Five years ago, Zack Winfrey was working at a private fly fishing camp in Idaho, not far from Yellowstone National Park and decided to write to the man he says molested him for eight years as a child.
Winfrey, who was 26 at the time, said he still isn’t sure what prompted him to do it, but that he had been thinking about it for a while.
“I went into my room and I just sat down and handwrote that letter,” Winfrey said. “I was planning on mailing it to him, and I thought, ‘That’s dumb. I’ll never know if he reads it.’”
So he typed a new version and mailed it.
And when he didn’t get a response he sent it to the man’s children.
And then he posted the nine-page, painfully detailed and angry message anonymously online and addressed it directly to the man.
“Do you yearn wistfully for the days you could force me to sleep in a bed with you, while you wore nothing but your underwear?” Winfrey wrote under a pseudonym. “Does it thrill you to reminisce about a nervous young boy naked in a hotel room, yours for the taking?
“… Sometimes I think about just how many lives you must have ruined. How many young boys you’ve permanently damaged with your selfish acts of sexual self-gratification. It has to be at least 100 right? I wonder how many had it even worse than I did?”
The headline on the letter, which is posted on the Quora.com website, read, “Brad Reger is a child molester,” and eventually prompted Reger to reach out to him on Facebook Messenger on Sept. 1, 2018, Winfrey said.
”Have you been sending me messages?” the first note from Reger asked.
“Sherlock Holmes over here with the great detective work,” Winfrey replied.
Then, Reger wrote, “I am deeply disturbed by all you have said. I do not remember most of what you have said.”
Today, Winfrey’s online post is filed in Sacramento federal court as Exhibit 1 in the case of USA v Bradley Earl Reger. Reger, 67, is being held in custody without bail.
Reger is a licensed nurse practitioner and former youth group leader from Susanville, a small town in Lassen County. He faces charges of abusing three minors in Susanville, Nevada, Virginia, Poland and the Philippines between 2006 and 2014.
Reger’s alleged victims begin to speak out
But federal officials say there may be many, many more victims worldwide, and some of them are now speaking out.
“We do believe that there are victims spread out across the nation and globally,” Sacramento FBI Special Agent In Charge Sean Ragan said, adding that since Reger’s arrest 40 to 50 potential victims have surfaced
Reger pleaded not guilty in July to the charges, and his attorney, Kresta Daly, declined to comment for this story.
None of Reger’s alleged victims have been identified by name in court documents, and an order issued Aug. 21 requires attorneys in the case to refer to victims and witnesses by numbers.
Since Reger’s arrest, three men have spoken to The Bee to describe what they say was molestation or grooming behavior by Reger when they were boys, telling stories similar to the allegations outlined about other victims in court papers.
“It was just like you hear from the other victims,” said Troy Wilson, a former Juneau, Alaska, police officer who said he met Reger as a boy at an Alaska bible camp in 1972 and was molested by him in 1979 on a camping trip. He said he has contacted the FBI; it has not responded yet.
“He took me aside away from the other two boys and had me pull my pants down. He said he needed to inspect me for ticks, made me have an erection and basically was fondling me, saying he was checking to see if I was OK.”
Federal officials say their investigation of Reger began last November and is continuing worldwide, with estimates that he may have molested hundreds of victims across the globe as he traveled overseas extensively.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Reger left his Lassen County home and businesses at least 235 times to visit foreign countries.
As federal agents prepared to arrest Reger in July, they became so concerned about a trip he was taking in Ireland that they sought and obtained a search warrant allowing them to track him through his cellphone upon his return to the U.S.
“The investigation has revealed that Reger has communicated with suspected victims both in person and through electronic means, including text messages and Facebook messages,” a recently unsealed search warrant affidavit says. “Investigators believe that Reger continues to communicate with victims (past, and potentially future) via mobile chatting applications utilizing his cell phone.
“Investigators recently received information from a victim indicating that Reger’s son will be a groomsman in a July wedding in Stockton. In that wedding, the groom is someone closely associated with the church Reger was affiliated with in Susanville.
