One Lancaster troop leader liked to kiss his Boy Scouts on the lips.
Another was arrested for molesting a boy he met through Boy Scouting as well as another teenage boy.
And a third leader of a Lancaster troop was arrested for statutory rape of a 12-year-old boy.
A new round of Boy Scout "perversion files" includes the names of three more local troop leaders who were ousted from the organization in 1987 and 1988 for sexual behavior involving children.
The men are: Dennis C. Geiter, now 70 and a resident of Las Vegas; William B. Martindale, now 72 and a resident of Camp Hill; and Jesus N. Arce, now 60, who could not be located.
The trio joins three other local men who were named in the first round of files released in October. Those men were banned from the organization from 1972 to 1983 for sexual behavior involving children.
As in the first round of ousted leaders, the local Scouting organization did not report any of the behavior of the three ousted leaders to the police. Two were banned only after police independently investigated their activities and charged them with sex crimes.
Thomas Lehmier was the Scout executive of the then Lancaster-Lebanon Council and was involved with all three cases.
Lehmier, who is 89 and lives in Lititz, said he would handle the cases differently today, taking a more aggressive stance and calling police about the leaders' inappropriate behavior.
But he said the Scouting organization's reaction to the cases should not be viewed through a modern lens.
"We were not policemen," he said. "We were not attorneys. What we were trying to do was protect the kids and not hurt the adults, which was wrong."
The most recently released files contain the names of these ousted leaders of local troops:
• Dennis C. Geiter, then a 42-year-old custodian for the city school district, was a scoutmaster of Troop 127 in Lancaster in 1984.
That autumn, parents and troop representatives began to lodge complaints about Geiter.
Geiter "liked to do something called rub-a-dub-ie," troop representatives told a Scout executive.
"He would rub noses with the boys and then kiss them on the lips," they said.
The executive said he talked with Geiter "about body language and the possibility of sending the wrong signals to observers."
Kissing boys on the lips might be "misinterpreted," he said.
That was the end of the issue at that time, according to documents in Geiter's Scouting file.
In fact, Geiter was allowed to continue his Scouting involvement for nearly four more years, despite additional concerns that were raised.
In the summer of 1985, Troop 127 asked that Geiter not stay with boys at the Edward Mack Scout Camp and that he resign his position with the troop.
But Geiter kept his registration with Pack 127 and also registered with Lancaster city Troop 16 of St. Joseph's Holy Name Society and Troop 25 of the 6th Ward Citizens Association.
And his troubles did not end.
In the spring of 1986, the Lancaster County Children and Youth Agency investigated a complaint of child abuse against Geiter. The agency determined the charge was "unfounded" and destroyed the report.
But that summer, three men reported earlier incidents involving Geiter to Scouting officials.
A camp director reported that he had found an extra bed in Geiter's tent at Camp Mack in the summer of 1984. He said Geiter was in the tent with his arms around a number of boys who were wearing only undershorts.
A Manheim man reported that he had been at Geiter's cabin below Holtwood with a group of boys in 1985. One boy slept in Geiter's bed and the next morning the observer "saw the boy get out of bed with an erection."
A Lancaster man reported seeing Geiter kissing boys on the lips at a winter campout in the winter of 1986.
All three men said they warned Geiter that his actions were unacceptable.
After hearing these reports, local Scout executives suspended Geiter's Scout registration.
These executives met with Geiter the next month and expressed their concerns about "several errors of judgment."
But he still was not made to leave Scouting.
Officials reinstated his registration, warning him in a letter to act responsibly in the future.
"This means that we do not want to hear of any more instances of your kissing boys on the lips, or having them sleep in your bed," the officials said.
National Scout officials, however, put Geiter on probationary status so that if he tried to register with any other Boy Scout troop his background file — including "actions which were not normal for a leader of youth" — would be made available.
In March 1988, national Scout leaders, after several times expressing concerns about Lancaster's continued registration of Geiter, told local officials that he should be banned from Scouting.
Local Scout officials finally summoned Geiter and told him to sever all ties with the Boy Scouts.
They reviewed Geiter's "several errors in judgment." These included recent reports from officials who had heard that Geiter had camped alone at his cabin with Scouts and gone hiking alone with members of Troop 16 that March.
Notes from that meeting, included in Scout records, mention Geiter's reactions: "denial, nervous, very unstable mentally, non-aggressive, understood our decision."
A decade later, in the spring of 1998, Geiter filed for bankruptcy. He left his home on Spruce Street in Lancaster and moved to Las Vegas. He will turn 71 next month.
Efforts to contact Geiter for this story have been unsuccessful.
However, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times did contact Geiter several weeks ago.
"The allegations were unfounded," Geiter told the Times. "I hugged kids and kissed kids. I stopped. I was never charged with anything."
