Editor's note: This story contains descriptions of sexual assault that may be disturbing to some readers. Information on what to do if you suspect a child is being harmed is available at the end of this story.

Jacy Marmaduke has been covering the case of Andrew Vanderwal since November 2016, when he first confessed to molesting a young boy. She's stuck with the story for more than 2 years, from Vanderwal's escape to Mexico to his eventual capture and prosecution. This in-depth, dedicated coverage is only possible with support from our readers. Sign up for a digital subscription to the Coloradoan today.

Update:Andrew Vanderwal was sentenced to 24 years to life in prison for one count of child sex assault.

Andrew Vanderwal refused to be a passenger.

His silver Chrysler 200 was like a limb. He insisted on driving wherever he went — to church, restaurants, hockey practice, one-day ski trips.

"Even when we went on a church trip where we took busloads of kids, he took his car," said Amy Henderson, a Loveland mother who once considered Vanderwal as something like a little brother.

"It's almost like he wanted an escape route at any time."

Maybe, Henderson wondered later, Vanderwal's attachment to his car should have been a red flag. But as his arrest for child sex assault and flight to Mexico set off a yearlong manhunt, hindsight twisted a lot of memories into warnings.

The way he hung out with boys instead of men. The way he paraded his stories of the children he'd rescued as an Air Force pediatric medic in Afghanistan. The way he carved a trail from house to house, family to family, each living arrangement seeming to end in a pool of bad blood.

His trail led from Michigan to Aurora to Fort Collins, passing through the intimate lives of at least seven young boys — not to mention all those he mentored in church youth groups, swim clubs and hockey teams.

Until his arrest in 2016, Vanderwal's criminal record included only a few speeding tickets.

He was a religious, mild-mannered veteran who aspired to be a firefighter, youth pastor or EMT. His resume included volunteering with youth at Loveland's Crossroads Church, working at the Youth Clinic's front desk and business office for two months, assisting with coaching boys hockey at the NoCo Ice Center and teaching children to swim in Denver. Leaders of those organizations said he didn't have one-on-one interactions with children at their facilities.

Nobody expected him to confess to Fort Collins police one night that he'd inappropriately touched his roommate's 6-year-old son four, five, maybe six times at a little white ranch house on Mansfield Drive.

Nobody expected him to abandon his beloved Chrysler on a bridge a few miles north of the Mexican border, about three months after his parents bailed him out of Larimer County Jail for $750.

Nobody expected him to be returned to justice. If it hadn't been for Lydia Lerma, the mother of the boy from Mansfield Drive, maybe he wouldn't have been.

But that's another story.

Vanderwal pleaded guilty to child sex assault in December 2018. His sentencing, where he'll be ordered to serve at least eight years in prison, is set for March 1. It comes nearly two and a half years after his initial arrest for assaulting Lerma's son and nearly 16 years after his first alleged sexual assault of a young boy — when Vanderwal himself was only 13 years old.

This is the story of why it took so long to get here.

Vanderwal declined an interview request from the Coloradoan through his attorney. The information in this story was gathered from police, FBI and Air Force documents, court records, and more than a dozen interviews with people who thought they knew Vanderwal.

In the end, none of them did. That, some said, was his ultimate escape route.

►Behind the story:How a determined reporter and a sleuthing mom worked together to tell Vanderwal's story

The confession

Nov. 1, 2016

The man in the interview room was going to be sick.

Crying and queasy, Vanderwal trembled across from Fort Collins police Lt. Jim Byrne. The 26-year-old had shown up at the station about 7 p.m. to "talk to somebody about some bad things he had done," according to the police report describing Vanderwal's first confession to law enforcement.

"What bad things?" Byrne asked him. Vanderwal replied that he'd inappropriately touched a child.

The child, he said, was his roommate's 6-year-old son, a skinny, dark-haired Cub Scout who couldn't pronounce his R's. The Coloradoan isn't naming the boy or his father to protect the identity of a victim named in a sexual assault case.

Vanderwal said it had started in June, when he and the boy were sitting on the couch and Vanderwal exposed himself. Then, he said, exposing himself turned into touching.

It always happened at the home where Vanderwal lived rent-free with a man who considered him like a son. Always on the couch in front of the TV. Always initiated by the boy, claimed Vanderwal, who reportedly described one encounter as "returning the favor."

