H
Harry Hope
Guest
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/12/04/documents-expose-huckabee_n_75362.html
December 4, 2007
Documents Expose Huckabee's Role In Serial Rapist's Release
By Murray Waas
Little Rock, Ark --
As governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee aggressively pushed for the
early release of a convicted rapist despite being warned by numerous
women that the convict had sexually assaulted them or their family
members, and would likely strike again.
The convict went on to rape and murder at least one other woman.
Confidential Arkansas state government records, including letters from
these women, obtained by the Huffington Post and revealed publicly for
the first time, directly contradict the version of events now being
put forward by Huckabee.
While on the campaign trail, Huckabee has claimed that he supported
the 1999 release of Wayne Dumond because, at the time, he had no good
reason to believe that the man represented a further threat to the
public.
Thanks to Huckabee's intervention, conducted in concert with a
right-wing tabloid campaign on Dumond's behalf, Dumond was let out of
prison 25 years before his sentence would have ended.
"There's nothing any of us could ever do," Huckabee said Sunday on CNN
when asked to reflect on the horrific outcome caused by the prisoner's
release.
"None of us could've predicted what [Dumond] could've done when he got
out."
But the confidential files obtained by the Huffington Post show that
Huckabee was provided letters from several women who had been sexually
assaulted by Dumond and who indeed predicted that he would rape again
- and perhaps murder - if released.
In a letter that has never before been made public, one of Dumond's
victims warned:
"I feel that if he is released it is only a matter of time before he
commits another crime and fear that he will not leave a witness to
testify against him the next time."
Before Dumond was granted parole at Huckabee's urging, records show
that Huckabee's office received a copy of this letter from Arkansas'
parole board.
[See the full letters sent to Huckabee's office here.]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/12/05/exclusive-the-complete-h_n_75373.html
The woman later wrote directly to Huckabee about having been raped by
Dumond.
In a letter obtained by the Huffington Post, she said that Dumond had
raped her while holding a butcher knife to her throat, and while her
then-3-year-old daughter lay in bed next to her.
Also included in the files sent to Huckabee's office was a police
report in which Dumond confessed to the rape.
Dumond was not charged in that particular case because he later
refused to sign the confession and because the woman was afraid to
press charges.
Huckabee kept these and other documents secret because they were
politically damaging, according to a former aide who worked for him in
Arkansas.
The aide has made the records available to the Huffington Post, deeply
troubled by Huckabee's repeated claims that he had no reason to
believe Dumond would commit other violent crimes upon his release from
prison.
The aide also believes that Huckabee, for political reasons, has
deliberately attempted to cover up his knowledge of Dumond's other
sexual assaults.
"There were no letters sent to the governor's office from any rape
victims," Huckabee campaign spokesperson Alice Stewart said on Tuesday
when contacted by the Huffington Post.
Subsequently, however, the campaign provided a former senior aide of
Huckabee's who did remember reading at least one of the letters.
But Huckabee and his aides insist that his receipt of the letters is
irrelevant because the decision to release Dumond was made by the
parole board.
Huckabee on Tuesday again denied allegations by former parole board
members that he lobbied them to release Dumond.
"I did not ask them to do anything," he said.
"I did indicate [Dumond's case] was sitting at my desk and I was
giving thought to it."
Charmaine Yoest, a senior adviser to the Huckabee campaign, told the
Huffington Post:
"I think what should be considered here is that if he [Huckabee] could
have changed what happened, he would. His whole life has been about
respect for life and understanding the value of each individual life.
Nobody regrets the loss of life here more than him."
In 1996, as a newly elected governor who had received strong support
from the Christian right, Huckabee was under intense pressure from
conservative activists to pardon Dumond or commute his sentence.
The activists claimed that Dumond's initial imprisonment and various
other travails were due to the fact that Ashley Stevens, the high
school cheerleader he had raped, was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton,
and the daughter of a major Clinton campaign contributor.
