Ex-NOPD child abuse detective, himself a serial molester, confronted by WWL, Guardian
Stanley Burkhardt had just been released from a halfway house after his sixth prison stint in a span of 37 years.
A former New Orleans police detective – who once busted the city’s pedophiles and then sexually abused their child victims – answered the door Friday at his half of a shotgun double in the Lower Ninth Ward.
Stanley Carl Burkhardt had just been released from a halfway house after his sixth prison stint in a span of 37 years. He wore a white T-shirt and an ankle monitor as this reporter stood on the other side of a screen door, with a WWL Louisiana microphone in his hand and Guardian reporter Ramon Antonio Vargas by his side.
No sooner did this reporter identify himself than Burkhardt exclaimed, “Oh no,” and quickly shut the door. He wouldn’t emerge again.
'Parents not even knowing...'
But his new neighbors did. One by one, they came to their porches and stoops to ask the news crew what was happening. None of them had heard that a convicted sex criminal – let alone one who had admitted under oath to molesting at least eight boys and four girls in the 1970s and 80s – was living in their neighborhood, immediately next to a house with a basketball goal and across from another where a mother emerged with her toddler.
“Parents not even knowing that this guy is living here, it's really sad,” said Keisha Henry, a friend of this reporter and a behavioral health specialist who has lived in the neighborhood her whole life. “And knowing people in our community are not big on media, they're not going to talk (on camera). But they're talking amongst each other, and they're not happy about it.”
Their concern appears to be warranted. Burkhardt has been diagnosed with pedophilia, released from prison and treatment a half-dozen times since 1992 and has never managed to complete the terms of his probation.
Court records
According to court records, he used his position as a leading NOPD child abuse investigator to control the evidence room and traffic in child pornography. And according to one of his earliest documented victims, Burkardt used his position as a child abuse detective to earn victims’ trust and take advantage of them when they were at their most vulnerable.
“Stanley Burkhardt is the epitome of evil. I've never met anybody like him, ever,” Richard Windmann said.
Windmann should know. He’s now the head of a national organization called Survivors of Childhood Sex Abuse, so he advocates for survivors daily. In 1974, when Windmann was just 9, his Boy Scout troop leader and other scoutmasters raped him and other boys, and his testimony helped convict them. In the late ‘70s, Windmann alleged that a janitor and priest at Jesuit High School both molested him. He said Burkhardt, who was supposed to be his protector after the Boy Scout trial, molested him in NOPD Headquarters, at his house and elsewhere over more than three years.
A federal judge in North Carolina later found that Burkhardt molested Windmann approximately 40 times between the ages of 13 and 16. Windmann said Burkhardt used to threaten him by showing him photos of dead teens and putting his service pistol in his mouth.
He said he also pimped him out as he built a reputation as a heroic child abuse detective.
“He would put me on a mailbox on Saint Philip Street in the French Quarter, where the pedophiles are known to cruise,” said Windmann, who now lives near Dallas and is running for state representative in Texas. “And he would make me have sex with the pedophiles so he can make cases against them.”
Burkhardt left the NOPD in 1987 when he was convicted of federal child porn charges. He got out in 1992 and was immediately arrested again, pleading guilty in 1994 to aggravated crime against nature for molesting his ex-wife’s 9-year-old niece. But a Louisiana state court gave him credit for time served on the federal charge and he was out again.
In 1998, Burkhardt was caught accepting child pornography in a sting operation by a U.S. postal inspector. When the feds searched his home, they found a 12-year-old boy inside, but no charges related to the boy were ever filed against him.
In 2006, Burkhardt violated terms of his release and accessed porn while staying at a halfway house. In 2011, a federal judge declared him “sexually dangerous” and committed him to a federal prison treatment center in North Carolina.
He was released in 2015, but violated his parole again in 2019 by using a secret cell phone and unauthorized accounts to download and comment online about hundreds of images of young boys. While Burkhardt was living in the Lower Ninth Ward in 2018, Vargas went to his home to try to interview him. Later, court records show Burkhardt said a neighbor tipped him off so he wouldn’t come to the door. He said he was “stressed” by the “adverse publicity,” and that’s why he accessed more child porn.
Vargas and the WWL Louisiana news crew tried again to speak with Burkhardt about an hour after he shut the door in their faces. It sounded like a TV or other media was playing inside. He never responded as the reporters asked through the door why this time would be different.
In 2021, U.S. District Judge James Dever III rejected Burkhardt’s request for parole, writing bluntly: “Burkhardt has repeatedly failed on supervised release and probation and has never successfully completed either.”
Granted supervised release
Dever ordered Burkhardt to stay in the federal prison treatment center in Butner, N.C., for more treatment. But Dever took a different tack in March 2024, granting Burkhardt a sixth release to a halfway house in New Orleans. The U.S. Probation Office then granted Burkhardt supervised release on an ankle monitor earlier this month, and Burkhardt reported his new address at 728 St. Maurice St. last week.
His release says he can’t linger within 100 feet of a playground or other place where children play. His new residence is approximately 1,000 feet from a preschool and daycare center. An official at the daycare said police notified her by email last week that Burkhardt had moved into the neighborhood, with a photo of him and his new address.
Neighbors said they received no such notice, and if it hadn’t been for Burkhardt’s ankle monitor, they wouldn’t have had any concerns about the 73-year-old who has only emerged from his house a few times in the last week. Calls seeking comment from the landlord who owns several of the shotgun doubles on that block, including the one where Burkhardt lives, were not returned.
Windmann said he wants to make sure every one of Burkhardt's new neighbors knows exactly who he is. And he has this message for his childhood tormenter: “As long as you're on the street, I'm going to be a serious problem for you. And so, you might as well go back to prison, where you get air conditioning, three meals a day. Not on my streets.”
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