Monday, September 27, 2010

Interesting Post on Salon.com

Over at Salon.com, Bonnie Russell has posted an interesting blog article on ayres and the court's delays. The commentary from viewers is spirited as well.

Bonnie Russell's Blog

Thursday, September 23, 2010

URGENT: Hearing on Motion to Delay Mental Competency Trial

[Original post: 09/23/2010 08:55am PST by Victoria Balfour]

HEARING TOMORROW:
Sept. 24, 2010, 8:45am, Courtroom 2A

Just checked with the court clerk. There is  indeed a hearing tomorrow, Friday, September 24, 2010 on Ayres' lawyer's motion to continue the mental competency trial date.

The hearing is scheduled for 8:45 am in Courtroom 2A in the Redwood City court house.
 

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

URGENT: ayres asking for Competency Trial Delay

[Original post date: 09/22/2010 06:33am PST by Deep Sounding]

[Update: 09/22/2010 01:05pm PST by Deep Sounding]


URGENT:

According to the San Mateo Daily Journal, william hamilton ayres, accused of molesting many young boys while acting as a "psychiatrist," is now asking for a delay in his October 4th competency trial.

There is a hearing THIS FRIDAY MORNING to determine the outcome. No word as to what the piss-ant attorney's excuse is this time.

Read the shitty news here: San Mateo Daily Journal

[Update: 09/22/2010 01:05pm PST by Deep Sounding]
NOTE: I checked with the court clerk today just before 1:00 pm. There is no hearing on the schedule. The next court date is the trial on October 4th. Probably just a system glitch somewhere. Checked again in the later afternoon, still nothing listed. I'm sure there will be a hearing on Friday, just have no idea when, or if it's public. More info later today hopefully.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Another September 11th.

September 11


My prayers to the victims, their families and friends, and everyone else who was, and still is affected by the events of 9 years ago today.

On a personal note: I closely associate September 11, 2001 as a trigger event associated with "unravelling" due to the after effects of what ayres did to me. I hate this day on so many levels. And I'm entirely pissed off that this is the THIRD time I'm posting this September 11th message. I had hoped to be finished tracking this ayres crap by now, and locked the blog. I hope everyone involved in causing and defending BOTH situations burns in the fires of hell for a long, long time.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Ayres' Boston Records: The San Mateo DA Says They Don't Exist, But Children's Hospital and the Boston Globe Say They Do!!

Judge Baker told ME, unlike whoever keeps talking about what their records will show, said there are no records from that time period.

-San Mateo prosecutor Melissa Mckowan in comment on this blog, January 29, 2010
_______________________________________________________________________

It's puzzling to me why the administration at Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston, where Ayres trained from 1959-1963, would have told the prosecutor on the Ayres case that " there are no records from that time period."
Because when I met with Judge Baker Chief Operating Officer Stephen Schaffer in August 2009 to discuss the Ayres case, he told me that records of Ayres' work at Judge Baker did exist . Furthermore, Schaffer said he had never received a call from anyone in the San Mateo District Attorney's office about Ayres' records. "Why didn't someone from the San Mateo District Attorney's office call us? " he asked. " We could have helped them look for them."
Granted, it is possible that either the San Mateo police or someone from the district attorney's office called someone else at Judge Baker about Ayres' records. But given the seriousness of the criminal case, one would have thought that Schaffer would have gotten wind of the request. But he told me last year he'd never even heard of the Dr. Ayres case.

Furthermore, in January, 2010, I was able to confirm that records of Ayres' work at Judge Baker DO exist. All of the case histories and notes on the boys who were inpatients when Ayres was there in the 1960s, are housed at Children's Hospital. This was confirmed to me by a staff member at Children's Hospital named Linda Lebel. These would include notes by the social workers' interviews with the children who were Ayres' patients and their parents; with the child care workers at Judge Baker; with the boys' teachers at the Manville School at Judge Baker; and notes by  Ayres himself.

