Earlier this month, Gov. Pete Wilson pledged that when a notorious rapist named Melvin Carter was paroled from prison, he would be kept out of populated areas - banished, the governor promised, "out in the wilderness someplace."
In 20th-century California, it is hard to imagine a wilder area than the Devil's Garden Conservation Camp, a minimum-security institution three miles up a hillside along a gravel washboard called County Road 73.This is where Carter arrived after dark on March 17, hidden in the trunk of a car so an alarmed citizenry would not see him. Here, where the high desert of California bleeds into Nevada and Oregon, lies one of the state's emptiest areas.
But things have not worked as Wilson had hoped. Though Modoc County is desolate, nearly 10,000 people call it home. And many of them are now obsessed with Carter, who admitted assaulting 100 women in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1970s and served half his 25-year sentence.
His presence at Devils Garden, whose inmates fight forest fires for penance, has residents locking doors for the first time, dusting off or buying guns and crying out in protest.
They can tolerate having the Department of Fish and Game dump mountain lions here, but not the Department of Corrections dumping convicted serial rapists.
Last year, an Alturas man convicted of a single rape was sentenced to 122 years in prison. "We just got one put away and then they give us another and there's no telling what they'll give us next," said Carole Scarbrough, a waitress at the Auction Cafe.
Thus far, however, protests, plus trips to Sacramento, plus the presence in Modoc County of a woman who says she was among those Carter raped 16 years ago have proven unavailing.
Under California law, the victim of a violent crime may ask that a parolee not be placed within 35 miles of her residence. But that provision requires the offense be both charged and proved, and the unidentified Modoc County woman never reported the episode.
James H. Gomez, California's chief of corrections, cited that failure Friday when he announced that Carter would remain here for the next three years. His decision prompted a new wave of outrage and anguish from local residents.
"Things are going to get ugly now," said Becky Givan, the mother of a young daughter whose eyes watered as she spoke. "I don't think that people are going to just sit back. They're going to say, `If I see him I'll kill him.' "
In Alturas, the county seat, photographs of Carter hang in the windows of most stores. On many, targets have been placed on his forehead; at the coin-operated laundry, there are written comments as well: "Death becomes you!" "We all hate you!" "Stay away, Melvin or beware!" "Let's Kill Him!!!" "No, Let's Castrate Him!!!"
The marquee at the California Market, which usually displays the cost of rump roast, now states, "Modoc Says No Rapist Here."
Normally, parole decisions are made by bureaucrats with few options other than sending released felons back to the communities they violated.
But facing pressure from residents of Hayward, where Carter was originally to have been sent, Wilson pledged 11 days ago to send Carter - an "animal" and a "psychopath," he called him - "out in the wilderness someplace, where he will have absolutely the least possible opportunity to hunt for any young woman."
"Someplace" turned out to be Modoc County.
"The governor has said to them in effect, `I'm going to play it safe and dump him on you guys,' " said Franklin Zimring, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "They can with some justification feel they've been discriminated against because they're hicks."
Wilson has since said that corrections officials, not he, chose Carter's destination. But even before Carter was released, the case had become an issue in Wilson's campaign for a second term, with his most likely Democratic opponent, state Treasurer Kathleen Brown, charging the rapist could have been kept behind bars had Wilson been more attentive.
Wilson said that the law tied his hands. He also noted that the judge who sentenced Carter so leniently was appointed by Brown's father, former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Sr., and that the provision halving his sentence for good behavior had been signed by her brother, former Gov. and presidential candidate Edmund G. Brown Jr.