Sex offender registered, but file lost

Michael J. Bizanowicz walked into the Woburn Police Department in the summer of 2002 and registered as a convicted sex offender, but the paperwork was apparently lost and his neighbors were not informed of his status until 16 months later -- after he had allegedly raped and killed a woman and slit the throat of her 12-year-old daughter.

Woburn Police Chief Philip L. Mahoney confirmed yesterday that Bizanowicz, 41, properly registered with the department in accordance with state law on Aug. 19, 2002, giving his fingerprints and having his mug shot taken. Bizanowicz was apparently prompted to register after his probation officer and a Woburn police officer went to his girlfriend's Totman Drive apartment to deliver an order requiring him to surrender to the court because he had violated probation by skipping some of his court-ordered sex offender treatment classes. His failure to register as a sex offender with the police in the community where he was living would have resulted in another probation violation.

What happened after Bizanowicz's visit to the police station is unclear -- either the information was never sent to the state Sex Offender Registry Board, or it was sent and lost on the other end, Mahoney said.

Either way, Woburn police never received confirmation from the board of Bizanowicz's status as a Level 3 offender, the highest level. As a result, police never notified his neighbors or community organizations as mandated by state law.

"I don't know if we were the ones who screwed up," Mahoney said last night. "But it doesn't matter, I just feel outraged. We could have and would have at least been able to give those neighbors some notification. We have a 34-year-old woman and a 12-year-old girl dead. Whether this would have changed anything I don't know, but at least in my own mind we would have done everything we could.

"I feel terrible about this, no matter who screwed up," Mahoney said.

Neighbors and friends of 34-year-old Joanne C. Presti and her daughter Alyssa have complained bitterly about not being notified that Bizanowicz, a convicted rapist who frequently played with neighborhood children and whose girlfriend was a friend of Presti's, was registered as a sex offender.

"I'm shocked. How do you lose that kind of paperwork?" Totman Drive resident Joanne Bruyette said last night. "I am really angry." Bruyette said she and one of her three teenage daughter were asked to go down to the police station for questioning after the slaying. In a glass case at the station entrance are photos of four of the city's sex offenders. Bizanowicz isn't one of them.

"Even just seeing those four, that was alarming," she said.

Informed last night that Mahoney said that Bizanowicz had attempted to register in Woburn, Charles McDonald, a spokesman for the registry, said, "We're going to look at that." As of last night, McDonald said, the registry had only one active address for Bizanowicz, which was in Lowell.

Police departments are trained how to use the state's sex offender database and can determine a person's status or update the system via computer -- adding new addresses for sex offenders, for instance -- from their headquarters, according to McDonald. But he said it was unclear yesterday how police departments notified the registry in 2002 of sex offenders living in their communities.

Mahoney said yesterday that he could not comment on whether Woburn had computer access to the registry at the time. The probation department, meanwhile, does not have direct access to the registry computer system, McDonald said, but "we rely on them heavily to communicate with us because many times they develop information that is helpful to us."

Suzanne DelVecchio, chief justice of the state Superior Court, said yesterday she didn't know whether Bizanowicz's probation officer had attempted to check if his registration as a sex offender in Woburn had been processed.

When any work or home address is added to the database for a sex offender and the registry confirms that that offender is at Level 3, a community notification process is triggered, requiring the local police chief to within two days "notify organizations in the community which are likely to encounter such sex offender and individual members of the public who are likely to encounter such sex offender," according to state law.

The notifications include offering the information to the local newspaper and public access cable station, hanging notices in the local town hall and library, posting a flier in the police station, and contacting schools and homes for the elderly, among other steps.

Handing out fliers in neighborhoods is also allowed but not required, McDonald said.

When Bizanowicz moved to Lowell and registered his address on Westford Street, his neighbors said they received written notification from the Lowell Police Department, including information of a 1989 conviction for child rape.

Advocates of sex offender notification were stunned by news of the apparent mistake in Woburn. "It is not very often that I'm speechless, but I really just can't believe this," Laura Ahearn, the executive director of Parents for Megan's Law, said last night. "The registry and the notification process -- all of these things are put into place to prevent people from being hurt. But here you have a mistake that has caused a woman and her child to lose their lives. It's a complete tragedy."

Mahoney said last night that he was investigating how the paperwork error occurred, and why the mistake wasn't also discovered a year later, when Bizanowicz was arrested in Woburn for trying to pass a false prescription for the pain drug Percocet.

Court records show that at the time of his arrest in Woburn in June on the drug charge, police apparently again failed to make sure he was properly registered as a sex offender, despite numerous signals both that he was a sex offender and living in Woburn.

After being told on the telephone by a Woburn detective that he was under investigation for trying to pass a false prescription at a local Brooks Pharmacy, Bizanowicz voluntarily surrendered himself at the police station three weeks later -- a factor that prosecutors later took into account in agreeing that he be released on a low bail instead of being sent back to jail.

Records from the case show that Bizanowicz gave a Totman Drive address in several instances, including on the allegedly false prescription slip for 36 five-milligram Percocet tablets. The records also identify him as a sex offender; in fact, a notation below Bizanowicz's picture in a photo array shown to the pharmacist bears the notation "SEX REG."

DelVecchio meanwhile, defended the state Probation Department's overall monitoring of Bizanowicz, saying that his probation officer kept close tabs on him and that he had resumed attending his sex offender treatment sessions right up to the time of the murders.

Bizanowicz even kept an appointment with his probation officer and a supervisor on Jan. 13, DelVecchio said, six days after the killings. "After a thorough investigation, I am satisfied that probation did everything they could have done in this case," she said. "Our probation officer was keeping track of him, she was visiting him at his home to make sure where he was living, and she was calling the sex offender counseling program to make sure he was attending. She was doing all of those things. She was doing her job."While Bizanowicz's probation compliance was sometimes spotty, there were no red flags to indicate that he might be ready to reoffend or that he had become violent, DelVecchio said. He also returned to his counseling sessions, she said.

Probation records show that, after Bizanowicz was cited in August 2002 for skipping his sex offender classes, he had begun attending them regularly again by the time he had a probation violation hearing in state court. A judge ordered him to keep attending them and to catch up on his probation fees, which he had stopped paying.

Bizanowicz was caught two other times falsely saying he had finished his treatment, but went back each time, DelVecchio said. The arrest for trying to pass the false pain-killer prescription was not considered a serious violation for Bizanowicz, who was receiving state disability payments for a back injury, she said.

Middlesex County prosecutors asked for only a $500 cash bail in the case, which the judge lowered to $300. "Given the information we had at the time . . . the bail that our office requested was appropriate based on what we knew from looking at the records and the file," Middlesex District Attorney Martha Coakley said in a statement released by a spokesman.

Probation officials in New Hampshire, where Bizanowicz had plea-bargained a sexual assault charge related to his molestation of a 2-year-old down to simple assault, appeared to have had less tolerance for Bizanowicz's spotty performace as a probationer.

DelVecchio said records show that in late 2001, Bizanowicz attempted to have his probation transferred to Stratham, N.H., saying he was going to live with his father. But New Hampshire probation officials rejected the request, saying they believed he was actually intending to live with a girlfriend who had children in her home.

Globe correspondents John McElhenny and Heather Allen contributed to this report. Ralph Ranalli can be reached via e-mail at rranalli@globe.com. Michael Rosenwald can be reached via e-mail at mrosenwald@globe.com.