Before Sandusky, there was Todd Hodne

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WTF is up with Penn State?

Weed, money etc., is one thing but this rape shyt is nuts. Makes you realize just how much went on back in the day......

Before Jerry Sandusky, Penn State football had another serial sexual predator. This is the untold story of his crimes and the fight to bring him to justice.


Only posting some of it because it's hella long.

 

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Karen was alone in her apartment when the phone rang.

She didn't like being alone. It had been weeks since she had been attacked there, but the apartment still felt to her like a crime scene, a place that had been turned over and rummaged through. She had called the police on the night of the attack, when she finally convinced herself that she might be safe. She had gone to the local hospital and submitted to an examination. She had opened the Yellow Pages and called a resource new to the town where she had gone to school and now lived, something called a rape crisis center.

But the police seemed to want more from her, even after she had told them everything she could remember. The hospital had run out of rape kits, and the nurse who examined her was rude, she thought, "mocking." The rape crisis center had no therapists to recommend, only women around her age who offered more sympathy than expertise.

 

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Karen felt as though she were being pushed aside and forgotten. The attack she had endured was inescapably real but, in its aftermath, she faced a sense of unreality so powerful that she kept in her pocket the scant newspaper clipping about her assault to remind herself that it really happened. The apartment provided no refuge. When she discovered that photos she kept of herself were missing, she knew they had been taken but couldn't be sure by whom. Nothing had gone untouched. When the phone rang, the call came through a line that a few weeks before had been cut by the blade of a knife.

She had heard from the police that there were others who had been attacked recently. She had heard some of the other women had received phone calls after their assault, possibly from the assailant. But when she picked up, she did not hear the voice she feared. This was someone familiar but not someone she knew. It was a man everyone knew. And when she realized who it was, she wondered immediately how he knew her name:

"Karen, this is Joe Paterno," the man said. "Are you OK?"

 

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FORTY-THREE YEARS AGO, Penn State University played for its first national championship in a football season that began against Temple on Sept. 1, 1978, and ended against second-ranked Alabama, on Jan. 1, 1979. It was the season in which Penn State football became Penn State Football, a season that saw head coach Joe Paterno become an American icon. It was also a season that saw a serial sexual predator attack multiple Penn State students.

If you are any kind of sports fan, you probably know the first story, all the way through its shocking denouement 10 years ago—the story of the football coach whose black shoes and white socks were seen as his moral underpinnings until they weren't ... until his career ended when the sexual abuse committed by an assistant coach named Jerry Sandusky came to light. You almost certainly don't know the second. It is not just a story that hasn't been told; it's a story that doesn't exist, even in obscure corners of the internet. It's the story of a Penn State football player who, as his team ascended to the pinnacle of the sport, was ransacking the lives of women in the dark.

His name was Todd Hodne, and he was perhaps the most dangerous predator ever to play college football. "I have been a prosecutor for nearly 30 years," wrote John B. Collins, who prosecuted one of Hodne's crimes, in a letter to a parole board. "I have prosecuted serial killers and capital cases. Todd Hodne, to this day, remains among the three most dangerous, physically imposing and ruthless excuses for a human being I have ever faced in court."

 

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Hodne arrived in State College in 1977 as a prized recruit from New York's Long Island, and in 1978, he was the Penn State Rapist. There were other rapes and rapists; Penn State, in the mid- and late seventies, was enduring an epidemic of sexual assault that female students of the day still talk about. But even against that backdrop, Hodne's rapes and attacks stand out because he was a football player who, according to one family member, "had no control over his dark impulses." He was big and strong, entitled and enabled. He was driven and determined and a little desperate. He was also cruel, the most predatory of predators, a hunter who liked to linger. He attacked with a knife to the throat, and when he attacked women, he made sure they couldn't see him, but he also liked to suggest they knew him. "Do you recognize my voice?" he'd asked Karen.

In October 1978, Hodne was finally caught on the strength of three fingerprints and a traced phone call. Five months later—two months after Penn State and Paterno lost the national championship game to Alabama and Bear Bryant—Hodne was found guilty of criminal sexual assault after one of his victims testified against him. But that was not the end of Hodne's string of attacks. It was, tragically, just the beginning of a series of crimes of such escalating violence that they have become generational, wreaking havoc on the lives of his victims and their descendants.

 

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Todd Hodne died of cancer on April 29, 2020, six days after his 61st birthday, comatose but still under guard in the prison ward of a hospital in New York state. The story you are reading started with three questions about Hodne and his criminal career: What did he do, why wasn't he stopped and why doesn't anyone know about him? We have examined hundreds of pages of surviving, often heavily redacted, documents and have done hundreds of interviews with Hodne's friends, girlfriends, family members, teammates and coaches, as well as those who investigated and prosecuted his crimes. We have contended with the obstacles of indifference and obstruction but also of time itself; after 43 years, people grow old, people forget and people die. But of course, they also remember, and the most consequential witness is offered by the women who survived the ravages not just of time but of Hodne himself—who survived their hours in the dark with a 240-pound Division I football player with a knife in his hand and no particular interest in their survival. Of the 12 women he is known to have attacked, four are dead. We spoke to six of the other eight and to the husband of a seventh. One did not respond. We asked them about the violent attacks they endured in 1978 and 1979—and 43 years later, they remembered those crimes in unflinching detail. They shared the stories they'd had to bear in private. And out of that, out of the sheer scope of lives changed and ruined, emerged a portrait of a time and a place, a portrait of a football program and its coach, and a portrait of a terrifying predator who called himself "the All-American kid."

