A toy, a soda and twenty-seven years in prison

On a summer afternoon in 1997, Gregory Vogelsang was driving through Citrus Heights when he saw a boy walking alone near Sunrise Mall. He pulled into the parking lot.

He was in his late twenties and had been molesting children for at least two years. He got out of his car, approached the boy — who looked to be eight or nine years old — and started talking.

He bought him a toy and a soda. He told him he’d forgotten his wallet at home, that they needed to swing by his house before they went to pick out a gift.

Vogelsang’s plan was to take him to his house, photograph him and molest him.

The boy got in the car.

In his own words

In November 2025, Gregory Vogelsang sat before the California Board of Parole Hearings at Valley State Prison and described all of it. The crimes, the escalation, the psychology underneath. He was fifty-six years old, using a walker and wearing a mobility vest. He had been in prison for twenty-seven years.

Vogelsang had been convicted in 1999 on more than two dozen counts — lewd acts, forcible sexual assault, kidnapping — involving at least six boys between the ages of five and eleven in the Sacramento area. A judge sentenced him to 355 years to life. Now he was asking to go home.

Over roughly two and a half hours, he described his crimes with a precision that was by turns clinical and devastating. He mapped his own psychology. He told the commissioners things that would later be cited both as evidence of transformation and as proof of danger.

He had known, he said, since he was about sixteen. He had girlfriends then, tried to live what looked like an ordinary life, pushed the attraction down. At nineteen, working as a furniture mover, he found a photograph of a child at a client’s house while the family was out. He took it. For years it was enough. Then it wasn’t.

From pictures to children

Moving furniture meant access to people’s homes, their belongings, their photo albums. When clients weren’t present, he went through them methodically, pulling out photographs of their children. The collection grew. Then it stopped being enough too.

“I was already viewing boys as sex objects,” he said during the hearing. “The victimization was escalating.”

His primary victim was the son of a friend. The molestation began in 1995, when the boy was around ten years old, and continued for three years. Vogelsang groomed him slowly with sleepovers, toys, trips to Great America and water parks. The patient cultivation of a child’s trust and a parent’s confidence. When the boy resisted, Vogelsang would stop.

For a while.

“He would slap my hand and tell me to stop,” Vogelsang said. He would stop. But the abuse continued.

When that boy aged out of his interest, Vogelsang didn’t stop. He found others; including the boy near Sunrise Mall, and another he spotted near a Kmart in the same area, also around nine or ten years old. Same approach. Same outcome.

There was a five-year-old he had babysat at his mother’s request, whom he molested while the child slept. There was at least one other victim whose abuse never resulted in charges.

When Presiding Parole Commissioner Teal Kozel asked whether the crimes would have kept escalating if he hadn’t been caught, Vogelsang didn’t hesitate.

“Yes, most definitely,” he said. “It would’ve been worse on the emotional and psychological damage that I did.”

Then he described what that escalation looked like.

“You have to stop masturbating to images of a child in your mind or real child pornography,” he said. He added that doing so “leads to molestation, molestation leads to kidnapping, and the kidnapping leads ultimately to murder of a child.”

His father

When Commissioner Kozel asked Vogelsang to describe the most impactful experiences of his childhood, he started with his father.

He had been molested by him, he said, from age seven to eleven. But it went further than that. His father had also molested his friends, and Vogelsang had known about it, and had been angry about it. He described growing up with abuse normalized, told repeatedly by his father that what was happening was simply how a father shows love. He suppressed it, he said. He pushed it down for years.

Commissioner Kozel noticed, partway through the hearing, that something had changed in his voice.

“It sounds like it’s making you a little bit emotional,” she said. “Am I misreading that?”

“No,” Vogelsang said.

She asked why.

“Because it’s still raw,” he said. “The abuse that I suffered. But in turn, I wish I would have got help and all the work I’ve done now to learn, I wish I would’ve done it then.”

The DA’s representative asked him directly how he thought the victims and their families would feel about his release after nearly three decades of a 355-year sentence.

“I think they would be shocked, upset,” Vogelsang said.

He continued, referencing things he had learned, what he planned to do to help stop others from committing similar crimes. He said he believed they would ultimately be “most appreciative.”

“Will molest again”

In Sacramento, the reaction to the board’s decision has been fierce.

District Attorney Thien Ho and Sheriff Jim Cooper held a press conference after the ruling became public. “This inmate will molest again,” Ho said. “And yet this parole board is letting him out.”

Cooper was blunter. “You don’t rehabilitate sex offenders,” he said. When a reporter cited data showing that no person released under California’s elderly parole program had ever committed a sexual re-offense, Cooper was dismissive. “They haven’t been caught. The smart ones don’t admit to it.”

That last line cuts to the core of the dispute. Vogelsang is not the smart one, in Cooper’s formulation, he is the one who seemingly admitted to everything. Critics argue that his apparent candor should be understood as what it might be: a performance, refined over decades and multiple hearings, of what rehabilitation is supposed to look like. A man who spent years grooming children by telling them exactly what they needed to hear has had a long time to learn what a parole board needs to hear too.

Vogelsang, at the hearing, seemed to anticipate this suspicion when the DA’s representative asked whether he believed he was still a manipulative person.