In my interviews with 19 child psychiatrists and pscyhologists at Judge Baker as well as  four people who had worked as social workers when Ayres was there, I learned that if any child had complained about Ayres sexually molesting him, the complaint would be included in  these case histories, now at Children's Hospital. Many of the former Judge Baker personnel I talked to suggested that it was possible that a boy might have complained to a social worker that Ayres had touched him and that this would have been included in the notes.

Incidentally, Children's Hospital Archives  also has some interesting documents on other pedophile doctors who worked at Judge Baker and Children's Hospital. I saw an evaluation of Dr. Donald Lee Rife - another Judge Baker and Children's Hospital alum who would go on to molest boys - by his supervising physician when he was a resident at Children's Hospital("Rife is always available to work at all hours," it said.)

In January, 2010, I notifed Boston Globe reporter Mike Rezendes of the existence of Ayres' case histories at Children's Hospital. Rezendes included this in his front page story on the Boston hunt for Ayres victims, "California Sex Abuse Trial Spurs Hub Queries"
At the Judge Baker Children's Center, chief operating officer Stephen Schaffer said the organization does not have personnel records for Ayres because he was an employee of Children's Hospital when he was working at the Center. He said the same thing about another resident child psychiatrist, Donald L. Rife, who practiced at the Center immediately following Ayres, from 1964 to 1966. Rife has had medical licenses revoked in Massachusetts and Vermont, and has been reprimanded in Florida, because of child sex abuse allegations.

Schaffer said that the Center has the clinical records of children who were treated by the two child psychiatrists, but that privacy considerations prevent him from examining them without a specific patient request to do so.

____

So, now we know that ARE records of Ayres' work  from that time period, what I would like to know is how the prosecutor was given a story about the records that is at odds with the story that was given to myself and the Boston Globe reporter. Why would someone from Judge Baker tell her one thing and everyone else another? Furthermore, why does the prosecutor seem more intent on DISPROVING everything about Ayres' time at Judge Baker rather than trying to get to the truth and find out more about it?  Where is the curiosity about Ayres' training? Why has so much energy been spent in trying to beat down other people's discoveries about say, how doctors were trained at Judge Baker with information that is not just inaccurate, but just plain wrong? Why turn a blind eye and slam the door on inculpatory information that could help win the case?

To that end, I am calling for the San Mateo District Attorney's office to conduct an internal investigation on what was actually done to investigate Ayres' training in Boston.

The public is owed answers to these questions:

- Who called the four doctors I found in Boston: Stanley Walzer; Dan Ditmore, Joseph Mullen and Jacqueline Amati Mehler?
-When were these calls made ? What was asked ?
- In her January 29, 2010 comment on this blog, why does the prosecutor only mention speaking with two doctors instead of four? (She says there were three, but she made two doctors out of one doctor)
-Why did she get the doctors muddled and confused in her blog comment?
-Why did the prosecutor say that Dr. Amati Mehler was "physically unable to travel" when this has never been the case and is indeed a falsehood?
- Why did the prosecutor say on the blog that none of the doctors could confirm to her what they told me- that they were NOT trained to give physical exams to her but then in the same comment go on to CONTRADICT  her own statement and admit that one doctor confirmed she was not trained to do physicals?
- Why has the prosecutor given so many different stories to so many different people as to why she didn't call the Boston doctors? Stories such as "Ayres didn't talk about his training at Judge Baker" (which is false) or "Ayres lied about where he went to medical school and by the time we found that out it was too late to call the Boston doctors"(highly implausible story)
-On the issue of Ayres' records at Judge Baker, who from the San Mateo Police or the DA's office originally contacted Judge Baker?
- Who was their contact at Judge Baker? When was the call placed to Judge Baker about the records?  What were they looking for?
-Why has Judge Baker Chief Operating Officer  never heard of the request from the San Mateo DA's office about Ayres' records?
- Why did the prosecutor say that Judge Baker told her that "there are no records from that time period?" when in fact there are records?
-Why did Judge Baker Chief Operating Officer Stephen Schaffer tell me and the Boston Globe reporter that records did exist?

