Just two weeks after Bill Wear enrolled in private school in Alabama, he said, a music teacher began touching him inappropriately.

The year was 1974, Wear said, and the abuse started with unwanted neck massages and full-frontal hugs. Wear said the teacher, at the time about 34 years old, pressed his erect penis against 15-year-old Wear.

“When it tried to escalate and I sort of pulled away, vague threats and comments were made about my scholarship,” Wear, now 60, told AL.com recently.

The teacher, Wear told police, was Delbert Bailey, a music instructor at Randolph School, a secular private school educating some of the more affluent children in Huntsville.

Delbert Bailey, the longtime former music teacher at Randolph School, is shown in a yearbook photo from 1976.

Bailey, who is now 80 years old and has been living in Margate, Fla., denied all allegations of sexual abuse.

“Good grief,” he said. “I never touched a student while they were students at Randolph.”

Wear is one of three men in three different states interviewed by AL.com in recent months who say Bailey sexually abused them decades ago when they were students at Randolph and he was a teacher in his 30s-40s. Former students Stuart Vance and James Lloyd also told AL.com about abuse they say they suffered.

None of the three men reported the abuse at the time they say it happened, though they have since filed separate police reports.

Huntsville police and the Madison County District Attorney’s office both confirmed they are investigating Bailey. Police say they have received at least six reports against Bailey, who worked at Randolph for about 20 years from the 1970s-90s.

Bailey said he hasn’t been contacted by any investigators.

“It’s under investigation,” said Madison County Chief Trial Attorney Tim Gann. “The Huntsville police department is working the case. We will be standing by at the end of their investigation to see where we go from there.”

In a statement, Randolph School officials said they are investigating a teacher who last worked there in the 1990s. School officials didn’t name the teacher.

The school hired Fisher Phillips, an outside law firm, to conduct their investigation.

“Our goals in conducting the investigation are to dignify allegations of past sexual abuse, uncover what happened at Randolph in the past, learn from our history, and do all we can to provide the safest environment possible for current and future students,” Randolph School officials said in an emailed statement to AL.com.

“As always, we are guided by Randolph’s mission to seek truth and to care for every member of our school community."

#MeToo

Wear said he doesn’t remember exactly what Bailey said when he made threats about his scholarship.

“I just remember feeling very strongly that if I didn’t comply, I would lose my scholarship,” Wear told AL.com.

Wear now lives in Crane Creek, Mississippi, and works as a senior staff engineer for a medical technology company in Mobile.

Bill Wear, now 60, says he was a 15-year-old 10th grader when a teacher at the Randolph School started touching him inappropriately. Over the next two years, Wear said, the abuse escalated.

When Wear became Bailey’s student, the teen was at a vulnerable point in his life. His young sister had died, his father developed a drinking problem and moved away, and his mother was on the verge of a mental breakdown, he said. Wear was doing well in public school at Stone Junior High in west Huntsville, but he’d become a target for bullies. A guidance counselor helped him get a scholarship to start school at Randolph in 10th grade.

Wear loved Randolph — calling it a place where he could thrive academically and socially.

That’s why, Wear said, even when the abuse escalated, he still didn’t tell anyone.

“Randolph at the time was basically a rich kid school,” he said. “I felt like they might fire him and then when the dust cleared they would get rid of me.”

Randolph is a K-12 private school formed in 1959. Current tuition for high school students can reach over $20,000 per year. Nearly 1,000 students attended Randolph during the 2015-16 school year, the most recent for which enrollment numbers are publicly available.

In the #MeToo era, as churches, political circles, entertainment industries and society reckon with allegations of decades-old sexual abuse and assault, schools — public and private — aren’t exempt.

A similar influential private school in Birmingham, Altamont School, last year released a report that said 10 students survived sexual misconduct by teachers between the 1970s-90s.

It’s not unusual for children to wait years before reporting abuse, said Nikki Patterson, a longtime Alabama sex crimes prosecutor who works in Mobile.

“It is extremely rare for a child to instantly report sexual molestation,” Patterson said. “It is much more common that there is a long delay in the report.”

Patterson said if the abuser is a public figure — such as a religious leader, teacher or principal, who’s held in esteem by other adults — it’s even less likely a child will report abuse right away.

“The child doesn’t want to take the risk that no one is going to believe them,” Patterson said.

Criminal investigations

Wear, Vance and Lloyd provided AL.com with copies of their police reports.

The provided reports don’t include narratives, which are the detailed descriptions on the back of the report that outline what the men say happened. Per policy, the Huntsville Police Department doesn’t release narratives to the public or to complainants.

The reports name Bailey as the suspected offender and list allegations of first-degree sexual abuse and first-degree sodomy.

But if police found evidence of a crime, it’s unlikely a teacher from the 1970s or early 1980s would face state criminal charges because the statute of limitations has long passed.