Not so, the boy's parents said.

The boy's father remembers the night of Oct. 27, the way the hairs raised on the back of his neck when he pulled into the driveway and his 12-year-old daughter told him his son was inside with Vanderwal. As he stepped through the front door, Vanderwal rose from the couch and left the room without a word.

His son was on the couch, a Denver Broncos blanket splayed across his legs. Usually the boy ran to greet his dad whenever he got home. That night, he didn't move.

Instead of chatting over breakfast with his dad the next morning, the boy curled up on the couch alone.

"Is everything OK?" the boy's father asked, according to arrest documents describing the conversation. "Did somebody do something to you?"

"Yes," the boy said.

"Who?"

"Uncle Drew," the boy said, avoiding his father's eyes.

"What did Uncle Drew do to you? Did he touch you?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

The boy pointed to his crotch and started to cry.

"This is my son, and it's my job to protect him," the boy's father said in an interview almost a year after he and Lerma took their son to the emergency room for a sexual assault examination. His voice caught in his throat as tears fell from his eyes. "Somebody that I trusted with my children was doing this to my son. I have a tremendous amount of guilt because of that."

Two hours after the boy told a forensic interviewer where Uncle Drew's hands had moved under the blanket, his father was waiting for Vanderwal to pick up the phone.

Vanderwal's story blurred and shifted between denial and confession throughout the 40-minute phone call recorded by police. Finally, he said he'd touched the boy a few times over the course of about four months.

"Well you know what, your son doesn't lie," Vanderwal said. "I accidentally touched your son, and I'm so sorry, and I just need to blow my head off. I can't believe that I even did that. Thank you for having the sixth sense to f------ call it out. Where do you want me to go? Do I need to go to jail?"

"I don't want to go to jail," he added. "I've never done something like that."

When Vanderwal confessed, a police officer took him from the station to Larimer County Jail. Detective Brinton Deighton turned on his recorder and read a handcuffed Vanderwal his Miranda rights.

"I explained my concern was identifying additional victims," Deighton wrote in the police report. "... Mr. Vanderwal said he had been around a lot of kids and nothing like this had happened before. Mr. Vanderwal said he did not know why he didn't stop it and felt pretty disgusted. Mr. Vanderwal said again there were no other kids.

"I told Mr. Vanderwal I would be disappointed if I learned he was lying to me."

It wouldn't be long before police came to believe he was.

'Uncle Drew was the hero'

2014

Everybody in the Huntington Hills neighborhood knew Vanderwal, the chubby, blue-eyed Air Force veteran with a zeal for mentoring young boys.

He said it was his way of atoning for the kids he couldn't save in Afghanistan. At the neighborhood pool, Vanderwal showed off his tattoo, a skull embellished with the words "Air Force medics" and "We bury our mistakes." He said the scars next to it were from shrapnel wounds.

He was an avid churchgoer armed with mental Rolodex of Bible references. A cross tattoo branded his left arm; a real one hung from his neck. When he wasn't tearing through the streets in his Chrysler 200, he was showing off his motorcycle.

The kids loved him. He took them to the park, played football with them in the streets, bought them presents and found odd jobs for the older boys who wanted some cash. If a parent needed their kid picked up from school or looked after, Vanderwal was the guy to ask.

But in 2014, Vanderwal rammed his fist into the side of a car in a fit of road rage.

The car belonged to a neighbor with a heroin addiction and partial custody of his 4-year-old son. The Coloradoan isn't identifying the man or his son to protect the identity of a victim named in a sexual assault case.

The car's driver and Vanderwal struck a deal to cover the damage, eventually spurring a sort of friendship. The man remained ambivalent about his new acquaintance, though — he thought Vanderwal bragged too much, he told the Coloradoan in a 2018 interview, and his stories about the women he'd dated, the places he'd traveled and the jobs he'd worked often seemed "too good to be true."

But the neighbor needed someone to help watch his son and pay the bills, especially after his ex-fiancee learned of his drug addiction and left him. And Vanderwal needed a place to live.

Vanderwal moved into his basement that spring.

"He'd always be overly helpful," recalled the 30-year-old car salesman with heavy-lidded eyes that give his long, thin face an impression of weariness. "He'd say, ‘You go rest, I'll give your son a bath, I'll watch him, I'll take him to the park. You just relax'. ... I thought he was just trying to be a good friend. But he definitely weaseled his way in. He targeted me because I needed help."

