How Could You? Hall of Shame-James McCurdy UPDATED

This will be an archive of heinous actions by those involved in child welfare, foster care and adoption. We forewarn you that these are deeply disturbing stories that may involve sex abuse, murder, kidnapping and other horrendous actions.

From Nevada, Iowa, adoptive father James McCurdy  “who is awaiting trial on sex abuse and child pornography charges, has filed an application to lift a no-contact order barring him from having contact with anyone under the age of 18.

McCurdy, 49, is alleged to have sexually abused a male victim over the course of nine years, ending when the child sought police help at age 14.”

“McCurdy is a single adoptive father of several boys and was recognized as an “adoption champion” by Iowa KidsNet, an organization that promotes the efforts of people who adopt hard-to-place children.”

You can still see him listed as the Ames contact in a 2009 Iowa KidsNet document.

Previously, he had been a Boy Scout leader for 10 years, worked for 2 different school bus companies, and ran for the Ames School Board in 2007, but lost.

“In February 2010, a victim came forward with allegations that included years of abuse by McCurdy. A search warrant was executed on his home and investigators found image files on his computer hard drive of minors engaging in sex acts.

“McCurdy was charged with sexual exploitation of a minor. He briefly was released but arrested again when it was found that he was living with a woman who had three minor children, a violation of his release. While back in prison, McCurdy was charged with four counts of third-degree sex abuse. He’s being held on a combined bond of $105,000.

McCurdy has pleaded not guilty in both cases. A trial in the sex abuse case has been set for Tuesday, May 10.”

Sex Abuse Suspect Asks to See Kids
[Ames Tribune 3/10/11 by Luke Jennett]

Update/Feb 17, 2012
Apologies for the belated update. This case went to trial last year and James McCurdy was found guilty and sentenced to 135 years in prison for six counts of sex abuse in October 2011. Below are excerpts of the case since March 2011.

April 2011

“District Court Judge Timothy Finn issued a ruling this week saying he would not lift a no-contact order keeping James McCurdy from having contact with anyone under the age of 18.

McCurdy, who is awaiting trial on sex abuse and exploitation charges against a child victim, asked that the order be lifted so he could see his adopted children. The motion by his attorney notes that while McCurdy is alleged to have committed a sex assault on a minor, the victim in the immediate case is not one of his children.

Assistant Story County Attorney Mary Howell Sirna fought the motion on several grounds, among them that McCurdy’s attorney, Patrick Peters, has indicated that he intends to call at least one of McCurdy’s minor children as a witness, and that McCurdy may use the fact that the child pornography found on his computer was one of the minor children as a possible defense.

The matter went to a hearing Tuesday. Finn filed on order denying McCurdy the ability to speak to his minor children on Wednesday.

McCurdy, a former Boy Scout master and candidate for the Ames Community School Board, was arrested in April 2010 after a 14-year-old male told police about a string of sexual abuses over the last nine years, most recently in January 2010. A search warrant was done on McCurdy’s home where he lived with his four adopted children, three of them minors, and his computer hard drive was seized. Investigators used forensic software to find several images on the drive depicting minors engaging in prohibited sexual acts or the simulation of prohibited sexual acts.”

Judge: Abuse suspect can t see his kids
[Ames Tribune 4/1/11 by Luke Jennett]

July 2011

“McCurdy is charged with five counts of second-degree sexual abuse, a class B felony, and one count of third-degree sexual abuse.

The jury was sworn in after a full day of selection at the Story County Justice Center in Nevada, during which several prospective jurors were dismissed from the pool, one after weeping openly after learning what the trial would be about.”

Defense attorney Patrick Peters and prosecutors Mary Howell-Sirna and Tim Meals divulged little information about the case to jurors. However, Sirna did question jurors about whether they knew Michael Trachta, a former Ames resident who pleaded guilty in November 2010 to two counts of lascivious acts with a child. Court documents indicate McCurdy may call Trachta as a witness.