In 1985, Alabama eliminated its statute of limitations for many sex crimes against children younger than 16. But the allegations brought by Wear, Vance and Lloyd involve instances long before the law changed.

Police said two of the reports alleging sexual abuse decades ago were filed in 2017. Four were filed in November 2018 — shortly after the Randolph School announced it was investigating an unnamed teacher accused of sexually abusing students decades ago.

Former headmaster Dennis Brown, who was Bailey’s boss at Randolph, said he never received any reports about impropriety against the music teacher.

The chairman of the Randolph board of trustees didn’t return calls for comment. Attempts to reach board members who are Randolph alumni also weren’t successful.

A vulnerable victim

Warning: The following contains details of sexual abuse.

In the winter of 1977 when he was a senior at Randolph, Wear said, Bailey took him alone to pick up drama equipment for the school. Wear said he doesn’t remember exactly where they went on the trip, but it was out of state and the equipment required at least two people to lift and transport.

Bill Wear is shown in an undated photo from the 1970's when he was a student at Randolph School in Huntsville, Ala.

Wear said Bailey checked them into a hotel and they went to dinner. That night, he said, Bailey assaulted him.

“There it escalated to full sexual intercourse — until I finally just got fed up and jumped out of the bed, sat in a chair, covered myself up with a blanket and wouldn’t do anything else,” Wear said.

After that, Wear said, he and Bailey still saw each other at school, but the teacher never tried to touch him again.

Bailey said the trip didn’t happen.

Wear first publicly said that he was a sexual abuse survivor in a 2015 post on Facebook. Wear said on Facebook at the time that he’d been abused by an unnamed teacher in high school. He waited to go public until after his mother died.

Wear said he didn’t report the abuse when he was a student because he was worried about losing his scholarship, and his family situation wasn’t stable.

Bailey was the choir director at St. Paul United Methodist, where Wear’s family attended church. Wear said Bailey knew his family situation.

‘Something wrong was going on’

Vance, who now at age 56 lives with his wife in Kapaa, Hawaii, told police he was a 16-year-old junior at Randolph when Bailey sexually abused him in May of 1980.

Vance attended a friend’s graduation party in south Huntsville on a Friday night. A day or two before the party, Vance said, Bailey told him he was welcome to spend the night at his house if the party ended late. Bailey’s home was closer to the party than Vance’s, so he decided to drive over to the teacher’s house.

Stuart Vance is shown in a photo from 1980, the year he says he was sexually abused by a Randolph School music teacher in Huntsville, Ala.

“It was very obvious very quickly that something wrong was going on,” Vance said.

Vance said he was stunned at the suggestion he share a bed with Bailey, but eventually went into the bedroom and climbed into bed with Bailey, who groped, massaged and fondled him for about half an hour.

“That’s the thing I remember most is his hands — those hands on my ass — squeezing, groping,” Vance said. “I felt violated. I still feel violated."

Vance said once Bailey fell asleep, he went into the living room and slept on the couch. He said he was “physically and emotionally a wreck,” and driving home at that point wasn’t safe. He went home the next morning.

Bailey denied the allegations.

“That never happened,” Bailey said. “He never spent the night at my house.”

Vance said Bailey, who was 40 years old at the time, never pursued him again.

The ‘special boys’

Bailey, who wrote the Randolph School’s alma mater, was the music teacher and oversaw advanced music groups, like chorus, show chorus and ensemble, which Vance, Wear and Lloyd joined in different years. The students performed musicals and other concerts.

Randolph alumni said the advanced music students were a tight-knit group. They traveled together, performed together and became close friends.

Several former students told AL.com male students often gave Bailey backrubs in his music classroom, located in what was the junior high building of the Randolph campus on Drake Avenue.

“This was just kind of a regular part of life in Delbert’s classroom — there was a student giving him a backrub like all the time,” said Lloyd, who described suffering years of abuse by Bailey in extensive interviews with AL.com. Lloyd is now 52 and lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where he volunteers at a domestic-violence and sexual assault advocacy center.

The boys who gave Bailey backrubs were his “special boys,” said Lloyd. “I was singled out as a special boy almost immediately.”

Hotel stays

Lloyd became one of the first to publicly say he had been sexually abused by Bailey. He contacted Huntsville police in 2017.

Lloyd started at Randolph School in fifth grade in 1976. He said inappropriate contact with Bailey began with backrubs or hugging. By the time Lloyd was a 14-year-old eighth grader, he said, it escalated to sexual touching over clothing.

James Lloyd is shown as an eighth grader in a 1979 photo.

Bailey said that didn’t happen.

Because of discipline issues, Lloyd left Randolph for two years, and was planning to return to Randolph as a junior in 1982.