Now more than two years sober, the neighbor admits those months were a blur because of his drug use. But some of Vanderwal's mantras rise like flames from the haze: "You're like a brother to me." "I'll always care for you and your son no matter what happens." "God put me in your life."

The boy's mother was suspicious of Vanderwal. After her ex-husband's former fiancee had left, she'd reached out to the mother and warned her not to trust Vanderwal — his gifts were too extravagant, she said. He lied. He cared too much.

But her blond-haired, rosy-cheeked son adored Uncle Drew, purveyor of Hot Wheels, brand-name sneakers and military memorabilia. Uncle Drew set up a playroom for the boy in the basement and filled it with toys. Amid a messy wrestle for custody, that playroom was like the eye of the storm.

It wasn't long before the boy's mother started hearing from Vanderwal.

Vanderwal quickly took on the role of the protector, she said. He'd send her texts and Facebook messages telling her how much he cared for her son and offering to watch him while she was at work, or telling her that the boy's father was high again but her son was safe with him.

"He's a big part of my life now," Vanderwal wrote in one message, she recalled.

"Uncle Drew was (my son's) whole world at that point, because he couldn't count on his dad and his stepmom had just left," she said. "Uncle Drew was the hero. I thought, ‘At least he has somebody taking care of him.' Until he got too involved."

The boy's mom eventually won emergency custody of the child. Vanderwal repeatedly reached out to her, imploring her to let him see her son. After she discovered Vanderwal had fabricated stories about dating the boy's caseworker, she told him she'd call the police if he contacted her again.

She didn't hear from him after that. But she can't shake the memory of the day she went to pick up the boy's things. The basement playroom was the only part of the house that wasn't trashed.

Vanderwal's bed was down there, too.

'He definitely lied to my face'

2015

Everything was starting to unravel.

The blond boy's father was evicted after multiple drug arrests, so Vanderwal had nowhere to live. With four evictions on his own record, he didn't stand a chance of getting his own place.

Vanderwal was more than $7,000 in debt. He didn't know it, but he was approaching the end of the line at Loveland's Crossroads Church, where he volunteered as a youth group leader.

And he would soon find a formidable opponent in Lerma.

She was a 5-foot-3 spitfire with Lipan Apache tribal heritage and an expansive firearms collection. Vanderwal moved in with her ex-husband in spring 2015 to help him take care of his son and daughter. In exchange, Lerma's ex-husband got Vanderwal a job and didn't make a fuss about rent money.

He thought it was strange that Vanderwal spent so much time around young boys, especially those from broken homes. But he gave Vanderwal the benefit of the doubt.

"He would tell me, ‘I'm trying to give back to children for the ones I couldn't save when I was in Afghanistan,'" he said. "And I thought, ‘That makes sense, right?"

Lerma couldn't stand Vanderwal.

"I'm a survivor (of sexual assault), so I have the creep radar," she said. "Just a handshake, a look, and I'm on high alert. He gave me that feeling."

She and her ex-husband fought about Vanderwal constantly. Why was he buying Nike sneakers and a $250 bicycle for their 6-year-old son? Why did he hide in his room every time Lerma stopped by? Why did he constantly insert himself in their arguments?

"Every day I strive to protect your children and listen to what is bothering them and help them talk through it," Vanderwal wrote in one email to Lerma.

"I'm getting really tired of you stretching (the boy's father) so thin, knowing that he would do anything for his children and pushing him into another financial burden," he wrote in another.

Then she caught her son tickling her daughter's inner thighs.

"I flipped out," she recalled. "I said, why are you doing that to your sister?' And she looked at me and said, ‘Well, Drew does that to (my brother) all the time."

Sometimes she thought about refusing to send the kids back to their dad's house until Vanderwal left, but she could never bring herself to do it. She knew what it was like growing up without a father, and she said she couldn't do that to her kids. So she kept dropping them off at Dad's house. But she didn't stop watching Vanderwal.

'Pedophile hunter:'Lydia Lerma traveled to Mexico to find Andrew Vanderwal

Vanderwal might have found some solace from Lerma's scrutiny at Crossroads, the Christian megachurch where he volunteered with the Next Generation team, a co-ed student ministry program for 6th- to 12th-graders.