“That victim has been invited to the wedding and believes that Reger might attend the wedding. Two other victims have separately stated that Reger met with them prior to their own marriages, and provided advice including tips for sexually pleasing their new wives.
“One of those victims said that Reger gave him an abusive physical ‘exam’ prior to his marriage.”
The affidavit from Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Dana Unger also noted that Reger had conducted such “physicals” overseas.
“In the past, Reger traveled to different countries and conducted physical exams at orphanages and in impoverished areas,” a recently unsealed search warrant affidavit says. “The investigation has revealed that Reger recently expressed an interest to return to Kenya on a non-church/non-mission affiliated trip where agents believe he may have access to minors.”
Writing prescriptions under other doctor’s name?
Reger has lived in Susanville since 1967, and despite local law enforcement investigations of him dating back to 1986 he apparently had never been charged with more than a traffic ticket until his arrest on July 6.
Lassen County Superior Court records show he was accused in a civil case in 2004 of practicing medicine without a license and using a local doctor’s prescription pads to issue prescriptions without that doctor’s knowledge.
The doctor, Stephen L. O’Barr, sought a restraining order and injunction against Reger after he received notice from a local Rite Aid store about a prescription O’Barr had never written, according to court records.
“You have deliberately and wrongfully exposed my family and I to very serious risks,” O’Barr wrote in a Nov. 5, 2004, letter to Reger. “There is to be no social or physical contact between members of my family and yours, to avoid further complications.”
The case was settled in January 2005 after Reger agreed to stop providing health care “purported to be under the supervision” of O’Barr, according to court records.
O’Barr died in 2008, and Reger maintained his medical businesses in Susanville for years, using his clinic as a cover to abuse boys and young men by purporting to provide physical exams of them that led to him groping them, court records allege.
‘He’s a monster’
At the same time, Reger managed to ingratiate himself with local church and school leaders, volunteering to chaperone school trips to Mexico and other locations, often paying for expenses for some trips and donating a bus and an ambulance to schools in Susanville and Alaska, according to men who say they were victimized by Reger.
“He seemed like a great guy, very charismatic,” said Wilson. He said Reger first abused him in 1979 when he was 12 or 13 and on a camping trip.
Wilson said he met Reger seven years earlier when his parents moved as missionaries to work at the Echo Ranch Bible Camp.
“He would kind of do anything and befriended my parents and my aunt and uncle and became a camp counselor,” Wilson said.
He added that he never reported the abuse on the camping trip. “I didn’t say anything at that point,” Wilson said. “I knew it was odd, but there was so much trust there that it didn’t even register.”
Echo Ranch, which is run by Avant Ministries, issued a statement after Reger’s arrest saying officials were cooperating with law enforcement and that “we recently learned that alleged abuse may have taken place at ERBC.”
“In the 1970’s and sporadically over years that followed, Mr. Reger volunteered at ERBC,” the statement said. “He is not, however, and has never been, an employee nor a commissioned member of Avant Ministries.
“In light of these issues, we have barred him from any affiliation with Avant Ministries, including being on Avant property.”
Wilson said that he saw Reger at the bible camp in the years after the camping trip, and that he “never had any issues with him” during those encounters.
But in 1985, Wilson said, Reger invited him to come to Susanville to live with Reger and his family and work at Reger’s ambulance service.
Wilson said that once he arrived there he was having back pain and that Reger “basically convinced me that I should allow him to examine me, that he would be able to figure out what was going on so I could get the treatment I needed.”
“Basically, he had me lay down on his bed in the bedroom and digitally penetrated me and did an exam for several minutes,” Wilson said. “When I thought things were done, I looked back and he was naked, masturbating.”
Wilson said he didn’t know what to do. “I had left home, I was living with him and I was working with him,” Wilson said. “I didn’t allow that to happen again.”
He said he returned to Alaska in 1986 and never told anyone what Reger had done.
