No-nonsense landlord gives sex offenders a home, hope
They record whether the man who raped a young relative is leaving the building at night. They reveal whether another, who fantasizes daily about molesting children, is trying to lure them off the street into his room.
The cameras are one deterrent for the 45 convicted sex offenders who live at New Washington. Linda Wolfe-Dawidjan, the building's owner-manager, is another.
The 52-year-old one-time waitress, one-time restaurant manager, recovering alcoholic, spurned wife and mother of two grown sons has made housing sex offenders her business. She offers cheap rent, clean rooms and plenty of rules and straight talk to ex-cons considered the scourge of society.
"I want the worst ones," Wolfe-Dawidjan said. "I want the higher-risk offenders because I feel we do a better job."
While neighborhoods around the state plead with officials to keep sex offenders out, and an average of 726 offenders leave Washington's prisons each year, Wolfe-Dawidjan steps in to help.
A few other private landlords around the state do make apartments available to newly released offenders, but corrections officials say no one takes on the challenges of providing shelter, protecting the community and laying the groundwork for second chances with more energy than Wolfe-Dawidjan.
Before accepting the highest-risk offenders, she visits them in prison to assess if they are a good fit for her building. Once they've moved in, she asks any question any time, zeroing in on behavior that might lead to trouble. And she offers hope, choosing some of the men to answer phones, file paperwork and deliver the mail. For some, it's their first sense of responsibility, the first time someone has viewed them as capable.
"It may not be the most glamorous, and it's a socially unacceptable thing that I do," Wolfe-Dawidjan says of her reputation as the landlord sex offenders turn to. "But (finding housing for offenders) is something communities will have to deal with."
Wolfe-Dawidjan sees herself as a public servant. Sex offenders have to live somewhere, and nobody wants them near their homes or schools or day-care centers. So why not in her building, she says, in a part of downtown Spokane made up mostly of vacant storefronts and businesses that have seen better days.
In the six years Wolfe-Dawidjan has been renting to sex offenders, Spokane police and the Department of Corrections say, they have had few complaints and know of no new sex crimes being committed by New Washington tenants.
"It's kind of nice to have them all in one building to keep an eye on them," said Max Hewitt, a neighborhood resource officer with the Spokane police.
When offenders come to New Washington, they are greeted not just by Wolfe-Dawidjan but with an orientation booklet that makes clear her expectations and the consequences for not living up to them.
"If you are serious about making it, this is the place for you. If you are not, you won't be here long," reads a line on the last page. Above is a drawing of handcuffs — the cuff for one hand undone, the other locked tight.
Keeping an eye on each other
Bruce Powell has lived at New Washington for two years. He is 40, from Spokane and likes to work on cars. He served nearly five years in prison for molesting a child, a friend of the family.
When Michael Flachmeyer, another child molester he had known in prison, was about to be released, Powell suggested New Washington.
Flachmeyer molested a 2½-year-old girl, a daughter of a friend from church, he said, and served more than four years. Since he got out in November 2001, he has struggled to control the urge to harm another child.
Rather than encouraging predatory behavior, grouping sex offenders together appears to guard against it, said Todd Wiggs, supervisor of the Department of Corrections' sex-offender unit in northeast Washington.
Sex offenders at New Washington tend to have no problem informing on each other if they suspect a tenant is engaged in inappropriate or criminal behavior, Wiggs said. The notion that the actions of a few could prompt Wolfe-Dawidjan to kick them all out weighs heavily.
Powell and Flachmeyer watch out for each other. They attend the same therapy sessions and know the signs — common to many sex offenders, they say — of falling into "the cycle."
"I know," Powell said, when Flachmeyer, 33, is in trouble. He becomes more secretive, spends more time alone and won't look Powell in the eye.
The most troubling cue is "lying about thoughts," Flachmeyer said. "My biggest thought is keeping appropriate thoughts from being bad thoughts."
Rather than bragging about their urges or egging each other on to commit new crimes, sex offenders tend to be ashamed and furtive, Wiggs said.
They might sneak pornography into their rooms. They might collect photos of children, as one tenant did by going through the trash at a nearby photo studio. The pictures were wholesome but may have been feeding a renewed or strengthened fixation. Corrections officers found out and talked to the man.