And finally, why did the prosecutor tell the mother of a victim that she had called Dr. Bert Brown, one of six doctors who trained with Ayres in that first key year of Ayres' residency at Yale, when in fact she never has? Why did the prosecutor then complain that Brown "never called her back " when in fact he has never been contacted by her in the first place ?
- Why would the prosecutor then,after saying she had contacted Dr. Brown, then go out of her way to try to make this prominent doctor who says he wants to help the victims and can help her win the case - look bad by falsely accuse him of doing something he has never done?

Again, I urge people who are interested in this case to contact San Mateo Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe and urge him to conduct an internal investigation. We are owed the answers to these questions. Wagstaffe's number: 650-363-4752.  Email:swagstaffe@co.sanmateo.ca.us

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

The Judge Baker Doctors Vs The San Mateo DA: More Questions

"For instance, the three (not four) Judge Baker Graduates who would allegedly have debunked Ayres' statements about being trained there -- did NOT confirm to the police or the DA what it was alleged in the blogs that they would say. One told me that she had told the reporter who talked to her that she didn't know anything about Ayres and was in school later than him and that although she could say SHE was never trained to give exams, she "couldn't say for sure what his training was." That is NOT helpful. Another one refused to testify and the last one is physically unable to travel and lives in Europe."

--Statement made on this blog on January  29, 2010  at 7:12 am by Prosecutor Melissa Mckowan from the San Mateo  District Attorney's office.
_____________________________
After my previous post on the controversy surrounding the Judge Baker doctors who trained with Ayres I found and the prosecutor's comments about them, I went back and looked at her comment again.


After reviewing her statement, I have even more questions. For anyone joining this blog for the first time, you can see the prosecutor's original comment in its entirety in the comments section under "Yale Debunks Ayres" from December, 2009.


My first concern is her remark that the Judge Baker doctors "did NOT confirm to the police or the DA what was alleged in the blogs that they would say." I don't know what blog the prosecutor is referring to, because back in November 2006, when I gave my information on the four doctors who were at Judge Baker when Ayres was there to Captain Mike Callagy in San Mateo, this blog did not exist at all. In fact, Ayres hadn't even been arrested and the prosecutor had not even been assigned to the case.


 I found the doctors and gave them to the San Mateo Police Department because I thought it would help their case. I still believe strongly that using one of the now 19 doctors who have either trained with Ayres at Judge Baker or trained at the same time he was there, would have helped the San Mateo DA's office to win the case. As I have stated, at least two jurors have told me that several jurors believed that Ayres had been trained in Boston to give physical exams to children.


I would like the readers now to look carefully at the prosecutor's words in her blog comment concerning these doctors I found at Judge Baker. There were actually four, but let's concentrate on the "three "she is referring to.  Actually, as she made the one female doctor I found into two doctors, it appears she is only talking about two doctors here.


The prosecutor starts off by saying that the doctors I found did "NOT" confirm to her or the police what they told me - that they were not trained to give physical exams in therapy.

But then in the next instant the prosecutor turns around and contradicts herself and confirms that a female doctor - that would be Dr. Amati Mehler - told her exactly what she told me - that   "SHE was never trained to give exams."  

Can anyone figure out why the prosecutor would say that they didn't confirm to her what they told me and then in the next breath admit that one did ? 

The prosecutor also makes an accusatory statement that the female doctor "couldn't say for sure "what Ayres' training was. Contrary to what the prosecutor said in her statement, I never said that Amati Mehler said that she could say "for sure" how Ayres was trained. I just asked her how  SHE  was trained.  The question I posed to Amati Mehler was: were YOU  trained to give genital exams to boys in therapy?  
What Amati Mehler told me was that she was not trained to give physical exams to children. "In the sessions with children, it was verbal only. If there was a physical problem, the on site pediatrics unit took care of it."
That is the information on Amati Mehler I gave to Captain Callagy.  As Amati Mehler was at Judge Baker the same years as Ayres, in 1963,  the information about one of Ayres' colleagues training seemed  pertinent. By giving over my information, I wanted the DA's office to know how others who trained at the same time as Ayres were trained. 


