Shattered glass and $600 in cash: The troubling case of William Stafford, sex offender

It was just before 10 p.m. on a cold January night two years ago when the sounds of breaking glass shattered the deep desert silence outside Jacumba Hot Springs.

Inside a small manufactured home, William Stafford, one of the town’s most unwelcome residents — the latest in a long line of unwelcome residents forcibly settled there by the state — was on the phone with the San Diego Sheriff’s Department.

Stafford, 73, had been living in a small home on Old Highway 80 outside of Jacumba since late 2022, placed there by a court order over the objections of community members. He is designated with perhaps three of the most alarming words in state law — sexually violent predator. 

On that night, from a back bedroom, he told a sheriff’s dispatcher that two front windows had been broken, and he could see the shadows of two people moving around the home. He heard voices — males, he said — but could not make out what they were saying.

After two minutes, the men left. Deputies arrived, collected a rock that had been hurtled through the front windows, took some photographs, and left.

At nearly the same time the next night, more rocks smashed five windows and assailants hurled a racial epithet at Stafford, who is Black. 

The attacks on William Stafford went largely unremarked outside of Jacumba, with the exception of a small set of lawyers, judges, case workers and mental health professionals. A police report was made, but no arrests. 

But in August 2024, the events of those January nights took on a pivotal role in a court hearing in front of San Diego Superior Court Judge Theodore Weathers. 

Stafford’s lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Alexandra Knudson, made the astonishing assertion that the attack on Stafford was a “set up” by the company that contracts with the state to place, supervise and monitor sexually violent predators like Stafford.

Knudson argued that workers at Liberty Healthcare, a Pennsylvania company, had wrongly accused Stafford of stealing $600 they said he had been given to pay for propane at his home, in order to revoke his release and return him to the state hospital for offenders in Fresno County. Liberty for years has managed the Conditional Release, or CONREP, part of the SVP program for the state. 

Liberty’s motive, she contended: Saving money.

The company was under pressure. It was being scrutinized by the State Auditor who was examining the SVP program, including its costs. After the rock attack in January, the company had to provide 24-hour private security for Stafford at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a month. Ironically, Liberty has been required to protect Stafford from the community rather than the other way around.

“Mr. Stafford, in my opinion, has been held unlawfully for the last four and a half months in custody based on this, in my opinion, fraudulent revocation,” she said, according to a transcript of the Aug. 28 hearing.

The Stafford hearing provided a rare look into the inner workings of an SVP case in San Diego. And it also provided an in-depth look into Liberty Healthcare — the company that has been paid $100 million in exclusive contracts by the state to run the program since its inception in 2003. The documents provided a window into Liberty’s work, which is often shielded by confidentiality laws.

Stafford is back in Jacumba with no further incidents reported. Both the Department of State Hospitals and the San Diego District Attorney’s Office say they are reviewing the circumstances of the attempt to revoke Stafford’s release. Liberty said in a statement that it was “fully cooperating” with the state’s review.

Neither the District Attorney’s office nor Liberty have challenged Knudson’s findings that she laid out in court in August, and the company has not admitted any wrongdoing. Likewise, no new effort to revoke Stafford’s release based on the supposedly stolen $600 has been filed.

For Knudson, the events last year involving her client go beyond the issues that the State Auditor raised, about the management of the CONREP program by Liberty and the state, to the core of the SVP program.

“This conduct raises serious concerns about Liberty Healthcare’s treatment and supervision of SVPs in our community,” she said in an email response to questions about the case. 

Knudson said the SVP law “exists on fragile constitutional footing” and requires an “unyielding adherence to legal standards by both the courts and supervising agencies.” 

“When doubt seeps into the enforcement process, as it did here, it threatens to unravel not just the integrity of a single case, but the legitimacy of the entire SVP framework.”

CONREP and Jacumba

Stafford is one of a few hundred people California designated sexually violent predators under a 1996 law that says inmates convicted of certain sex crimes can be civilly committed for an indeterminate amount of time to undergo mental health treatment. He has a long record of felony convictions between 1968 and 1990, according to prosecutors. These included rape, forced oral copulation, and unlawful sexual intercourse with someone under 18 years old.