"One of the reasons sex offenders are so difficult to manage ... is their deception and secrecy," Wiggs said.
With other sex offenders around to observe, law enforcement has an improved chance of getting to the offender before he commits a new crime.
"The sooner we're able to intervene in that ... cycle, the better off we all are," Wiggs said.
Wolfe-Dawidjan, then, assumes the role of chief detective. Perfect casting, she says, since if she had her professional life to do over, she'd probably satisfy her desire to be on the edge with a career in law enforcement.
"I don't want to sell pantyhose at Penney's," she said.
When Wolfe-Dawidjan smells alcohol on a tenant's breath, "I tell 'em to go to detox." When she saw a big plastic tricycle in the back of Powell's truck, she asked him, "What are you trying to do, Bruce? Entice little kids with the bike?"
She also talked to Powell's community corrections officer, assigned to supervise Powell in the years after his release from prison. Powell said he was just delivering the tricycle for his brother-in-law but acknowledged he shouldn't have had it under any circumstances.
Wolfe-Dawidjan says even if Powell's explanation is genuine, she doesn't assume all her tenants are stopped before they hurt someone.
"Are they reoffending but not in the building? Probably," she said.
A business born of a desire to help
Wolfe-Dawidjan was born in Massachusetts, an Army brat and one of seven children whose mother, an alcoholic, died when Wolfe-Dawidjan was 16.
One brother died of AIDS, another committed suicide when he was 21. His death, in 1980, figures into her desire to help "young men with mental illness," she said.
So does her fight against alcohol.
When her first marriage crumbled — a betrayal she describes in the most profane terms — she quit work, went on welfare and drank. A pregnant, bottoming-out alcoholic, she gave up that child for adoption and tried to hang on to raise the other two.
When she finally decided to get help, she bought a case of beer and drank the last can in the treatment-center parking lot.
Now she is 14 years sober, she said, with the help of three Alcoholics Anonymous meetings a week.
At New Washington, Wolfe-Dawidjan first rented to several addicts referred by treatment and detox centers. One addict happened to be a sex offender, and slowly, steadily, staff at the Department of Corrections asked Wolfe-Dawidjan if she could take more — first one, then another, then another.
Corrections officials convinced her that sex offenders who end up on the streets pose a greater threat than those with an incentive to keep a roof over their heads.
And, as a result of her own addiction, Wolfe-Dawidjan started to wonder if even sex offenders — though often known to repeat their crimes — might try to reform.
"I don't know if sex offenders rehabilitate," she said. "I think maybe they can contain it."
Wolfe-Dawidjan gets no money from the state and says she doesn't need to rent to sex offenders; plenty of people need an inexpensive place to live.
But there is no denying that sex offenders, as well as recovering addicts who fill another building she owns, provide steady business.
Wolfe-Dawidjan gets at least 10 letters a week from inmates or their families eager to land an apartment in time for their release. Corrections workers, in keeping with state law, call to arrange apartments for high-risk offenders who must list an address before the state can set them free.
Rent is $240 a month. Kitchen and bathrooms are down the hall, and tenants must do a daily chore to remain in good standing. Tenants still on post-sentence supervision, similar to probation, must sign in and out and visit the community corrections officer, whose office is on the main floor.
No children are allowed. No drugs or alcohol. No guests unless they sign in.
Wolfe-Dawidjan said she won't take offenders she views as especially surly or aggressive, because they could take advantage of tenants who have a learning disability or mental illness. Many in the building receive Social Security disability payments; about half hold jobs, Wolfe-Dawidjan said.
The manager's office, where relations with Wolfe-Dawidjan are made or broken, overlooks the stairway up from the street. With help from some of the tenants, including Powell and Flachmeyer, Wolfe-Dawidjan monitors the video console that picks up images from cameras around the building.
Powell said he has never held a real job. He has survived off odd jobs — fixing cars and laying foundations.
As of this month, he is no longer supervised by a corrections officer and, presuming he could find a willing landlord, could move. But after two years, he is not ready to leave a place where he is taken seriously.
An assistant manager, Powell handles the night shift after Wolfe-Dawidjan has gone home to her husband of three years. It is a position of responsibility Powell could not have imagined holding six months ago. "I didn't really think I could do it. She told me I could."
Beth Kaiman: 206-464-2441 or bkaiman@seattletimes.com