Shortly after 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, Kane County Jail inmate Jeffrey Morse, 30, was wheeled into a hospital operating room, where he got his wish: He was surgically castrated.
The operation, which lasted 45 minutes, was completed without complication by an unidentified board-certified urologist at a Chicago-area hospital, Morse’s attorney said.
Morse, a convicted child molester, began asking for the operation several months ago and insisted on going through with it even after a judge said he could offer Morse no guarantees of a light sentence in return. Even Morse’s attorney, Paul Wharton, said he tried to talk Morse out of it in the minutes preceding the surgery.
It was the first time in Illinois that an inmate had made such a request and been granted a medical furlough to carry it out, legal experts said.
Morse pleaded guilty last fall to molesting two girls–a 10-year-old from Algonquin and a 9-year-old from St. Charles–and is to be sentenced Feb. 24.
In a jailhouse interview with the Tribune the night before the surgery, Morse said he wanted to be castrated so he could control his sexual urges.
“I’m doing this for me, so I can get control of my life,” Morse said. “It’s a pretty bad life when every day you think about sex.”
He said he believes that with castration and psychological counseling he could eventually be rehabilitated and live safely in society–even among children. That point of view is not shared by most medical and psychiatric experts.
There is little evidence that child sex offenders can be rehabilitated, most experts say. Even after surgical castration, in which the testicles are removed, a man can become aroused and have an erection.
“There’s definitely a chance at rehabilitation,” said John Mulhall, a urologist and the director of the Center for Male Sexual Health at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood. “But my problem with this whole thing is what failure rate can we as a society accept. What if there’s a 20 percent chance of recidivism? That’s a very high failure rate. Can we accept that?”
Morse said he knows that he won’t be able to convince most people that he can be rehabilitated, and he said he recognizes that he may spend many years in prison.
Dressed in a bright orange prison uniform and blue canvas gym shoes, Morse spoke Monday from an office just outside his jail cell. He sat calmly with his right ankle resting on his left knee, speaking about his crimes, his family background and his unwavering decision to be castrated, which gained him national publicity.
Morse, who was raised in Kentucky and lived in Schaumburg at the time of his arrest, described himself as a loner and “sex addict,” adding that he had been obsessed with sex since puberty.
He said he was not sexually or physically abused as a child, but that he developed a voracious appetite for pornographic magazines and movies.
By the time he was 24, after a breakup with his fiance, Morse said he began fantasizing about young girls. He said he felt sexually insecure and immature. “Sex scared me some. I was looking for someone more on my own level,” Morse said.
“It went into an area it shouldn’t have,” he said, his eyes moving toward the floor.
Morse admitted to the crimes that landed him in jail, and he said the police accounts of what happened were accurate–he was naked from the waist down when he brandished a toy gun and asked each of the girls to perform sexual acts. The first incident took place in October 1996, and involved the Algonquin girl. The second was in March 1997, with the St. Charles girl.
He said he feels sorry for what he did and worries about his victims: “Days don’t go by where I don’t feel sorry and wonder how they’re going to handle it. It just scares me to think that maybe they’re going to be afraid to go outside.”
Morse said he got the idea of getting castrated from watching television.
“There was a guy on the news standing before a judge in an orange uniform asking for this,” Morse said. It seemed like the perfect solution for Morse, who said he has long felt ashamed about his sexual urges, but didn’t know how to control them.
“It’s not going to vanish,” Morse said of his urges. “I’m still going to need psychological help and eventually I’ll get a better grip on it.”
Asked why he didn’t consider a less drastic solution, like chemical castration, which involves taking hormones, Morse said he wanted the most effective procedure available.
Short of castration, Morse said, “I’d have to shut myself in, avoid TV, avoid books. I can’t avoid that. I can’t avoid eventually getting out and around other people either.
“Even though I buy (pornography) I’m bothered by it. It controlled me too much. I spent money on magazines that I should’ve spent putting gas in my car. Almost everything I’ve done wrong in the last 17 years has been related somehow to sex.”
Morse said he doesn’t need sex anymore. He also said he has not enjoyed the publicity his decision has brought him, but he was speaking out in the hopes that “someone else will look at me and maybe say `This is right for me. I need help.’ “
Morse grew up in Owensboro, Ky., and lived with his mother until she died of cancer when Morse was 9.
After she died, Morse shuttled between relatives and an orphanage, and when he was 18 he joined the Army. He was stationed in Ft. Hood, Texas, for 4 1/2 years, and moved to the Chicago area in 1990 when he got engaged.
At the time of his arrest, he was a carpet cleaner for a Palatine company. He said he has never been violent or molested other children.
Before the surgery Tuesday, Morse received a spinal anesthetic and intravenous sedatives, and his lawyer said that while Morse was awake, he had no recollection of the procedure.
The procedure involves making one incision in the scrotum and removing the testes and the epididymes, the glands that sit behind the testes, Mulhall said.
By 1 p.m., Morse was back in jail recovering. His lawyer said Morse would not be available for comment.
“He’s in a reasonable degree of pain,” Wharton said. “But he’s happy it’s finally done.”
Most of the literature on the recidivism rates of castrated sex offenders is 20 years old and originates in Germany and Denmark, where as late as the 1960s chemical or surgical castration was mandatory for certain sex offenders.
Recidivism rates are up to 15 percent in those studies, compared with 20 to 80 percent in the non-castrated population of sex offenders, Mulhall said.
“There are some people who believe that all sexual deviants have a personality disorder. Changing their testosterone levels is not going to change that,” Mulhall said. “There’s no evidence to show that castration is a cure-all.”
For his part, Morse said he was not going to beg for mercy.
“There’s no way I’m going to convince someone else (that I won’t molest again),” Morse said. “But if a few people feel that I’ll be safer to society because of this, that will just be another benefit. This is for me.”