The case for Dumond's innocence was championed in Arkansas by Jay
Cole, a Baptist minister and radio host who was a close friend of the
Huckabee family.
It also became a cause for New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy, who
repeatedly argued for Dumond's release, calling his conviction "a
travesty of justice."
On Sept. 21, 1999, Dunleavy wrote a column headlined "Clinton's
Biggest Crime - Left Innocent Man In Jail For 14 Years":
"Dumond, now 52, was given conditional parole yesterday in Arkansas
after having being sentenced to 50 years in jail for the rape of
Clinton's cousin," Dunleavy wrote.
"That rape never happened."
A subsequent Dunleavy column quoted Huckabee saying:
"There is grave doubt to the circumstances of this reported crime."
After Dumond's release from prison in September 1999, he moved to
Smithville, Missouri, where he raped and suffocated to death a
39-year-old woman named Carol Sue Shields.
Dumond was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life in prison for
that rape and murder.
But Dumond's arrest for those crimes in June 2001 came too late for
23-year-old Sara Andrasek of Platte County, Missouri.
Dumond allegedly raped and murdered her just one day before his arrest
for raping and murdering Shields.
Prior to the attack, Andrasek and her husband had learned that she was
pregnant with their first child.
Dumond died of natural causes while in prison on September 1, 2005. At
the time of his death, Missouri authorities were readying capital
murder charges against Dumond for the rape and murder of Andrasek.
Huckabee has refused to release his gubernatorial administration's
records on the matter, saying that he was concerned for the privacy of
Dumond's victims and that the records contain sensitive law
enforcement information.
The Arkansas Parole Board also refuses to make public any letters or
warnings it received from Drumond's victims.
"We don't release comments for or against a clemency application or a
parole case," the Board's spokesperson told Huffington Post, "except
when they are comments from public officials."
But most of the women assaulted by Dumond and interviewed for this
story say that Huckabee could have made information public while
guarding their privacy.
Law enforcement authorities also scoffed at the idea that anything in
the records would have harmed an ongoing investigation since Dumond is
no longer alive .
The records revealed in this story -- including correspondence between
Dumond's victims and Huckabee, as well as the governor's own file
regarding Dumond -- were provided to me in the fall of 2002 by a
Republican staffer to then-Gov. Huckabee.
I made the decision not to make the files public at that time because
of concern for the privacy of the rape victims and their families.
I felt that their right to privacy outweighed the public's right to
know, although I understand why many people would disagree.
Now that Huckabee is running for president, and after consulting with
the victims and their families, I have decided to proceed, given what
his actions on the case - and his attempts to whitewash his
involvement in it -- say about his judgment and integrity.
During a 2002 bid by Huckabee to be re-elected governor of Arkansas,
the staffer who provided the documents attended a meeting where
Huckabee and top aides expressed concerns that information in the
files showing that other women had told Huckabee about being raped by
Dumond might somehow become public, and thus become an issue for his
opponent.
The information remained secret, and Huckabee won a tight race for
re-election.
The staffer said that during that same period, another senior aide to
Huckabee suggested asking other state agencies, which might have
portions or even the entirety of the Dumond file, to transfer their
records to the governor's office.
If the files were transferred, the aide to Huckabee said, they would
no longer be obtainable by reporters or political opponents under the
state's Freedom of Information statute.
Arkansas has one of the most progressive Freedom of Information laws
in the country.
People need only to make requests orally whereupon state officials
have to quickly respond and make them public.
Governors, in sharp contrast, have wide latitude in deciding which of
their own files to make public.
"The files had to be disappeared because there just wasn't a plausible
explanation for the governor's stance," the former staffer said.
"I mean, what could the governor say? That he believes these women
made up their stories? That women lie when they say they are raped?"
Asked on Tuesday whether Huckabee would release his file on Dumond,
campaign spokesperon Alice Stewart said, "We're not the governor, we
don't have the file."
Asked if Huckabee would ask the current governor to release the file,
she responded, "No. I don't want to see it. You apparently want to see
it."
