A generation heals from Earl Bradley

She remembers the grinning Disney characters with their frozen arms, the stick-on constellation beaming from the ceiling as he dimmed the lights.

Today, Georgetown pageant queen Jenna Hitchens recalls only the details of the carnivalesque rooms of Earl Bradley's office — not what happened in them over a decade. 

She's still fuzzy on whether she was drugged, raped or videotaped by one of the most notorious pedophiles in U.S. history, an archetypal loner who is serving 14 life sentences in a single-bunk cell. 

Bradley wasn't the only one sentenced to life.

"I will always have a hatred for him," says Hitchens, a willowy 23-year-old who used to cinch her belt so tight that it threatened to cut off her circulation.

"Why did you do that to me?" she asks. "Why did you do that to my life?"   

Five years after the state's highest court affirmed his conviction, hundreds of Bradley's victims — an entire generation of pediatric patients along the Delaware seashore — are struggling to heal brutalized bodies and minds.

As toddlers, they were more afraid of the monster in the lab coat than the monster under the bed. As adults, they can exhibit a range of dysfunctional behaviors psychologists say are common to abuse victims:

More:Lawyers, victims seek solace after Earl Bradley case

More:Complaints rise against Delaware doctors, but punishment varies

They don't trust authority. They fear intimacy. They get entangled in abusive relationships or hooked on drugs and alcohol. They suffer in a state of perpetual high alert, like hunted animals.

Some mutilate their wrists to feel pain. Others shoot up drugs to forget.

"I really just wanted to sleep my life away," admits Aubrey Heary, who blew her half-million-dollar Bradley settlement check on heroin, luxury cars and extravagant gifts for friends and family. Now 33, she is fighting to take a more active role in the life of her 3-year-old son, who was adopted by her parents when she lost custody.     

In Lewes, Bradley's demolished BayBees Pediatrics site is still on the market, and his clapboard home has been gutted. Residents say they're not trying to whitewash the serial child molester's stain on the community, but they'd prefer if Bradley's name was never mentioned again –– in the news media or in casual conversation.

"We'd like to get past that," explains Pat DeBiasse, a ruddy-faced plumber, and firefighter who moved to the area with his wife years after Bradley had been put behind bars.  

The DeBiasses purchased Bradley's Savannah Road home last year for $300,000, less than half its market value, from the church whose parking lot abuts the property. 

Bethel United Methodist was gifted the three-story house with its sagging gable roof after no buyers surfaced and the bank wanted it off the books. The local Historic Preservation Commission barred anyone from leveling the nearly century-old, structure.

The DeBiasses are investing $200,000 in a down-to-the-studs overhaul to create an airy three-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath oasis located less than a mile from the beach. The home sits across the street from the Lewes firehouse, where Pat, a volunteer firefighter, can hop on the first truck after the bell.

Asked what he plans to salvage, Pat points to an ornate banister and glides a dusty hand across it. The wood is weathered from the palms of previous inhabitants, including Bradley and his four children.

Beyond the coin-operated Buzz Lightyear ride that warned "Do not leave child unattended," Bradley grabbed the tiny hands of his patients, some of them still in diapers, plying them with promises of popsicles and Barbie dolls.

As parents paid their bills, he led their infants to hidden, video-monitored rooms. There, he brazenly violated them, muzzling their shrieks and sedating them with nitrous oxide. He didn't discriminate against those who had autism or suffered from hearing loss. 

Ashen-faced children nearly suffocated from being forced to perform oral sex on him. One girl was raped on video four times before she turned 2.       

In the end, a total of more than 1,400 identified victims and other patients who were too young to talk shared an unprecedented $123 million settlement paid by Bradley's employer, Beebe Medical Center; hospital insurers; the Medical Society of Delaware; and other defendants. 

When they reach age 18, Bradley's victims become old enough to claim their "blood money," as Heary calls it. Dozens already have, trying to appear upbeat about college or job prospects as they sign papers, lawyers involved in the case say. Payments range from a few thousand dollars to more than $400,000 in the most heinous abuse cases.

The News Journal recently interviewed victims, their families, attorneys, child advocates, health care executives and state regulators involved in the landmark case and its aftermath.

Archive:Coverage of the Earl Bradley case

The collateral damage is far-reaching. 