“I didn’t say anything to anyone,” he said. “I figured I was an adult and I allowed it to happen and there wasn’t anything I could do about it other than feel really stupid.”
After Reger’s arrest, Wilson said, he posted a news story about Reger on Facebook and revealed that Reger had abused him.
“He’s a monster,” Wilson said. “He has used, unfortunately, God and medicine to perpetrate abuse on his victims.”
Reger’s home and businesses were based in Susanville, a gritty former timber town of about 17,000 people 85 miles northwest of Reno where much of the population worked at one of two area state prisons, High Desert State Prison or the California Correctional Center, which closed in June.
Main Street features two small movie theaters, gun shops and banners hanging from light posts honoring local youths who are serving in the military.
The area also boasts at least a dozen churches, and Reger frequented a number of them over the years, volunteering, helping with church trips and sometimes filling in for pastors with sermons, according to the men who now say he victimized them.
Gossip about him floated through town for years
Locals in Susanville said suspicions about Reger lingered for years but nothing ever came of them, either because church and school leaders didn’t believe the gossip or didn’t want to.
Joel French said he is speaking to the FBI. He spent 15 years working as a prison peace officer in Susanville and said he met Reger in the early 1990s at a Christian church in nearby Janesville and later encountered him at Cornerstone Christian School, where Reger volunteered as a bible class teacher and chaperoned mission trips.
French said Reger never physically abused him, but that he believed Reger was grooming him. On school trips to Mexico, Reger would watch French and the other boys closely as they showered, French said, adding that Reger sometimes joined boys in showers.
“Brad would be in there laughing, giggling, joking with us, and he always had just this creepy gawking stare,” French said. “You know, I can still remember to this day just the look in his eyes, like you could just see that he was excited to be in there and he would just look at you.
“And he had this, just this nasty, almost evil grin.”
“By 1995, we all felt very strongly that he was a pedophile and that he was a child molester,” French added. “Conversations would come up and then somebody would always kind of quash our thinking or our ideas about Brad.
“Adults would, other students who maybe hadn’t experienced what we had would try to tell you, ‘No, he’s actually a good guy. He’s just a little strange, you know?’”
French said the breaking point with Reger came when he was in his junior year at Cornerstone and Reger was chosen to teach a health class the students were required to take to graduate.
Reger showed up and announced that the boys were going to fill out a questionnaire he had prepared, and that they would do so anonymously, French said.
“I hadn’t even looked at the questions yet, and the individual sitting in front of me, he blurts out, ‘F this, I’m not doing this BS,’” French said. “And he gets up, throws the thing in the trash and stomps out…
“I start reading the questionnaire and the first question on there was like, How often do you masturbate? And then it was, Multiple times a day? Daily? Several times a week? Several times a month? Rarely or never?
“That was question number one. And I’m sitting there thinking, man, this is like only stuff that a pedophile would want to know about…
“Question number two is, When you masturbate do you like to look at pornography?”
The questions went on in the same vein, and French said he and other students walked out of the class.
‘I think you’re a pedophile’
French said he didn’t tell his parents about the incident until his father, who also worked as a prison employee, came home from work and told him that Brad Reger had come up in conversation with a co-worker.
“The guy said, ‘Hey, let me tell you something about him,’” French said his father told him. “’He molested me when I was a kid.’”
His parents both asked French if Reger had ever touched him inappropriately, and he told them about the showers in Mexico and the health class questionnaire, French said.
That led French’s parents to move their son to Lassen High School for his senior year and a meeting with Cornerstone school board president Richard Cook and Reger, French said.
“And I looked right at Brad and I said, ‘You know, I think you’re a pedophile,’” French said. “’I think you’re a child molester. You know, like straight up. That’s what I think….’
“And then Brad actually started crying. I’ll never forget it. He started crying and acting like he was the victim.”
French said Cook defended Reger, even after French’s mother, a former Cornerstone teacher, warned him that the school could be liable if the suspicions were true.
