Theodore Sypnier, at 100 New York’s oldest registered sex offender, is scheduled to move by week’s end out of a Buffalo halfway house and into a place of his own, after completing his latest term in state prison for molesting little girls. The judge who sentenced him said at the time that she expected him to die behind bars, reports the Associated Press. But 10 years after his last arrest, some warn that the spry Sypnier has not changed from the manipulator who used his grandfatherly charm to rape victims as young as 4.
Six months after marking his 100th birthday in prison, the retired telephone company worker now says he wants to get to know the youngest members of a family that has disowned him. “I’ll tell them I never harmed any children,” the great-grandfather told the Buffalo News. Being grandfatherly was how the 5-foot-5, 150-pound Sypnier found his victims, authorities say. After his most recent arrest at age 90 on charges of raping and sodomizing a 4-year-old girl and her 7-year-old sister, his neighbors in the Buffalo suburb of Tonawanda recalled what appeared to be a kindly Sypnier offering rides to adults, handing out money to children so they could buy candy, and baby-sitting.