- Confessed serial rapist Richard Gillmore is scheduled for release from prison later this year.
- Survivors worry Gillmore could offend again, despite his technical “low-level” sex offender classification. They work to help victims of similar crimes.
- “It has a lifetime effect. And I know that he was in prison for 36 years, but aren’t all of his survivors, his victims? We’ve kind of been in a prison for that much, and we still have to be,” survivor Tiffany Edens told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
A convicted rapist set to be released from an Oregon prison in December has the potential to reoffend, survivors of his crimes told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Richard Gillmore, now 63 and known as the “Jogger Rapist,” was arrested in 1986 and only received a 30-60 year sentence for raping 13-year-old Tiffany Edens of Gresham, Oregon, escaping prosecution for eight other confessed rapes as far back as the late 1970s because of an expired statute of limitations, according to KOIN. His sentence was eventually reduced and his parole release is scheduled for December, but Edens and fellow survivor Danielle Tudor told the Daily Caller News Foundation he may still endanger people, despite his official “low-level” sex offender status.
“We moved from Portland to be gone before he is released,” Tudor told the DCNF.
Tudor said she has focused intensely on issues like this since coming forward as a survivor in 2008, and Gillmore “has always failed his more than a dozen psych evaluations over the years.”
WOW ! Three years later all this legislation is now law. We’ve got a few more things to accomplish @gentnerdrummond https://t.co/zXO3GYfKTF
— Danielle Tudor (@danielletudor62) February 7, 2022
“The last ones were done in 2016. I’m perplexed why the parole board would not do some current evaluations?” she stated. “He was sentenced as a dangerous offender at trial. How the parole board is getting around that I don’t know.”
Oregon Board of Parole and Post-Prison Supervision Dylan Arthur told OregonLive that Gillmore had last received an updated psychological evaluation in 2016. The board branded him a danger to others around the same time.
Edens explained that she has “worked hard to come to a place of some comfortability” with Gillmore’s upcoming release, despite disapproving of the decision to let Gillmore out. She said she was upset to read that his “Static-99R” psychological assessment results qualified him as a “low-level” sex offender.
The internationally-used Static-99R risk assessment tool considers sex offenders’ potential for recidivism, according to the Oregon Board of Parole.
“I think that the public needs to be aware that he’s not dumb,” Edens, now a behavior health professional, said of Gillmore. “He’s had a long time to get used to things and to know how to answer things, so I don’t think that we can trust the Static-99 test, and I think that the community has every right to know when a dangerous person could be moving next door to their daughter, or granddaughter. So I think that public awareness should be, as he’s now low-level, that means that the state and the county don’t need to report to the community where he’s gonna be.”
Gillmore was in the process of attempting to become a police officer at the time of his arrest, and Edens was able to identify him in photos and audio from one of his interviews, she recalled.
“You’re trying to be a police officer, someone who protects and serves, yet you are following me, watching me for two weeks, and then you break into my home when I’m 13 years old and brutally rape me?” Edens told the DCNF.
She thinks there is still a chance he could reoffend, questioning whether people like him can ever be completely rehabilitated. (RELATED: John Lennon’s Killer Denied Parole For The 12th Time)
Edens, Tudor and fellow alleged survivors Colleen Kelly and Renee Smith advocated for Oregon to pass the 2009 “Tiffany Edens Bill” extending statutes of limitations for particular sex crimes with defendants identified through DNA comparison.
“I have done a lot of work and I am a pretty strong person. I’m pretty confident, I have wisdom now, I help other women, I work in a field of helping others, but I’m telling you, that rape still affects me, and it’s not good,” Edens told the DCNF. “It has a lifetime effect. And I know that he was in prison for 36 years, but aren’t all of his survivors, his victims? We’ve kind of been in a prison for that much, and we still have to be.”
Gillmore’s crimes have affected hundreds of people, including victims’ family members, Edens argued. She noted how her PTSD returned after she and her family assumed a prominent role in advocating for victims’ rights, which took a significant toll on her.
Edens also suffered injury from surfing and a car wreck, began taking pain medication and ultimately fell into heroin addiction and other drugs, she said.
“I lost everything in my life. I lost my family, my son,” she told the DCNF. “I just recently celebrated eight years clean and sober. I sponsor women in 12-step groups.”
Edens started the “Get Your Voice Back” survivors group for women who “didn’t get justice, didn’t get bills named after them… they just got nothing,” she explained. The group was founded to help women “get their voices back” and share her strengths.
“They need to re-visit this process of how they’re getting from a dangerous offender, stranger-to-stranger, sexual sadistic, serial rapist, to low-level [offender],” she said of public officials. “I think there needs to be more conversation on that.”
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