“No,” he said. “That person is dead and gone.”

The boy who led them back

The case that cracked the investigation open was the boy near Sunrise Mall.

After Vogelsang assaulted him and returned him home, the boy described to detectives in detail where he had been taken. Investigators identified the house, executed a search warrant and arrested Vogelsang. Inside, they found boys’ underwear, which Vogelsang admitted keeping for sexual gratification. They found photographs.

He was charged in connection with six victims. A jury convicted him on twenty-seven counts. A judge gave him 355 years in prison.

For the next twenty-seven years, he was in prison. And then, on a November morning in 2025, he sat in a hearing room and described all of it to two commissioners appearing by video screen.

Nineteen minutes

The two-person parole board deliberated for nineteen minutes. When Commissioner Kozel returned with the decision, she walked through the reasoning in detail.

To understand why the board ruled the way it did, it helps to understand what the board is and is not permitted to do — and what question they are actually there to answer.

California’s Board of Parole Hearings is an independent body whose commissioners are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate. They are not there to retry a case or reconsider a sentence. By the time a case reaches a parole hearing, guilt has long been established. The board’s job is narrower and in some ways harder: to determine whether the person sitting before them today poses an "unreasonable risk" to public safety if released. That is the only question they are legally permitted to answer.

Since a 2008 California Supreme Court ruling the board has been prohibited from denying parole solely on the basis of a crime’s severity. The length of the original sentence, the number of victims, the nature of the offense — none of these, on their own, can be the basis for a denial. As the court established, denying parole based on the facts of the crime alone, without evidence that those facts indicate a current danger, violates due process. Under that standard, neither the objections of law enforcement nor the weight of public opinion are a substitute for evidence of current dangerousness.

What commissioners can consider is extensive. They review a comprehensive risk assessment conducted by a forensic psychologist, which uses validated evidence-based tools to evaluate the incarcerated person’s likelihood of reoffending. They examine the person’s central file — their full institutional history, disciplinary record, programming participation and behavior over the course of their incarceration. They consider parole plans: where the person would live, what support systems they would have, what supervision conditions would apply. And they hear from victims, whose impact statements carry moral weight even when they cannot, under the law, be the sole basis for a decision.

For Vogelsang specifically, the board also applied two additional legal frameworks: the Youth Offender statute, which requires special consideration for crimes committed before age 26; recognizing that brain development, impulse control and decision-making are still maturing at that age. The other is the Elderly Parole Program, which mandates that the board give special consideration to a qualifying person’s advanced age, length of incarceration and diminished physical condition. Vogelsang qualified under both.

The aggravating history was plain; multiple victims, multiple years, some of them strangers, crimes committed under the influence of methamphetamine. None of that was in dispute. But under the legal standard the board operates within, it also could not, by itself, be the answer.

So Kozel described what she had observed across the hours of testimony. Vogelsang had completed Road to Freedom, a sex offender treatment curriculum, and was co-facilitating weekly sessions for other incarcerated men. He had taken victims awareness courses, anger management classes and substance abuse programming. He had written individual apology letters to each victim, which he claimed were tailored specifically to what he had done to each of them. He had gone five years without a disciplinary write-up.

And he had stopped telling the board what it turned out they didn’t want to hear. In a 2022 hearing, he had claimed his pedophilic disorder was in remission, possibly eradicated. He was denied. In the years since, he had arrived somewhere different.

“I know this pedophilia will always be in me,” he said. “In my mind, in my body.”

He had also given the board a specific date: March 2020. That was when he had last masturbated to thoughts of a boy; more than twenty-two years into his prison sentence. He has not done so since, he said.

Kozel also noted something harder to quantify. When Vogelsang talked about his victims — about the harm he had caused, about what it might mean to those men today — something happened that she said didn’t appear to be performed.

“It bubbles up and spills over when you talk about your crimes,” she told him. “And as long as that emotion doesn’t destabilize you, I hope it will continue to happen. Because it’s a good reflection of the work you’ve done.”

The board granted the parole.

Still waiting

Before the hearing adjourned, Vogelsang read from a prepared closing statement.

He named what he had done; the assaults, the kidnappings, the photographs taken of children. He called them “the most horrific, callous and despicable, disgusting, horrendous and appalling crimes I could have ever done to these innocent boys and the men they are today.” He said the harm was everlasting. He said not a day passed without guilt.

“I’m truly and extremely sorry,” he said. “Thank you.”

Gregory Vogelsang, now 57, remains in prison. Governor Newsom, who under California law cannot reverse parole grants in non-murder cases, referred the decision to the full board for en banc review. DA Ho urged Sacramento residents to attend and testify. On March 18, 2026, the full board voted to refer Vogelsang’s parole grant to a rescission hearing — a process that evaluates whether a fundamental error was made by the original granting panel. That hearing is expected to take place sometime this summer. If the rescission panel finds that the original grant was improper, the parole grant could be revoked. If not, Vogelsang's path toward release continues.

On a summer afternoon in 1997, a boy got into a car.

Twenty-eight years later, that boy is a man and the predator who lured him into the car is in a cell, waiting.