In early April 1988, then-Gov. Neil Goldschmidt sent a handwritten note to Gail Acherman, his environmental advisor, Acherman had earlier advised him that Bob Burtchaell, a friend of Goldschmidt's, should not be granted an extension on his lease of state land. goldschmidt, in his note, overruled Acherman and instructed her to "act on my behalf: in seeking approval of Burthchaell's extension request. |
One of the many unanswered questions about Neil Goldschmidt's sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl is how he kept it a secret for 29 years.
Willamette Week's two-month investigation found that although many friends of the victim knew about the crime, few of Goldschmidt's aides, as mayor or as governor, did.
One individual who knew--and who provided a good deal of help to Goldschmidt--was a private investigator named Robert K. Burtchaell.
Three decades ago, Burtchaell was an original investor in WW and worked as the paper's marketing manager. (WW has been sold twice since then and has been owned since 1983 by Editor Mark Zusman and Publisher Richard Meeker.)
According to court documents, Goldschmidt stopped having sex with Susan in 1978. Sometime afterwards, several sources say, Goldschmidt asked Burtchaell to help, in the words of one source, "handle" her. Another person close to Susan characterized Burtchaell as "an intermediary between [Susan] and Neil" who "helped her contain her anger at him and helped her with her escalating problems."
Those problems were evident in 1986 when Susan moved into a shared apartment off Northwest 23rd Avenue. One of her new roommates believed that Susan had stolen her credit card and run up $1,000 in charges, mostly at Meier & Frank.
The roommate, in an April interview with WW, said she had threatened to press charges if Susan didn't pay the bill. Not long afterward, she told WW, she got a phone call from a man who said he would pay the debt. He said his name was Bob Burtchaell.
About the same time, Burtchaell repeatedly called a male friend of Susan's, who says Burtchaell was trying to help find an approach that would get Susan moving in the right direction.
"Burtchaell's job was to keep her from Neil," says a third source. "If she had problems, she should bring them to Bob." If Susan called Goldschmidt, Burtchaell returned the call, the source says. If Susan met Goldschmidt, Burtchaell was in the room.
According to people close to Susan, Burtchaell remained the primary intermediary between her and Goldschmidt up until Susan obtained a financial settlement from Goldschmidt in 1994.
Burtchaell's career is difficult to categorize. After leaving WW, he counseled people experiencing alcohol problems and invested in real estate before becoming a private eye.
During the late 1980s, at the same time Burtchaell was entrusted with handling Susan, he was experiencing financial problems.
In January 1988, court records show, he borrowed $241,000 from U.S. Bank. The loan was due in 90 days, but Burtchaell failed to pay it back on time.
A company that Burtchaell was part of had bought land along the east bank of the Willamette River near the Sellwood Bridge in 1986 for $125,000. Burtchaell also leased an adjacent moorage for 25 houseboats called Watery Lane from the Division of State Lands, which owns all the river bottoms in Oregon.
In February 1988, according to correspondence WW obtained from the state archives, Burtchaell wrote to then-Gov. Goldschmidt about the moorage.
"I need your advice!" Burtchaell wrote. "I felt that a letter to you would help me find a direction to follow."
Burtchaell outlined his problem: His lease on the moorage was set to expire in 1995, and the state, having determined that there were too many houseboats on that part of the Willamette, had determined in 1984 that it would not renew Burtchaell's lease.
Goldschmidt was in a position to help. As governor, he was one of three members of the state land board, along with the secretary of state and the state treasurer.
Burtchaell wanted a 30-year lease extension. Members of the Sellwood Harbor Condominium Association, whose views included the houseboat moorage, strongly opposed his request. Many of them said they had bought
their units in the belief that the houseboat moorage would disappear when Burtchaell's lease ended in 1995.
State lands staff evaluated Burtchaell's request for a lease extension and found it without merit, according to their report. Gail Achterman, a lawyer employed by the state to advise Goldschmidt on land issues, concurred with the staff opinion. "I do not think renewal in 1995 would be justified," she stated in a handwritten note to Goldschmidt on April 7, 1988.
But Goldschmidt pushed hard on Burtchaell's behalf. Buried in the state archives is a handwritten note to Achterman, in which he takes issue with her advice. "I have reviewed the material and now have discussed it with Bob Burtchaell," he wrote back to Achterman. "Unless I am missing facts, I reach a different conclusion.... Please schedule a meeting with Bob Burtchaell. From this point on please act on my behalf in this case."
Achterman reversed her initial opinion and prepped Goldschmidt for a meeting of the land board at which he would recommend a lease extension for Burtchaell.
In a July 27, 1988, memo, Achterman advised Goldschmidt that there would be strong opposition at the land-board meeting, so he should just push for an extension of the lease but not discuss specifics. "Bob needs it done now, but he agrees it should be a ministerial staff matter," Achterman wrote. "This approach should keep discussion of the appropriate lease term out of the meeting and out of any subsequent contested case hearing."
Goldschmidt's support for the lease extension was welcome news for Burtchaell, who was by then in default on his U.S. Bank loan.
After a protracted process, Goldschmidt triumphed over the objections of Treasurer Tony Meeker (no relation to WW's publisher) and Secretary of State Barbara Roberts, and Burtchaell got what he wanted. In January 1989, the land board agreed to reconsider the earlier ruling forbidding the extension of his lease.
