Breach of Trust: Unwrapping the Saga of 'Coach Ron'
By Michael Giusti, Staff Writer
Originally published in The Daytona Beach News-Journal, June 3, 2001
DAYTONA BEACH — William Ronald Johnson was everyone's friend. He wrapped sprained ankles, coached girls' softball, helped bring in more than $100,000 in donations. No one at Father Lopez High School suspected anything was wrong, until two boys came forward.
"Coach Ron"
St. Clair County Sheriff Department William Ronald Johnson was arrested April 24 by police in Frankenmuth, Mich., and turned over to St. Clair County officials on warrants from both Florida and Michigan.
For now, the school is silent.
Summer school doesn't start for a few weeks and 69 seniors walked the stage at the Father Lopez High School graduation two weeks ago. But the seniors are not the only ones who will not return in the fall.
The principal of 10 years unexpectedly stepped down. A handful of students jumped ship for other schools some even left town. Rumors are flying that the school will not renew a few coaches' contracts. And although nobody has come forward to officially admit it, many people believe it all has something to do with one ex-volunteer trainer awaiting trial 1,200 miles away for several disturbing charges.
William Ronald Johnson has rattled the small Catholic school's community and forced some to rethink the school's screening process.
How could a convicted felon, much less a man charged in an open warrant with molesting a child five states away, get a job as a sports trainer at a high school?
Johnson arrived at Father Lopez three years ago as a volunteer trainer. He called school administrators, told them he had a background in medicine and that he wanted to donate his time wrapping ankles and rehabilitating sprains.
To this Catholic school with 400 students, Johnson sounded like a savior. A full-time trainer's salary would never fit within its budget.
So, school officials invited "Coach Ron" for an interview.
Johnson claimed to be independently wealthy—taking a modest inheritance and sinking it into Microsoft and Ford at just the right times. He took taxis to and from school, claiming glaucoma prevented him from driving.
After Johnson worked at the school for less than a year, donations began rolling in.
Improvements to the football field, new equipment for the weight room, a refurbished training room with a whirlpool and other donations kept coming.
Then in February of this year, a pair of students came forward with a darker side. They told of blood being drawn, nude examinations and molestation.
Their parents demanded action.
But when police finally got involved, Coach Ron was nowhere to be found. He skipped town in a stolen recreational vehicle, police said.
The school and the Catholic Diocese of Orlando have since been sued by the parents of eight students, seeking more than $100,000.
Parents, unsure of where the needles he drew blood with came from, are now having their children checked for HIV, hepatitis and other diseases. "Not knowing anything, I dropped my son off to that school every day to be molested," one mother said, trembling.
Running from his past
Coach Ron loved talking about past professions, but never about his personal life.
Johnson told people he once worked on the training staff for the National Football League's Detroit Lions, and he could drop the names to prove it—not big-name running backs like Barry Sanders, but trainers and obscure position coaches, insider stuff.
He told everyone he had a sister who lived in Deltona and an uncle in Ormond Beach. Johnson could rattle off the good places to eat in Tampa near a school where he claimed he once worked. And he was always ready to share stories about exotic places he had been.
But his stories only checked out on the surface.
Johnson did live in Detroit.
He worked as a licensed paramedic in the '80s where he was paid to do much of what awed so many people at Father Lopez.
While working for a now-defunct ambulance company, he was arrested after $25,000 was discovered missing.
Johnson was charged with embezzlement, but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. He was released on the condition that he pay the money back at the rate of $400 per month and check in with a parole officer regularly for five years. Johnson made the first payment and then left town.
A hospital in Southfield, Mich., 25 miles to the northwest, hired Johnson, but fired him a few months later, claiming he stole prescription pads and forged bogus prescriptions for steroids and depression medication.
Johnson skipped town again, this time avoiding arrest.
In Port Huron, a Michigan town near the Canadian border, Johnson signed on at a high school as a volunteer trainer.
The school's policy then was not to do background checks on volunteers, so nobody suspected him as a convicted felon wanted a few counties away on drug charges.
The honeymoon didn't last.
Johnson was fired from Port Huron High School for stitching up an athlete's knee after a game.
When police began looking into the volunteer, they found a trail of bounced checks. Then a neighborhood boy came forward and said Johnson molested him.
Before police could serve the warrants, someone leaked the story to a local newspaper.
Johnson fled town.
Stranger among friends
What happened from Michigan to Florida is difficult to reconstruct.
During his time in Daytona Beach, Johnson, believed to be 41, used at least five Social Security numbers and even more dates of birth. He went by different names, but usually used some combination of William, Ronald or Johnson.
He likely spent some time in Hawaii and then in the Tampa Bay area, and is suspected of being run off by a private school, though records to prove it are elusive.
When Johnson showed up in Daytona Beach sometime between 1997 and 1998, he answered a classified advertisement for a caregiver.
He helped take care of an elderly man in Ormond Beach before wearing out his welcome. Coincidentally, the man lived next door to a woman named Betty McFall, the widow of Russell McFall, an executive with Western Union.
Johnson befriended McFall. When he lost the caregiver job, the widow invited him to stay in a spare room at her home rent free.
Johnson isolated the widow from her family, family members have said.
She hired him as a live-in caregiver for $250 per week, according to her family. The locks on McFall's home were changed and family members were never given keys.
Johnson put a lock on his bedroom door and told McFall it was there to keep her relatives from going through his things.
After a few months, Johnson began bringing the widow to sporting events at Father Lopez, where he had landed a job as a volunteer trainer.
After he skipped town, family members found several letters in Johnson's room addressed to high schools around the country.
