Sex Offender Becomes Pastor

I'm not sure what all the hubbub is about, but some people are really going ape over Mark Hourigan becoming an ordained pastor at City of Refuge Worship Center in Louisville's Germantown. There's protests and angry mobs, and petitions, mostly from people who don't even go to that church.

If registered sex offenders aren't supposed to be allowed to ever DO anything with their lives after they get out, then we might as well just put them to sleep like shelter animals, right? (Unfortunately, many of the protestors would probably love nothing more.)

When I was a kid, we were told in Civics class that you commit a crime, you do time in prison, and then you've paid your debt to society and that's that, back to normal life. Somewhere along the way it's turned into this weird situation where sex offenders are second class citizens whose civil rights are practically nil, and yet they're expected to go out and find a career and have some sort of life. That's kind of hard to do when you're blacklisted on some online pervert database and you have to constantly report to Big Brother and check in, and you can't work here and you can't work there, and you can't do this and you can't do that.

But they're still expected to pay taxes, of course.

Crazy thing is, even axe murderers don't have to go through such nonsense. No one has to go knocking on doors saying "Hello, I served time for manslaughter and I'm required by law to alert all my new neighbors that I've moved here". I guess they'll get around to that sooner or later.

Like some book I found in a drawer in a motel once said, "Let he who is without Sin cast the first stone".

The Erica Fraysure Case

Erica Fraysure was a 17-year-old resident of Germantown, KY. She was a senior at Bracken County High School and was employed part-time at Carota's Pizza in Augusta, KY.

Fraysure was last seen on October 21, 1997, during the 9pm hour, at the Video-N-Tan in Brooksville, KY. She drove away and headed for her home in Germantown, but never got there.

The next day, Fraysure's car was found only one mile from Video-N-Tan, parked between haystacks on Fronks Road. Her purse was inside the car with all her money and valuables intact. Fraysure's car keys were discovered nearby, covered with leaves. There was no blood, no signs of struggle, no evidence of foul play. Because of this lack of evidence, her disappearance is being considered a missing person case, not a criminal matter.

In 1998, the cheesy self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Browne claimed to have information about the Fraysure case that she psychically gleaned with her paranormal abilities. (You can read more about Browne here and you can check out her own ridiculous websites here and here.) Browne announced her claims on, of all places, the Montel Williams Show, where she declared that Fraysure's body was at the bottom of a lake near Brooksville. For reasons unclear to me, the police decided to take the word of a TV psychic hotline lady seriously, and at great expense, all nearby lakes were dredged.

Fraysure wasn't found.


Undaunted by her failure, Browne continued to appear on the Montel show, and allegedly hinted that a man named Chris Mineer was responsible for Fraysure's disappearance. Mineer subsequently committed suicide. Mineer's mother tried to sue over the incident but a judge in Covington, KY ruled to dismiss, for reasons that are also unclear to me.

Meanwhile, investigators are no closer to solving the Erica Fraysure case than before.