Letters, written to Gov. Mike Huckabee and the parole board, by rape victims of Wayne Dumond, the man Huckabee set free.
These letters were released directly from Huckabee's own files.
Huckabee kept these and other documents secret because they were politically damaging, according to a former aide who worked for him in Arkansas. The aide has made the records available to the Huffington Post, deeply troubled by Huckabee's repeated claims that he had no reason to believe Dumond would commit other violent crimes upon his release from prison. The aide also believes that Huckabee, for political reasons, has deliberately attempted to cover up his knowledge of Dumond's other sexual assaults.
"There were no letters sent to the governor's office from any rape victims," Huckabee campaign spokesperson Alice Stewart said on Tuesday when contacted by the Huffington Post.
Subsequently, however, the campaign provided a former senior aide of Huckabee's who did remember reading at least one of the letters.
Despite reading these heart-wrenching letters, Huckabee directed the parole board to release Dumond.
"I signed the [parole] papers because the governor wanted Dumond paroled. I was thinking the governor was working for the best interests of the state."
—Ermer Pondexter, ex-member of the board of pardons and paroles
"For Governor Huckabee to say that he had no influence with the board is something that he knows to be untrue. He came before the board and made his views known that [Dumond] should have been paroled..."
-Deborah Springer Suttlar, former parole board member
The consequences of Dumond's release were tragic and irrevocable - and as the letters quoted above demonstrate, entirely predictable.
After Dumond's release from prison in September 1999, he moved to Smithville, Missouri, where he raped and suffocated to death a 39-year-old woman named Carol Sue Shields. Dumond was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life in prison for that rape and murder.
But Dumond's arrest for those crimes in June 2001 came too late for 23-year-old Sara Andrasek of Platte County, Missouri. Dumond allegedly raped and murdered her just one day before his arrest for raping and murdering Shields. Prior to the attack, Andrasek and her husband had learned that she was pregnant with their first child.