Meanwhile, a court order filed July 13 ruled that McCurdy’s post-arrest conversations with Keith Acker, a Seventh Day Adventist minister from Delaware, will not be held as inadmissible at trial. According to court documents, McCurdy and Acker have been friends for two decades, and after his arrest, Acker flew to Iowa to help take care of McCurdy’s adopted sons.

Acker has testified that during one of the post-arrest conversations with McCurdy, the former Boy Scouts leader admitted that the boy had been in his bed on the night of the alleged abuse.

McCurdy allegedly told Acker the child had been high on marijuana and had gotten into bed with him naked. McCurdy said that he awoke to find the boy performing a sex act on him and also told the minister that he believed the boy was in love with him.

The court ruled that McCurdy and Acker were speaking as friends, rather than as a religious matter, and that the conversation was therefore admissible.

Ames police first began investigating McCurdy in February 2010, when school resource officer Brook McPherson met with a student at Ames High School who said that he had been the victim of sexual abuse by a family friend during the previous nine years. The boy said McCurdy was a friend of his family’s and would sometimes lend him money or take him out to eat. However, the boy claimed McCurdy was sexually abusing him once or twice a month. The amount of abuse decreased as the boy grew older, he said.

The alleged assault took place Jan. 31, 2010, after McCurdy gave the boy a ride home from a friend’s house. McCurdy reportedly took the boy to his home, where he lives with his adopted male children. The boy told police that he went to McCurdy’s bed to sleep at around 7 p.m., but awoke at around 9:30 p.m. with McCurdy laying in bed with him.

McCurdy allegedly molested the boy, according to court documents, after which the boy walked home.

The boy also told police he was concerned that McCurdy was abusing several of his adopted sons.”
Jury selected in trial of former school board candidate
[Ames Tribune 7/21/11 by Luke Jennett]

” The boy, now 16, said McCurdy was his father’s best friend for years and had been a father figure to him as well, even after the abuse started. The boy said he often would sleep over at McCurdy’s home and he and his father had lived with McCurdy and his adopted sons at one point.

However, the boy’s father said he didn’t know that McCurdy and his son routinely shared beds when the boy slept over, or that when they did they both slept in only their underwear, which he said was unusual for the child.

The boy described the first incident, which happened when he was 5 years old; he said he and McCurdy were alone watching a Harry Potter movie when McCurdy offered to “do something that would help me go to sleep.”

The boy said McCurdy then molested him with his hand.

The alleged incident would begin a pattern the boy said went on for years before he finally made a report to police in February 2010. When questioned by prosecutors, he said he finally came forward because he was afraid McCurdy also was abusing two of his own young adopted male children.

While the abuse was occurring, the boy said, McCurdy also was a friend and confidant, often giving the boy rides home or taking him to McDonalds for food. When the boy began to get mixed up with drugs and alcohol, McCurdy hid the boy’s problems from his father, and allegedly even encouraged them by providing the boy with rum and money in exchange for marijuana. The boy’s relationship with his own father grew rockier over time, and he said he never told his father about the abuse by McCurdy. However, he did tell his father when one of McCurdy’s adopted children, a boy two years older than him, touched him inappropriately.

McCurdy’s attorney, Patrick Peters, hasn’t cross-examined the boy yet, but he did say in his opening statement that without any eyewitnesses or physical evidence, the case would boil down to “a he-said, he-said situation.”

Peters said McCurdy had made some bad decisions in the past, such as getting into bed with a 14-year-old child, but re-asserted McCurdy’s version of events; that it was the boy, and not McCurdy, who performed a sex act on the night of Jan. 31, 2010.

This version seems to be at least partially corroborated by a jailhouse conversation McCurdy had with Keith Acker, a Seventh Day Adventist minister who took the stand Monday and testified that he had been McCurdy’s best friend for 25 years.

McCurdy reportedly called Acker after his arrest, and after Acker asked him why it had been so long since he had called, McCurdy said he was involved in a “very stressful situation,” which he had hoped to resolve but that it hadn’t happened.

McCurdy told Acker the son of his best friend in Iowa had brought a false abuse accusation against him. He said the alleged victim had been at his home the night of the incident, that he’d been high on drugs and that he’d passed out in McCurdy’s bed.