Marriages have dissolved, as one guilt-ridden parent turned against the other. Lawyers and police detectives, who were forced to watch 13 hours of Bradley's homemade video tapes, still hear the blood-curdling screams of children being molested, sodomized and raped.

Of the 86 patients recorded, the average age was 3. The youngest was 3 months old. 

All five Sussex County forensic interviewers, responsible for rehashing details with victims over several months, quit after the job was done, said Randall Williams, executive director of the Children's Advocacy Center of Delaware.

"It did take an immense emotional toll …," he said. "During that period, everyone knew how important it was to keep going."

One of Delaware's most prominent child advocates, then-Attorney General Beau Biden, passed up an opportunity to run for his father's U.S. Senate seat to successfully prosecute Bradley. Biden died of brain cancer in 2015, before he had the chance to run for governor of his home state. His family foundation enshrined his legacy of protecting victims of child abuse. 

At the urging of Biden and others, state legislators swiftly passed a package of patient protection bills in 2010 that made it easier to suspend the license of a doctor who poses a "clear and immediate danger" and increases the fines levied against individuals who fail to report suspicious conduct.

That action had no effect on a handful of local doctors, who were implicated in the Bradley case for not reporting his behavior. All still hold active medical licenses with no disciplinary actions, according to state records. 

Among them is James P. Marvel Jr., a prominent orthopedic surgeon who retired from Beebe last year. A state-commissioned report found that Marvel, two-time president of the state Medical Society and the grandson of Beebe's co-founder, defended Bradley's record to police detectives and failed to investigate multiple allegations of the pediatrician's inappropriate behavior with young girls while he led the medical trade association.

Marvel has repeatedly refused News Journal requests for interviews. He could not be reached for comment recently. 

Since Bradley's conviction, no other Delaware doctor has been reported to the state Division of Professional Regulation for engaging in sexually inappropriate behavior with a child, division director David Mangler said. Three doctors, however, have had their licenses revoked for inappropriate sexual conduct with adult women, according to state records. 

Nobody in the law enforcement or medical communities alerted Delaware's Board of Medical Practice to Bradley's inappropriate contact with girls despite a 1996 investigation by Beebe, a 2004 complaint to the state medical society reported by Bradley's half-sister and former office assistant Lynda Barnes, and two police investigations in 2005 and 2008 overseen by the Attorney General's Office. 

Mangler noted that there was confusion at the time about which agency handled the licensing of doctors. The board has since educated the community about its function and improved coordination with law enforcement, he said.  

"I do believe that the board is much more sensitive to the fact that they have a legal and moral obligation to the public," he said. 

Meanwhile, Beebe's sprawling complex, where Bradley previously served as chief of pediatrics, has rebounded from near-bankruptcy and recently announced a $180 million expansion, including a new Women's and Children's Department. 

After being accused in the civil lawsuit of dereliction of duty and medical negligence in connection with Bradley, the hospital instituted a robust internal reporting and oversight process to respond to allegations of doctor abuse, according to senior executives. Beebe, like other hospitals, now requires that a chaperone, such as a parent, be present before a pediatrician can conduct an intimate exam on a patient under age 16.

The Lewes medical center's settlement contribution represented more than half of its net income at the time. Beebe's final $100,000 payment is due in November.

"You can never assume that because you have a respected physician in the community that everybody thinks the world of, that person can't do something terrible," Jeffrey Fried, Beebe president, and CEO, said recently.

STORY:Beebe Healthcare receives $10 million donation

Today, more than 4,700 people — a minority of them pedophiles — are listed on Delaware's sex offender registry, which represents the third-highest rate per capita in the nation, according to research by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.  

Pedophilia, a sexual attraction to prepubescents, is defined as a mental illness — but only when acted on, according to the American Psychiatric Association.

Bradley was born in the Germantown section of Philadelphia to a mother who was a raging alcoholic and a father who stockpiled photographs of naked girls, according to an earlier News Journal interview with a Bradley relative. At age 87, Bradley's uncle was convicted of lewd behavior and exposing himself to young girls in central Pennsylvania.

A member of the Latin honor society and rifle club, Bradley did not crack a smile in his senior yearbook photo. Years later, his Temple University medical school yearbook page was decorated with cartoon doodles, along with a photo of Bradley holding an unidentified girl about 2 years old. She was not his daughter.

