When Richard Gilmore saw the notice in the newspaper two years ago, the 78-year-old grandfather felt his temples pound. It could not be.
The story was as benign as it was brief: Howard W. Curtis, the former director of the Haverhill Public Library, had been selected to run the Beverly Public Library. But to Gilmore, it was blood-chilling.
Three decades earlier, Curtis had been the assistant scoutmaster of the Boy Scout troop in which Gilmore's son Ted was a member. When the boy revealed to his family years later that Curtis had sexually abused him, Gilmore wrote a searing letter to the Scout organization. Within months, Curtis had quit his job and left town.
Now, unbelievably, he was back. Gilmore picked up his pen again.
"In simple language, Curtis is a pedophile, and should not be placed in a position where he would be in daily contact with children," Gilmore, a father of six, wrote to a Beverly library trustee.
Curtis fervently denied the charge, but he withdrew from the Beverly job within weeks. Once again he moved on. And no one in authority kept track of where he went next. After all, he hadn't been charged with anything.
And so Gilmore, a retired utility executive with a crown of white hair, took it on himself to follow Curtis to his next job, in West Tisbury, and tell police what he knew. And it fell to a young man in New Hampshire - another of Howard Curtis's Scouts who says he was sexually abused, starting at age 12 - to seek legal action in the case.
Curtis has pleaded not guilty in Salem Superior Court to charges that he raped that young man, Forrest Pettengill, who is now 34. But last week his lawyer notified the court that Curtis intends to change his plea.
Pettengill also filed a civil lawsuit in US District Court last fall against Curtis, the city of Haverhill, and the Boy Scouts of America, saying that both of those institutions failed to adequately supervise Curtis. The suit says that Pettengill had been emotionally disabled by the abuse and seeks unspecified damages. Pettengill went to police in November 2006, after he said months of intensive therapy helped him to realize that Curtis had abused him.
Curtis, who was indicted last summer, has said nothing publicly about the criminal charges, which carry a potential life sentence. His lawyer in the civil matter has denied the allegations. Neither of his lawyers responded to several Globe requests for an interview about the abuse charges or why Curtis plans to change his plea at a hearing in May.
One reason may be this: Pettengill's case has given courage to others who contend that Curtis victimized them in the past. Ted Gilmore and his childhood friend David Carter, both former Scouts who say that Curtis abused them repeatedly in the 1970s, have been told that the statute of limitations bars prosecution of their allegations. But both men, who are now middle-aged, came forward after reading about Pettengill's lawsuit and have agreed to testify against their old hero.
Over the past three decades, Curtis, 58, a Haverhill native and former Eagle Scout, worked as director of four libraries in three states and built a reputation as a skilled and innovative administrator. When officials in some of those communities learned of the charges against him, many were astonished.
"Howard was a very highly respected member of our community," said Tom Vartabedian, a retired columnist and photographer for the Haverhill Gazette, whose two sons were Boy Scouts. "People are too shocked to have an opinion."
When Curtis ultimately walks into the courtroom, Ted Gilmore will be there. It has been a long time since he was a boisterous member of Troop 11, in his Scout's olive shirt and green neckerchief.
Gilmore, now 45, is a solemn man who does maintenance work at a golf course. For most of his life he has lived alone three blocks from where he grew up. Gilmore never wanted to speak publicly about what happened to him, but he feels he owes it to Pettengill, even though he has never met him. "Most of my life I have felt guilty about not speaking up," Gilmore said, shaking his head. "If I had, maybe I could have kept other kids safe. So, I figure this is my penance."
A young man with flair
When Howard Curtis showed up at the Haverhill Public Library fresh out of college in 1974 and looking for a job, he was a young man to be reckoned with. A local boy from a respected family, he was tall, with brooding good looks and a thick head of rust-colored hair. Impressed by his intelligence and energy, library officials gave him a temporary job moving books and he scaled the library ladder quickly. By 1981 he was named the library's director, a job he would keep for 15 years.
If library officials were wowed by Curtis, the members of the Boy Scout Troop 11 were even more so. Curtis, or Howie as some of the boys called him, was cool. Unlike some other Scout leaders, who were fathers on in their years, Curtis was young and single and drove a red Datsun pickup truck. He wore open-necked flannel shirts instead of an ironed Scout uniform. Best of all, he listened.
"Howard was the hippest guy there was," recalled David Carter, 45, who grew up in Bradford and is now a teacher living in Boston. "He treated you like a friend, not a kid. He gave you respect. You could tell him anything."
