8B
Thursday, January 19, 1995
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Man goes to trial for son's death
Girl clears father in brother's death, then changes story
The Associated Press
GLENDALE, Ore. — Nearly four years have passed since people in this little mill town sluggled through mud and snow searching for a 2 1/2-year-old boy who disappeared from his front vard.
Time has done little to diminish the division between folks who think the boy's father, former sheriff's deputy Larry Gibson, killed the boy and hid the body, and those who believe Gibbon is a victim himself.
"It used to be a saying that you don't talk about sex and religion," said Terry Reid as he pumped gas into a pickup truck for a couple of loggers. "Well, in this town, you don't talk about sex, larry and Larry Gibson."
Reid and others in this southern Oregon town of 800 hope the arguments finally will be settled as Gibson goes on trial on charges of murder and murder by abuse.
Jury selection begins today in nearby Roseburg. The trial itself could last two or three months as each side presents more than 100 witnesses.
The body of Tommy Dean Gibson was never found, despite intensive searches. Gibson, 34, says that someone must have stolen his little boy from the front yard of their isolated mobile home while Gibson was off jogging in the wooded hills and his wife was in the house.
But state police investigators immediately identified Gibson as a suspect, initially theorizing that he killed his son while shooting at a neighbor's cat.
Crucial to the case is the testimony of Gibson's daughter, Karen, who was just 4 years old when her brother disappeared. She told investigators in
April that she saw her father hit Tommy three times, stick him in a black plastic trash bag and stuff him in a sheriff's department patrol car on March 18, 1991.
The statement sharply contradicts her statement to police soon after Tommy disappeared that she saw two strangers drive up to the yard and take him away.
Even before he was charged this spring, Gibson's life was crumbling.
Former defense attorney Charles Lee says Karen was hypnotized to improve her memory soon after her brother disappeared and never said anything under hypnosis about her father hitting Tommy. Police say she was too frightened to talk at the time because her father had threatened her.
Ten months after his son disappeared, Gibson resigned from the sheriff's department and moved his family back to Montana, where he went through bankruptcy.
His wife, Judy, left him last spring
and returned to Oregon, where detectives interviewed Karen, and gathered enough evidence to charge him. Family and church members also told investigators that Gibson threatened to kill his wife. Gibson moved in with his grandmother in Montana and sold insurance until his arrest.
Unable to raise $25,000 to secure his release, Gibson has spent the last nine months in the Douglas County Jail, where he reads novels and studies his Mormon religion, said his lawyer Alan Scott, a public defender.
"He's very relieved that this is finally to trial, "Scott said.
Folks in Glendale are ready for some answers, too.
reit, for one, is tired of the people he meets at horse shows knowing just one thing about Glendale, and that's the Gibson case.
"If you done it, Larry, confess," Reid said at the gas station. "If the didn't do it, leave him the hell alone. It's up to the man upstairs. He knows what happened."
Clinton faces dissension on Mexico's bailout
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Few would have guessed President Clinton's first foreign policy showdown with the new GOP-run Congress would not be over Russia, Korea or Bosnia — but Mexico. The intensifying battle underscores just how vulnerable he is on Capitol Hill.
A week after winning the tentative backing of congressional leaders for a rescue plan, Clinton's proposal for $40 billion in loan guarantees is drawing increasing fire, much of it from members of his own party.
And, while the current dispute is partly a replay of the 1983 debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, a pact with wide GOP support, Republicans are signaling to Clinton that this time he must do a better job at rounding up Democrats.
But Democrats, now in the minority, seemed more willing than ever to speak out against their own president. "I think we're going in absolutely the wrong direction," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, suggesting the
rescue plan would raise U.S. interest rates and hurt Mexican workers.
It added up to another big headache the president didn't need as he worked on the State of Union address he'll give to a joint session next Tuesday.
That there was a fight of such magnitude was remarkable in itself, given that the rescue plan is also supported by House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole.
Analysts generally agreed the rescue package would eventually pass but not without requiring Clinton to dip into already dwindling political capital.
"The troika of Clinton, Dole and Gingrich will mobilize the vote," said George Grayson, a Mexico expert at Virginia's College of William and Mary. "We really have no alternative. We are increasingly part of a world economy, and an economic problem in Mexico will affect the well-being and stability of U.S. taxpayers and U.S. stock owners."
