Taught English in Bangkok & Pattaya for 19 years
Dennis
Gale Catron (seated) was finally apprehended after being on the run for 19
years.
Boonlua Chatree
A convicted American pedophile who split his time in
Pattaya and Bangkok teaching English was finally apprehended after being
on the run for 19 years.
Dennis G. Catron, 60, was taken into custody by
Chonburi Immigration Police and U.S. embassy officials outside his
Nonthaburi condominium June 29. The former Illinois schools
superintendent was convicted and sentenced in abstensia in 1994 to 36
years in prison for sexually abusing a 13-year-old for six months in
1991.
Catron fled to Thailand after a plea-bargain dispute
between judges in two Illinois counties allowed him to be released on
bail. Police have been searching for him ever since.
Since then, Catron has been living in Thailand
teaching English for the Mahidol Institute of Language in Sriracha,
among other schools. Immigration Police Superintendent Col. Chousak
Panat-amporn said he’d been splitting time between an apartment on
Pattaya’s Soi Buakaow and in Bangkok.
Working with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Office,
which canceled his passport, Immigration Police voided his visa and
turned him over to U.S. marshals for deportation back to the U.S. where
he will be handed over to the Illinois Department of Corrections to
begin serving his jail term.
Catron originally was arrested in June 1991 at his
home in the Vermillion County, Ill. town of Hoopeston after the father
of a boy from nearby Ludlow filed a complaint accusing Catron of
sexually abusing their son for half a year. Catron had been
superintendent of schools in both Ludlow and Hoopeston.
He had already been under investigation in
neighboring Champaign County and was eventually charged and acquitted of
abusing a 6-year-old boy. Charges were also filed for sexual abuse of
the same 13-year-old from Ludlow.
Following his release on bail, Catron vanished until
mid-1992, when he turned himself in voluntarily to Vermilion County
authorities. Champaign prosecutors, however, had already worked out a
plea agreement on lesser charges that would keep him in jail. A judge,
however, refused to go along with the deal, saying it might prevent
Vermillion authorities from prosecuting him on more-serious charges.
When the deal fell apart, Catron was released again
on $50,000 bail and promptly fled the country.
According to local Illinois media reports, police
there always suspected he fled to Thailand and, in fact, Thai officials
quoted said he never changed his name and freely admitted to neighbors
that he was wanted by U.S. authorities. Mahidol and other English
schools obviously never did background checks.
“We have been actively pursuing him since he left,”
Vermilion County Sheriff Pat Hartshorn told the Eastern Illinois
News-Gazette. “We did not give up on this and have worked with several
federal agencies to try and locate him, and we’re happy that the U.S.
Marshals this time were able to get cooperation from the Thailand
government.”