 

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THEY WERE a bunch of kids, 14 years old, but also strangers to one another. They were at freshman football camp, on a new team for a new school, St. Dominic in Oyster Bay, Long Island. They were just yakking before mealtime, in their bunks. You know boys like these: someone had to prove himself, someone had to dominate. So one of them, John Poggioli, started messing with the kid playing linebacker, the kid with the long face and the long hair combed to the side and the serious real estate at the jawline. Nobody even remembers what was said. But anyone who was there remembers what happened next. One second, Poggioli is talking, teasing the kid. Next second, the kid takes out a knife and throws it at him. He misses, but not by much—the knife sticks in the wall, vibrating like a tuning fork, a few inches from Poggioli's head. The linebacker, Hodne is his name, gets up and without a word pulls the knife from the wall. He slides it back in its leather sheath and heads for chow. The rest follow, wondering if they should tell one of the coaches what they just saw. They never do.

Hodne could hit. Even before he put on all that muscle, even when he was all shoulders and long legs and arms, he could ring bells, he could make the guy on the other side of the line quit or at least reconsider being a hero. "It was just different, getting hit by Todd," Poggioli says. It's human instinct to slow down when you make a tackle—to pull up, just a little bit, right before contact. Hodne didn't have that instinct. He accelerated through the tackle. He accelerated through the ball carrier and liked to luxuriate in the aftermath, standing over the guy he laid out. There were rumors he stuck rolls of quarters in his arm pads.

 

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His ferocity was what brought him to St. Dominic. It was a small school, with around 150 kids in each class, and not a traditional power. But the football coach, Tom Capozzoli, had been at St. Dom's for about a dozen years, and now he had a star player—his son Tony, who had won the national Punt, Pass & Kick championship two years in a row. The athletic department decided to bring in players who would help the Capozzolis win a championship before Tom retired. Hodne was one of them, along with a teammate from the Levittown Red Devils travel team, Dave Smith. Hodne wasn't even Catholic. He was just rangy and violent, an intimidator.

He was even intimidating at the freshman dance in the fall of 1973. It was held at the Knights of Columbus Hall; the football players hung around a big round table, showing off for each other. Hodne wound up doing something they talk about even now. He pulled a girl at the dance under the table while his teammates stayed in their chairs—an act that made his reputation in some quarters, and in some quarters undid hers. "To be very honest with you, we all pointed the finger at her," says Marge Galtieri, a St. Dominic cheerleader and one of Hodne's classmates. "We judged her. But maybe we judged her wrong, looking at the events of the following years."

Hodne was from Wantagh, a comfortably middle-class town between the little boxes of Levittown and the fulfillment of Robert Moses' vision in the boardwalk of Jones Beach. He had a hard-working father, a charming and stylish mother, and siblings with whom he was close. He became an All-Long Island linebacker whose very name rattled opponents. But even in ninth grade, Todd Hodne was a polarizing figure at St. Dominic, because even in ninth grade, Todd Hodne was talking about breaking the law. He brought his knife to school and, according to Poggioli, "definitely" kept the quarters in his fists when he, as a freshman, battered a senior who challenged him. He also bragged about stealing car stereos and doing burglaries. His teammates listened, and they had to decide whether to believe him and what to do if they did. Dave Smith was the son

 

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of a Nassau County police officer, and when they were all sophomores, he told his father that Hodne was breaking into people's houses. Smith's father contacted Hodne's local precinct, which investigated. The result, says retired officer Don Smith, was that Hodne, at 15, was "custodialized" by the juvenile justice department of Nassau County and compelled to return the stereo equipment he had stolen. The intervention made enduring enemies of Hodne and Smith, the two inside linebackers for the St. Dominic Bayhawks. But it neither deterred Hodne nor threatened his status on the team.

Many of Hodne's teammates remember Tom Capozzoli repeatedly taking up for him with school administrators. One remembers a coach being fired after he tried to warn Hodne's parents about their son. Ralph Willard, who was the athletic director at the time and went on to coach basketball with Rick Pitino at Louisville, says, "I don't remember there being any problems with Todd, to be honest. I just remember how he hit."

 

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St. Dominic won the state Catholic High School Football League championship in 1975, in Tom Capozzoli's final season as head coach. His son Tony, a senior, was named first-team Parade All-American, and he committed to Penn State as a quarterback and a kicker. Todd Hodne, Dave Smith and John Poggioli had one more season together, and though Hodne and Smith once had a fistfight on the school stairs, Hodne and Poggioli were thought to be best friends. In truth, Poggioli said he remained in the friendship because he didn't know how to get out. He was drawn to Todd Hodne and he was afraid of Todd Hodne in equal measure, and Hodne made him pay every time Poggioli tried to emerge from under his sway. When Poggioli was a junior, he told Hodne that he might try out for the school play; Hodne responded by sneering, "You're no actor," and dumping a pail of water on his head. When Poggioli had a crush on a girl named Janet, he wouldn't dare ask her out because Hodne, though not her boyfriend, had claimed her. "In my four years at St. Dominic, nobody asked me out because they were so afraid of Todd," Janet Shalley remembers now. "I could only date boys from other schools. And back then, I had it going on."