That summer, Lloyd said, he went to work for Bailey at the teacher’s side business — a local shop called West Side Ceramics. Lloyd said he was trying to earn spending money for a trip to vocal camp Bailey wanted him to attend in Pennsylvania.

“That was when Delbert first really sexually assaulted me,” said Lloyd.

Lloyd said Bailey had a plan for the trip to Pennsylvania. They would share a hotel room, where there would be a Betamax, pornography, alcohol and cigarettes.

Shortly before the planned trip to Pennsylvania, Lloyd said, he traveled with Bailey to Nashville to pick up bulk supplies for the pottery shop and they stayed at a hotel. Lloyd said after they went to dinner that night, Bailey watched him shower and Lloyd performed oral sex on the teacher.

Bailey denied the allegations.

“I have no knowledge of anything like that at all,” Bailey said. “I don’t even remember James Lloyd working in the shop.”

Shortly after they returned to Huntsville, Lloyd said he ran away from home and spent weeks in California as a juvenile runaway.

Lloyd said he felt threatened by Bailey and did not tell anyone about the abuse. That fall, Lloyd left Randolph. He said he didn’t see or hear from Bailey again until he was an adult in 1990.

Lloyd, who receives disability benefits for mental health reasons, said he still struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder. Lloyd said Bailey isn’t the only adult who sexually abused him during his teenage years.

“I accept responsibility for making some really shitty choices in my life,” Lloyd said. “But I’m not accountable for what these adults did.”

James Lloyd, 52, lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Lloyd says he was sexually abused during the 1980's by a music teacher at Randolph School in Huntsville, Ala.

Long before Lloyd contacted police, he told other people, including his longtime former partner, about the abuse.

Bill Bennett, who dated Lloyd for years, said it was in the spring of 2001 that Lloyd first told him about Bailey. “I knew James well enough to know he was not lying,” Bennett recently told AL.com.

Keeping quiet

Vance, Wear and Lloyd each said they didn’t tell their parents, school administrators or other authority figures at the time. In separate interviews, each said he was concerned about how disclosure might affect his success or scholarship at Randolph.

Brown, the former headmaster, said he doesn’t remember anyone reporting Bailey for improper behavior when he worked at the school.

Brown said he’s been disappointed by some social media comments that imply faculty and administrators were complicit in the abuse because they didn’t report it.

“I can tell you there’s absolutely no recollection I have of any reporting of impropriety of Mr. Bailey,” Brown told AL.com recently. “I also don’t remember any gossip for that matter about Mr. Bailey.

“I certainly sympathize with any of the students that have indicated they were abused,” he added.

‘I had to come forward’

Until late last year, Bailey was the music director at Cokesbury United Methodist Church in Margate, Florida. In accordance with church policy, Bailey was suspended from his duties when church officials learned about the decades-old allegations in Alabama, a spokeswoman told AL.com. Bailey resigned in December 2018.

Delbert Bailey resigned from Cokesbury United Methodist Church in Margate, Florida after he was suspended from his music minister duties, officials said. This image has since been removed from the church website.

“We pray that God’s healing and love for all involved will bring the grace and power of God to this situation,” said Gretchen Hastings, communications director for the Florida conference of the United Methodist Church, in an emailed statement.

Vance said he told the church about the Randolph investigation.

“I felt like I had to come forward,” he said.

Randolph investigation

After the Randolph School announced in late October 2018 it was investigating sexual abuse allegations involving a former teacher, Vance contacted AL.com to talk about his experiences. He first publicly disclosed the abuse on Facebook this past fall.

Through Vance, AL.com connected with Wear and Lloyd, who also agreed to speak on the record.

The men said they never really knew each other in school because of their age differences. They have publicly spoken about the abuse at different times during the past several years.

School officials declined to say whether they will publicly release the findings of their investigation or when the probe is expected to wrap up.

“Out of respect for the integrity of the process, we will not be responding to further questions until the investigation is concluded,” said school officials.

Because Randolph is a private school, it’s not required to release information that public schools would have to release under federal or state public records laws.

Wear, Vance and Lloyd all said they loved attending Randolph. Music was an important part of their lives in high school.

“Having come from (Huntsville) Middle School where I was horrifically bullied, Randolph, for me, was an utter revelation,” said Vance. “It was, by and large, a truly wonderful place for me to discover what I was good at — for me to be able to do activities that I could not have done (at another school).”

Stuart Vance, 56, lives with his wife in Kapaa, Hawaii. Vance says a Huntsville, Ala. private school teacher sexually abused him in May 1980.

Vance said he appreciates the current Randolph administration’s response to the abuse allegations. But he questions whether anyone in the school administration decades ago knew anything about the abuse.

“That’s one of the things I’m hoping we’ll get from the investigation — who knew what and when,” Vance said.