Sexual predator with violent past committed to mental health facility by AG Hawley

A 71-year-old man who admitted he is a violent sexual predator has been committed to a mental health facility by Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley.

Jamie B. McPherson, 71, of Independence, was committed Thursday. He will remain in a secure facility under the care of the Department of Mental Health until he is no longer a threat to society, authorities said.

According to the Attorney General’s Office, McPherson has a decades-long history of molesting prepubescent boys and girls, and at one point admitted he’d had some form of sexual contact with more than 100 children.

Hawley said in a statement McPherson’s commitment is necessary because of his history of repeated abuse and failure to complete sex offender treatment.

“Jackson County is safer because of this commitment,” Hawley said.

McPherson often met his victims through his job as a postman in Lexington, Mo. during the 1980s and 1990s, authorities said. He reportedly touched a child on his route in 1996 but was not arrested.

McPherson eventually retired and relocated to Independence. There, authorities said, McPherson used his role as a church deacon and a Boy Scout leader to lure young boys into his home to sleep in his bed, shower with him, and eventually be orally sodomized.

In 2008, while under investigation for molestation, McPherson, then 61, sexually assaulted a 12-year old girl at a YMCA pool. It was later revealed McPherson sodomized a half-dozen boys ranging in ages from 5 to 9, including a special needs child.

Numerous other boys and girls reported some form of sexual contact, authorities said.

In 2010, a judge placed McPherson on probation despite warnings by probation and parole officials.

The probation was later revoked after several infractions — McPherson was caught with life-sized child dolls that were replicas of two of his prior victims; playing with a child at a bus stop; and being kicked out of sex offender treatment.

Despite years of treatment from 2010 to 2017, McPherson continued to manifest beliefs that all of his child victims created the ideas to make him abuse them and that he had never intentionally acted upon a victim, authorities said.

Hawley filed suit in 2017 to block McPherson’s release.

This story was originally published October 12, 2017 at 4:33 PM with the headline "Sexual predator with violent past committed to mental health facility by AG Hawley."