The boy described how a man he had trusted, William “Bill” Jacobsen, ignored his pleadings and assaulted and threatened him.
Jacobsen is on trial in 27th District Court for continuous sexual assault of children. It is unclear at this point what impact the boy’s hour-long testimony will have on the jury but his words, equally gripping and disturbing, kept jurors and others in the courtroom listening with rapt attention.
Prosecutor Leslie McWilliams guided the boy through the events that preceded the charges against Jacobsen. She rose from her seat twice and pulled a tissue from a nearby box and placed it in front of the boy so he could dab the tears from his eyes.
Women in the courtroom cried. One man, seated on the back row, whispered “I’ll kill him,” as the boy described in pointed detail sexual assaults he said occurred at the hand of Jacobsen, first at a home in Little River-Academy and later at a home in Rogers.
Testimony indicated that Jacobsen spent time grooming a group of Little River-Academy boys, many of them from his baseball team, by playing video games with them, throwing birthday parties, taking them to events at the Bell County Expo Center and allowing them to spend the night at his house.
Two boys, one a former baseball player of Jacobsen’s, testified that the abuse typically happened at the sleepovers where Jacobsen would serve the youths alcohol then choose one out of the group and molest them without the other boys knowing.
One boy said he estimated he spent the night at Jacobsen’s house 20 times. The boy said he was in the sixth grade when Jacobsen began groping him in the spring of 2007. Both boys described an escalation in the type of abuse, which ended in June 2008, according to testimony.
The former player from Jacobsen’s team said that on June 7, 2008, Jacobsen trapped him in the master bathroom at his home. Jacobsen had been molesting the boy for up to a year and as the assaults became more severe, so did the boy’s determination to put a stop to it.
The boy said he told Jacobsen twice to stop but said Jacobsen persisted, telling him “you’ve been mocking me for long enough.”
The boy said he then asked why they couldn’t do something else, like go fishing. To which he said Jacobsen replied, “I asked you if you wanted to go fishing earlier and you said no. It’s too late.”
The boy testified, “I told him I didn’t want to and he said that’s too bad. I tried to procrastinate as long as I could. I thought maybe he would stop. Then he told me I would be all right. He told me not to say anything, not to make any noise.”
When the assault was finished, the boy said Jacobsen told him, “I’m sorry it has to be this way, but I know you’re gay. It’s got to be this way.
“He pulled this knife out of the drawer. He pulled it out and held it to me. He said he would kill my mom, sister and grandma. He said he would leave my grandfather alive so I would have somebody to live with.
“Later on after I calmed down … he slapped me in the face. He held a knife to my face, then slapped me again. He told me to go out there and act like nothing happened. Told me to wipe the tears off my face.”
The boy described how he went out to be with the other boys and contemplated running to a neighbor’s house but chose not to because he feared Jacobsen would catch him.
A boy at the house that night described the alleged assault victim as “unusually quiet” after he emerged from the back of the house.
“He was wanting to go home,” the boy said. “He seemed real anxious about it.”
At one point the boy who said he was assaulted said he tried to catch a ride home with Jacobsen’s wife rather than spend the night at the house. Jacobsen reportedly told his wife not to let the boy leave because he had been drinking alcohol and feared the boy’s grandmother might find out.
Once Jacobsen went to sleep that night, three of the boys locked themselves inside his green Ford Explorer and began calling people on cell phones. At one point, one of the boys left, leaving in the car the two boys who testified on Tuesday about being assaulted.
One of the boys called a girl and confided in her about what had just happened to him. He swore the girl to secrecy, but she eventually told her mother, who told her friend. That friend was married to a Bell County sheriff’s deputy.
Within hours one of the boys was undergoing a sexual assault examination and an investigation was under way.
In her opening arguments Mrs. McWilliams said before investigators could even interview Jacobsen, he and his wife, Marilyn Wesson, skipped town and eluded U.S. marshals until they were captured in Mexico nearly two months later.
It appeared early on that the trial would be filled with legal intrigue. The jury was out of the courtroom for the first 20 minutes of the trial as defense attorney Michael White worked to limit the evidence prosecutors could bring forward.
White wanted several extraneous offenses, included testimony about Jacobsen holding knives to both boys’ throats, deemed inadmissible. Paul and Mrs. McWilliams argued that the alleged incidents brought context to the overall charge levied against Jacobsen.
Judge Joe Carroll ruled “out of an abundance of caution” that Mrs. McWilliams could not mention the threats with knives in her opening arguments but later ruled in favor of the prosecution and allowed the testimony of it by the boys.
Although the boys’ testimonies indicated the abuse went on for about a year, the indictment used to formally charge Jacobsen only alleged abuse from September 2007 to June 2008. That’s because he was indicted under a new get-tough child predator law first enacted in September 2007.
White argued that any alleged offenses that occurred before September 2007 should not be allowed in evidence.
“The least sympathetic of defendants deserve the most constitutional protections,” White said.
Carroll countered with “You can blame a lot of things on a lot of people, but you can’t blame us for the legislature writing the law.”
White chose not to cross-examine either of the alleged victims. Out of eight prosecution witnesses that testified on the first day of the trial he only cross-examined two, a sexual assault nurse and Jacobsen’s friend, Richard Young.
The nurse, Sheilah Priori of Scott & White Memorial Hospital, said she vividly remembers when the 13-year-old boy she examined walked into her work area.
“He was tall and stout for 13, limping, with pain on his right side,” she said. “He looked extremely embarrassed.”
Ms. Priori said the boy became tearful and his voice quaked as he spoke with her.
“He was so uncomfortable talking about the assault he had to write it out,” she said. “He was limping because he had an infected bug bite …But he actually thought he had caught something from Jacobsen.”
