Developing Story

Two Billings men included in Boy Scout perversion files

Posted: Oct 19, 2012 7:09 AM by Drew Trafton - Q2 News
Updated: Oct 19, 2012 7:09 AM

BILLINGS- On Thursday the Boy Scouts of America released 20,000 documents detailing sexual assaults and alleged sexual assaults, many from the 1960's through the 1980's, which resulted in the banning of more than 1,200 Boy Scout leaders across the nation.

Six of those files included Montana Council Boy Scout leaders and two more came from Northern Wyoming troops in Powell and Basin.

Two of those files profile men who were scout leaders in Billings-and both of those men still live in Billings.

One of the men was banned following his conviction in a 1977 sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl in Billings.
He was sentenced to serve a 15-year sentence in the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge.

The man is not a registered sex offender because he did not fully serve his sentence and was released prior to the establishment of the Montana Sexual or Violent Offenders Registration Act in 1989.

The man who is the center of the other file involving the Boys Scouts of America in Billings was a Troop Master.

The Troop Master was accused of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old boy during a camping trip he chaperoned in 1976.

The Boy Scout involved wrote a letter to local Boy Scout leadership, who took it and confronted the Troop Master within weeks.

According to documentation released in the file, the Troop Master resigned within a week of the confrontation.

In a letter the local leadership written to a regional office as part of a correspondence about the Troop Master's dismissal, it writes a representative told the Troop Master his resignation, "...will save embarrassment on both your part and ours."

The lack of criminal charges in this case is not rare when it comes to the files-which the Boy Scouts called "perversion files".

According to media outlets around the country, hundreds of the files show alleged sexual assaults never reported to law enforcement.