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Austin, we have a problem
What does his clumsy, evasive handling of rumors of cocaine use do to George W. Bush's much-heralded "electability"?
By Jake Tapper
[08/20/99]

Who is Eliza May?
Is the woman at the center of the Texas funeral home scandal a wronged government watchdog or a Democrat with a political agenda?
By Robert Bryce
[08/20/99]

The funeral scandal time line
A chronology of the battle between the Texas Funeral Service Commission and Service Corporation International.
Compiled by Robert Bryce
[08/20/99]

There's no place like home
Three Albanian-Americans who fought for the KLA struggle to find their place after the war.
By Elsa Davidson
[08/19/99]

Contempt charges sought against Bush
Did the Republican front-runner lie in his sworn affidavit? It all depends on what the meaning of a conversation is.
By Robert Bryce
[08/18/99]

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Dillard was transferred to the cell of Wayne Robertson, better known as the "Booty Bandit." For a time, his vocation was beating, torturing and sodomizing fellow inmates while prison guards looked the other way. This psychopathic serial rapist was the guards' resident enforcer, one whose specialty was reining in abrasive young toughs.

Dillard protested the transfer, pointing out that Robertson was a known predator. "Since you like hitting women, we've got somebody for you," came the reply. There, in a tiny box with the Booty Bandit, began the tragic re-education of Eddie Dillard.

Lessons commenced with verbal abuse and threats, soon progressing to a violent and bloody assault in which Robertson beat the smaller, younger Dillard into submission. For the next several days Robertson beat, raped, tortured and humiliated Dillard, tearing open his rectum in the process. Guards and other inmates listened to the echoes of the young man screaming, crying for help and begging for mercy.

When the cell door finally opened to let him out, Dillard rushed onto the tier and refused to go back inside. But it was too late: He had been "turned out." He was reduced to a psychologically broken, politically servile "punk" -- in the prison argot, the lowest form of life. Dillard was now jailhouse chattel, to be sodomized, traded and sold like a slave. Robertson, on the other hand, received new tennis shoes and extra food for his services.

When he was released from prison, Dillard told the Los Angeles Times of the trauma he still suffers: "They took something from me that I can never replace. I've tried so many nights to forget about it, but the feeling just doesn't go away. Every time I'm with my wife, it comes back what he did to me. I want a close to the story. I want some salvation. But it keeps going on and on."

Dillard's case is not an isolated incident. Though using rape as a management tactic may sound like an extreme concept, the Dillard case appears not to have been an isolated incident. The Boston Globe, for example, reported that guards in Massachusetts prisons have used known rapists in the same fashion as their California counterparts: "Several prisoners at Shirley [State Prison] said that Slade [a notorious prison rapist] has had a long history of attacks there, but that he is typically reshuffled by the guards into cells with 'fresh fish,' or new inmates."

Next page | Rape in the time of AIDS