Dumond raped Ashley Stevens, Clinton's distant cousin, in 1984 when
she was a 17-year-old high school student in Forest City, Arkansas.
He was convicted in 1985 and sentenced to life in prison, plus 20
years.
In 1992, Jim Guy Tucker, who became governor of Arkansas after Clinton
left office, reduced Dumond's sentence to 39.5 years.
Shortly after taking office in 1996, Huckabee announced his intention
to commute Dumond's sentence to time served.
A public outcry ensued.
Stevens, her father, and Fletcher Long, the Arkansas state prosecuting
attorney who sent Dumond to prison, met with Huckabee to protest.
"'This is how close I was to Wayne Dumond,'" Stevens says she told
Huckabee at the time.
"'I will never forget his face. And now I don't want you ever to
forget my face.'"
Stevens now says:
"This isn't and was never about politics. This is about a rapist. This
is about a murderer. ... I might never forget Dumond's face, but there
are other women [for whom] Dumond's face was the last thing they ever
saw on this earth... I would hope that Huckabee would remember the
faces of his victims."
Stevens, who had been silent about her rape and not identified in the
press for more than a dozen years, finally spoke out publicly in 1996
after feeling frustrated by her meeting with Huckabee.
Twenty women members of the state House of Representatives protested
the commutation proposal.
The editorial pages of some Arkansas newspapers questioned Huckabee's
judgment and suggested he reconsider.
What the public never knew, however, was that other women who had been
sexually assaulted by Dumond had privately written Huckabee about
their anguish.
Their very private attempts at changing Huckabee's mind, they later
told the Huffington Post, were based on concerns that speaking out
publicly would have been too painful and traumatizing.
One such letter was from the daughter of a Dumond rape victim:
When you ran for office, one of the reasons I voted for you was the
fact you are/were a Baptist preacher.
I come from a very strong Baptist background... [O]ne of my
grandfathers is also a preacher.
I have always been a faithful church member where I am the choir
director, yet this is one event that is not so easily forgiven.
I have prayed about these feelings, but once someone hurts your
mother, or daughter the way this man hurt my mother I believe that you
would feel the same...
Please understand that this letter is coming from my heart.... I would
love to have the chance to talk to you about this matter as a daughter
of a surviving rape victim.
The woman provided Huckabee with her personal phone number in hopes
that he or at least someone on his staff would call.
She says that she never heard back.
What was left unsaid in her letter to Huckabee was that she was three
years old when, in the 1970s, Dumond raped her mother.
The girl was in her mother's bed asleep when the rape occurred. Dumond
held a butcher's knife to her mother's throat during the assault.
In an interview, her mother told the Huffington Post how she fought
with Dumond to wrestle the knife away from him, willing to risk her
own life rather than suffer at Dumond's hands.
But Dumond overcame her resistance. He pointed to her daughter
sleeping next to her and threatened:
"If you don't cooperate with me, she'll be next."
The woman did as she was told.
As Dumond continued to violently rape her, the woman recalled, she lay
consciously and deliberately silent.
Even as she was being assaulted, she gently stroked her daughter's
hair, praying she would not wake up.
When the assault was over, the woman said, Dumond threatened to come
back and rape and kill her daughter if she told anyone.
Twenty-three years after the rape, the girl who had been protected by
her mother's silence attempted to persuade Huckabee to keep Dumond
behind bars.
Fearing that the rapist would attack her mother again, she wrote to
the governor:
Governor Huckabee, I really wish you could spend one night in my
mother's home.
Even though twenty years have past [sic?] she still has trouble
sleeping at night.
The house is never dark...
Friday afternoon when I heard the dreadful news [that Huckabee
intended to commute Dumond], I was the one to tell my mother.
She was on her way out of town and I didn't want her to hear this on
the radio while she was driving.
I wish you could have heard the emptiness in her voice.