McCurdy told the minister that he’d joined the boy in his bed and went to sleep, but at some point during the night he awoke because of the sex act. McCurdy claimed he immediately told the boy to stop and to go sleep on the couch.

“The whole situation was very shocking to me and very disturbing, and I was wondering what the motives would be of a young person to do that,” Acker said. “He told me that the only thing he could think of was that (the boy) was in love with him, and that (the boy) felt that he had scorned his love, so (the boy) had made these allegations against him to ruin his life.””

Alleged victim takes the stand in sex abuse trial [Ames Tribune 7/22/11 by Luke Jennett]

Friday was the third day of the trial and saw the end of testimony by the alleged victim of McCurdy’s assaults, a 16-year-old male whose father is a close friend of McCurdy’s. The boy routinely slept over at McCurdy’s house and sometimes in McCurdy’s bed. The boy contacted authorities in February 2010 and said McCurdy had been molesting him since he was 5 years old.

On cross examination, defense attorney Patrick Peters questioned the boy about a plan he had spoken to his friends about before he disclosed the abuse to police. The plan was intended to help the boy get out of living with his father, and it apparently involved making his father so angry he would strike him, resulting in the state taking the child out of the home.

The defense is featuring the plan by the boy as a possible motive for falsely accusing McCurdy of abuse, a theory McCurdy himself introduced to detectives shortly after the investigation began.

Under redirect examination by prosecutor Mary Howell Sirna, however, the boy said it was concern for McCurdy’s two young adopted sons that had prompted him to contact the police. The boy said McCurdy would often share a bed with the two boys and would also bathe them in the locked bathroom.

The jury also heard testimony from Ames Police Detective Suzanne Owens, who talked about the investigation into McCurdy. Owens helped set up two recorded phone calls to McCurdy, one by the boy and one by the boy’s father, and later presided over the execution of a search warrant at McCurdy’s home.

Owens said much of what was recovered corroborated the boy’s version of the latest assault, but a Department of Criminal Investigation test on McCurdy’s bedding had come back negative for any semen and did not turn up any DNA from the boy. However, she noted, a similar set of sheets were found in the washing machine at the home when the warrant was served. These sheets weren’t tested, she said, because she believed the washing machine would have destroyed any DNA that existed.

Prosecutors played a tape of Owens’ first interview with McCurdy for the jury, in which McCurdy admitted getting into bed with the boy the night of the most recent incident, but he said no sexual acts occurred and that he had no idea where the boy’s accusations were stemming from.

Owens said that in a second interview days later, McCurdy’s story changed slightly on several points, and McCurdy also put forward the theory that the allegations were part of the boy’s plan to move out of his father’s house.

“When I asked how it pertained to him, he said he thought maybe (the boy) wanted him and his dad to get into a fight over the allegations,” Owens said.

The state’s evidence ended with testimony by a female friend of the boy who said that he had come to her and another friend to tell them about the abuse the day before he contacted authorities.

“Jim (McCurdy) almost seemed like a dad to (the boy), but almost too close,” the girl said. “He’d buy him stuff and he always came to pick him up.”

The female witness said the boy had been scared and upset when he had talked to police about his past abuses.

However, on cross-examination, she said that much of her knowledge of the boy’s relationship with McCurdy was third-hand. Peters made a motion to strike her testimony as heresay, but it was overruled by Judge Kurt Stoebe.

The trial is expected to continue at 9 a.m. Monday, July 25, with the presentation of the defense’s case.

McCurdy also faces child pornography charges. The aggravated misdemeanor case has been kept separate from the sex abuse case and stems from an earlier arrest in the investigation. McCurdy is scheduled to go to trial on that case on Aug. 9.”
Prosecution rests in McCurdy sex abuse trial
[Ames Tribune 7/22/11 by Luke Jennett]

“The defense began its case Monday by calling Travis McCurdy, James McCurdy’s 19-year-old adopted son. Travis McCurdy again raised the issue of the “plan” James McCurdy said the alleged 16-year-old victim had been developing to get out of his father’s house.