Bradley would have his own daughter in 1984, after marrying a woman who graduated with degrees in nursing and law. By the early 1990s, he established a solo practice near his home and also treated patients at Frankford Hospital in Northeast Philadephia.

In 1994, a mother discovered Bradley with his hand down the front of her 21-month-old's diaper in a darkened toy room. She called him a "sick bastard" and filed a police report. Bradley accused the mom of "extortion" and soon set up shop in Milford and Lewes.

Post-Bradley, Delaware vaulted from its ranking as one of the worst states for disciplining doctors for misconduct to leading the nation in patient protection reforms. The "Bradley bills" increased the penalty for failing to report to the state medical board potential abuse by a doctor — $10,000 for the first offense and $50,000 for a repeat offender.

But problems persist. Nationwide, unscrupulous doctors continue to benefit from a self-regulating profession and secretive disciplinary process, a 2016 Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found. That same system shielded Bradley from at least eight accusations of sexual misconduct from 1994 to 2009.

As many as 1 out of 4 girls and 1 out of 6 boys will experience some form of sexual abuse before the age of 18, according to research by child advocacy organizations.

Ninety percent of child victims of abuse know their abuser; 60 percent are sexually abused by a person the family trusts.

The same year that Bradley received the maximum sentence allowed, the Diocese of Wilmington and several religious orders throughout the diocese distributed more than $110 million to 152 adult survivors who were sexually abused by area Catholic priests. Tens of millions more were paid in confidential settlements with dozens of other childhood rape survivors who had been abused in families; other churches; nonprofit groups; or in public, private or religious schools in Delaware.

In 2012, after the Wilmington Diocese emerged from bankruptcy, Pennsylvania State University began compensating child molestation victims of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. The toll is a quarter-billion dollars and climbing.  

Vigilance is key to preventing child sex abuse, experts agree. Yet inadequate funding has hampered the Biden Foundation's mission to educate at least 5 percent of the First State's population in steps they can take to prevent, recognize and react responsibly to the crime, according to foundation CEO Patricia Dailey Lewis. So far, the foundation has trained about 25,000 people, she said, including the University of Delaware and Delaware City police departments and Wilmington police recruits.

STORY: The front line of child abuse in Delaware

A state mandate for all publicly funded schools to provide age-appropriate child sex abuse prevention training has been put on hold for up to two years while government agencies attempt to coordinate a curriculum.  

In the summer of 2016, former Gov. Jack Markell signed Erin's Law, named for Erin Merryn, an Illinois-born survivor of sexual abuse. The law required all publicly funded schools to provide child sexual abuse education for kindergarteners through six-graders, as well as related training for teachers and other staff members, starting this school year.

But less than a month before the academic year kicked off, the General Assembly amended the statute to extend the training deadline to the 2019-2020 school year. That gave state agencies more time to coordinate the three-hour child abuse trainings with suicide prevention, anti-bullying programs and more, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Susan Haberstroh.

Haberstroh said some districts already offer child abuse prevention programs, but she couldn't provide a list because the department doesn't track it. 

"All deadlines are being met," she said.

At the same time, the number of reported child abuse incidents statewide continues to grow, nearly doubling to almost 21,000 over the last six years. The number of substantiated incidents has stayed mostly flat at about 1,100 cases, according to child advocates, who blame a shortage of case workers.

State officials counter that what matters most is accurately analyzing each situation and reacting appropriately, with the goal of keeping the family whole whenever possible.

Earlier this year, the Children's Advocacy Center, which collects evidence in criminal child abuse cases, sustained a nearly $100,000 state budget cut to its three locations. To make up the difference, leaders froze one of six forensic interviewer positions and are rolling back operating hours.

Citing Bradley's "overall impact" on inmates and correctional officers, the state moved the 63-year-old from James T. Vaughn Correctional Center near Smyrna to a state prison in southern Connecticut last year. 

There, Bradley continues to fire off handwritten, well-crafted court appeals.

Publicly, he has expressed no remorse for his crimes.

His victims wish they, too, could rescript the narrative.

Unlike the perpetrator, their ending hasn't been written yet.

Contact Margie Fishman at (302) 324-2882, on Twitter @MargieTrende or mfishman@delawareonline.com.

TO REPORT CHILD ABUSE OR NEGLECT

In Delaware, call (800) 292-9582 or visit iseethesigns.org. If a child may be in imminent danger, call 911.