Serial Predator Says I'm Sorry - The Duclod Man

For two decades the Duclod Man frightened college students by sending accusatory anonymous letters. Multiple colleges were his victims, accusing their young men and women of being bise xual, and of being dishonest by hiding their se xuality from both straights and gays, accusing them of hiding in two closets, which he considered "dually closeted", and which he called "duclod".

Letters from the Duclod Man were postmarked from several different states. He also maintained an anonymous internet presence by setting up pages at free hosting websites, and by leaving comments in various fringe forums. Even his grafitti was identified, in public bathrooms, from his unusual use of language. But the police were baffled, and his written barrage continued.

In 2004 reporter Sarah Aswell began a high-tech search for the Duclod Man, whom she calls "Richard".

Richard's letters were mostly directed to senior students at Grinnell College in Iowa, and the University of Kansas. They were posted to the U.S. mail in groups, during school breaks. Sometimes it was sent to the student's home address, where there was a chance it would "out" the recipient to his or her parents. The envelope contained a sheet of paper folded up like a homemade greeting card, with childlike drawings of men crawling on the ground, trash cans, and closet doors, and included a written message that could be a threat or an off-color joke, such as "DUCLODS DI E TWICE".

Sarah tracked Richard through a long and increasingly disturbing chain, of clues he left on the internet. He advocated the training of boys in how to be abusive, in a comment left at a battered women's forum. In a forum dealing with autoer otic asphyxiation, he pretended to be a teenage girl. At the end of the chain, she found a website with old resume of his.

He turned out to be a gardener and overweight. She found his photograph, his home address, his real email, and his phone number. She tried calling him, but was answered only by a robotic female voice from an answering machine. He did not repond to Sarah's emails, either. Then, in the style of his own modus operandi, she sent him an anonymous letter which said, "Stop sending messages, Richard."

Next her expose was published in "the Advocate", an American magazine covering events important to the LGBT community, which has won numerous mainstream publishing awards.

But the Duclod Man did not stop. He continued his inflammatory letter writing campaign. Aswell decided to out him, to his family. A family spread across several different states, from which he had been mailing his letters. His father was dead, and his mother old and nonplussed. But Sarah made a connection with his two sisters.

These sisters, said Richard may have autism, but since he grew up in the 50's, he was never officially diagnosed. Intellectually he was slightly above average, but he had the emotional development of a ten-year old, they said, and he lived as a recluse, and his health was not good. In Aswells's follow-up article in "The Adocate", she revealed that his family did confront him, asking him to take down his web pages. He took down the pages.

On the last web page to go down, the Duclod Man published an apology. Although the apology is rambling, and makes conspiratorial references to memes like the "New World Order", and Ted Kaczynski the Unabo mber, he ends his rant like this: "I always looked for others to feel superior to and really thought I could build myself up by putting others down, but it just doesn't work that way over the long haul, and I'm sorry for the pain I caused to others... by going postal the way I did... I was hurting people more than I realized."

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