And furthermore, if you were a prosecutor, wouldn't you be interested to know that another doctor who was there when Ayres was there was not trained to give physicals to children in therapy?  Wouldn't that whet your curiosity if you were a prosecutor? Wouldn't you, oh, maybe put in at least one call to the top brass at Judge Baker to find out how doctors were trained there in the 1960s?


To find out the history of how child psychiatrists were trained at Judge Baker,  I went to the administration of Judge Baker. In August 2009, in an interview with Chief Operating Officer Stephen Schaffer told me in no uncertain terms that no child psychiatrists at Judge Baker were trained or allowed to give genital exams to child of either gender. Furthermore, he said that anyone caught giving a complete physical exam to a child in therapy would have been fired and the police would have been called. My question is: why didn't anyone in the DA's office think to call Schaffer and ask him this? Why rely on what another trainee said when you can go to the top?


Going back to the prosecutor's blog comment, what are we to make of her statement that Amati Mehler  "didn't know anything about Ayres? "  But what exactly does she mean that she "doesn't know anything?" That she doesn't know anything about Ayres molesting boys ? I never said in the information that I gave to the police that Amati Mehler knew anything about Ayres molesting boys. In fact, when I first told her about Ayres, Amati Mehler was very upset to hear the news about him. I never told the prosecutor anything other that Amati Mehler remembered him and where he was from in Ohio and that she was never trained to give physicals.


Or does the prosecutor mean that Amati Mehler had never heard of Ayres? We do know that this is not true, as in her first email to me in 2006 -which I gave to the police, Amati Mehler remembered meeting Ayres in her first week at Judge Baker and that he was from Columbus,Ohio.


The prosecutor then talks about another doctor, the one who was "physically unable to travel and lives in Europe." This actually is Amati Mehler again. Please note carefully: The prosecutor doesn't say that Amati Mehler could not confirm that she was not trained to give physical exams. It sounds in fact, as if they might have wanted this doctor to testify. 


But then for some odd reason, the prosecutor offers up the excuse that Amati-Mehler was physically unable to travel. We have seen in my previous thread that Amati-Mehler says this is false - that she travels all the time for her work. My question is: IF Amati Mehler was contacted and she did confirm that she was not trained to give physicals to boys in therapy, did the prosecutor just make up an excuse so she wouldn't have to use her ? And if so, why ? Why wouldn't the San Mateo DA's office use everything in their power to nail Ayres with people who actually trained at Judge Baker?


And what about the doctor in the prosecutor's comment  "who refused to testify?" Did that mean the prosecution wanted him to testify because he told them he wasn't trained to give physicals? Why would you want him to testify at all if he didn't have something useful for the case? 


Is anyone who is reading this as confused as I am by these contradictory statements? Can anyone please tell us what's going on here? 


Finally, if you go back to the original longer comment by the prosecutor on the "Yale Debunks Ayres" thread,  the prosecutor stated, "But take my word for it, any "credible" tip that has come in has been looked into." 


To the prosecutor: If that is true, then what's the  deal  with Dr. Bert Brown


To be continued..



Friday, September 3, 2010

The Judge Baker Doctors' Word Against the San Mateo District Attorney's Office: The Controversy Deepens

"For instance, the three (not four) Judge Baker Graduates who would allegedly have debunked Ayres' statements about being trained there -- did NOT confirm to the police or the DA what it was alleged in the blogs that they would say. One told me that she had told the reporter who talked to her that she didn't know anything about Ayres and was in school later than him and that although she could say SHE was never trained to give exams, she "couldn't say for sure what his training was." That is NOT helpful. Another one refused to testify and the last one is physically unable to travel and lives in Europe."

--Statement made on this blog on January  29, 2010  at 7:12 am by Prosecutor Melissa Mckowan from the San Mateo  District Attorney's office.

__________

Dear Victoria Balfour,
 
I believe there must be some misunderstanding somewhere! I keep travelling all the time, because my profession and institutional offices at the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) involve doing this as well.

Perhaps I am being confused with someone else.

I did train at Judge Baker Guidance Center and Children's Hospital, and I know many of the people that you mention in your letter.