In her own letter to Huckabee, the woman who was raped by Dumond in
the 1970s wrote that she felt deep guilt over what happened later to
Ashley Stevens:
I feel responsible for Ashley's years of suffering at Dumond's hands
because I was so na
December 4, 2007
Documents Expose Huckabee's Role In Serial Rapist's Release
By Murray Waas
Little Rock, Ark --
As governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee aggressively pushed for the
early release of a convicted rapist despite being warned by numerous
women that the convict had sexually assaulted them or their family
members, and would likely strike again.
The convict went on to rape and murder at least one other woman.
Confidential Arkansas state government records, including letters from
these women, obtained by the Huffington Post and revealed publicly for
the first time, directly contradict the version of events now being
put forward by Huckabee.
While on the campaign trail, Huckabee has claimed that he supported
the 1999 release of Wayne Dumond because, at the time, he had no good
reason to believe that the man represented a further threat to the
public.
Thanks to Huckabee's intervention, conducted in concert with a
right-wing tabloid campaign on Dumond's behalf, Dumond was let out of
prison 25 years before his sentence would have ended.
"There's nothing any of us could ever do," Huckabee said Sunday on CNN
when asked to reflect on the horrific outcome caused by the prisoner's
release.
"None of us could've predicted what [Dumond] could've done when he got
out."
But the confidential files obtained by the Huffington Post show that
Huckabee was provided letters from several women who had been sexually
assaulted by Dumond and who indeed predicted that he would rape again
- and perhaps murder - if released.
In a letter that has never before been made public, one of Dumond's
victims warned:
"I feel that if he is released it is only a matter of time before he
commits another crime and fear that he will not leave a witness to
testify against him the next time."
Before Dumond was granted parole at Huckabee's urging, records show
that Huckabee's office received a copy of this letter from Arkansas'
parole board.
[See the full letters sent to Huckabee's office here.]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/12/05/exclusive-the-complete-h_n_75373.html
The woman later wrote directly to Huckabee about having been raped by
Dumond.
In a letter obtained by the Huffington Post, she said that Dumond had
raped her while holding a butcher knife to her throat, and while her
then-3-year-old daughter lay in bed next to her.
Also included in the files sent to Huckabee's office was a police
report in which Dumond confessed to the rape.
Dumond was not charged in that particular case because he later
refused to sign the confession and because the woman was afraid to
press charges.
Huckabee kept these and other documents secret because they were
politically damaging, according to a former aide who worked for him in
Arkansas.
The aide has made the records available to the Huffington Post, deeply
troubled by Huckabee's repeated claims that he had no reason to
believe Dumond would commit other violent crimes upon his release from
prison.
The aide also believes that Huckabee, for political reasons, has
deliberately attempted to cover up his knowledge of Dumond's other
sexual assaults.
"There were no letters sent to the governor's office from any rape
victims," Huckabee campaign spokesperson Alice Stewart said on Tuesday
when contacted by the Huffington Post.
Subsequently, however, the campaign provided a former senior aide of
Huckabee's who did remember reading at least one of the letters.
But Huckabee and his aides insist that his receipt of the letters is
irrelevant because the decision to release Dumond was made by the
parole board.
Huckabee on Tuesday again denied allegations by former parole board
members that he lobbied them to release Dumond.
"I did not ask them to do anything," he said.
"I did indicate [Dumond's case] was sitting at my desk and I was
giving thought to it."
Charmaine Yoest, a senior adviser to the Huckabee campaign, told the
Huffington Post:
"I think what should be considered here is that if he [Huckabee] could
have changed what happened, he would. His whole life has been about
respect for life and understanding the value of each individual life.
Nobody regrets the loss of life here more than him."
In 1996, as a newly elected governor who had received strong support
from the Christian right, Huckabee was under intense pressure from
conservative activists to pardon Dumond or commute his sentence.
The activists claimed that Dumond's initial imprisonment and various
other travails were due to the fact that Ashley Stevens, the high
school cheerleader he had raped, was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton,
and the daughter of a major Clinton campaign contributor.
The case for Dumond's innocence was championed in Arkansas by Jay
Cole, a Baptist minister and radio host who was a close friend of the
Huckabee family.
