CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles Times
By Ashley Powers, Los Angeles Times
January 15, 2013
There is something about me that is happier when accompanied by a small boy…. Perhaps besides the sexual element, the child in me wants a playmate.
— Father Robert Van Handel
Damian Eckert turned on the computer in his in-laws’ home office, a tiny, dim, book-strewn space. He left the door open so he could hear his 5-year-old daughter playing in the next room.
He pulled up a website and scanned it for Father Robert Van Handel, the priest who led the community boys choir he and his younger brother sang in when they were growing up in Santa Barbara. There he was — receding hairline, bulbous nose, gap-toothed smile.
Eckert opened a document: 27 pages that Van Handel wrote for a therapist years ago, his so-called sexual autobiography. It made Eckert’s palms sweat and his back knot.
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