I can certainly confirm that our training did not include at all, and at no time, genital exams or even corporeal exams of any sort of our little patients. If needed they would have been referred to the pediatric wards of the Children's Hospital.

- Email from Jacqueline Amati Mehler M. D., September 2, 2010 at 5:20 pm

_____________________________________________________________

Those of you who have been following this blog might recall that San Mateo prosecutor Melissa Mckowan unexpectedly posted a comment under her own name on January 29, 2010 under the thread Yale Debunks Ayres. It's a long comment and I am not going to post all of it here or comment on its entirety. You can read it here. http://williamayreswatch.blogspot.com/2009/12/yale-debunks-ayres-our-child.html

What I do want to focus on here today are the statements the prosecutor made concerning the doctors a "reporter" found - doctors who trained at Judge Baker in Boston - either directly with Ayres or who were trained there at around the same time.

 I am the reporter the prosecutor is referring to. To that end, I wanted to give you a little background on what  is threatening to become a growing controversy over the Boston doctors who trained with Ayres,  and  over who is telling the truth - the doctors themselves or the prosecutor.

Back in June 2006, almost a year before Dr. Ayres was arrested, I cold called a former medical partner of Ayres named Hugh Ridlehuber. In our conversation, Dr. Ridlehuber recounted a story about a boy patient he had inherited from Ayres in the 1970's, a "dentist's son", because, as the boy's father told Ridlehuber, the boy refused to go back because of all the physical exams Ayres had been giving him. Ridlehuber told me that he was concerned about this, as he had not been trained to give physical exams to boys in therapy. He said that when he confronted Ayres on this matter, Ayres told him that he had been trained to give complete physical exams to boys, including the genitalia, at Judge Baker Guidance Center in Boston in the early 1960s.

Ridlehuber said he did not challenge Ayres' statement about his training, but I decided to track down as many doctors who had trained at Judge Baker at the same time as Ayres to determine whether he was telling the truth about being trained to give genital exams to boys in therapy. In the summer of 2006, I spent many hours pouring over dusty old medical directories from 1959-1963, the years Ayres attended Judge Baker, at the New York Academy of Medicine Library.  As medical directories in the old days didn't list any doctors by their specialties, I had to pick out every doctor whose office address matched that of Ayres, on Longwood Avenue in Boston.  I started making calls. By August 2006, I had four doctors who either trained with Ayres directly at Judge Baker or whose stint at Judge Baker overlapped with Ayres.
Their names were: Dr. Stanley Walzer, who later became Director of Judge Baker in the 1970s; Dr. Joseph Mullen; Dr. Dan Ditmore and Dr. Jacqueline Amati Mehler. Walzer and Mullen lived in Massachusetts. Ditmore lived in Florida. Dr. Amati-Mehler - the only woman I was able to find who trained with Ayres, lived in Rome. All four of the doctors remembered Ayres at Judge Baker. Amati Mehler even recalled correctly, that Ayres was from Columbus, Ohio.

This is the question I posed to all four doctors:
During your training at Judge Baker, were you at any time trained to give physical exams to children as a routine and regular part of therapy - physical exams that would include an examination of the genitalia?

Here are their responses:

- Dr. Stanley Walzer:  Me, I didn't do physical exams on kids. To suggest we did at Judge Baker is crazy!!

- Dr. Joseph Mullen: We didn't do physical exams in psychiatric sessions with children. That's not part of the psychiatric treatment. No way!!

- Dr. Dan Ditmore: I worked at the outpatient psychiatric clinic at Judge Baker. I didn't do physical exams on children and neither did anyone else there. Why would they do that when we had pediatricians on staff and the best pediatricians in the world right across the street at Boston Children's Hospital?

Dr. Jacqueline Amati Mehler: In the sessions with children, it was verbal only. If there was a physical problem, the on site pediatrics unit took care of it.

I turned over my interviews in November 2006 with the four doctors in person to Captain Mike Callagy of the San Mateo Police Department in San Mateo, California.  Callagy said these interviews would be helpful to the prosecution.