Crossroads leadership conducted a criminal background check, called his references, interviewed him and trained him before giving him the green light to help with large group activities and worship services for teens. Vanderwal didn't have one-on-one or small group contact with children as a volunteer, executive pastor Katie Martinez said.

Vanderwal was well-liked at Crossroads, said Henderson, the Loveland mother who met him when they volunteered with Next Generation. He took a special liking to a small group of boys that included her son, who was in middle school at the time.

"In the beginning, he was just a sweet, nice, caring guy that seemed to really care for our kids," Henderson said. "He seemed to really want to do good and was active in church and learning."

"He was alone here," she added. "He didn't have family here. And he had a vested interest in boys who didn't necessarily have father figures around."

She invited Vanderwal to spend Thanksgiving at her home. Soon, he started coming by the house a couple times a week. He found odd jobs for her son, bought him stuff he didn't need and promised to give him his Chrysler once he got his next car.

Her son needed someone like that in his life, Henderson said. So she overlooked some of Vanderwal's idiosyncrasies, like his compulsion for self-transport and his righteous indignation when her son didn't return a phone call or text.

"Well, I buy him all these things, the least he could do is pick up the phone," Henderson recalled Vanderwal saying.

But in September 2015, Vanderwal did something Crossroads leaders said they couldn't overlook.

Thompson School District has no official record of the incident at Loveland's Lucile Erwin Middle School. According to several secondhand accounts, though, Vanderwal showed up at the school unannounced one afternoon and claimed to be there as a representative of the church.

When that got back to Crossroads leadership, they called him in for a talk.

"We don't like having our staff and volunteers disrupt school," Martinez said, so church leaders spoke to Vanderwal about the importance of respecting boundaries and suggested he seek additional training if he wanted to be more involved with youth.

Vanderwal responded by claiming that mentoring children was "his calling," Martinez said.

"We got the sense he didn't agree with our guidelines," she said. That, along with his grandiose language and over-participation, was cause for a mandatory break.

"This is not an emotionally healthy person," she added. "We knew we didn't want him around our students and children."

Henderson and her son were taken aback by Vanderwal's sudden dismissal.

"He came to me and said, ‘Did you hear from the church at all?'" Henderson recalled. "Looking back, he was probing. He said, ‘They said I can't volunteer anymore, and they won't tell me why.' He definitely lied to my face."

Soon after the church barred him from volunteering, Vanderwal stopped showing up altogether. His visits to the Henderson house slowed. He bailed on plans and ignored texts from Henderson's son.

In early 2016, Vanderwal left Colorado for a sojourn in Michigan and Oklahoma. That was the beginning of the end.

'He knows how to do this'

October 2016

Babs Rambold didn't think Vanderwal was a pedophile. She just thought he was "really freaking weird."

She and her then-boyfriend had found Vanderwal's hardscaping business through Home Advisor and hired him to work in their Loveland yard. Vanderwal had returned to Colorado in June from his out-of-state travels and started a business working with concrete, brick and stone yard features.

But he didn't seem to know what he was doing, Rambold said, and she eventually had all his work re-done. He said strange things out of nowhere, she recalled, announcing once that he'd leave the U.S. to live in Mexico or kill himself if he had to.

Vanderwal brought a pack of teenage boys with him whenever he worked in the yard, and soon he started dropping by just to hang out.

"He was very clingy," she said. "He invited himself over all the time, and we had no more privacy. He'd call and say, ‘Hey, I'm on my way over,' and then just show up."

After Vanderwal's father posted 10 percent of his $7,500 bail for the sexual assault charge Lerma's son, he turned up on Rambold's doorstep again.

He said he was innocent and that he planned to sleep in his car. Rambold let him stay with them for a few nights — because "you don't know anyone in life who actually abuses kids" — until she learned Vanderwal had confessed to police. That's when she kicked him out.

From there, Vanderwal's path started to disappear like footprints in melting snow.

He showed up to his first two court appearances. After that, FBI documents show that he traveled to a homeless shelter in Pueblo, about 180 miles south of Fort Collins.

Though Vanderwal's religious ties in Fort Collins were with nondenominational Christian churches, he called his grandmother on Christmas and told her "the Mennonite church does not answer to the laws of man." He told her the church would take him to Belize, according to FBI arrest documents.

