Elke and Victor Puiatti

It was late — about 11 p.m. — when the neighbor came knocking on his door. It was a Saturday night and she wanted to go dancing. Will you please watch my little one, she asked, not noticing his drug-induced stupor. That night, 28-year-old Victor Puiatti did something he had never done before in his life: He fondled an 8-year-old boy.

It didn’t take long before he found himself in front of a judge. He took a plea for an attempted sexual battery with a victim under the age of 12. As the gavel slammed, Puiatti understood that he faced the next five years in a Florida prison as a convicted sexual predator.

He did hard time and was released under the supervision of the courts in 2002. Puiatti is currently finishing out his 15-year split sentence, meaning he spent five years behind bars, and now must trudge through the next 10 on probation.

His wife, Elke Puiatti, is having a hard time distinguishing between the two sides of the razor-wire fence. “I believe that you either lock someone up until he dies or you let him out of prison and give him a chance,” the German native said. “My husband does not get a chance.”

Florida law states that those who have been labeled sexual offenders/predators must strictly adhere to probation guidelines given to ex-convicts. This can include specific distances between a sex offender’s residence and places where children congregate. It also means that those convicted must register their address with authorities and apply for a Florida driver’s license or identification card within 48 hours of release from a corrections facility. Many are further asked to check in daily with their probation officer. Failure to comply is a third-degree felony.

Elke’s hurt stems from her very-real tale of two lovers who must deal with adversity if they want to survive.

Elke’s Story

At 26 years old, Elke wanted more than her home country of Germany could offer, so she immigrated to the United States. Before long she met the son of the family she worked for; his name was Victor. It was 1995 — four years before the attempted sexual battery.

When Victor was locked up in Florida's Liberty Correctional Institute, he and Elke decided not to see one another. They chatted on the phone and wrote letters, but had no physical visits.

She did not excuse his crime, but was in love with the person she believed to be good.

“I have never let [him] off the hook easy because I believe all of our actions have consequences,” Elke said. “His crime was horrible and the consequences are accordingly.”

In October of 2004, the two were married. Two months later, Victor was released from prison.

The first day he walked out as a free man — free as one can be while on probation — Puiatti walked into the arms of his wife. She got pregnant that very same day.

For many, having children means the beginning of life. For the Piuattis, the pregnancy meant fear. Part of Puiatti’s supervision requirements include living 1,000 feet away from any person who is under the age of 18 — including his newborn child.

“I didn’t want this child to go through this,” Elke, who admitted that she contemplated abortion, said. However, because her physician had previously told her she would never be able to have kids, the news of a pregnancy was a miracle she could not dismiss.

Puiatti has met all of the requirements the state asked him to complete, including a sexual offender treatment program. According to Elke, her husband’s probation order “states that after successful completion of his court-ordered sex offender treatment, he would be allowed to have unsupervised contact.” But this, Elke said, has yet to happen.

His treatment counselor, Barry Jones, believed that he could live with his wife and child.

“When our daughter was born, Jones had written a recommendation to the court for us to live together, and for me to supervise the contact between my husband and our child,” Elke said.

The day before their daughter  was born — she is now 19 months — the courts denied the request.

“When I came home from the hospital, my husband moved out of the house.”

As recently as March 26 their petition was again denied.

The Puiattis now reside in two homes in Tallahassee, an area where 3.1 of the state’s sexual offenders live, according to Florida’s Department of Corrections. Miami-Dade has the highest number of offenders per capita in the state: 11 percent.

Puiatti lives about 10 miles from Elke and his daughter. He cannot be in his own wife’s home, even if she and the child are out running errands. On the night of the SunPost interview, Elke expressed her helplessness: Her daughter was sick, and they only have one car. That night it was with her husband, and he has a strict curfew between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. There would be no way he could drive to get her medication.

Thus, there are two new victims in this case, Elke said: her daughter and herself.

“I am the one who has to run two households, raise a child by myself and allow as much time as I can for our child to be with her father,” she said. For now, because there are no restrictions on the family being together in other people’s residences, the couple and their daughter often go to a friend’s house to hang out, have dinner and try to be a normal family.

“Our relationship has suffered,” Elke said.

Jones has now taken the pair in for couples counseling, “because we don’t know how we are going to survive as a couple for seven more years living apart,” Elke said. She added that Jones told her, “it’s going to take a miracle.”

A Long-Lasting Stigma

In the late 1990s, William Eades, another sex offender who has served his time in prison, said he “went off the deep end and got involved with people and things [he] had no business getting near,” after the death of his children’s mother.

A 1999 article in the Tallahassee Democrat stated that he and his wife at the time, Bonnie Eades, were “charged with engaging in sex acts with girls as young as 10, and taking pornographic photos of them.”