“Before this, he was talking about having one of his friends beat him up to the point it would be concerning and then telling the police that his dad did it,” Travis McCurdy said.

In his own testimony, the boy admitted to having discussed the plot, which James McCurdy later described to police as a possible reason for the boy’s accusation against him. However, Suzanne Owens, a detective for the Ames Police Department, said James McCurdy hadn’t been able to articulate how he believed the boy’s plan would be forwarded by accusing him of sex abuse.

Travis McCurdy said the night of Jan. 31, 2010, which the alleged victim claimed was the most recent incident of abuse, the boy came to their apartment, as he often did, apparently intoxicated, and fell asleep on either a chair or in the bed in James McCurdy’s room.

Then, later in the night, Travis McCurdy said he saw the boy sitting in the living room, watching television.

Travis McCurdy said that while he hadn’t ever known the boy to sleep in James McCurdy’s bed before, he said he didn’t think it unusual the boy had gone to James McCurdy’s room to sleep, because the bed in James McCurdy’s room was the best in the house.

On cross-examination, Travis McCurdy said part of him was bitter at the boy for making the claim against his father because of the turmoil it had caused in the family’s lives.

“My dad lost his job. Our finances went down. I was hospitalized because I was freaking out,” Travis McCurdy said. “Everything I knew was ripped away from me, my home, my security …”

The last defense witness was Steven J. Sherman, a psychology professor at Indiana University, who was flown in by McCurdy to act as an expert witness. Sherman testified at length about delayed reporting in abuse cases and the academic study of false accusations and their link to faulty memory.

“People, in general, have a not exactly correct view of how the memory works,” Sherman said. “It’s easy to think that if it’s in someone’s head, then it must be true. But memory doesn’t work like a video recording. Even a vivid, salient or traumatic event can be distorted or misremembered.”

On cross examination, Sherman said he hadn’t studied the case materials and he was talking about generalities, rather than in this specific instance. He also noted he was neither a licensed psychologist nor a clinician.

Prosecutors answered with their own expert, calling Lana Herteen as a rebuttal witness. Herteen, a forensic investigator for the Regional Child Protection Center at Blank Children’s Hospital in Des Moines, talked about the process of grooming by sex offenders and testified that delayed reporting occurs in a significant percentage of child abuse cases for varying reasons, among them reasons of affection toward the abuser.

“In sexual abuse situations, there are positive elements to the relationship,” she said. “A lot of times, I’ll hear kids refer to their abusers as, ‘a really nice person if only they would stop doing that icky stuff.’””

Sex abuse trial turned over to jury [Ames Tribune 7/26/11 by Luke Jennett]

“A Story County jury returned guilty verdicts on all counts Wednesday in the trial of James McCurdy, 49, of Nevada.

McCurdy was charged with five counts of second-degree sex abuse, a class B felony, and one count of third-degree sex abuse, a class C felony, after police discovered he had been molesting the son of a close friend over a period of nine years.

McCurdy showed no visible emotion in the courtroom as the verdict was read. His attorney, Patrick Peters, asked for a poll of the jurors, who each confirmed voting against McCurdy on all six counts after only one day of deliberation.

McCurdy will be held without bail pending sentencing, which has been set for Sept. 30.”

“[A] key point in the trial was the testimony of Keith Acker, a Seventh Day Adventist minister from Delaware who’d been McCurdy’s close friend for 25 years. Acker took the stand for the prosecution and testified that during a phone call with McCurdy following his arrest, McCurdy said that he’d awoken the night of the most recent assault reported by the victim to find that the 16-year-old was engaged in a sexual encounter with him. He told Acker that he’d stopped the boy and told him to go sleep on the couch.

Up to this point, McCurdy had repeatedly denied to investigators and the victim’s father that he had any idea why the victim would be making the allegations against him. However, Acker said McCurdy believed that it was possible that the child victim was in love with him and was making the allegations out of scorn for having been rejected.