Pastor Steve Ramer of the Fort Collins Mennonite Fellowship told the Coloradoan last year that Vanderwal wasn't affiliated with the Mennonite community here. But he spoke of "colony Mennonites" in Belize and other places who might have considered offering refuge to Vanderwal.

Some "colony Mennonites" speak an older form of German and eschew vehicles for horses and buggies, Ramer said. Groups not "savvy" with issues like sexual abuse might be more easily convinced that a person was being wrongfully persecuted, he added.

"They have a little bit of a persecution complex," Ramer said. "It wouldn't be unusual for them to include somebody in their group who was being persecuted."

Or, in this case, prosecuted.

A few days before he missed a scheduled court appearance, Vanderwal called his parents from Pueblo to promise them he would do "the right thing."

Instead, he cleared out his bank account, ditched his car in El Paso, Texas, and crossed the southern border, FBI documents show.

Law enforcement officers said Vanderwal slipped through their fingers: He fled the country despite a wiretap on his phone, a flag on his bank account and suspension of his passport.

In eight years of tracking fugitives, Fort Collins Police Detective Marty Shaw said he'd never seen someone so swiftly drop all their financial ties and cut off communication with their friends and family.

"He knows how to do this," Shaw said more than a year later in a crowded courtroom. Vanderwal sat a few feet away from him, handcuffed.

'It breaks my heart'

As Vanderwal made a new life for himself in Mexico, Lerma was putting together the pieces of his old one.

He'd left pretty much everything he owned at her ex-husband's house. She found Vanderwal's diaries, military personnel records, old resumes, a high school diploma signed by his parents.

On the top shelf of his closet, she found the rest: A box labeled with his name, containing a boy's baseball glove, a Nerf gun and a sneaker. Storage tubs filled with children's drawings, letters and photos.

Tears welled in Lerma's eyes as she flipped through the stacks of photos. Little boys' faces looked back at her from professional portraits and yearbook photos, football team pictures and family snapshots.

In one picture, Vanderwal crouched behind a scrawny boy holding a rifle, a dead boar sprawled in front of them. In another, he loomed in front of the camera sporting a pulled-up hood and a grim expression, a boy on each arm.

Lerma counted four, five, six boys at least, boys she'd never seen before. The realization slapped her across the face, she recalled: Her son may not have been the first victim before Vanderwal's arrest. He was the last.

The truth about Vanderwal's past emerged from the piles of abandoned mementos.

He never served in Afghanistan, or anywhere he could have endured injuries from shrapnel, according to his military personnel records.

He enlisted in the Air Force at 18 after finishing home school in a conservative suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. He grew up swimming and attending Christian Reform Church services twice a week.

Enlisting was a natural next step for a young man who dreamed of being a hero and lined his Fort Collins bookshelf with stories about firefighters, first responders and Navy Seals.

But his history in the Air Force was no hero's tale. He served as an aerospace medical service apprentice in Aurora for just eight months before his supervisor suspended him.

His supervisor at the Buckley Air Force Base Medical Clinic rated Vanderwal's performance "poor" and wrote in reports that he often showed up late to work and browsed Facebook and YouTube during his shifts.

"You consistently make excuses for your actions, and I want you to know that your excuses will no longer be tolerated," she wrote in a letter of counseling, the predecessor to a more severe letter of reprimand.

Vanderwal received two letters of counseling and three letters of reprimand between June and November 2010, and his supervisor suspended him in December 2010. He was declared ineligible for reenlistment in February 2011 because of his performance.

He tried to reenlist anyway a few months later, claiming in a letter that his ineligibility was due to a "fear of water" that got the best of him during training.

His stint in the military might've been a blip on the map of his life, if not for two things.

One, he used his status as a veteran — who'd supposedly been stationed in Afghanistan — to secure a foothold with a series of families, according to FBI documents and Coloradoan interviews with the families.

And two: It was where he met the first Colorado boy who would later accuse him of sexual assault.

The boy was an 11-year-old middle school athlete in foster care with his younger brother. Their mother had been dead for six years, and their dad was in and out of prison for drug and theft charges.

He said he met Vanderwal at the Air Force clinic in Aurora, where he went for physicals every few months so he could continue to play sports.