And they had a lot to tell. Each of the three boys who have accused Curtis of sexual abuse were needy in some fashion, either because of family difficulties or personal insecurities. Carter says he yearned to escape his warring mother and stepfather. Gilmore struggled with his shyness. Pettengill - who joined the Scouts in 1984 - grew up with eight siblings and was ever hungry for attention.
"They were very vulnerable boys," said Lisa Arrowood, Pettengill's lawyer.
And Curtis welcomed them into his camping tent, according to the civil suit. Gilmore and Carter have agreed not only to testify in the criminal case, but their allegations are also extensively documented in the civil case, in which they are presented as witnesses to a pattern of abuse.
Curtis, according to the suit, not only repeatedly engaged the boys sexually on camping trips, but also in his car and at several residences in the Haverhill area. Carter and Gilmore were allegedly assaulted at Curtis's mother's house in Rockport, while Carter and Pettengill were allegedly abused at the John Greenleaf Whittier Birthplace in Haverhill, where Curtis served as a trustee in the early 1980s, according to the suit, and lived for a while.
Curtis hired each of the boys at different times to work part time at the library. And the sex, according to the suit, continued with Carter and Pettengill behind the library walls.
"It was mostly after hours, in the research room," said Carter. "The secretiveness of it made it all the more thrilling."
Gilmore recalls one of the first times that Curtis touched him sexually. They were sleeping in a tent together near a pond in New Hampshire. As Curtis began to fondle the younger boy, "he began to moan 'Christine, Christine,' " Gilmore said.
Curtis later told Gilmore that Christine was a woman he had loved who had recently died. "So, whenever Howard was asleep, or pretended to be, and I heard 'Christine' after that, I knew it was playtime," he said.
At the time, none of the boys considered Curtis's behavior wrong. Carter, who lived with Curtis and his wife for a year in the late 1970s, was smitten with his scoutmaster, who didn't just teach him about camping but took him to museums and football games and concerts by the pianist Vladimir Horowitz.
"My God, I had never even heard of Horowitz," said Carter.
"I loved him enormously," he said. Curtis "was the center of my life. He was my everything."
And if the boys' parents wondered at times at their sons prolonged absences, "I just told them I was with the Scouts," sighed Gilmore. "I mean, what could happen to you in the Boy Scouts?"
As Carter and Gilmore grew into their teens, their fascination with Curtis wore off. Curtis, they say, seemed more interested in younger Scouts. And in time, each began to grow angry.
Carter moved to Lowell and in the late 1980s, he wrote a letter to Curtis telling him never to contact him. He has spent most of his adult life in therapy and says he still has "confusion about my sexuality."
Since the early 1990s, Pettengill's life unraveled as he "abused drugs and alcohol, was hypersexual and experienced sexual identity confusion," according to the suit. In 2005, Pettengill was hospitalized and diagnosed with bipolar disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder. By then he had lost both his job and home.
Gilmore got a job raising raspberries and strawberries, and buried himself in the writings of naturalists. But by the 1990s he was haunted by guilt that other young men might have been abused because he had failed to speak up.
Standing up to Curtis was daunting. By the early 1990s, the soft-spoken Curtis was a prominent community leader. Not only was he the head of the library, but he also was active in community preservation projects, and had been a clerk of the First Church of Christ in Bradford.
In 1995, feeling on the brink of suicide, Gilmore at last went to the Haverhill police, only to learn that the statute of limitations had expired. The next day Gilmore told his parents. Furious, Richard Gilmore wrote a letter to the Scouts and told them "what Curtis had done to my son."
Randy Larson, executive director of the Yankee Clipper Council, the regional Boy Scout chapter, acknowledged that a complaint about Curtis was received and that his membership in the Scouts was revoked. He declined to say what the allegation was about, or whether the complaint was from Gilmore. Lawyers for the Boy Scouts did not return phone calls.
"Mr. Curtis was removed from scouting as a necessary precaution," said Larson. "He did not choose to appeal."
No one - not the Scouts or local police - seems to have informed the Haverhill library about the Gilmores' report. Haverhill police referred all questions about Curtis to the Essex County District Attorney's office.
When Curtis resigned his job in 1996, months after Gilmore sent his letter to the Scouts, he said he was going to California. Curtis's wife had filed for a divorce recently, and Curtis told several people "he wanted to go away and start something new," recalled former Haverhill mayor James Rurak, who was also chairman of the library board of trustees. "That's why I thought he left."
