Panty thieves are common enough. Often they target young girls, but there is no reason to think that only pedophiles turn to thievery to satisfy their illicit desires. Why not gerontophiles too? No doubt there are pervs out there who, in their insatiable lust for the geriatric, would steal adult diapers from the very asses of Alzheimer’s patients.

However, aside from the theoretical possibility that the “sheltered housing complex” could be stalked by a gerontophiliac panty thief, there is nothing to indicate why authorities think this could really be the case. There are obvious alternative explanations: things get lost in the wash, or eldsters with dementia play strip poker and forget to bring their lost briefs back to their rooms. Do authorities have proof that these explanations are not correct? Is there evidence of perverted activity? Did some deviant leave DNA on the Depends?

(Thanks for the link to Neko, who wrote: “I think old-people rape has probably been done, but the religious aspect interested me (you can just imagine their family meals together) as did the creepily ambiguous statement by the kid’s dad.”)

It is true, Neko, that PervScan has covered a number of stories about “old-people rape” or gerontophilia. It seems paradoxical: if you’re going to risk jail to rape someone, why choose a little old lady? But then this crime occurs in reality more often than you’d imagine, which suggests that, though it may sound paradoxical to a logical mind, it makes perfect sense to a warped one.

There are actually experts who specialize in profiling gerontophiles. Is it too hasty to call this young man a gerontophile? It’s unclear whether he has much of a history with old ladies, but authorities “believe the elderly woman was targeted by Opont and that they don’t believe robbery was his motive.” If he wasn’t motivated by robbery, it implies he wanted to attack the old woman. Maybe it wasn’t lust. Maybe he bore her some grudge. Maybe she was a feisty old lady who dared to tell the kid to clean up his act. Neighbors assert that the pastor’s son was never an angel.

As for the religious aspect of the story, it is difficult not to relish the sight of religious people caught red-handed in some crime. It deflates their holier-than-thou pretensions and puts them on the same footing as the rest of us sweating, struggling, fucked-up humans. But that doesn’t really pertain here. The rapist appears to have been rebelling against the religiosity of his home, and you wouldn’t want to lay any of the son’s sins at the father’s doorstep. Maybe he’s a bad dad, maybe he’s a great one. The only thing you can say for sure is that, Jesus or no Jesus, the father must be heartbroken.

Finally, the 99-year-old victim may well be the oldest ever to suffer such an ignominious fate. Somebody call the folks over at Guinness World Records. What is the age of the oldest rape victim ever?

Here is a picture of the perp. This McDonald’s employee with the long sideburns and wiggy hair admitted to beating the old lady. He admitted to masturbating before her vagina as she lay bleeding on the ground. However, he would not admit to penetrating her with his penis, even though a DNA test revealed the presence of his semen inside the woman. For this reason, the young man and his lawyer invented torturous, implausible theories about how his semen might have travelled from his penis to the woman’s vagina. His lawyer floated the possibility that the young man held open but did not enter his victim’s vaginal lips as he ejaculated.

Only in the insane world of the courtroom could a technicality such as this make the least difference. This guy beat the shit out of some grandmother, pushed his fingers into her vagina, pleasured himself in a way that caused his sperm to enter her body — and lawyers are arguing about whether or not his penis penetrated her? About whether or not this was rape? Hell yes, it was rape. A guilty verdict indicated that this was apparent even to jurors in California, where popular consensus holds that O.J. got away with murder and M.J. with child abuse.

Past history does make you wonder, though, how jurors would have ruled if the perp had been a celebrity. If he were the star, say, of a reality show, would they find it plausible to think that an emergency-room nurse might have accidentally shoved the perp’s semen into the victim’s vagina with a swab? Or that little sperm fairies might have whisked his stuff into her vagina with their magic cum wands?

(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

One of the very first stories published here on PervScan declared that gerontophilia “is one of those fetishes that always makes you scratch your head and go, ‘Hmmm.’” It seems to defy the logic of attraction. Why would somebody rape an octogenarian in a grocery parking lot when he could just as easily rape some hot young thing? It doesn’t make sense. True, many fetishes take the peculiar as their object. Many people would find repelling the feet that excite some fetishists. Or if you’ve ever seen a dead body, it’s hard to imagine how a necrophile could really want to hump it and pump it. Dead bodies set off some innate ick reaction. How does that disgust become lust?

This doctor writing in the Times explains the matter by claiming that gerontophilia is not about desire, it’s about revenge. An FBI profiler covered here made a similar case. They may well be right, but somehow it has never seemed like a very satisfactory explanation. If somebody wants to take revenge on an old person, why not bash him in the head with a shovel? Why not coat his dentures with arsenic? Why fuck him? Somehow the revenge explanation leaves the specifically sexual motivation of gerontophilia out of the picture. It whitewashes gerontophilia, neuters it, portrays it as a violence in which sexuality is merely incidental or epiphenomenal. But must desire not form a part of this odd crime against the elderly? Is it really possible for revenge to cause an erection with no admixture of lust?

It seems wrong-minded or possibly even prudish to leave desire out of the concept of gerontophilia. It shoves aside the perversion’s paradox — how does desire attach itself to an object which no longer seems desirable? — but thereby seems to explain something other than the perversion, some geronto mania devoid of its philia.

In only the third story that was posted to the then young site, PervScan noted that gerontophilia “is one of those fetishes that always makes you scratch your head and go, ‘Hmmm.’ The victim in this story was 84 years old. What’s the allure exactly? Wrinkles? Dentures? A gray bush?” And that’s really the most common response when you happen to hear of some guy raping an old lady. Why? Why a little old lady? If you’re going to risk going to prison for a sexual offense, shouldn’t you at least rape someone who is younger and, by most standards, sexier?

