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In March the former assistant
manager of the Fells Acres Day School passed his
42nd birthday, an occasion unmarked by celebrations.
Gerald Amirault has by now spent almost ten of his
42 years imprisoned for atrocious sex crimes
allegedly committed in concert with his elderly
mother and his sister--all participants, according
to the prosecutors, in a family conspiracy to
assault preschool children. In September, Gerald's
now 72-year-old mother Violet Amirault--the closed
school's former proprietor--and his sister Cheryl,
37, were released after eight years in prison when
Massachusetts State Judge Robert A. Barton
overturned their conviction. Gerald, tried
separately, will have to depend on the decision of
the state's Supreme Judicial Court, scheduled to
take his case up early this fall, along with that of
the Amirault women, whose reversal of conviction the
state is appealing.
The day after the women were
released a state prosecutor troubled to tell this
page that he believed in the case against the
Amiraults and that he was glad to be taking part in
it. Former district attorney and now Attorney
General of Massachusetts Scott Harshbarger, whose
office prosecuted the Amiraults, has continued to
offer assurances and proclamations that justice was
done in the Fells Acres case. The Amiraults were
serious child abusers, he has explained, and those
saying otherwise were attempting, as Mr. Harshbarger
put it, to smother the voices of the victim children
and parents.
When the state sent Gerald
Amirault to prison he left behind three children of
his own, ages seven, six, and 22 months. The family
now began a new existence revolving largely around
the absent Gerald, a tumultuous life in which his
wife Patricia, a schoolteacher, tried to make ends
meet by working at three jobs. The eldest daughter,
Gerralyn, now 17, recalls the first years of her
father's imprisonment, when he sometimes brought a
ball to the visiting room and played catch with her
young brother. Those days, when she had seen her
father run around the chairs having fun, she would
leave the visit feeling happy and light-hearted--not
the way it felt most of the time, saying goodbye.
With the passing months she began to adjust to the
chaos of the new life, the prison visits. The
Amirault children accustomed themselves, as they had
to, to everything--everything except daily traffic
in a world which viewed their father as a monstrous
criminal and tormentor of children, as he had been
described for so long in the Boston press.
Gerald concluded, early in his
imprisonment, that he could keep himself intact by
concentrating on the present, rather than how he had
come to be here--a useful resolve impossible to
keep. Memories of the charges mounted against the
Amiraults, beginning in 1984, are not easily
repressed. Reported previously, those charges are
worth repeating.
He had, it was alleged, plunged a
butcher knife into the rectum of a four year old,
which he had had great trouble removing, according
to the prosecution's child witness--and, according
to this witness, when Gerald told another teacher
what he was doing with the knife, she simply warned
him not to do it again. Nothing about this testimony
prevented Gerald Amirault's conviction on the charge
that he raped the child with a butcher knife--one
which miraculously left no signs of injury. The same
young witness produced testimony about a visit from
a green and yellow and silver robot from "Star
Wars," who bit her on the arm. There were charges of
molestation in magic rooms by bad clowns, extracted
by determined interviewers. The Amiraults had
slaughtered bluebirds, child witnesses said, tied a
naked boy to a tree while all the other teachers and
children stood around watching. Violet Amirault
allegedly assaulted a child anally with a stick
while he stood up, and raped him with a "magic
wand"--charges of which she was convicted. Gerald
Amirault was sentenced, after a trial ending in
1986, to 30 to 40 years. A year later his mother and
sister would be tried, convicted and given eight to
20 years.
After nearly eight years at the
ancient Middlesex House of Detention, Gerald was
transferred, in 1994, to the newly built Plymouth
County Correctional Facility, not far from Plymouth
Harbor. Here he spends much of the day reading in
the unit established for prisoners in protective
custody, most of them convicted of sex crimes.
Frequent targets in prison, people charged with such
crimes against children are at the lowest rung of
the social ladder--the highest being reserved for
those in for killing a policeman.
Gerald Amirault's section houses
some 51 men. Here, securely separated from the rest
of the inmate population, everyone wears a uniform
of blinding orange, as opposed to the general
population's indeterminate green. In this impeccably
modern prison complete with air-conditioning,
prisoners get up for breakfast delivered on trays
beginning at 6:30. Afterward, Gerald watches the
morning television news in the area immediately
beyond the doorless 12-by-12 cubicle shared with
three other inmates. His own corner of this world is
a bunk bed sitting just at the edge of the open
corridor: a bottom bunk, to be sure--one of the
perquisites of a senior prisoner.
When Gerald's middle daughter,
Katie, saw her father in the new prison for the
first time, she cried bitterly. In the old prison
closer to home they had all been able to visit
several times a week and sit with one another. In
Plymouth, which allows no contact with prisoners (to
prevent the passing of drugs and other contraband),
visitors and inmate talk via phone, through a glass
wall. Gerald would give much to be back in
Middlesex, decrepit and non-climate-controlled, but
where, once or twice a week, he could hold the
children and hug his wife. Here, the children
recall, there were the bumps on the visiting room
wall that their father had used to show them how
tall they were growing.
The children's strong attachment
to their father, obvious early, had its reasons.
Wherever Gerald was, his wife notes, there the
children were sure to be. When year-old Katie had
trouble sleeping he would be the one to sit up
rocking her. "Try letting her cry," Patricia
Amirault would urge when the child woke up for the
fifth time--directions Gerald invariably refused.
Not for nothing did the children grow up adoring
him. When he was brought to trial his daughters were
just old enough to grasp the terror that had
befallen the family. The youngest, P.J., knew
nothing at 22 months. Long after Gerald had been
taken away, the child continued to grow excited when
the floorboard creaked--a sound he associated with
Gerald--and to call for his father.
When the Fells Acres trials ended
in convictions, and the TV cameras were gone, when
the state's attorneys had finished celebrating their
model prosecution (as the case was billed at the
time) and Scott Harshbarger had won
re-election--when it was all over the Amiraults were
left holding on to one another, and what remained of
life. And they lived--if with difficulty--brought up
children, celebrated holidays and christenings and
hope when they could find it. When the time came for
them to receive Communion, the girls wore their
white dresses to the prison, and P.J. his suit, so
their father could see them and in this way, take
part.
For most of their years on earth
he had been shut away because the state prosecutors
had found a case to build and had built it, on
testimony whose manifestly incredible nature jurors
were told to discount, in order that the war on
child sex abuse could go forward. It is on the
grounds of high moral principle, as well, that
determined prosecutors let it be known a few weeks
ago that they will be retrying Robert Kelly, the
chief defendant in the notorious Little Rascals
Nursery School case in North Carolina, whose
conviction on similarly absurd charges of
molestation was thrown out last year. It is on
grounds of high principle, too, that prosecutors are
now preparing their efforts to return Violet and
Cheryl Amirault to prison, and to keep Gerald there.
Pondering what may come, Gerald
lies awake in the small cubicle he considers quite
spacious. In prison, he is by now a man of small
expectations, and of fears of unspeakable depths,
the central one of which is of years more to come
looking at the children behind the glass. |