Could something similar happen to Keith Alan Raniere as what happened to child molesters David Bobb, 48, and Graham De Luis-Conti, 62, last month?
Both men were serving life sentences for aggravated sexual assault of a child under 14, in Corcoran State Prison in California. The prison houses more than 5,400 inmates and specializes in substance abuse treatment.
Another one of the prisoners, Jonathan Watson, 41, who is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, chose to end the lives of both molesters.
We get details from Watson, who proudly confessed in a letter to the Bay Area News Group in Northern California.
Watson explained he was transferred from a single-person cell, where he wanted to stay, to a lower-security dormitory pod at the prison.
Six days after he arrived, a child molester moved into the pod. Watson believed the man began taunting other inmates by watching children’s television programs.
In his letter, Watson said he couldn’t sleep that night “having not done what every instinct told me I should’ve done right then and there.”
The next day, Watson told a prison counselor he needed to be transferred back to higher-level security “before I really fuck one of these dudes up.”
Jonathan Watson, a hero for killing child molesters?
The counselor “scoffed and dismissed” him, Watson said.
Watson returned to the housing pod.
“I was mulling it all over when along came Molester #1 and he put his TV right on PBS Kids again,” he wrote.
One of the fellow prisons said, ‘Is this guy really going to watch this right in front of us?’
Watson interrupted him, saying, “I got this.”
Then he picked up his cane and “went to work on him.”
After killing Bobbs by delivering blows to his head, Watson left the housing pod to find a guard and turn himself in.
On the way, he saw “a known child trafficker, and I figured I’d just do everybody a favor,” Watson wrote. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
Watson then beat De Luis-Conti with his cane but did not immediately kill him. De Luis-Conti died three days later.
Watson then found a guard.
“I told him, ‘I’ve got some pretty bad news,’ to which he ironically replied, ‘You’re not going to hit me with that cane are you?’” Watson wrote. “So after jesting for a moment, knowing this might be the last decent moment that I have for a long time, I told him what I’d just done, which he also didn’t believe until he looked around the corner and saw the mess I’d left in the dorm area.”
After being detained for the killings, he gave prison officials a full confession. Watson said he will plead guilty to both killings if the state takes him to court and hinted he may kill again if he is housed with child molesters in the future.
By the way, Watson got his wish and is back in segregated housing.
“Being a lifer,” he wrote, “I’m in a unique position where I sometimes have access to these people and I have so little to lose. And trust me, we get it, these people are every parent’s worst nightmare. These familys (sic) spend years carefully and articulately planning how to give their children every opportunity that they never had, and one monster comes along and changes that child’s trajectory forever.”
What is interesting is that Watson may not be punished in any measurable way. He is in for life and is likely now a hero to many prisoners.
I suspect the guards won’t look down on him either and might actually treat him with more respect.
Could the same thing happen to Raniere?
Some lifer, with nothing to lose, might one day decide to beat a very vulnerable Keith Raniere to death for something as innocuous as watching a TV show.
According to numerous reports and accounts of prisoners, in the society of prisoners and guards, they all agree: Molesters are the lowest form of life, the worst of all transgressors. Nobody hates Watson for what he has done.
From the moment a man is found to have molested a child, he is forever an outcast. And robbers, fraudsters, drug dealers and murderers look down upon him and feel morally superior, a feeling they may not enjoy with any other class of society.
In cases like Watson’s, a man might even find redemption, become a prison hero, and brag to a receptive media, as Watson has done, about his exploits, by dispatching a couple of molesters.
He did not murder; he decreased the population of child molesters by two.
Very few, maybe no one, outside of prison will condemn Watson. Some will applaud him.
Keith Alan Raniere, child molester. Sketch by MK10ART.
Sure he was also fraudster, conman, and cult leader, but what counts in prison is, Raniere was a child molester.
If he is not protected, possibly in a supermax facility, he may end up one day getting brained by some prisoner with nothing to lose.
What steps will the Federal Bureau of Prisons take to prevent this after Raniere is sentenced in April?
