photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Dustyn Polk appears at his trial, following three guilty verdicts for child sex crimes, with his attorney Carol Cline on Oct. 8, 2024, in Douglas County District Court. Douglas County DA Suzanne Valdez and Senior Assistant DA Ricardo Leal are at right.

A Douglas County judge, after a two-day bench trial, on Tuesday found a Lawrence man guilty of multiple sex crimes against children in a long-running case in which the man had at one point described himself to police as a “monster” but then opted to spend years fighting the charges.

Judge Sally Pokorny found Dustyn Polk, 49, guilty of one count of rape, one count of aggravated indecent liberties with a child, and criminal sodomy for crimes perpetrated against two girls when they were 13 and 15. The counts for which he was convicted went as far back as 2009, though he had been accused of dozens of incidents over a period of years, in one case when a girl was just 10.

At one point, Polk, who waived his right to a jury trial, had sought to represent himself, but this week attorney Carol Cline argued his case before Pokorny. Cline attacked the state’s evidence as just “words” and attempted to impugn the credibility of the victims, who had sometimes described their memories of long-ago events as fuzzy or jumbled.

Cline suggested that people who had been through trauma should have sharper memories, which did not hold sway with Pokorny, who said that she not only found both victims credible but also observed that in her long experience with such cases that memories of traumatic experiences are not “enhanced,” as Cline had argued, but “are actually suppressed” as a kind of coping mechanism.

Pokorny said the victims had recounted enough details about the events to convince her beyond a reasonable doubt that they had occurred.

The youngest victim, for instance, recounted details such as in what room the abuse had occurred; exactly how long it lasted — 12 minutes, which she knew from having looked at a microwave clock before and after being assaulted; that Polk used a condom and what the condom package looked like; and that the rape was physically painful.

As to Cline’s arguments that the state’s case was “just words,” Senior Assistant District Attorney Ricardo Leal shot back, “Words are evidence. We all know this.”

Leal, who worked alongside District Attorney Suzanne Valdez on the case, pointed out that Polk’s own “words” — describing himself as a “monster” to police — were among the strongest evidence.

“These were children,” he emphasized to the court in his closing argument.

With the older girl, there was a factual question of whether she had been 16 or 15 at the time. This mattered because 16 is the age of consent in Kansas, and the evidence suggested that she had generally consented to be with Polk. Fifteen-year-olds cannot legally consent, however, and Pokorny found that the woman had reliably established that she was 15 at the time.

Pokorny, in explaining her guilty verdicts, also noted Polk’s statements to police in 2018, when he referred to himself as a “monster,” evidently acknowledging his molestation, and also telling officers that one of the child victims reminded him of an old girlfriend for whom he still sexually longed.

Another indicator of guilt, Pokorny said, was that Polk had offered “anticipatory defenses” to police, telling them that if they found his semen on items belonging to the young girl, such as a bed or towel, that it was because he had gratified himself in the proximity of those things when he was alone.

Polk’s phone also contained hundreds of highly specific searches of particular kinds of sexual content involving adult men and young girls, which Cline had dismissed as “distasteful” but which Pokorny called “damning.”

Polk is scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 13.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Dustyn Polk appears at a pretrial conference with his attorney Carol Cline on Sept. 27, 2024, in Douglas County District Court.