"… the 'physical' was just a way for Andrew to sexually assault me," he wrote, years later, in a civil lawsuit he filed against Vanderwal and the Air Force from prison. He later relayed the same information to Aurora police, investigation records show. He declined to press charges, citing his lawsuit.

"I face lifelong humiliation, embarrassment, mental damages and social issues that have come directly and indirectly from these traumatic incidents," he wrote. "I have been damaged in many ways that cannot be fixed."

The boy, now a 21-year-old man serving a lengthy prison sentence, told Aurora police last year that Vanderwal said he was in the Big Brothers Big Sisters of America program.

Air Force representatives declined to discuss the case.

"While we cannot discuss specific investigations without an appropriate release, the Air Force treats all allegations of misconduct of military members seriously," a representative wrote in an email to the Coloradoan.

Among Vanderwal's possessions, Lerma found a photo of Vanderwal with the boy and his brother, smiling in a parking lot. One of the boys sits astride a yellow motorcycle. Vanderwal also kept a post-it note scribbled with the boys' Social Security numbers and a phone number for their caseworker. He saved handwritten notes from each of the boys.

Lerma wrote a letter to the man who brought the lawsuit against Vanderwal, and the two became unlikely pen pals. Sometimes she sends him money to buy deodorant or toothpaste.

"It breaks my heart to know what became of his life because of (Vanderwal)," she said. "Vanderwal had an opportunity when he met these boys. He could have made a really amazing, positive impact on them and helped steer them in the right direction, and he didn't. He further victimized these boys."

Lerma sees a pattern among the boys memorialized in Vanderwal's closet: Their families were in distress when Vanderwal embedded himself in their lives. Vanderwal was adept at spotting and exploiting the threadbare patches in a family's fabric, she said.

Vanderwal learned at a young age to use fear and shame to silence his victims, said a 28-year-old Michigan man who filed a police report against his childhood friend in August 2018. The man told the Ottawa County Sheriff's Office that Vanderwal raped him four times between 2003 and 2004. He said the first incident occurred when he was 12 and Vanderwal was 13.

The case remains open, according to the sheriff's office. As of Feb. 20, Vanderwal hadn't been formally charged in the case.

The two were neighbors growing up, the Coloradoan confirmed independently. The man said Vanderwal threatened to kill his dogs if he told anyone about the abuse and said nobody would believe him. The conservative, religious area where they were raised taught people to "hide their dirty laundry," he said.

"You could be having the worst day of your life, and you just continue on," he told the Coloradoan. "You cannot let anyone else know that something bad is happening. And I think he really took that to heart. ... He just learned how to be manipulative and work his way in. He learned how to prey on people's weaknesses."

Public records, interviews and a review of Vanderwal's possessions indicate connections to at least seven boys:

Vanderwal's childhood neighbor, who said he will attend Vanderwal's sentencing March 1 and give a victim impact statement.

The child from the Buckley clinic, who declined to press charges because of his civil lawsuit. The U.S. District Court of Colorado dismissed two iterations of his lawsuit in 2017 and 2018 due to lack of jurisdiction.

The younger brother of the child from the Buckley clinic. He told Aurora police Vanderwal didn't touch him inappropriately, but his older brother told police that his brother had told him otherwise.

The young son of a woman Vanderwal met at his Fort Collins apartment complex in 2013. He was the original owner of the baseball glove and other mementos Lerma found in Vanderwal's closet. The family hasn't pressed charges.

A boy Vanderwal lived with in Michigan for a brief period in 2016. The family hasn't pressed charges.

Lerma's son.

The son of the Fort Collins man who was struggling with addiction. He's the other boy named in Vanderwal's ongoing case.

'Just part of his game'

Charlie Harper Penner's life ended on Feb. 19, 2018.

That's when the FBI arrested Vanderwal, who was posing as a German Mennonite under that alias in Ciudad Cuauhtemoc, Mexico. Much like he had in America, Vanderwal was scraping by and owed months of unpaid rent. He coached a boys' baseball team in his ample free time.

Lerma had spent months tracking Vanderwal in hopes of putting him back in a jail cell. She waged an intense social media campaign to keep him in the spotlight even after his case faded from the headlines, and she eventually traveled to Mexico to find him. The Coloradoan previously reported the story of Lerma's hunt for Vanderwal.