"In the end, Republicans will vote
overwhelmingly for the stabilization package and so will Sun Belt Democrats, "Grayson said.
Thrown off balance by the sudden fight, the White House mobilized its big guns yesterday and also enlisted the support of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.
Clinton lobbied publicly for support, going to the Treasury Department to address U.S.business leaders with a stake in Mexico.
Meanwhile, Vice President Al Gore,
Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, Treasury
Secretary Robert Rubin and
Greenspan sought support on Capitol
Hill.
"We have a core of support for doing the right thing and moving forth expeditiously," Gore asserted. "We are on schedule and moving forward."
Many lawmakers of both parties are calling for delaying the bailout or adding conditions on immigration and labor standards.
The devaluation of the Mexican peso just before Christmas has sent the Mexican economy into a tailspin.
The U.S. dollar has become 35 percent more valuable in comparison.
Some critics claim the bailout — pledging U.S. repayment of the loans should Mexico default — will mostly help wealthy investors who had bought Mexico's short-term government bonds.
"This ballot is unjust. It takes Wall Street off the hook and puts the American taxpayers on," said conservative columnist and 1992 GOP presidential contender Pat Buchanan.
Even Dole seemed a little uncomfortable with his earlier support as Clinton strained for Democratic votes. "We're not going to carry the whole load here and get hung out to dry," he said.
The fierceness of the fight reflects what Clinton has to deal with as he does battle with his own devalued political currency.
And it only hints at the obstacles ahead—when he tries to move something through Congress that isn't blessed with the support of Republicans Gingrich and Dole.
Sexual orientation shown in childhood, researchers claim
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — Boys who persistently play with girls' dolls, dress like girls and display other stereotypically feminine traits will probably grow up to be gay men, researchers say.
Playing with dolls does not cause homosexuality, but it's a possible early sign, said researcher J. Michael Bailey.
"If you have a very feminine boy, one so feminine that he's constantly wanting to dress up as a girl and wants to be a girl, chances are he's going to be a gay man," said Balley, a psychologist at Northwestern University.
For a very masculine girl, Bailey guessed the chance of becoming a lesbian adult is perhaps 10 percent. He said that compared with a general chance for a girl of 1 percent or less, though others give higher estimates for the incidences of lesbianism.
The chance is probably about 75 percent for these boys, who also generally prefer playing with girls and taking the female role in games like "house," he said.
Bailey said he doubted parents could do anything to change a child's chance of becoming a homosexual adult.
Very feminine boys are probably rare, Bailey said. While they run the highest chance of becoming gay men, less feminine boys can also have a higher chance than a masculine boy does, he said.
But that doesn't apply to a boy who "plays with female dolls every now and then, but who enjoys boys as playmates or who doesn't say he's unhappy about being a boy," said co-author Kenneth Zucker.
Bailey and Zucker reported their findings in this month's issue of the journal Developmental Psychology. The report is a review of prior research.
Margery Sved, president of the
Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists, called the work a "very fair" description of existing research.
While the studies say very feminine boys are likely to become gay men, most gay men were probably not so extremely feminine as boys, she said.
The report reviewed two kinds of research. One kind began with very feminine boys and studied them again in adulthood. Bailey said that this approach produced his 75 percent estimate.
The other kind of research had adults recall their childhoods. The new analysis included 41 of these studies done in the United States, Canada and Australia. All but two were published after 1960.
Overall, the results indicated 89 percent of the gay men in the studies had been more feminine as boys than the typical heterosexual man had been. Similarly, 81 percent of the lesbians had been more masculine as girls than the typical heterosexual women had been.
Sved cautioned that such studies may overstate the differences in childhood behavior because gays and heterosexuals may recall those years differently. Still, she said she believed such differences really did occur for many homosexuals.
Signs of masculinity were defined to include such things as enjoying rough play, liking sports and being interested in traditionally male careers like being an airplane pilot. Definitions of feminine traits included such things as wanting to be a dress designer or nurse, preferring to play with girls and wanting to wear dresses, jewelry and makeup.
Some of those definitions may seem outdated. But psychologist Gregory Herek, co-editor of an annual series of reviews of research into homosexual psychology, said the studies relied on persisting patterns of behavior.
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