He was trying to find a school that needed a volunteer trainer.
Blind trust
At Father Lopez, Coach Ron could do no wrong. He converted a small storage room in the school into a training room where he practiced his trade.
When an athlete would twist a knee or pull a muscle, Coach Ron's diagnosis was almost never wrong. It was good enough for the parents—some of them doctors and nurses themselves. He wrapped ankles and knees before games and nobody gave him a second thought.
The diocese, which runs Father Lopez, has a policy of fingerprinting and running background checks on all teachers and volunteers at its schools.
Because of the pending lawsuit, neither the school nor the diocese would say if Johnson had been cleared through a background check before he was hired. Diocese officials would only confirm that it is standard procedure to run a check with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Chobee Ebbets, the parents' attorney, claims that not only was Johnson never checked until after he disappeared, but also that the school had a flawed policy of trusting a volunteer to get fingerprinted and return the card.
Regardless of whether Johnson was cleared through a background check, people in the school community assumed he had. Administrators and parents figured that with a background policy in place, their children were safe.
Behind the locked door
Only the children and Coach Ron really know what happened behind the locked door of the training room. The identities of the boys who are making the claims are shrouded in secrecy named only as John Roe and John Doe in the lawsuit.
The boys' accounts speak of manipulation, isolation and abuse.
Coach Ron ran a weight-training program that included a vitamin and supplement program. In order to properly monitor the boy's progress, Johnson insisted on drawing blood samples.
What happened to the blood after it was drawn is a mystery.
After the stories began trickling out, two parents questioned Johnson about the blood. They asked for documentation about its purpose and he gave them a scrawled paper he claimed was a lab report.
The report, Johnson claimed, came from a friend who worked at a local hospital and who was running the reports as a favor to him.
While the blood-drawing was bizarre, the stories of molestation nearly destroyed the boys' parents.
Any time a boy was hurt, the boys say, Coach Ron asked him to disrobe, don a towel and come into his office for a "towel exam."
During those exams, Coach Ron is said to have checked for sexually transmitted diseases with cotton swabs and make sure "they could still have babies."
The shame of the ordeal has forced at least two of the 14-year-old boys to switch schools.
The boys' mothers say Father Lopez administration never took their claims seriously. They say despite repeated complaints, former principal David Gonsalves never called police.
Police records show the first call about Johnson came in at noon on March 20, after three parents camped out at Gonsalves' office demanding he make the call.
The parents say they showed up in the office at 7 a.m. in a final effort to get the school to take their concerns seriously. They had contacted Gonsalves several times before the meeting, Ebbets said, and had been rebuffed each time. Johnson's generosity to the school blinded the administration to any wrongdoing, he claims.
A week after Johnson took off from Daytona Beach, Gonsalves told The News-Journal that he called police as soon as he verified the trainer was performing unauthorized procedures on the children.
Diocese policy states that police should be called when even a suspicion of sexual misconduct exists.
Despite repeated requests, Gonsalves and Diocese officials refused to comment on the case.
Half a million missing
Most, if not all, of the donations to Father Lopez credited to Johnson really came from McFall. Her name is on the new press box at the school football field. She was honored at several sports banquets paid for through her donations. And it was her signature on the checks to the school.
She claims to have made some, if not all, of the donations on her own. "I'd rather give it to them than to Uncle Sam," she said in an interview on March 24.
But her family claims McFall was not aware of the amounts of cash she was handing over to the school and that Johnson was taking advantage of her generosity.
The total amounts given to the school are unknown. Catholic schools do not have to report all donations to the IRS.
By family accounts, the donations exceeded $100,000, and the total amount missing from McFall's accounts nears $500,000.
Johnson took more than school donations from McFall, family members said.
Johnson and McFall went on several cruises to the Bahamas. They invited coaches and friends from the school to come along at their expense. They even invited several student athletes to come along for one before the school shot down the idea.
After eye surgery that McFall paid for, Johnson's "glaucoma" was cured and he took to driving her Lincoln Town Car.
They bought a condominium in Daytona Beach Shores where McFall and Johnson were going to move, and they put her home and properties in Ormond Beach up for sale.
Johnson took regular trips on casino boats, and thousands of dollars in assets were liquidated, McFall's family said.
Along with another coach at the school, Johnson opened a corporation called RJJT Enterprises.
Through that corporation, Johnson invested in a now bankrupt Beach Street sports bar. The corporation bought two coin-operated laundries in the area.
Johnson also bought a recreational vehicle through the corporation, which was listed as the owner. Corporation assets have since been turned over to Betty McFall.
After police began snooping around the school, Coach Ron disappeared in that motor home.
He is now being held at the St. Clair County Jail in Michigan on $1.2 million bail. He was arrested April 24 and will be brought back to Florida after he stands trial in Michigan on charges of criminal sexual conduct and unlicensed medical practice, among others.
Here, he faces charges of grand theft and exploitation of the elderly. Additional charges are pending on the molestation accusations.
That file in the State Attorney's Office has grown to include 17 students.
About this story: In his investigation of William Ronald Johnson, a former volunteer at Father Lopez High School now facing molestation charges, reporter Michael Giusti analyzed court case files, police reports, criminal background checks and business records, among other documents.
He also conducted extensive interviews with those who knew Johnson, including the family of an elderly woman who entrusted him with her money, teachers, coaches, parents, administrators and students at Father Lopez.
School employees said they were threatened with losing their jobs if they spoke with the media. Teachers, staff members and students would only discuss the case under a strict promise of confidentiality. The News-Journal agreed to this condition in order to provide a more accurate portrait of a man who gained—and lost—the trust of so many.