It also became a cause for New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy, who
repeatedly argued for Dumond's release, calling his conviction "a
travesty of justice."
On Sept. 21, 1999, Dunleavy wrote a column headlined "Clinton's
Biggest Crime - Left Innocent Man In Jail For 14 Years":
"Dumond, now 52, was given conditional parole yesterday in Arkansas
after having being sentenced to 50 years in jail for the rape of
Clinton's cousin," Dunleavy wrote.
"That rape never happened."
A subsequent Dunleavy column quoted Huckabee saying:
"There is grave doubt to the circumstances of this reported crime."
After Dumond's release from prison in September 1999, he moved to
Smithville, Missouri, where he raped and suffocated to death a
39-year-old woman named Carol Sue Shields.
Dumond was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life in prison for
that rape and murder.
But Dumond's arrest for those crimes in June 2001 came too late for
23-year-old Sara Andrasek of Platte County, Missouri.
Dumond allegedly raped and murdered her just one day before his arrest
for raping and murdering Shields.
Prior to the attack, Andrasek and her husband had learned that she was
pregnant with their first child.
Dumond died of natural causes while in prison on September 1, 2005. At
the time of his death, Missouri authorities were readying capital
murder charges against Dumond for the rape and murder of Andrasek.
Huckabee has refused to release his gubernatorial administration's
records on the matter, saying that he was concerned for the privacy of
Dumond's victims and that the records contain sensitive law
enforcement information.
The Arkansas Parole Board also refuses to make public any letters or
warnings it received from Drumond's victims.
"We don't release comments for or against a clemency application or a
parole case," the Board's spokesperson told Huffington Post, "except
when they are comments from public officials."
But most of the women assaulted by Dumond and interviewed for this
story say that Huckabee could have made information public while
guarding their privacy.
Law enforcement authorities also scoffed at the idea that anything in
the records would have harmed an ongoing investigation since Dumond is
no longer alive .
The records revealed in this story -- including correspondence between
Dumond's victims and Huckabee, as well as the governor's own file
regarding Dumond -- were provided to me in the fall of 2002 by a
Republican staffer to then-Gov. Huckabee.
I made the decision not to make the files public at that time because
of concern for the privacy of the rape victims and their families.
I felt that their right to privacy outweighed the public's right to
know, although I understand why many people would disagree.
Now that Huckabee is running for president, and after consulting with
the victims and their families, I have decided to proceed, given what
his actions on the case - and his attempts to whitewash his
involvement in it -- say about his judgment and integrity.
During a 2002 bid by Huckabee to be re-elected governor of Arkansas,
the staffer who provided the documents attended a meeting where
Huckabee and top aides expressed concerns that information in the
files showing that other women had told Huckabee about being raped by
Dumond might somehow become public, and thus become an issue for his
opponent.
The information remained secret, and Huckabee won a tight race for
re-election.
The staffer said that during that same period, another senior aide to
Huckabee suggested asking other state agencies, which might have
portions or even the entirety of the Dumond file, to transfer their
records to the governor's office.
If the files were transferred, the aide to Huckabee said, they would
no longer be obtainable by reporters or political opponents under the
state's Freedom of Information statute.
Arkansas has one of the most progressive Freedom of Information laws
in the country.
People need only to make requests orally whereupon state officials
have to quickly respond and make them public.
Governors, in sharp contrast, have wide latitude in deciding which of
their own files to make public.
"The files had to be disappeared because there just wasn't a plausible
explanation for the governor's stance," the former staffer said.
"I mean, what could the governor say? That he believes these women
made up their stories? That women lie when they say they are raped?"
Asked on Tuesday whether Huckabee would release his file on Dumond,
campaign spokesperon Alice Stewart said, "We're not the governor, we
don't have the file."
Asked if Huckabee would ask the current governor to release the file,
she responded, "No. I don't want to see it. You apparently want to see
it."
Dumond raped Ashley Stevens, Clinton's distant cousin, in 1984 when
she was a 17-year-old high school student in Forest City, Arkansas.