The jury also heard two “pretext” phone calls made by the victim and the victim’s father just after the abuse was reported. In one, the victim asks McCurdy when the next time would be, indicating the sexual acts that prosecutors said had become a routine part of the boy’s life. McCurdy, rather than asking what the boy meant, said, “Don’t know. Not sure. Not yet.”

In the second phone call, the victim’s father told McCurdy that the boy had reported being abused by him. McCurdy responded with long silences and curses, and eventually said that he “would never hurt” the child, but made no actual denials.

Later, when interviewed by Det. Suzanne Owens of the Ames Police Department, McCurdy denied that any sex abuse had taken place and later introduced the theory that the victim was making the allegations as part of an attempt to get out of his father’s house.

The jury was not told, however, that McCurdy is facing separate charges for a child pornography related arrest that is currently scheduled to go to court on Aug. 9.

Prior to his arrest, McCurdy was a dispatcher for a company that provides bus services to Ames schools, and he once ran unsuccessfully for a spot on the Ames Community School Board. He was also the single father of four adopted male children, two of whom the victim in the case believed were in danger of similar abuse to what he faced.” Verdict: McCurdy guilty on all counts[Ames Tribune 7/28/11 by Luke Jennett]

September 2011

“Claiming prosecutors engaged in misconduct by invoking 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination during opening arguments, James McCurdy has asked a Story County judge for a new trial.”

” The motion, filed Friday with the Story County Clerk of Court, asks for a new trial and cites three errors McCurdy’s attorney, Patrick Peters, said the court made during the original trial.

First, McCurdy claims, the testimony of Keith Acker should have been inadmissible. Acker, of Delaware, was one of McCurdy’s best friends and is also a Seventh Day Adventist minister. After McCurdy was arrested, he called Acker to talk to him about the situation.

Acker testified that McCurdy claimed he had been asleep and woke up to the then-16-year-old victim engaged in a sex act with him. McCurdy told Acker he believed the sex assault allegations were the result of his having rejected the youth and telling him to leave the bedroom after the incident.

The question of Acker’s admissibility as a witness was addressed prior to the trial, and it was ruled that he was acting as McCurdy’s friend, and not as a religious official, when the conversation took place.

McCurdy’s motion also alleges that prosecutor Mary Howell Sirna improperly invoked 9/11 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy in her opening remarks at the trial, and is “guilty of prejudicial misconduct.”

Sirna used the two events to illustrate a national loss of innocence and linked them to the loss of innocence suffered by the victim in McCurdy’s case.

McCurdy and Peters claim the statements were an “im proper emotional appeal designed to persuade the jury to decide the case on issues other than the facts before it.”

The motion further alleges the jury verdict was contrary to law and the weight of the evidence.

On Tuesday, District Court Judge Kurt Stoebe ordered a hearing set to argue the motion for a new trial. The hearing has been set for 10 a.m. Friday, Sept. 30.

McCurdy is being held at the Story County Jail pending sentencing, which also had been set for Sept. 30
McCurdy asks for a new trial
[Ames Tribune 9/15/11 by Luke Jennett]

October 2011

“James McCurdy, an adoptive single father of four who previously lived in Ames and Nevada, was sentenced in district court last week to 135 years in prison for six counts of sex abuse.”

“McCurdy was ultimately convicted of five counts of second-degree sex abuse, a class B felony, and one count of third-degree sex abuse, a class C felony. Judge Kurt Stoebe sentenced McCurdy on Friday to five 25-year terms and one 10-year term, all of which are to be served consecutively.

McCurdy was also given a special sentence remanding him as a sexual offender for the rest of his life.

The court overruled a motion by McCurdy’s lawyer Patrick Peters for a new trial. However, an appeal has already been filed in the case.”

McCurdy sentenced for sex crimes
[Ames Tribune 10/5/11 by Luke Jennett]

REFORM Puzzle Piece

As with other similar cases, I feel that the homestudy could have evaluated red flag behaviors that could have prevented all of this from happening. We still remain concerned about the two adoptees whom the victim indicated were also abused.