In May 1990, Burtchaell's company sold its property and the lease on the state lands to the Sellwood Harbor Condominium Association for $350,000, which was $225,000 more than it had paid for the land four years earlier.
Both Burtchaell and Goldschmidt declined to be interviewed for this story.
In 1993, just a year before Susan threatened to sue Goldschmidt, Oregonian columnist Steve Duin interviewed the former governor. Duin asked whether Goldschmidt felt guilty about having walked away from his political career. Goldschmidt answered by recounting a conversation he'd recently had while "smoking cigars with a friend named Bob Burtchaell" in a Palm Springs hot tub.
Burtchaell, he said, had told him, "'All God has in mind for you is that you get up and do the best you can every day. And God will take care of the rest.' And [Burtchaell]'s absolutely right. Guilt hasn't bothered me since."
Editor's note: Last Sunday, The Oregonian published a piece by Burtchaell titled "No one benefits from learning Goldschmidt's secret" in its Opinion section. Burtchaell, who described himself as an entrepreneur and a friend of Goldschmidt, criticized Willamette Week for publishing the evidence of sex abuse on its website last week prior to Goldschmidt's public confession. "This is not a story about an adult man having sex with a young girl," he wrote. "It's really about a man redeeming himself...."
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That's Incredible
An internal memo reveals how The Oregonian missed the Goldschmidt story.
Editor's Note: This is a memo that was sent to Oregonian reporters Friday, May 6, the day after Neil Goldschmidt resigned from several posts upon learning that WW was about to publish evidence that, when mayor, he had sexually abused a 14-year-old girl. That story, posted on WW's website Thursday afternoon, was covered by all the local TV and radio stations Thursday night. On Friday, after The Oregonian published its story about Goldschmidt's "affair" as well as the "confession" he prepared for the paper, key managers and staffers met to recap the previous day's events. This memo, which was sent to WW by more than one source, summarizes that meeting. It is reprinted, unedited, in its entirety. It was written by Kay Balmer, a senior manager who oversees the paper's suburban bureaus. The people named in the memo include reporter Brent Walth, columnist Steve Duin, assistant crime editor Kathleen Glanville and Steve Engelberg, who manages investigative projects. "JoLene" is features editor Jolene Krawczak. "Sandy" refers to editor Sandra Mims Rowe. "Peter" is executive editor Peter Bhatia.
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First, a big thanks to WEST for jumping in on the story about the material witness in the Madrid bombing. Much of the extraordinary detail came from West reporters who were out the door working on this the minute it broke.
Today's meeting, as you might imagine, centered on a discussion of Goldschmidt. I'll try to give you some of the highlights.
-- We had gotten a tip about it sometime last winter. This was something that Brent Walth had tried to nail down years earlier when he was at Willamette Week and couldn't get. We began pursuing the rumors last winter, but didn't get too far. For one thing, the woman at times would confirm what had happened and then at other times deny it. Brent was on a plane to Nevada yesterday to talk to the woman when the story broke.
Willamette Week got a copy of the conservatorship somehow and told Goldschmidt they were going with a story. Goldschmidt called us and wanted to tell us, in Sandy's word, because we are the only credible news outlet.
-- Steve Duin felt strongly that our coverage today was too reverential. We are dealing with a child molester. He made a very impassioned plea for doing the who knew what when story -- lots of people became rich riding Goldschmidt's coat tails -- and why they kept it secret. He suggested that readers might think we'd learned nothing from Packwood and that we are hands off people in power.
-- Kathleen Glanville talked about the mixture of emotions she felt. Goldschmidt had been so important, so admired and had had such a profound effect on the city and the state. And, now, to learn that he's a child molester.
-- Steve Engleberg said that in hindsight he wished that they'd put 48 reporters on the story the day they got the tip. Someone -- I don't remember if it was Steve, Sandy or Peter -- said that this tip came in about the same time that two other similar tips concerning public officials came in. It was pursued, just not with the urgency that Steve now wishes we had put into it.
-- JoLene was concerned that so much of the discussion took place behind closed doors. Kathleen Blythe complained that researchers are too often kept in the dark about why they're looking at someone and the why could help them do their job and make them think about taking different reserach routes. ... Steve responded that they'd been asked to keep this very quiet by the initial source, who felt very vulnerable, and that they didn't want everyone to know that Goldschmidt was coming to us because we didn't ,want other media to pounce on that. He, again in hindsight, said he wished that he'd let more people in on what was going on.
-- Lots more talk about the stories that need to be done:
How this has ruined the woman's life.
Who knew what when and the people who enabled.
Status of all the projects he's involved in and how this will affect them.
The man and his secret
and on, and on.
This is not an all inclusive report -- I didn't think to take notes -- but it's the highlights, I think.
--Kay |
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Months? Or Years?
The one discrepancy between the story that Willamette Week published on its website last Thursday and the confession Neil Goldschmidt offered later that day has to do with the length of the sexual relationship between Goldschmidt and Susan.
Court documents, both in Seattle and in Washington County, say the sexual abuse occurred from 1975 to 1978. Goldschmidt, however, says the "affair" lasted less than one year. WW checked with Jeff Foote, the lawyer who negotiated a settlement with Goldschmidt on Susan's behalf. "Our records indicated that the abuse started when she was 14 and ended when she was 17," he says. "It happened, and it happened over a sustained period of time." --NJ
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