He was convicted in 1985 and sentenced to life in prison, plus 20
years.
In 1992, Jim Guy Tucker, who became governor of Arkansas after Clinton
left office, reduced Dumond's sentence to 39.5 years.
Shortly after taking office in 1996, Huckabee announced his intention
to commute Dumond's sentence to time served.
A public outcry ensued.
Stevens, her father, and Fletcher Long, the Arkansas state prosecuting
attorney who sent Dumond to prison, met with Huckabee to protest.
"'This is how close I was to Wayne Dumond,'" Stevens says she told
Huckabee at the time.
"'I will never forget his face. And now I don't want you ever to
forget my face.'"
Stevens now says:
"This isn't and was never about politics. This is about a rapist. This
is about a murderer. ... I might never forget Dumond's face, but there
are other women [for whom] Dumond's face was the last thing they ever
saw on this earth... I would hope that Huckabee would remember the
faces of his victims."
Stevens, who had been silent about her rape and not identified in the
press for more than a dozen years, finally spoke out publicly in 1996
after feeling frustrated by her meeting with Huckabee.
Twenty women members of the state House of Representatives protested
the commutation proposal.
The editorial pages of some Arkansas newspapers questioned Huckabee's
judgment and suggested he reconsider.
What the public never knew, however, was that other women who had been
sexually assaulted by Dumond had privately written Huckabee about
their anguish.
Their very private attempts at changing Huckabee's mind, they later
told the Huffington Post, were based on concerns that speaking out
publicly would have been too painful and traumatizing.
One such letter was from the daughter of a Dumond rape victim:
When you ran for office, one of the reasons I voted for you was the
fact you are/were a Baptist preacher.
I come from a very strong Baptist background... [O]ne of my
grandfathers is also a preacher.
I have always been a faithful church member where I am the choir
director, yet this is one event that is not so easily forgiven.
I have prayed about these feelings, but once someone hurts your
mother, or daughter the way this man hurt my mother I believe that you
would feel the same...
Please understand that this letter is coming from my heart.... I would
love to have the chance to talk to you about this matter as a daughter
of a surviving rape victim.
The woman provided Huckabee with her personal phone number in hopes
that he or at least someone on his staff would call.
She says that she never heard back.
What was left unsaid in her letter to Huckabee was that she was three
years old when, in the 1970s, Dumond raped her mother.
The girl was in her mother's bed asleep when the rape occurred. Dumond
held a butcher's knife to her mother's throat during the assault.
In an interview, her mother told the Huffington Post how she fought
with Dumond to wrestle the knife away from him, willing to risk her
own life rather than suffer at Dumond's hands.
But Dumond overcame her resistance. He pointed to her daughter
sleeping next to her and threatened:
"If you don't cooperate with me, she'll be next."
The woman did as she was told.
As Dumond continued to violently rape her, the woman recalled, she lay
consciously and deliberately silent.
Even as she was being assaulted, she gently stroked her daughter's
hair, praying she would not wake up.
When the assault was over, the woman said, Dumond threatened to come
back and rape and kill her daughter if she told anyone.
Twenty-three years after the rape, the girl who had been protected by
her mother's silence attempted to persuade Huckabee to keep Dumond
behind bars.
Fearing that the rapist would attack her mother again, she wrote to
the governor:
Governor Huckabee, I really wish you could spend one night in my
mother's home.
Even though twenty years have past [sic?] she still has trouble
sleeping at night.
The house is never dark...
Friday afternoon when I heard the dreadful news [that Huckabee
intended to commute Dumond], I was the one to tell my mother.
She was on her way out of town and I didn't want her to hear this on
the radio while she was driving.
I wish you could have heard the emptiness in her voice.
In her own letter to Huckabee, the woman who was raped by Dumond in
the 1970s wrote that she felt deep guilt over what happened later to
Ashley Stevens:
I feel responsible for Ashley's years of suffering at Dumond's hands
because I was so na
