Convicted rapist up for parole on Tuesday
A man serving a 50-year sentence for sexually abusing a child in Evergreen in 1997 is up for parole on Tuesday.
Ernest Wilcock, 60, was convicted in Flathead District Court in May 1998 of having sex with an 11-year-old girl more than 30 times. The girl said the abuse escalated in the last six months before it was reported to police.
Wilcock has continuously tried to appeal his sentence to the Montana Supreme Court to no avail. As part of his sentence, he was not able to be paroled until the victim reached age 25 in 2010.
Wilcock also tried in 2011 to access his deceased daughter’s life insurance payout, which the Montana Supreme Court said he unquestionably was not entitled to.
His daughter, Darlene Wilcock, was strangled to death in a Kalispell motel room in 2003. Her death remains the city’s only unsolved murder.
Prior to his release, Wilcock served five years in Utah’s prison system for a 1987 incident where he fired 13 shots at a woman who fled in his squad car after she refused his sexual advances. Wilcock was a highway patrolman at the time of the incident.
He offered the intoxicated woman a ride home, but instead pulled into a construction site and demanded sex in exchange for not charging the woman with a crime. The woman was able to lock him out of the patrol car and drive away.
After the incident the victim and six other women who alleged sexual misconduct by Wilcock came forward.
They included one woman who said Wilcock enticed her into getting into his patrol car, bound her hands and legs with handcuffs and raped her. Afterward Wilcock harassed the woman via telephone, he showed up at the woman’s home and threatened to take her children away if she did not comply with his advances.
The other women said that Wilcock fondled them during traffic stops or preyed on them by asking for sex while they were intoxicated and threatening to charge them if they did not do what he wanted.
Four of the women sued the state in that case. The cases were settled out of court.
Wilcock will appear before the board with other prisoners housed in Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge.
The hearings will be held begin at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday and will last through Wednesday.
Reporter Megan Strickland can be reached at 758-4459 or mstrickland@dailyinterlake.com.