• William B. Martindale was a member of the troop support committee of Boy Scout Troop 4, sponsored by Lancaster's Bethany Presbyterian Church, in 1987.
Martindale, then 46, was arrested in spring of that year and charged with sexually assaulting two teenaged boys. One of the boys was a member of Troop 4, according to a newspaper story from that time.
The story about his arrest noted he had taught English and Latin at Oxford Area High School in Chester County and had been an adjunct instructor at Millersville University.
Police said Martindale molested the two boys, in their mid-teens, at his Kirkwood home between May 1985 and May 1987. Police also said he supplied the boys with beer and showed them X-rated movies, according to a news story about his arrest.
Martindale was charged with two counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, as well as indecent assault and corruption of minors.
The troop support committee said the church board asked Martindale to sever his relationship with the troop shortly before he was arrested.
The committee said it had heard rumors about Martindale six months earlier but took no action because the complaints came from anonymous sources.
Martindale was sentenced to five to 10 years in the State Correctional Institution at Camp Hill.
After he got out of prison in 1996, and was living in Harrisburg, Martindale was arrested again and pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography. He again was sentenced to prison and a lengthy parole period, which ended in 2007.
Martindale, now 72, lives in Camp Hill.
Asked by telephone to comment on the molestation case, Martindale said, "I was convicted and served my sentence. I've satisfied the requirements of the law."
Martindale is registered as a sex offender on the Megan's Law website maintained by the Pennsylvania State Police.
His Facebook page says he graduated from Mercersburg Academy at Mercersburg in 1958 and Bowdoin College in Maine in 1962.
• Jesus Nathaniel Arce was a leader of Pack 24 in 1985 and Pack 43 in Lancaster in 1983 and 1984.
In the summer of 1984, Arce, then a 32-year-old city streets department employee who lived in Lancaster, also helped at Camp Mack.
Arce received a Webelos Leader of the Year award in 1984 and a Den Leaders Training Award in 1985. Webelos are Scouts in fourth and fifth grades.
In March and April of 1986, Arce was charged in two different cases of indecent assault, one involving a 12-year-old boy and the other involving a 9-year-old girl.
It does not appear that Arce knew the boy from Scouting, according to the arrest warrant affidavit from the case, which indicated Arce was dating a member of the boy's family.
Arce was charged with involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, statutory rape, indecent assault, indecent exposure and corruption of minors in the case involving the 12-year-old boy, who ended up in the hospital after the assault.
Arce was charged with involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, indecent assault, indecent exposure and corruption of children for the case involving the 9-year-old girl.
In January 1987, Arce pleaded guilty in both cases. He was sentenced to five to 10 years in state prison for each of the cases, sentences he served concurrently.
Arce, who would now be 60 years old, could not be located.
Two months after his sentencing, Arce was placed in the Scouting "Confidential File," according to documents, which include newspaper clippings about his arrests in the two cases.
A concerned parent of a Scout wrote to the local Scout council after seeing a newspaper article about Arce's sentencing, noting that the parent's son had spent time with Arce at Camp Mack.
Nothing unusual happened at camp but the parent did note the son "was contacted after camp by letter several times by Arce with requests for my son to come to his home for a visit, which my son never did."
In a letter back to the parent, Lehmier, the local Scouting executive, told the parent that Arce had been banned and would not be allowed to register again with Scouting.
"What we have to do," Lehmier wrote, "is enable sponsoring organizations themselves to be more thorough in screening — and this we continually attempt to do."
Lehmier was involved with the cases of all six of the local men who were placed in the confidential files.
Another local Scouting executive, J. Cabot Gupton, was involved with two of the cases. He now lives in North Carolina but efforts to contact him were not successful.
Lehmier said he would conduct himself differently today with regard to the cases.
In particular, Lehmier wishes he would have acted more quickly to dismiss Geiter.
"I should have taken action sooner," he said. "I did not."
The Scouts now have instituted a policy forbidding an adult to be alone with a Scout and requiring background checks and training for leaders.
The recently released Boy Scout files were opened from 1985 through 1991, according to the Los Angeles Times, which has compiled a database of ousted Boy Scout leaders.
Most files opened after 1991 have not been made public, although their release is being sought in various court cases, the Times reported.
The released files were at the center of a 2010 trial in which an Oregon law firm proved the Boy Scouts knew it had, but concealed from the public, an institution-wide problem with sexual abuse, The Associated Press has reported.
Some of the allegations contained in the files were later substantiated in court proceedings, the Times reported. However, in a great many cases, no such substantiation ever occurred.
The Oregon law firm that released the files said it was not suggesting that every allegation in the files was true, but that the records serve as notice to the Boy Scouts of potential child abuse.