If you’ve ever wondered what sort of person ends up raping old ladies, then this in-depth profile of Mark Safarik, of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, is well worth reading. Mr. Safarik has discovered that gerontophiles conform to type more often than most other sex offenders. They tend to be youngish (around 27), alcoholic, poorly educated, unemployed. They tend to live near their victims. They tend to have criminal records, but few arrests for sexual assaults — a seeming oddity that helps to explain the fact that gerontophilia, in Mr Safarik’s estimate, is rarely a sexual crime. “In these cases, they are looking for an available and vulnerable target; that’s why they don’t assault members of their peer group,” Mr. Safarik explained. “And once inside the house, they have unfettered access and all the privacy they need, so when you look at it that way, you can see how it’s not difficult to explain because they’re taking back the power and control they don’t have. And rape is the most intimate way to assault a female and express your rage.”

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

It’s hard to imagine the truly bizarre conjunction of circumstances that resulted in this tragedy. On one hand, there’s a gerontophile with a gun lurking around a certain neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning. On the other hand, an octogenarian with dementia wanders out into the street at precisely the same wee hour of the morning. It’s such a weird bit of serendipity — or maybe anti-serendipity, given the consequences — that it calls to mind the famous surrealist dictum about the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table. The chance meeting of an armed gerontophile and an 85-year-old Alzheimer’s patient is just as surreal.

Perhaps the underlying lesson is that many if not most rapes are in fact crimes of circumstance. Rapists are opportunistic. Like scavengers, they take what comes their way. Usually you imagine them passing on the old and the disabled, but in a few cases you have that chance encounter where the rapist might actually enjoy the thought of exploiting the elderly. What makes it surreal is simply the improbability involved, the one-in-a-million aspect of the encounter. But then that’s the nature of chance, of randomness. When a drunk cheerleader walks alone into the purview of a rapist, there’s a good chance she’s in danger. When a demented octogenarian walks alone into the purview of a rapist, there’s a small chance she’s in danger — but however small it may be, however surreal, it’s still a chance.

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

Another article about this case tells how the victim had suffered sixteen strokes in the twenty years before being raped so viciously. She probably thought her life had been hell, and then this young punk came along to make it even more hellish. “I’m an old woman,” she kept yelling, but apparently that didn’t stop the brute.

And it always makes you wonder: here is a young man committing a heinous crime for which he will go to jail for many years. Given the penalty, you’d think that the natural inclination would be to commit a more delectable crime. Rather than rape a partially paralyzed and blind old lady, wouldn’t you rather assault Gwen Stefani or the Olsen Twins or something? You could make the case that raping the Olsen Twins would be worth a long jail sentence. At least it would give you fond memories. But raping a helpless old lady? It hardly seems worth it.

Naturally the perp blamed it on his state of inebriation. But booze and pills don’t make people into gerontophiles. They worsen your judgement, for sure, but can they really transform a natural lust for healthy adult women into an urge to rape sick old ladies? Buckfast, ironically, is a famous tonic wine manufactured by the monks at an English abbey. The monks are no doubt horrifed, and if they suspect that it can cause young men to yearn so deliriously for old ladies, maybe they’ll pull it off the market — or repackage it to compete against Viagra.

(Thanks to charlesss666 for an additional version of the story.)

Here are some boys that weren’t raised right. If you raise your boys right, they’ll know that if a fellow is going to commit a crime for which he may well suffer severe punishment, he should at least make the crime tasty. Raping somebody’s grandmother does not fall into this category. There’s something about septuagenarian breasts that resembles elephant skin, and you shudder to think about what those old orifices might resemble. Regardless, it’s not worth going to prison for.

So if you want to raise your boys right, teach them that serious crimes need the right balance between punishment and pleasure. If you’re going to rape somebody, go for a hot chick, a cheerleader or supermodel, rather than an old sack of granny flesh. The long years of juvenile detention or perhaps even prison might be less onerous if you’ve once tasted a moment’s worth of infinite joy.

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

You can’t make this kind of stuff up. Amputees raping bedridden grandmothers — it’s like a tiny detail in the corner of a painting by Hieronymous Bosch. It’s a slice of life when life has become meaningless, a local expression of a global implosion of sanity, a taste of things to come when it’s the End Times that are coming. Lordy. You imagine the guy hobbling over to the bed, beating granny with a prosthetic leg, then fingering her gray old gash.

To look at it another way, the article notes that the victim shared a room with another patient. The other patient claims that a room divider prevented her from realizing that a brutal rape was occurring five feet away. This is hard to believe. If you’ve ever been in a hospital room, you know that those room dividers furnish about as much privacy as a two-way mirror. If the victim gave a scream or even a grunt, you’d think it would be impossible for the roommate not to have noticed it. Which leads to an interesting possibility: maybe granny didn’t scream? After all those years, maybe it was nice to feel the touch of a man again, even if the man was pummeling her.

While it’s pretty impressive what forensic scientists can do with DNA these days, you would think that criminals must be catching on. For example, suppose you want to rape an old lady. What is the first thing you should do — pick a target at the local bingo game? Break into her home? No! You should collect some random DNA samples — take half-chewed meals from restaurant trash bins, find stray hairs in public bathrooms, maybe even give five bucks to a homeless guy for some skin scrapings or a little blood.

Then when you go commit your crime, you simply strew a bit of DNA around the scene. At worst, if cops still find some of your DNA, they’ll figure you’re part of a vicious gang. At best, they might even fixate on one of the other DNA samples and arrest the homeless guy or an otherwise upright citizen whose pubic hair you stole from a toilet seat in an airport bathroom. And if enough criminals start strewing DNA around their crime scenes, it will also jam up the crime labs, overload them with work. This could have the additional benefit of impeding law enforcement’s ability to identify criminals.