Eades claims the media sensationalized his crime. The minor involved was on the cusp of her 18th birthday and volunteered to take part in adult films, he insists.

“The charge of capital sexual battery was not prosecuted because there was no evidence whatsoever to support the accusation,” Eades pointed out. “And the accusation of child porn was made, but I was never charged with anything even akin to it.”

In 2000 he was sentenced to five years and four months in a Florida state penitentiary for lewd and lascivious acts in the presence of a minor, a crime he said is discriminatorily applied as it is “on the same level as the charge you would receive for being seen taking a leak in an alley.”

Like Puiatti, Eades’ time behind bars was not easy.

“My fellow inmates saw S.O.’s [sexual offenders] as being fair game to becoming somebody’s ‘baby,’ and we were constantly receiving threats of bodily injury or death,” he said. “Fights were common.”

Now that he is out, Eades has signed up with the sexual offender registry, and he must check in with the sheriff’s office every four days. Unlike Puiatti, however, he is not on probation.

But living with children is still a big no-no.

Janet Eades married her husband after he was released from prison. Despite his past, both Janet and her 10-year-old son moved in with Eades.

“I stuck by my husband because the first time we went out to coffee he was upfront and honest about his charges; he did not try and hide anything,” Janet said. “Second, I saw how he acted around me and, later, around my son, and [I] had total confidence in him.”

To her surprise, Janet’s ex-husband convinced a Leon County judge that the child would be better off living with him and his new wife in Illinois.

Janet said friends from church tried to testify about Eades’ positive relationship with the boy, but to no avail.

“My son came to love William as a dad, but none of that mattered; the judge only wanted to see the label.”

Kathleen Trzesiara, 50, has worked in and around prisons and feels the sexual predator label is necessary to protect communities and children within sexual predators’ reach, as they cannot be rehabilitated.

“It is my opinion that anyone who has molested a child will do so again; it is only a matter of time,” Trzesiara said. “They will groom and charm a vulnerable child to fulfill their needs and then justify their behavior as expressing love. It is about power, not sex.”

But Eades disagreed with the judge who took away Janet’s son, saying he is further infuriated because he feels the judge did not even consider his involvement in a faith dorm — a state step-down program that allows inmates leaving the prison compound to dedicate their time to character-building.

Now, although the couple can live anywhere they want — meaning no geographic restrictions from parks, schools and so on — they cannot go anywhere with Janet’s son.

“My son can’t live in the same house with William during visits, or even ride in the same car with him,” Janet said. “All three of us can’t be together anywhere.”

The Inclusion of Family in Rehabilitation

To Elke, stripping a family away goes against logic.

“It is a well-known fact that an inmate who is released from prison and has strong family ties is at a much higher success rate than someone who is left on his own,” Elke said.

Eugene Pierre Deess, director of Institutional Research and Planning for the New Jersey Institute of Technology, said that of the 90 ex-convicts he studied from Rikers Island, those “inmates released with stronger family ties and support were significantly less likely to be rearrested in the first 90 days after release.”

The family ties appear necessary, even if society — according to Elke — does not look at the ways family influences the life of the offender. “I am appalled about a justice system that creates victims, but does nothing to prevent future crimes by eliminating the roots of crimes.”

Had someone took heed of Puiatti’s background, he might never have been where he is now, Elke believes. “There are factors that led to the crime. Jones and I suspected there had been sexual abuse in Victor’s past, but as far as I know that was never confirmed,” she said.

Victor Puiatti declined to be interviewed for this article.

Sexual abuse may not have been determined, but physical abuse most certainly was a part of his family’s household.

When his friends were doing 10-year-old-boy activities, Puiatti was hanging out with men who were waiting to die. Since the early 1980s, Puiatti’s brother Carl has sat on death row in Florida’s Union Correctional Institute for the 1983 kidnapping and murder of a young woman.

Carl’s accomplice has already been executed; however, Carl’s date has been postponed while the state makes a determination about his mental state, which has been questioned. According to court documents, Carl was repeatedly beaten with household items, and his parents used to break wooden spoons as they wailed on him. His father testified, “The only limit I placed on my assaults on him was that I wouldn’t beat him to the point of drawing blood."

Elke sensed the deeply held anger in the family — when one is abused, the perpetuation then continues.

“When I met his parents I sensed a lot of pain,” she said. “The biggest problem I always saw, and still see, is that problems were never discussed, but [rather] ignored to the point that everyone was hoping they would just go away.”

Now, Elke sees a change in the behavior of her own daughter. Not having her father around, she said, will most certainly take its toll.

