center.”

In contacting Boland and writing the letter, they were following advice from the pastor of their church to “find a way to bring justice and closure to this part of (his) life,” they wrote.

Sally Sheppard, executive director of The Cottage, a sexual assault and children’s advocacy center in Athens, said alcohol and drug abuse is the most common way for survivors of childhood sexual abuse to cope with what had happened to them. It can be easier to be in a chemical haze than confront memories of abuse, she said. Such negative coping mechanisms make her more worried about the child victims she doesn’t see than the ones she does.

Aside from self-destructive behavior, the scars of abuse run deep, Sheppard said. It can induce post-traumatic stress disorder, bouts of depression and anxiety that stress them physically as well as mentally and invade every aspect of a victim’s life.

“It affects every facet of every relationship that they ever have,” she said, adding that she doesn’t only mean romantic or sexual relationships either.

She recommended those trying to push through such childhood tragedies seek out support networks of friends or family and seek counseling. Her organization can set victims up with therapists who specialize in the trauma they are trying to deal with. But that all depends on the victim being able to put words to what had happened to them.

Predators, especially those with years of experience, Sheppard said, can become very good at finding the perfect victim: Quiet and able to be persuaded by special attention. Some estimates have the number of victims in the triple digits, she said. It’s an assumption she makes for Boland, given the time frame in which the accusations began.

“Child molesters, especially ones that get away with so many victims over such a long time, they pick the perfect kid to go after and they do it time and time and time again,” Sheppard said. “I mean, they’ll have hundreds of victims until they get caught.”

In an interview, the mother said she didn’t know for decades about her son’s abuse. They never pursued legal action because of the statute of limitations. A lawyer friend had told them “you could spend every penny you have, you could lose you’re home, and still not win your case.”

So she spent years after her son told them of the abuse, after he died, after her husband followed soon after, praying to see Boland’s name in a headline connecting him to molestation.

“I don’t care if they put him in jail or what they do with him,” she said prior to Boland’s death. “I just want him revealed.”