Sex offender expert arrested on
Child Abuse charges

COLUMBIA, MO  –  A Columbia forensic psychologist and national leader in the field of sex offender management has surrendered to St. Louis Metropolitan Police on warrants for child sex crimes in two Missouri counties.

Court filings show Kurt M. Bumby, 50, was arrested Friday by St. Louis Metropolitan Police on a Boone County warrant for two counts of statutory sodomy and a St. Louis warrant for two counts of sodomy.  Bumby was booked into the St. Louis County Jail and posted a $200,000 cash-only bond — $100,000 each for the two sets of charges — to secure his release.

Defense attorney Joel Schwartz did not return calls or emails seeking comment.

Bumby for nearly two decades served as an advisor on sex offender management to governmental agencies across the nation.  He is accused of molesting two children in incidents in both counties, the oldest of those charges stretching back to 1988.

In November, Bumby was paid $280,000 to present a report to the Arizona Supreme Court.

Court spokesman Aaron Nash on Monday said the court will conduct a review of the report, which was authored by Bumby and another, but many of the recommendations seem to be in line with what many experts say are current best practices.

“Most were not controversial, they were things like treatment should be specific to the individual,” Nash said.  “But this is a big deal, so it’s something the Arizona Court is taking back to the National Center for State Courts, who provided the study, just to check back in and ask is there anything in here that reflects bias, is there anything that needs to be revisited.”

In the report, Bumby advocated for the elimination of polygraphs for juveniles, which Nash said has met with some controversy.  In light of the recommendation, Nash said the court did agree to a judicial officer approval before the test could be administered.

“So it (a polygraph) is still an option, but a probation officer or somebody has to make the request to a judge, with the information why they think it’s appropriate for this child and this incident, and then the judge makes a decision,” Nash said.

Missouri Supreme Court spokeswoman Beth Riggert said on Friday she was unable to locate anything which showed Bumby had presented or made any recommendation to the courts in Missouri.

From 2003 until Jan. 1, during much of the time the alleged abuse was taking place, Bumby was a senior associate with the Center for Effective Public Policy, a position in which he discussed with and presented to judges, state officials and policymakers across the nation trends in the rehabilitation and recidivism of sex offenders.

As part of his duties, he has been the director of the Center for Sex Offender Management.  He also served as principal assistant to the director of the Division of Youth Services in the period from about 1999 to 2003 and prior to that as a psychologist at Fulton State Hospital.

In the Boone County case, investigators with the Missouri State Highway Patrol wrote that Bumby sodomized a child who was a family friend multiple times between 2008 and 2015 at Bumby’s home in Columbia.

The case involving the St. Louis child dates 1988 to 1994, while Bumby was attending school at the University of Missouri, and again stemmed from a relationship he had with the victim’s family.  He would visit the victim’s home on the weekends and began abusing them.