ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- A self-styled religious patriarch known as "Papa Pilgrim" pleaded no contest Tuesday to felony charges including incest.
Robert Hale, 65, was accused of molesting one of his 15 children over a seven-year span, including a period when his family lived in seclusion at Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.
The Pilgrims, as they once called themselves, gained notoriety for their feud with the National Park Service over access to the family's remote homestead within the 13.2 million-acre park.
In Tuesday's hearing, Hale pleaded no contest to consolidated counts of first-degree sexual assault, incest and coercion.
He told Superior Court Judge Donald Hopwood that he never sexually assaulted anyone but decided to plead "for the good of his family," said Palmer assistant district attorney Richard Payne.
Hale had been scheduled for a January 16 trial on 30 felony counts involving one of his daughters. The incest and two other counts were consolidated and charges of kidnapping and assault were dropped in a deal Hale made in exchange for a state-approved sentence of 14 years.
Family member Moses Hale, 22, said no one in the family wanted to comment.
link | Background story:
Papa Pilgrim says he obey's God's will &
The Pilgrim Story
It seems to make people feel superior to others than themselves, to denegrate the character, and bring down any one they feel they can get by with doing so.
"The Hunman Heart is deceitful above all things, and despertely wicked , "who can know it?
Humanitry is sick at Heart...
Whats new?
Lots of Love
Grandpa.
Can you really be this naive? This kind of sick shit is always going on in secluded societies with a male in charge. They´re called "cults" and they exist to get the alpha male whatever he wants. For some reason, in "religious" communities, this always seems to include underage pussy. ONE count of incest seems tame.
If some rat-bastard manages to convince a number of people that he is a man of God and gets them to obey his every command, sooner or later he starts to believe it of himself.
Warren Jeffs, anyone?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/26/AR2006122600847.html
The following, which is from that article, provides some interesting background.
"To drum up publicity for the court challenge, Hale and his handlers from the land-rights movement invited me and other reporters to spend the night at Hillbilly Heaven in the late summer of 2003.
"In the course of a long evening spent with his children and his wife, who listened to Hale in worshipful silence, it seemed that he held a cultlike control over his family. None of the older children, several of whom were in their 20s, wanted or needed any life outside the family, Hale said then. He said they were all virgins.
"Hale, it turned out, had had an extraordinarily odd life before bringing his family to Alaska.
"He grew up affluent in Fort Worth, the son of I.B. Hale, an All-America tackle at Texas Christian University who in 1939 was the first-round draft pick of the Washington Redskins.
"While in high school, Robert Hale eloped to Florida in 1958 with Kathleen Connally, the 16-year-old daughter of John B. Connally; Connally was to become governor of Texas and was wounded when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Shortly thereafter, she died of a shotgun blast to the face, an apparent suicide that Hale said occurred while he was with her in a hotel room.
"In the 1970s, when Hale called himself "Sunstar" and lived as a hippie, he met Kurina Rose Bresler, then 16. They moved with their first two children to a subsistence farm in New Mexico on land owned by actor Jack Nicholson. They lived there for more than 20 years, tanning leather, breeding dogs and antagonizing many neighbors. It was there they became born-again Christians, Hale said."
Yall coming on here talking bout my G-bus thet ant rite.
git yoor hart rite wit galled today.
Weez a praying for ewe all. ya here?