Cook said in an interview that he did not recall details of that meeting or ever hearing about such a questionnaire, and he added that Reger was never a school employee, but a volunteer.
Cook’s wife, Sharon, a former teacher at the school, added that she had heard rumors about Reger but that “I didn’t hear a specific rumor.”
Private investigator never found ‘smoking gun
Another former Susanville resident and Reger employee said talk around town about Reger had been rampant for years. Ryan Potter worked for Reger’s ambulance company until the two had a falling out over Potter’s plans to start his own ambulance company.
“It’s been pretty well known about his deviant behavior clear back into the 1980s,” Potter said.
“The medical community in Susanville knew about this for years,” Potter said. “The churches knew about this for years, fairly substantiated rumors, and it was never really acted upon.”
Potter said at one point he hired a private investigator to look into Reger’s background but never found “a smoking gun” that police could pursue.
Weeks after his July 6 arrest and subsequent indictment by a federal grand jury, the FBI said it’s asking others to report their abuse online at fbi.gov/RegerVictims of to call 800-225-5324.
Winfrey was the first to speak out publicly and met with the FBI to help agents in their investigation prior to Reger’s arrest. He said he is one of the alleged victims in the case.
For Winfrey, now a 31-year-old delivery driver in San Francisco, the abuse began at age 10 after he first met Reger. Winfrey said that the abuse was so frequent he doesn’t remember all the instances because “it all kind of runs together.”
He was a little boy at the Church of Nazarene in Susanville, he said.
“We moved to Susanville when I was 3, and we started going to that church when I was 4,” Winfrey said. “Before that, we’d never gone to church before.
“Brad and his family were already members of the church. He was always there.”
At the time, Reger ran a medical clinic and owned an ambulance company and an air ambulance operation. Winfrey recalls him showing up at church on occasion wearing a jumpsuit with a two-way radio in case he had to go out on a medical call.
Over time, Winfrey said, Reger became more active in the church, becoming “like a youth pastor, basically.”
Winfrey would go to Reger’s home with play dates with his children, a huge house that Winfrey said had a large trampoline inside that attracted him to the place. And although he said Reger was never a pastor at the church, officials “let him do all of the things that a pastor does.”
“If the pastor of the church was gone, Brad was one of the people that would get up and give a sermon in his place,” he said.
The church said Reger never had an official role there, and that it has “barred Bradley Reger from any ministry or service anywhere within the Church of the Nazarene.”
“He is not, nor has he ever been credentialed as a pastor or minister in the Church of the Nazarene” the church said in a statement on its website.
Despite that, Reger’s relationship with the church was so close that when he settled a lawsuit against a rival ambulance firm in 2007 the settlement agreement called for the company to write out a $20,000 check payable to Reger, his attorney and the church, according to court records.
In an email, Pastor Kathy Watson declined to discuss Reger, citing the ongoing investigation, and wrote that she knew nothing about the lawsuit payment.
Winfrey said he believes church officials are trying to protect themselves from liability, and that Reger used the church to find his victims.
“At the time there was a youth group, but it was only for high schoolers,” Winfrey added. “So they created a junior high youth group and they put Brad in charge of that. He said “my earliest times being molested” were then.
The physicals always ended ‘with a very long hug’
The abuse took the form of Reger performing “physicals” at his medical clinic in advance of a trip or a camping outing, a practice described in detail in a federal criminal complaint outlining allegations about Reger’s abuse of another boy known as “Minor Victim #3.”
“This exam usually consisted of two parts,” the complaint says. “The first was a medical checkup, during which Reger took a urine test and conducted a genital inspection.
“Minor Victim #3 remembered the genital inspection included touching of the testicles and penis…
“The second part of the physical exam was a mole inspection. Reger looked over Minor Victim #3’s entire nude body for moles. Reger noticed a mole on Minor Victim #3’s penis, which Reger described as concerning. Each time he conducted the mole inspection, Reger used his hands to move around his penis and instructed Minor Victim #3 to get an erection so he could better view the mole.
