Garbage Patch Kids: The Patch frightens readers with annual FAKE NEWS fearfest, adds Dennis RoBLEHgh OpEd justifying their fake news fearfest

Lets address the bovine excrement in this article:

1. Lisa French was killed by someone with no prior sex offense record. A registry would not have saved her life.
2. This story was 40 years ago, while registries have only been around in most of the US in 20. Between 1971 and today, there have not been any other cases like this one, so to claim the registry had any impact on this once in a lifetime issue is ludicrous.
2. Recidivism is cloer to 1% than 25%. This clown needs better numbers.
3. The claim that "most sex crimes go underreported" is a bold-faced lie dragged straight from the truly scary myth of the satanic ritual abuse era, the mother of fake news reporting.
4. Dennis denies there have been protests at the homes of registered citizens. That alone shows he is completely ignorant about this issue. We've not only seen protests, we've seen people use the registry as hit lists. Apparently this clown never heard of Jeremy and Christine Moody, or Patrick Drum, or Stephen Marshall. It must be nice living in Dennis's fantasyland.

The Patch isn't a real news site anyways, it is a self-publisher. ANYONE can write for Patch, and unfortunately, they allow doucherags with zero journalistic skills and even less integrety write for them.

https://patch.com/us/across-america/then-i-see-delight-your-eyes-turn-fear

'Then I See The Delight In Your Eyes Turn To Fear'
This is why Patch publishes local sex offender maps.
By Dennis Robaugh (Patch National Staff) - Updated Oct 13, 2017 11:06 pm ET

I wonder what Lisa French would think if she could see her local sex-offender registry — the public record of addresses for every person convicted of a sex crime. Every fall for the last six years, Patch has plotted those places on local maps and shared the maps with our readers. What would Lisa French, as a mom, think about our effort to help parents easily see who lives in those dwellings?

At Halloween, would she find that map useful as she dressed her little ones like pirates or princesses and prepared to walk through their neighborhood in a gleeful hunt for candy?

We'll never know.

Lisa French isn't a mom. She never grew up to raise children of her own. Her life ended Oct. 31, 1973, at the hands of a man thereafter known as the "Halloween killer." Out trick-or-treating that evening, dressed as a little hobo, she knocked on a neighbor's door looking for a handful of sweets and chocolates, but that night she came face-to-face with evil.

The Halloween killer took her inside his home, took her innocence and took her life.

Lisa French was just 9 years old.

"I doubt that I could ever fully realize the terror you experienced at my hands," Gerald Turner wrote in a "letter" to his victim. The document is part of his parole file.

"I can still see you standing (in) the doorway with that felt hat beaming at having recognized me. Then I see the delight in your eyes turn to fear as I close the door behind you.

"The rest of my life I will have to live with what I did to you ..."

He stripped her, raped her, murdered her, stuffed her into a garbage bag, then dumped her in a field. He wore socks on his hands to try to avoid leaving fingerprints, according to the court record. A farmer found her nude body a few days later in a bag. The city of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, still mourns Lisa French.

Nine months later, detectives snared Turner and he confessed.

"It isn't the same here in Fond du Lac. Everybody that lives here always knows about Lisa French," the lead detective on the case, Melvin Heller, told WISN News recently. "What I like the parents to know is the possibility of this thing happening again is very realistic today, because those people aren't locked up forever today."

Turner wasn't locked up forever, either. Convicted in 1975, the Halloween killer was sentenced to 38 years in prison and paroled in 1992. His release prompted Wisconsin to enact a sexual predator law that gave the state power to keep a sexually violent person behind bars for treatment. Turner was imprisoned for a few more years because of the law, but the state again set him free in 1998. Five years later, he was returned to prison after authorities discovered he brought sexually violent pornography into his halfway house. He could be freed in February 2018.

We publish sex-offender maps because people deserve to know whether they live near someone like Turner who's preyed on the most vulnerable.

Every state now has a sex-offender registry. While there is no national database, the U.S. Justice Department maintains a national public offender sex registry website with links to lists for every state and territory. Laws have been passed barring registered sex offenders from passing out candy on Halloween or attending community Halloween celebrations.

In the days before kids trick-or-treat, many police and sheriff's departments visit their towns' sex offenders to remind them of the rules.

The National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws, an advocacy group for sex criminals released back into society, objects to the publication of local sex-offender registry maps on Patch. The organization points to a lack of Halloween abductions and molestations in the last 20 years — since the advent of sex-offender registries — as a reason why we should not do this, arguing we unfairly demonize these criminals and even encourage community hysteria.

In all the years we've published sex-offender maps or sat in bond court, we've never heard of people marching with torches to a child predator's home. We have, however, seen many parents weep in court because their child was raped or molested.

Lisa French was taken from her parents and her community 44 years ago. She could have been a mom. If not for the Halloween killer, she might even now be walking door-to-door, beaming at her little costumed grandchildren.

Statistics and research may show children are at no greater risk of falling victim to pedophiles on Halloween than any other time of the year, but that doesn't mean children are not vulnerable. Some studies show there's a one-in-four chance a convicted sex offender will run afoul of the law again, but most sex crimes go unreported, which means the true recidivism rate among molesters and child rapists cannot be known.

We could very well publish these safety maps at the start of summer when kids are out and about playing, or the start of the school year when kids begin walking to the bus stops. We chose October, but the timing really doesn't matter. 

Parents across Patch communities repeatedly tell us how much they appreciate our culling through public information to assemble these maps as a public service. We will continue to do so. We present the information clearly and plainly, without hype or hysteria. Knowledge is empowering, and if we've helped parents know more about their neighbors, that's what matters.