Law enforcement officials returned Vanderwal to Fort Collins on March 23, 2018, nearly 500 days after he skipped his court date and fled south. Eighth Judicial District Judge Susan Blanco initially set his bond at $100,000, inspiring outcry, but she raised it to $750,000 a few days later after Lerma, Henderson and others lined up in the courtroom to protest.

His bond is among the highest for a non-violent offender in Larimer County history.

Vanderwal says little and looks at no one during his court appearances at the Larimer County Justice Center. He's gained weight and, as of his last appearance, had stopped shaving his beard.

The cast of his old life often watches from the pews.

Henderson peers at the man in the orange scrubs and shower shoes, trying and failing to see the man who came to her house for dinner and played baseball with her son. She doesn't think he's all bad — a couple months after Vanderwal vanished from her life, a cashier's check appeared in the mailbox. No return address. It was the money Vanderwal owed her son for helping out with yard work all those months.

The father of the other boy named in the investigation is engaged to be married and has regained partial custody of his son. He still doesn't know exactly what Vanderwal did with the boy in the basement playroom. He doesn't think he wants to.

The boy's mother got the whole story for the first time last year. Her son came home from school one day and told her what Vanderwal did to him when they were alone together, she said. He told his mother that he begged Vanderwal to stop. Since then, he's had behavioral problems in school, distracting other students in class, talking back and slamming doors.

Lerma has dedicated herself to tracking down other fugitives wanted for sexual assault, using her social media know-how to aid in a hobby she calls "pedophile hunting." She's teaching her son how to hunt, too — for elk and pheasants in rural Colorado.

Teaching her son to protect himself brings Lerma some comfort. She and the boy's father will have more once Vanderwal is in prison.

Vanderwal faces 8 to 24 years in prison and up to $750,000 in fines. As part of his plea deal, he'll be on parole for 20 years to life after he's released, and he'll have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

His former friends will spend the rest of their lives trying to understand how they missed the signs.

"He really didn't care about anybody else," one of the boys' fathers said. "All he cared about was the assault. Everybody else was just part of his game. So once s--- hit the fan, he really didn't have any true emotional ties to anybody. So he was able to just…"

Run.

The case at a glance

The Coloradoan's coverage of the Andrew Vanderwal case started in 2016, when Fort Collins Police Services arrested him after he reportedly confessed to molesting Lydia Lerma's then-6-year-old son. We tracked the case every step of the way, from Vanderwal's flight to Mexico to Lerma's search for him and his eventual prosecution. Here are the key events in the case, with links to related coverage.

— Compiled from police reports, court documents and previous Coloradoan reporting.

MORE:Here are the signs a child is being harmed, and what to do

If you think a child is being harmed

The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, an anti-sexual violence organization, lists tips for what to do if you suspect a child is being harmed.

1. Recognize the signs

The signs of abuse aren't necessarily obvious, but they include:

Behavioral signs: Shrinking away from physical contact, thumb sucking or other regressive behaviors, changing hygiene routines, engaging in age-inappropriate sexual behaviors, or having sleep disturbances or nightmares

Verbal cues: Using words or phrases that are "too adult" for their age, unexplained silence or suddenly being less talkative

Physical signs: Bruising or swelling near the genital area, blood on sheets or undergarments or broken bones

2. Talk to the child

Pick your time and place carefully and find a place the child feels comfortable. Be aware of your tone. Try to make the conversation more casual and be non-threatening.

Talk to the child directly. Ask questions that use the child's own vocabulary but are a little vague. For example, "Has someone been touching you?" In this context "touching" can mean different things, but it is likely a word the child is familiar with. The child can respond with questions or comments to help you better gauge the situation like, "No one touches me except my mom at bath time," or "You mean like the way my cousin touches me sometimes?" Understand that sexual abuse can feel good to the child, so asking if someone is "hurting" them may not bring out the information that you are looking for.

Listen and follow up, but avoid judgment and blame.

Reassure the child, and make sure they know they're not in trouble.

Be patient. Remember this conversation may be very frightening for the child. Many perpetrators make threats about what will happen if someone finds out about the abuse.

3. Report it

Reporting a crime like sexual abuse might not be easy, and it can be emotionally draining.

Keep in mind that reporting abuse gives you the chance to protect someone who can't protect themselves.

Before you report, tell the child that you're going to talk to someone who can help. Be clear that you are not asking their permission.

Learn more at www.rainn.org.