The president of a child sexual molestation survivors’ advocacy organization says children have been left “at risk” after his abuser, Stanley Burkhardt, was recently released from a federal halfway house with relatively few limits on his movements.
Burkhardt is a former Louisiana detective who has acknowledged preying on minors and has been investigated in connection with a series of murders. Richard Windmann said the latest opportunity at comparative freedom granted to Burkhardt – who previously investigated child abuse cases for the New Orleans police department – is “abhorrent” and “a repeated injury to his victims”.
“Those we’ve entrusted with protecting our society … put our children at risk,” Windmann, who now lives near Dallas, said in a statement. He said Burkhardt as an ex-police officer should be “held to a higher standard, and yet they repeatedly let this monster go”.
“It is an atrocity, a complete and utter failure of the justice system any way you slice it,” Windmann said.
A parole violation had led Burkhardt, 73, to spend the prior few years in intensive therapy at a federal prison in North Carolina for people who, like him, had been deemed sexually dangerous. He was released on 9 April and sent to a halfway house in New Orleans for several months where he was required to work, participate in sex offender therapy and log his movements, among other things, according to court records.
Burkhardt’s time at that facility ended on 14 August, federal Bureau of Prisons officials confirmed. Records show he must still comply with dozens of restrictions to avoid reincarceration, including refraining from being around children unsupervised, coming within 100ft of places frequented by minors or using websites that promote casual sexual encounters.
But, while he must wear an ankle monitor providing his location to officials around the clock, Burkhardt no longer has to log his movements, honor a curfew or avoid anywhere not explicitly banned by his release conditions, which were approved by the North Carolina-based federal judge James C Dever III.
A letter filed in court and written by Burkhardt’s parole officer maintained that “a prescribed regimen” of medical and psychiatric care prevented Burkhardt from being sexually dangerous. And the officer wrote that releasing Burkhardt into a less prohibitive environment would allow him “to focus on rehabilitation without undue encumbrances”.
Windmann – the founder of Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse – was unconvinced, however. “The judicial system has let Burkhardt’s victims and the citizens of New Orleans down yet again,” he said.
Attempts to contact Burkhardt weren’t immediately successful. Louisiana’s sex offender registry listed his latest address – in New Orleans – beginning on Tuesday.
Burkhardt once enjoyed a reputation as a dedicated law enforcer by building cases against New Orleans child abusers in the 1970s and 1980s. But his career ended in disgrace and temporary imprisonment after being convicted of mailing images depicting the molestation of underage boys to undercover agents.
Additionally, he later admitted that he had again received imagery depicting child molestation – and he separately pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a nine-year-old girl to whom he was related by marriage.
Federal prosecutors tried to keep Burkhardt in prison for as long as possible by resorting to a law providing for lifelong, involuntary commitments for people determined as being “sexually dangerous”. A predecessor of Dever found Burkhardt met that definition in 2011. But after four years of treatment, Dever in essence conditionally paroled Burkhardt.
Louisiana state police in 2019 found Burkhardt had violated that parole, in part by failing to notify them of an email address and username that he used to leave suggestive comments under young men’s pictures on a photo-sharing website. A subsequent search of his home uncovered a phone with 67 sexually abusive images of teenagers, and Burkhardt was sent back to prison until his halfway house transfer in April.
Burkhardt at one point blamed that behavior on stress created by media attention surrounding Windmann’s decision to speak publicly about his abuse.
Windmann was a child in the mid-1970s when he testified to being sexually abused by leaders of a Boy Scout troop in a case that led to numerous criminal convictions – a sequence of events chronicle in the 2023 Netflix documentary Scouts Honor.
Officers investigating that case introduced Windmann to Burkhardt. Windmann said he was then molested by Burkhardt himself – and that Burkhardt would boast to Windmann about having killed a teenage boy who was found dead in the Mississippi River.
Those recollections from Windmann prompted cold case detectives to re-examine the 1982 drowning death of Edward Wells. And they also gave fresh looks to the strangulation murders of three other teenagers with ties to New Orleans whose bodies were dumped around the region in the late 1970s: Dennis Turcotte, Raymond Richardson and Daniel Dewey.
Windmann was even interviewed as part of that revived investigation, which – along with links among Wells, the abusive Boy Scout troop and Burkhardt – was explored extensively in the podcast New Orleans Unsolved. Ultimately, though, a state police investigator testified that Burkhardt was not considered a murder suspect.
Burkhardt – who also uses the alias Sam Powers – has denied ever committing murder. But in 2020 he did contradict years of denials by admitting under oath that he molested Windmann – although his attorneys later argued Burkhardt had actually meant to say he engaged in sexual activity with Windmann after Windmann had reached the legal age of consent.
Windmann – who is running for a seat in Texas’s legislature in November – has a pending lawsuit demanding damages from Burkhardt and New Orleans’ city government over his abuse.
His attorney, Kristi Schubert, on Wednesday called it “very disturbing … Burkhardt is out of jail at all” given his history of parole violations.
Windmann’s lawsuit is unrelated to a case that federal jurors began hearing on Monday over whether the city was financially liable for the sexual assault in 2020 of a 15-year-old girl by a New Orleans police officer who met her while escorting her to the hospital for a medical examination known as a rape kit.