At the time, Richard Gilmore did not pursue an investigation into his son's charges.
"It was years after the fact. Curtis was leaving," explained Gilmore. "I was not going to chase this guy all over the world."
Moving from job to job
Howard Curtis stayed in California for nearly a decade. He worked as director of the public library in Corona, less than an hour south of Los Angeles, and was both popular and respected for expanding the library's services.
And then he left. In 2000, Curtis resigned and became the director of the Montclair Public Library in New Jersey, saying he wanted to be near his two children on the East Coast. The job didn't work out. After 10 months, Curtis quit. The former president of the Montclair Library Board, Glenn M. Rogers, said that he received no complaints about Curtis, but that the librarian and the board agreed that he should go because of "differences over his leadership style."
Curtis returned to his old job as head of the Corona library in 2001, and stayed there for four years. But in spring 2005, he abruptly left again.
The director of human resources for the City of Corona, Laurie LoFranco, said the city did not receive any complaints about Curtis. She said she has been told that Curtis left because of differences with his supervisor.
According to a settlement agreement between Curtis and the city, Curtis was told that he was going to be terminated, but was ultimately given the option of retiring. The agreement further states that references would be "prohibited from disclosing the terms of [Curtis's] resignation."
Stunned, some of his supporters presumed he had been fired.
"One day he was just gone," said Tacy Bensiek, a member of the Friends of The Library. "We all assumed he'd been asked to leave, but city officials would never say what happened."
Curtis landed a job within months, this time at the Beverly Public Library in Massachusetts. The library's previous director had retired after being charged with indecent assault and battery charges stemming from a relationship with a 15-year-old boy. And so when Joanne Panunzio, a Beverly library trustee and chairwoman of the search committee, received Richard Gilmore's letter in January 2006 - and another from Ted Gilmore's sister Jean - alleging that the man she had just offered the director's post to had been accused of sexual abuse, she promptly handed the matter over to the city's attorney.
Curtis, told of the letters, swiftly withdrew from the job. In a letter to the chairman of the trustees, Curtis wrote that, "I can assure you that nothing inappropriate ever occurred between me and the person who wrote that letter," apparently believing that the letter had been written by Ted Gilmore himself. Curtis continued, saying Ted Gilmore, "was a very troubled young man - seemingly a 'throw-away' within his own family. I did all I could for him . . . but never in any inappropriate way!"
Curtis wrote that Gilmore's 1995 letter to the Scouts had "required me to make the painful decision to leave Scouting and also placed doubts in the mind of my wife. That accusation - anonymous then - resulted in my own life falling apart."
Curtis added that he had hoped "the nightmare had ended," but that, "It would now appear that [Gilmore] has chosen to hold on to this crutch and excuse for his sad and sorry life."
Four months later, in spring 2006, Curtis was selected from a national pool of candidates to be the director of the library in West Tisbury on Martha's Vineyard. Elaine Pace, library trustee and the chairwoman of the search committee, said that Curtis's references were "all excellent. There was nothing of concern."
But then Richard Gilmore called and yet another letter about Curtis cropped up in December. This one was sent to West Tisbury police Chief Beth Toomey and it accused Curtis of pedophilia, according to two town officials familiar with the letter. The letter was signed "from a friend."
Once again, Curtis denied the charge against him. And once again he promptly resigned. At the next meeting of the library trustees, the town's attorney, Ron Rappaport, stressed that the board had before it "only an unsubstantiated anonymous allegation. Howard appreciated that and said that although the allegation had no merit, he would be willing to resign to avoid any publicity."
Curtis and the town signed an agreement that prohibited both parties from taking legal action. After he left, trustees discovered an account on which Curtis had charged $3,000 worth of books and movies for personal use, some of it pornographic, according to a town official who declined to be identified. Curtis paid the library back and apparently moved away. Local officials say he has not been seen in town since.
Tokens of appreciation
During the time that Curtis captivated some of the young men in Haverhill, he often gave them tokens of his affection. He wrote them loving letters. He gave them photographs of himself in the woods, and books inscribed on their birthdays.
Over the years, David Carter destroyed many of the gifts and letters that Curtis gave him, but not all. He still has the journals he kept as a teenager that describe his maelstrom of emotions about Curtis. And he also kept the gift that Curtis gave him when he graduated from Haverhill High School in 1980.
It is an elegant gold pocketwatch with a C engraved on the front and an inscription inside: "Not an end - just another beginning."
It is signed simply, "H."
