The Neighborhood Perv?

Two nights ago I get a call from my next door neighbor. She says, "Have you heard what's going on in the neighborhood?" I recently got a little notice from the neighborhood association so I ask "About the fields?" I can tell by the tone of her voice that the news she's talking about has nothing to do with the two fields full of wildflowers at the top of neighborhood that developers are salivating over.
"No."
"Umm, somebody's building a fence or a wall?" There was something about that in the notice, too, but I can tell that's still too innocuous an item and her voice is full of foreboding. So, finally I shut up and let her tell me.
"You know that family that lives next door to the Smiths? They have the two kids that you never see. The older one has gone to college I think."
"Oh, yeah." I'd completely forgotten about these people.
"Well, the husband moved out a while back and now he's back and guess what? He's a registered sex offender."
"Oh, crap. Are you sure this isn't some rumor?"
"No, it's on the web and everything. With a picture of him. I'll send you the email."
Well, it turns out our neighborhood sentries are up in arms about this guy. They would like to convince the family to move, but I don't see how that's possible. I mean, you can't shun people who don't socialize with you in the first place. The gossip is that he may have molested family members, and no one is quite sure why the wife has let him move back in with her. My general inclination is to give people the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, I have a daughter who has roamed free with her pals in this neighborhood for six years. We lived in this little bubble of 1950s bliss, our girls camping at whichever house had something good to eat. From what I know or have read about sexual offenders, they don't get cured. Your standard run-of-the-mill criminal (a variety I once knew well) generally outgrows his or her stupidity or dies young. But sexual predators? Well, just look at how old some of those Catholic priests were. Or what about the "dirty old men" we all knew about when we were kids. I remember my friend Paula complaining when we were about eleven that her grandfather tried to French kiss her. She hated him.
My husband watches FOX News all the time. (I'm not going to get into that here.) They are always swept up in some frenzy of "thoughtful and insightful" analysis into the latest murdered/disappeared child-girlfriend-pregnant wife.
So . . . now when we drive out of the neighborhood, my husband says the perv is probably hiding in the bushes right now. And I tell him not to worry because our kid is now fifteen which is probably over the hill for a true perv. But still we're paying a little closer attention these days.
My thought is that we need to turn this to our advantage. We need to let the developers who want to put their cookie-cutter houses up on the beautiful fields where we let our dogs play that we have a registered sex offender in the neighborhood and that we plan to let any prospective home buyers know it. Ha, so they'll never be able to sell the houses and maybe they won't build them in the first place.