Child molester moves to a neighborhood near you

0 Comments | Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), May 14, 2002 | by Rich Tosches

Meet Michael Ballard. He's 57. For five years he and his wife and another couple sexually assaulted and tortured the other couple's children.

Mike Ballard forced the kids - whose ages ranged from 1 to 12 - to perform sexual acts on him, his friends, strangers and other children. He locked some of the kids in a 2-foot-square box for hours at a time. He made the littlest ones eat bowls filled with oatmeal and his urine.

Mike liked to videotape the sexual assaults and the torture. Then he sold the tapes for $10.

In 1992, Mike was sentenced to 12 years in prison, where he refused to attend sex offender treatment programs because, well, he didn't want to.

Officials at the Colorado Department of Corrections let him out of prison after just nine years.

Good behavior, they said.

Last week, Mike Ballard - who enjoyed scalding the children with boiling water after he had sex with them - boarded a bus in his hometown of Boulder and moved away.

He moved to Colorado Springs.

As you read this, Mike could be waking up. Maybe he's shaking the cobwebs from his twisted mind. Maybe he has walked out of his motel room on North Nevada Avenue.

Maybe Mike got up early so he could watch the school buses go by.

Frankly, no one really knows what Mike is doing today.

"We can't keep an eye on him every second," a probation official told me.

Early in 1992, Ballard faced 36 felony charges stemming from the sexual assaults and torture of the children.

The district attorney in Boulder County eventually allowed Ballard to plead guilty to one count of sexual assault on a child and one count of child abuse.

(His wife, Patricia, spent six years in prison. The woman who assaulted her own children, Marcia Palmgren, was locked up for seven years. Her husband, Dennis Dunann, is serving a 120-year sentence.)

Part of Mike Ballard's sentence called for eight years of probation.

Boulder District Court wanted him placed in a Community Corrections program, which offers the highest level of supervision. But five Community Corrections programs - including El Paso County's - refused to accept him.

So Boulder District Judge Dan Hale ordered that county's Probation Department to place Ballard on intensive supervision probation - in another county.

"Community Corrections can just say 'We don't want him,'" said Boulder County chief probation officer Rob Bresciani. "But we don't have that choice. The court ordered us to find a place for him, away from the victims."

And so, in a deal called a courtesy probation transfer, the El Paso County Probation Department agreed to take Ballard for the next eight years. Lucky us.

According to local probation supervisor Joe Kraudelt, Ballard has to attend a scheduled weekly meeting with his probation officer, who also will make at least two unannounced visits to Ballard's motel room or, eventually, his home or apartment.

Ballard also must submit to DNA testing, complete a treatment program for sex offenders and register with police as a sex offender. He cannot have any intentional contact with anyone younger than 18, and cannot go near a school or any other place "primarily used by children" - including parks, playgrounds, arcades or swimming pools. And he can't use drugs or alcohol and must submit to testing for those substances.

If he's caught violating terms of his probation, he could be sent back to prison for as long as 32 years.

I hope that doesn't happen to Mike.

I hope he gets hit by a bus.

- Rich Tosches' column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Friday.