But those of you who attended the first Ayres criminal trial in the summer of 2009 may recall that none of these doctors were called to testify. In fact, the prosecution didn't bring in anyone from Judge Baker to testify about how child psychiatrists were trained there. And to the surprise of many, the prosecution failed to challenge Ayres' lawyer's assertion that physical exams were part of the "therapeutic model" when Ayres was trained in the 1960s. I found this to be puzzling, as in addition to the Judge Baker doctors, I  had interviewed child psychiatrists who were trained at Yale, Harvard, and Johns' Hopkins during the same period that Ayres was, and I couldn't find a single doctor who said they had been trained to give physical exams to boys in therapy. In fact, what they told me was that any child psychiatrist who did ask a child to take off his clothes would be a cause for serious concern.

During the trial, several people who knew that I had found the doctors who had been at Judge Baker during the early 1960s, and who had debunked Ayres' claim about being trained to give physical exams, asked the prosecutor why she had not called the doctors.

Mystifyingly, the prosecutor offered up different reasons to different people. To a mother of an in-statute victim, she said that she had not called the Boston doctors because Ayres had "lied about where he had gone to medical school, and by the time we found this out, it was too late to call the Boston doctors."  This statement had people scratching their head. I know that in my eight year research into Ayres that I have never seen a single instance of him lying about where he went to medical school. Furthermore, Ayres talks quite a bit about his training in Boston in his 2004 civil deposition. And Judge Baker, for that matter isn't even a medical school.
To myself and another victim, the prosecutor stated after her closing argument that she had not called on the Boston doctors because Ayres had not talked about his Boston training on the stand and that he had said he had trained at Yale. Those who attended the trial and those who have a copy of Ayres' testimony will tell you that Ayres did indeed talk about his Boston training at the trial. He even talked about treating a 15 year old boy who had murdered his mother.  Additionally, I had told the prosecutor just minutes before she was to cross examine Ayres for the first time that Ayre had NOT trained in child psychiatry at Yale, and that the only place he had trained in child psychiatry had been at Judge Baker in Boston.

At the time, her conflicting statements confused several of us, and still do to this day.

In August 2009, after the mistrial, and still not understanding why the Boston doctors had not been used at the trial, I called Dr. Joseph Mullen and Dr. Ditmore to ask if they had been contacted by the DA's office. Dr. Ditmore said he had not and Dr. Joseph Mullen could not recall. During my conversations with these doctors, they both confirmed with even more conviction that they had not been trained to give physical exams to children in therapy and didn't know anyone who had.

Then, from August to December 2009, I proceeded to track down and conduct interviews with still more child psychiatrists who had trained with Ayres at Judge Baker during the years 1959-1963. I also did an in person interview with Judge Baker Chief Operating Officer Stephen Schaffer in Boston in August, 2009.  Schaffer told me that in the nearly 100 year history of Judge Baker, that they have never trained or permitted child psychiatrists to give complete physical exams to boys in therapy, and that if they had caught anyone doing this they would have called the police. Furthermore, Schaffer said that if only the San Mateo DA's office had contacted him, he would have set the record straight.

I posted  my interview with Schaffer and the other doctors on this blog in 2009 , and so if you are interested in their full interviews, go back and read them.

I asked the doctors the following question:

During your training at Judge Bake, were you at any time trained to give physical exams to children as a routine and regular part of therapy -- physical exams that would include an examination of the genitalia?

Here is a sampling of some of their responses:

- Dr. Lee Willer: I trained with Ayres. Neither he nor I nor anyone else in our training group was trained to give physical exams to children as part of therapy. In fact, we were advised NOT to do physicals on children.

- Dr. Milton Shore: Never, never, never did you touch a child in therapy! It was very implicit. Period. You didn't do physical exams. If the child at Judge Baker had a physical need to be examined, you got a pediatrician.
_______
In all, I conducted 19 interviews with psychiatrists and psychologists who either trained with Ayres directly or were trained at Judge Baker at the same time. I couldn't find a single doctor who said that they had been trained to do physical exams or who did physical exams on boys in therapy.