“A child is born to a mom and dad for a reason,” she pointed out.

A Political Debate

The Puiattis await their next appeal, but one may question whether their efforts are futile or not. It appears that sex offenders have become a source for political debate.

“In reference to [this] particular case, most likely the courts would not make an exception or be lenient due to the age of the child,” said Miami Beach Vice Mayor Michael Gongora. “He is a child molester, and sexual offenders are extremely likely to use physical violence and to repeat their offenses.”

In Miami Beach, during his 2006 State of the City speech, Mayor David Dermer lauded city staff for implementing “a groundbreaking” law that “further separated convicted sexual predators from where children gather to learn and play.”

The law created a 2,500-foot buffer zone around places where children congregate. Due to the excluded zone’s size, the law effectively bans registered sexual offenders from living anywhere in the city. Recent reports have cited a handful of ex-offenders now living under the Julia Tuttle Causeway, Gongora said, as there appears to be nowhere else to legally put them.

Gongora said there is a housing problem for sexual offenders, and while he supports a residential mandate, he said it needs to be a “more realistic approach.”

Each time there is “another horrible sex crime [the public] will scream for even stricter guidelines, or [ask] to have all sexual offenders sent to an island in Alaska,” said Gongora — a suggestion that Elke says is “not a joke, as it was proposed by someone from Homeland Security.”

When sex offenders released from prison cannot find housing or employment because of restrictions, they are more likely to be a threat to their community, according to a final report composed by the state’s Governor’s Ex-Offender Task Force.

Finding an apartment that is not inside the buffer zone is very difficult, Elke said, and each place needs to be approved by the supervising office.

Eades was one of the lucky ones; he found housing within the required three days post-release. “Had I not completed these steps, I faced immediate reincarceration on a new charge of ‘failing to register,’ which carries an automatic five-year sentence,” he said.

And, according to the Re-Offender Act — which states that if an ex-offender commits a crime within the three years following release, the maximum sentence allowable for that crime can be doubled — those who do not find housing could sit in prison for another decade, Eades said.

“Can you imagine being sent to prison for 10 years because nobody would rent to you, even though you had the ability to pay?” Eades asked.

Statistics — as stated in former FBI agent Gavin de Becker’s book, Protecting the Gift, — show that the number of children snatched from the side of the road is far fewer than those faced with ongoing, incestuous molestations, Elke pointed out. Thus “none of the restrictions for the sexual offenders are going to prevent this … no GPS or driving log, or residential restrictions,” Elke said.

Miami Commissioner Tomas Regalado agreed that attempting to pinpoint who will commit a crime should not be up to those creating city code.

“I think the decision should be left up to the courts,” he said. “We in the cities don’t have, and should not have, the power to decide who is okay and who could be a repeat offender. The reality is that the county and most, if not all, the municipalities have these laws on the books.”

Florida law states that unless one was designated a sexual offender prior to Oct. 1, 1998, “registration is for life, unless you have received a full pardon or had a conviction set aside for any offense that met the criteria for the sexual predator/offender designation.”

Like Elke, Eades finds it disturbing that his name, photo, identifying marks and history can be easily accessed on the Internet.

“According to a study done by the U.S. Department of Justice, sex offenders are among the least likely to repeat offend,” Eades said.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Offender Statistics report, which was last updated on Sept. 30, 2006, notes, “Sex offenders were less likely than non-sex offenders to be rearrested for any offense –– 43 percent of sex offenders versus 68 percent of non-sex offenders.”

In fiscal year 2005-06 there were 1,713 male and 22 female sexual offenders admitted to Florida’s prisons, according to the Adult Community Supervision Office fact page. Of them, 1,203 had never been to prison before.

According to the Florida Department of Corrections, sexual offenders constituted 5 percent of the total 35,098 people admitted to prison in FY 2005-06 — a percentage lower than that for robbery, kidnapping, DUIs, grand theft, trafficking of drugs and arson. Yet many of these ex-offenders do not have to live a specific distance from certain populations.

Eades feels he has paid his debt to society — and unlike robbers, drug dealers or tax evaders, everyone knows who he is. He wonders why the state does not require the registration and control of drug dealers: “They destroy thousands more lives every year than all the sexual offenders.” And many have multiple convictions for their trade, Eades said.

“We made a terrible mistake, but we have paid for our crime, and should be treated humanely, not legislated underground, which is just what is currently happening,” he said.

In Eades’ view, sexual offenses are the “crime of the week,” and are “sensationalized by the media, and the public is worked into a legislative frenzy before ever really knowing all the facts involved.”

All he wants is that people think.

“Get to know the person, not the label,” he said. “You may be really surprised as to who you face.”