Escapes of a Sex Predator

Some remember the adopted son of one of the town's leading families as an outdoors lover who sold greeting cards door to door and swept floors in downtown stores for a quarter. Others remember an awkward loner with an explosive temper.

"He was a strange, strange lad," said Jack Gannon, a former neighbor in this Seattle suburb. "When he was 12 or 13, I caught him stealing balls out of my golf cart. I chastised him and sent him home. He came back with a rifle. I jerked it away and busted it up and took him back to his dad."

Anger was just the veneer. Beneath it, Stokes harbored a hunger for sexual violence that took root early, in encounters with younger boys that began, by his own account, when he was 9.

Stokes' exploits would consume his family, especially his father, a respected funeral home owner. Time and again, Ned Stokes tried to help his son out of trouble, only to see him get in deeper.

In the late 1960s, the elder Stokes asked the owners of a lake resort where the family had vacationed for years whether his teenage son could work for them. Eddie was having problems, he said. Maybe a summer away from home would straighten him out.

One day, Eddie invited the owners' young son up to his room, exposed himself and asked the boy to remove his pants. The child's parents called Ned Stokes and told him to come get Eddie -- and never return.

Today, Stokes, 48, is known to authorities as one of the West's most insatiable sexual predators. By his own count, he has assaulted scores of boys and young men over a generation. Prosecutors still hope to put him in prison for life.

What sets Stokes apart from other serial sex offenders is his ability to escape prolonged incarceration in an era of habitual-offender laws and minimum sentences. Though often caught, he has never been stopped.

Stokes has been convicted of felonies stemming from sexual assaults at least five times and has spent more than 20 years behind bars in four states. Yet each time, he has managed to avoid a lengthy prison term, get free again and find new victims. Along the way, he's caught plenty of breaks: cases weakened by uncooperative witnesses and clouded recollections, cases dropped or plea-bargained by prosecutors.