He came to live in Jacumba through CONREP, the state-run system where doctors and a judge have determined that offenders like Stafford are safe enough to be placed back in communities, with strict supervision: GPS monitoring, regular interactions with caseworkers, regular polygraphs, random searches. Community release is the second-to-last step in a treatment program operated at Coalinga State Hospital. 

Sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1990, Stafford was first designated an SVP and committed to the hospital in 2001.

In 2019 Stafford sought his release under the supervision of CONREP after an expert determined he could leave the hospital and was not a public safety threat. Two years later, in May 2021, San Diego Superior Court Judge David Gill agreed and ordered him released.

It wasn’t until October 2022 that Liberty was able to find a place for Stafford at the Old Highway 80 property in Jacumba. Many residents of the town were angry that another SVP was in their midst.

Jacumba has had 12 men — more than half of the county’s total of 21 — housed there over the years, according to a roster of SVPs on the District Attorney’s website. 

The animosity forced extraordinary security measures at the property. This included surrounding the property with a 6-foot fence, installing cameras and motion sensors, and putting a film on the windows so they wouldn’t shatter, court records show.

After the January 2023 rock attacks, Liberty assigned around-the-clock private security for Stafford. Records Knudson produced at the hearing showed that the security cost was huge — $493,000 one year, $539,000 the next. 

Those costs were accumulating at a time when the state auditor was examining the CONREP program, Knudson told the judge. 

“Liberty was literally hemorrhaging their budget in security costs for Mr. Stafford,” she told San Diego Superior Court Judge Theodore Weathers.  

At one point Liberty pared back the security staff. But in November 2023, Gill reinstated the full security over what Knudson said were strong objections from Liberty.

Faced with the cost of providing security and the spectre of the audit meant CONREP and Liberty’s SVP program director Melissa Bagwell needed to do something, Knudson contended. Getting Stafford’s release revoked and returning him to the hospital would mean “there would be no more security costs,” she said. 

$600 in cash, a trip to jail

This is where the $600 came in.

Every month SVP clients are given a certain amount of “Life Support Funds,” which pay for necessities. These funds are considered no-interest loans, carefully tracked by case workers, and have to be paid back before getting discharged from the program.

Using a sheaf of documents from Liberty’s case file on her client, Knudson argued that even though Liberty said they had given Stafford the $600 on Feb. 29 to pay for propane gas for his home, there was ample evidence they had not.

One record showed that on March 4, Stafford had $200 of LSF funds on hand. But how could that be, Knudson said, if he had received $600 just five days earlier — the ledger should have recorded $800.

She also showed entries in the case management file for Stafford, where people supervising him have to record everything they do, no matter how small. 

The records for Feb. 29 do not show that Liberty gave Stafford $600. 

Thinking it might be an oversight, Knudson reviewed all the “chrons” — the detailed records showing what Stafford received and when — for each day from Feb. 29 to March 28. 

None recorded Stafford receiving $600.

Another point: Although Liberty was meticulous about having clients sign receipts for any money given to them, there was no receipt for $600 on Feb. 29. A month later on March 28, his case supervisor asked him to sign a receipt, according to the paper trail Knudson showed the judge. 

Stafford denied ever receiving it. 

To further buttress her claim of a setup, Knudson showed an email from Liberty’s Bagwell written at 4:08 a.m. on March 19 to three others, including Liberty workers overseeing Stafford’s case. 

“I have a plan to get rid of security and to take back control of the situation with wsta,” she wrote, using the shorthand for Stafford. “Do you have time to meet briefly this morning to discuss.”

It was nine days after that when Stafford’s caseworker asked him about the $600. 

Knudson said that on April 16, five Liberty employees searched Stafford’s residence. The case manager who said he had handed him the money found it in a manila envelope, with the cash denominations written on the outside, underneath a clothes dryer. 

But the lawyer questioned that find. Showing Weathers a picture of the envelope and where it was found, she noted the “very pristine envelope that they say has been under a dryer for two months.” 

All of this didn’t add up, Knudson argued. 