 

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Hodne followed Tony Capozzoli to Penn State. The coach who recruited both of them remembers Hodne as a good kid: "If he wasn't a good kid, we wouldn't have brought him to Penn State." But even with Hodne in Pennsylvania, Poggioli remained under his influence. After Hodne completed his freshman year as a Nittany Lion, he invited Poggioli and a friend from Wantagh to spend a weekend with him in State College. School had ended. But Hodne was living with some other athletes in a house off campus. He had made plans with his friends from home to drive to Philly for a Rolling Stones concert. They were going to have a cookout in the backyard, and so they went to the supermarket. "We went to get supplies for the barbecue and got a bunch of steaks," remembers his Wantagh friend. "He goes, 'I know this trick: You just turn the steaks over in the cart and walk on out.' So we robbed all these big steaks and had a feast."

 

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The next morning, June 18, 1978, there was something else Hodne wanted. They went to a store on College Avenue, the main drag for Penn State students. It was called the Record Ranch, and Hodne, sometimes in the company of other athletes, had been stealing LPs from there since he'd come to school, hiding them under his coat. The store was closed on a Sunday morning, but Hodne wanted to go in. Poggioli thought it was a bad idea, he says now; the problem was telling his friend. "I didn't stop Todd because I couldn't stop Todd. If you tried to stop Todd, he would hurt you. You couldn't say no to him, and he could convince you to do things you wouldn't normally do." According to a police report, they kicked in a window of the Record Ranch and were in the process of stealing $30 in quarters and another $800 in merchandise—a Yamaha stereo amplifier; a Rolling Stones mirror; some T-shirts and Harley Davidson belt buckles; and record albums by Donald Fagen, David Gilmour, Little Feat and Rick Wakeman, among others—when two employees from an adjacent store saw a door open and peeked inside. They saw Hodne's Wantagh friend dangling from the broken window and called the police. He was arrested along with Poggioli, who had stayed outside. But Hodne easily shrugged off the police and ran right through them. "Todd got away because Todd at that point was a criminal," Poggioli says. "He knew how to get away."

 

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The next day, Hodne showed up at the police station, saying he heard two of his friends were in some trouble and wanted to visit them in jail. According to a police report, he first said his name was "Tom Harris." Then he changed his mind and "stated that his name was Todd Hodne ... that he was a Penn State football player and that he did not want his name out." He was leaving the station when an officer told him he matched the description of the man who fled the Record Ranch burglary. The officer asked for permission to take a photograph of him, and Hodne agreed. Hodne drove back to Wantagh and, in his absence, was identified in a photographic lineup. When he returned to State College, he was arrested, and on June 21, he, along with his friend from the neighborhood, were charged and later convicted with felonies. "He ruined my life," says Poggioli, who wound up pleading to a misdemeanor. "But he ruined so many lives. I feel lucky to have gotten out when I did. I feel lucky compared to the others."

It was not a violent crime. But it was a felony, and Joe Paterno was a coach who called players into his office even when he heard they were not participating in classroom discussions. He was a disciplinarian, and there would have to be discipline. On Aug. 19, 1978, two months after the burglary, Penn State held a scrimmage, and afterward, Paterno told gathered reporters that Todd Hodne had been suspended for the season. But he did not like to give up on his players, and he did not give up on Hodne. In his announcement, Paterno said that Hodne will be able to return to the team "if he has a good academic year and if he proves to us that [the robbery] was a mistake." He also sought to provide Hodne a role model for his sophomore season, and to that end, one of his seniors, Fred Ragucci, was summoned into the football office. Ragucci went to a Catholic high school on Staten Island, and now he played defensive end for Paterno. When Ragucci was told he would have a new roommate in Hamilton Hall, he didn't blink, even though he was two years older than Hodne and was not part of his crowd. Ragucci could figure out easily enough why he wound up in this unlikely pairing: "I was a pretty good student. I was pretty straight

 

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never in any trouble. Nobody specifically mentioned this to me, but I think they were trying to put people in with people who might be a good influence."

They did not spend a lot of time together at 279 Hamilton. Why would they? In 1978, there was nothing in most college dorm rooms outside a stereo and perhaps a hot plate. But later, Ragucci will always remember one thing about his new roommate: his knife. It was Hodne's prized possession, a gift his grandmother gave him after she returned from a trip to her ancestral Norway, the blade forged from fine Scandinavian steel. But what Ragucci remembers is how much time Hodne spent with it, his fascination with it. "He was always playing with it when he was in the room," Ragucci says now. "It had a leather sheath, and he would take the sheath on and off, on and off. All the time, even when you were having a conversation."

 

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Ain't posting the rest because it's damn near a book but ESPN still has some journalists.