“During later trips, only a mole inspection was conducted.”
Winfrey said he was an available target for Reger because he had stomach problems, and Reger was always willing to perform a “physical” to determine the cause.
“The physicals would always end with a very long hug, him praying for you,” Winfrey said. “He had a lot of lines…
“The prayers would be like, ‘Raise this man up to be a might warrior for your army.’
“Just weird stuff like that as he’s hugging you in his big sweaty embrace right after groping you. And so that always felt weird because at that point I’d had physicals and like, OK, there’s always the uncomfortable part …
“But none of them ever gave me a big hug afterwards and told me they loved me, you know?”
Winfrey said the abuse took place outside the medical clinic, as well, including on a trip to Washington state in Reger’s large passenger van with a group of other children.
Winfrey remembered the van had tinted windows and that the other children were watching a movie while he stayed behind because of a stomach ache. He said that Reger groped him then in the van.
The abuse continued until he was 18, Winfrey said.
“I got too old,” he explained.
Eventually, Winfrey left Susanville, and last year had plans to move to Europe when he learned that Reger’s activities had come under scrutiny, and that his online post had gotten the attention of authorities.
Reger already had been the subject of numerous investigations, starting with a 1986 case by the Susanville police and Lassen County Sheriff’s Office over allegations of sexually abusing a minor, according to court records.
Nothing ever came of that case, or of subsequent local investigations in 2003, 2006, and 2007.
But in late February 2022, a victim came forward to church officials and said Reger “had groomed him for sexual abuse when he was a minor and had sexually abused him under the guise of medical treatment, with escalating conduct from 2016 through 2020,” court records say.
“The Church began an internal investigation of allegations of Reger’s abuse in June of 2022, with the Church of Nazarene’s “Fact Finding Ministry” locating 10 to 15 minor victims and several adult victims, according to court records.
The church’s headquarters in Kansas took the findings and reported them on Oct. 18, 2022, to Lassen County’s child protective services division and the state Board of Registered Nursing, which falls under the California Department of Consumer Affairs, court records say.
By Nov. 1, the Sacramento FBI field office and U.S. Homeland Security investigators were involved, eventually forming a joint investigative task force along with the state consumer affairs department.
That was around the time Winfrey got his first call about the investigation, one from an investigator hired by the church, he said.
By then, Winfrey had posted his real name on the Quora post to Reger that he had written in 2018, and in 2022 the church’s Fact Finding Mission had posted a comment at the bottom of the post saying they were “conducting an investigation and very interested in speaking with you.”
Winfrey said he decided to meet with the FBI instead, and as the investigation progressed he and about six other victims began talking among themselves, forming a sort of support structure as they waited for news of an arrest.
‘I said he ruined my life. He did.’
Winfrey was in San Francisco waiting in his car to pick up an Uber food order for delivery when he got a voice mail message from the FBI, he said.
“Hey, Brad was arrested, we’re at his house,” the message said.
“I just instantly started calling the other guys and we were just, no one could believe it,” he said. “We kind of knew it was coming, but we’d all been pretty jaded by that point.”
Since then, Winfrey has driven to Sacramento to attend both of Reger’s court hearings to date, and says he will make his way to all of them because Reger “ruined my life.”
During the second hearing in July, Winfrey and another victim sat in the front row of the courtroom behind prosecutors.
Reger, sitting in a wheelchair, was on the other side of the court, but turned to look back at the gallery after prosecutors announced two victims were present.
Winfrey and Reger locked eyes, appearing to stare each other down before Winfrey smiled and gave Reger a little wave as he was wheeled back out of court to jail.
“I’m going to be at every single one,” Winfrey said of Reger’s court appearances. “This is all I live for.
“I said he ruined my life. He did. I mean this is what I live like right now. This is my entire life, is this case. I gave up living in Europe. I gave up all of my plans for my future to put on hold for the next few years to deal with this. This is all I have right now.”
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