And then, out of the blue, on January 29, 2010, the prosecutor posted a comment on this blog about the original Boston doctors I had found in 2006.  For reasons that aren't clear, she stated that I only found three doctors and then proceeded to get the doctors I found muddled and confused with each other, making Dr. Amati Mehler into two doctors. When I read the prosecutor's statement that the doctors I found would not confirm that they had not been trained to give physical exams to children at Judge Baker, I was surprised and confused - especially as I had just completed my 19 interviews  with the Judge Baker doctors  from the 1960s. They had all been adamant with me that they were not permitted to touch children in therapy. Indeed many of them who knew Ayres and had even been to dinner at his house expressed outrage and disgust that Ayres had been getting away with molesting boys under the guise of bogus medical exams for decades.

What I couldn't figure out was: why were the doctors telling me one thing, and yet the prosecutor said they told her another story? Why had Dr. Joseph Mullen and Dr. Dan Ditmore RECONFIRMED their statements to me after the trial that they had not been trained to do physical exams on boys in therapy? And yet why had the prosecutor stated that they had told her another story? As they couldn't recall being contacted by anyone in the DA's office, I decided to leave it alone for the time being.

But then, when I read a news story this August that the San Mateo District Attorney's office and the prosecutor in the Ayres case were being sued for allegedly lying to a judge in another child abuse case, I decided it was time to fact check the prosecutor's statement on the Ayres blog from January of this year. I already knew that Ditmore and Mullen had reconfirmed their statements to me last summer. As Dr. Walzer now has Alzheimer's, he was out. That left Dr. Jacqueline Amati Mehler.

I emailed Amati Mehler, who still lives in Rome, this week, to ask if she had been contacted by the DA's office; whether she remembered telling me that she had not been trained to give genital exams to children in therapy; whether she had NOT been able to confirm to the prosecutor that she had not been trained to give physical exams to boys in therapy and whether she had been at any time physically unable to travel. In her response, which I posted  at the top of this post, her first words were "I believe there must be some misunderstanding somewhere!! I keep travelling all the time...."

And on the issue of her training, Amati Mehler wrote, "I can certainly confirm that our training did not include at all, and at no time, genital exams or even corporeal exams of any sort on our little patients. If needed they would have been referred to the pediatric ward of Children's Hospital."

Amati Mehler said that she "cannot remember if anybody or the police contacted me" and said she would check her emails on her home computer in Rome after she returns from travelling (!!!)

The question is: who is telling the truth here? The Judge Baker doctors or the prosecutor?

Why would, for example, the prosecutor say that Amati-Mehler was "physically unable to travel?" Is the prosecutor just misremembering or is there something else at play here?

Why did the prosecutor say that none of the original doctors I found could not confirm to her what they originally told me in 2006- that they were not trained to give physical exams to children in therapy - when in fact three out of the four doctors have since reconfirmed to me with conviction that they were not trained to give physicals to boys in therapy?

Why do the prosecutor and the doctors have different stories?

And why did the prosecutor muddle the doctors and get them confused in her own blog statement?

Does her boss, Steve Wagstaffe who admits in an interview to the San Mateo County Times on December 28, 2009 that he is a micromanager with his prosecutors and pretty much oversees everything they do- know that one of his prosecutors posted a comment under her own name on the Ayres blog and got a lot of her information wrong and made misstatements?

Why did the San Mateo District Attorney's office not investigate Ayres' training either at Judge Baker or at Yale?

Why didn't they think to challenge Ayres' bogus statement that physical exams of children was his "therapeutic model?" -especially as at least two jurors I spoke to from the trial said that several jurors actually believed that Ayres was trained in Boston to give physicals to children and their failure to do so may have very well prevented them from winning the case?

Why has the prosecutor told so many different stories to different people about why she didn't call the Boston doctors to testify?

For those who would like answers to these questions, I would  strongly urge you to contact San Mateo Chief Deputy DA Steve Wagstaffe himself at: swagstaffe@co.sanmateo.ca.us or call: 650-363-4752.


One would hope that the San Mateo DA's office would pursue with the same zeal the confusing and conflicting statements made by a member of their own office as  they would with a defendant they are trying to convict.