She told the judge, “I believe it’s clear they didn’t give him the money on 2-29. And if they didn’t give him the money on 2-29 and yet they found it at his house on 4-16, then they had to have put it there. 

“There would be no other way to get it.”

Court records show that Liberty has a very different view. 

In a year-end report about Stafford’s case to Weathers, they contend that they handed Stafford the money in a manila envelope on Feb. 29. But on March 28 — the day he was asked to sign the receipt — the report said Stafford was asked to produce the money. 

“He took a couple of steps, then suddenly stopped, and developed a reported memory loss of ever receiving or knowing anything about the $600 that had been provided to him for propane,” the report said. 

Liberty also said that they gave Stafford two lie detector tests on, one on March 29 and a second on April 8, and when asked specific questions about the cash his answers were considered “untruthful.”

Eight days after the second test — which Knudson said were flawed and not reliable — he was taken into custody and jailed until a hearing revoking his freedom was held.

As he waited in county jail, Knudson assembled the records detailing the events surrounding the $600. She felt strongly enough about what they showed that on Aug. 27, the day before the scheduled hearing, she flew to Sacramento for a meeting with top DSH officials.

She met with the department’s chief psychologist, assistant psychologist, the top lawyer for the agency and another lawyer. Also present was Deputy District Attorney Carder Chan, who was working on Stafford’s case.

After the meeting, the department canceled the hearing scheduled for the next day. By nightfall on the 28th, Stafford was out of the Vista jail.

Aftermath

Liberty initially directed all inquiries about the Stafford case to Bagwell, who did not respond to a request for comment left on her phone and in an email. Instead, another staff member said any questions about the program had to be answered by DSH.

The company later issued a statement that said privacy laws prohibited commenting on the specifics of any case, and added: “Liberty is fully cooperating with DSH’s review of this matter and welcomes transparency, investigates any allegation of wrongdoing, and actively seeks to improve policies and procedures and implement training where opportunities are identified.”

DSH declined a request for an interview about the Stafford case and Liberty.

In a statement, a spokesperson wrote “DSH is aware of an allegation against Liberty Healthcare regarding alleged mishandling of funds that are allocated to support an individual in the CONREP-SVP program and is currently conducting a full review of the matter. 

“The Department takes claims of inappropriate behavior and/or misconduct by DSH team members and its contractors with the utmost seriousness.”

But the audit report concluded that was not always the case.

In the more than 20 years that Liberty has had the contract, auditors found, DSH has conducted only one comprehensive review of the program, in 2019. (For a reason that auditors could not determine, the legislature made the contract with Liberty exempt from the state’s normal contracting requirements, including normal contracting oversight.) 

The department conducts quarterly reviews, which are smaller in scope than a program review. In either event, the audit found that the department “has not held Liberty Healthcare accountable for resolving outstanding deficiencies.”

Moreover, auditors said DSH “does not have an effective oversight process to track and monitor Liberty Healthcare’s implementation of the recommendations that DSH makes as a result of its reviews.”

Under the terms of the contract, DSH is supposed to set deadlines for Liberty to fix any deficiencies found in review or audits. Failure to make corrections could result in canceling the contract.

Auditors said that provision has not been enforced. 

For example, the company was supposed to submit a corrective action plan addressing the problems identified in the 2019 program review.

But the company asked for, and received, numerous six-month extensions until DSH refused to give any more in October 2021. The company finally submitted a response in January 2022, nearly two years after the original deadline. 

The issues identified in the audit highlighted key areas where Liberty had to improve, such as the “excessively long” time it takes to find housing for a CONREP release, Knudson said. Stafford’s case has much broader and consequential implications, she said.  

“What occurred in Mr. Stafford’s case goes far beyond mere mismanagement or negligence,” she said. “In his situation, Liberty Healthcare’s allegations led to his unlawful incarceration.”

Liberty has been the only company in the country willing to take on the state’s SVP program. The state has tried to re-bid the contract four different times, but only Liberty has responded, the audit noted. 

The Stafford case, and the issues identified by the audit, have not appeared to interfere with the long running relationship between DSH and Liberty. 

In November, the state finalized another extension for Liberty. The three-year deal runs through 2026-27, and will pay the company another $37 million.