Vigilante justice

Jeff Bast, who goes by Millstone the Klown on social media, says he is protecting children. His online following has brought scrutiny to people on the sex offender registry – and fear and lost work to people around them.

Lucy Reid took down the signs in broad daylight.

They had been posted around Winchester for weeks, calling attention to a child sexual abuse case. Reid understood the anger behind them. But the signs seemed to be everywhere, and she had grown weary of seeing her hometown defined by the worst thing alleged to have happened there.

She expected the person who put them up to be upset. She did not expect strangers to call her a “pedophile protector” or contact Our Town Books in Jacksonville, where she worked as a bookseller. Reid said the store was deluged with calls threatening demonstrations outside the shop unless it cut ties with her. One man contacted an author scheduled to appear there and the store’s book distributor.

Reid was placed on unpaid leave. When she asked to return, she said, the answer was: “No, not yet.” 

Then a video began circulating online among some of Millstone the Klown’s followers showing the entrance to the building where Reid lived. She said another video named her and referred to bringing pepper spray and a knife on a future visit. She worried about her 14-year-old son coming over.

One morning, a wood chipper was parked nearby.

In the 1996 film Fargo, a murderer feeds a body into a wood chipper, leaving a leg visible as a police officer approaches. The scene gave the machine a gruesome place in popular culture. Reid said commenters on the Millstone the Klown Facebook page suggested she should be thrown into one. She did not know why the machine was parked near her home. With videos showing her door circulating online, its presence frightened her.

“All I did was pull down some signs,” Reid said.

After seven weeks out of work, Reid returned to the bookstore part time the week of Oct. 5. Store owners Alex and Christina Helmich did not respond to a request for comment from Illinois Times.

Llaina Groves, owner of Llaina’s Dance & Gym in Jacksonville, said Bast posted a claim linking her husband and business to an alleged sex offender. Groves said he had the wrong person. Bast later posted an apology, she said, but people had already reacted to the accusation. She went to the police because she feared what strangers might do.

When Groves arrived at work Sept. 25, she found “DPDRE” spray-painted on the parking lot in front of the entrance, an abbreviation for “Dead Pedophiles Don’t Reoffend.”  The identity of the person who painted them is not known. 

Their experiences expose a question larger than one dispute in one small town. Public sex offender registries were created to give people information about convictions. Online, that information can also become a call to punish employers, co-workers and anyone seen as defending them. The consequences reach people who committed serious crimes, people trying to keep a business open and, as both women learned, people with no connection to the registry at all. Whether such campaigns protect children depends on what they accomplish after the crowd arrives.

The man behind the mask

Jeff Bast, a 56-year-old Macoupin County man, calls himself Millstone the Klown. Wearing a creepy clown mask, he carries a sign that reads, “Dead Pedophiles Don’t Reoffend” and sells merchandise with that slogan. His Facebook page identifies people accused or convicted of sexual offenses, along with those he believes support them, and publicizes court cases.

Bast said the idea came from a California campaigner he saw on Facebook. The man wore a clown mask to draw attention to his signs, Bast said, and inspired him to bring the approach to Illinois. His Millstone the Klown Facebook page, which launched this summer, has already amassed 11,000 followers.

Bast’s clown name comes from Matthew 18:6. Jesus of Nazareth warns that anyone who causes “one of these little ones – those who believe in me – to stumble” would be better off with “a large millstone hung around their neck” and drowned in the sea.

Bast said he does not attend church. “I’m not really a religious person, but I’m very spiritual,” he said. When the interviewer suggested that the verse did not literally say what Bast’s sign says, Bast agreed. “It’s what everybody perceives it as,” he said. “And perception is reality pretty much anymore.”

Bast said he has never been sexually abused. He described his childhood as “normal” and free of that harm. He and his wife have no children, but he said accounts of children who have been abused – and his belief that the law has failed them – draw him to demonstrations across central Illinois.

He calls the people who follow his page “supporters.” He estimates that he receives around 120 messages a day, many asking him to examine a case or expose someone. He cannot pursue every request. A post, however, often prompts his followers to call a business, leave comments or demand that it stop employing someone.

Bast’s page has also asked supporters for money to help pay for a concealed carry permit. In his interview, he said he does not carry a gun, though he carries pepper gel and a knife. He described an earlier militia group, the Illinois Sentinels, that met and trained at his home. 

“I’ve got a shooting range,” he said. “We used to train there.” Bast said the group did not last long.

He says his campaign is about justice, not vengeance. Asked what his sign means, Bast called for the death penalty for people who sexually abuse children and said he wants the U.S. Supreme Court ruling barring execution for child rape when the victim was not killed overturned. 

“There’s no reason they should be out in the public,” he said. “They’re suckling off the state now for the rest of their life instead of facing the death penalty.”

While some of the shirts he sells on his Facebook page simply bear the message “Protect our children,” others have a darker tone. New Halloween-themed offerings include “Save a pumpkin – smash a pedo” with an image of a boot and skull, along with an orange shirt that reads “Curbstomp your local pedophile” with an image of a boot print. 

A baker’s second life

Long before Mike Edwards became a target of Bast’s campaign, he was a boy helping his mother and grandmother in the kitchen. By sixth grade, he wanted to be a cook. He trained at Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island, became a chef and eventually taught culinary arts to high school students in Ohio.

There, Edwards committed a sexual offense involving one of his students. He was 48 years old at the time. He said the record lists her as 16, but that she was 17 when the offense occurred. The distinction matters to him; it does not change the authority he held as her teacher. He served about two years in prison and says he has remorse for what he did.

Edwards described himself at the time as an alcoholic, struggling with his mental health and distant from his faith. He does not offer those circumstances as an excuse. “I made a choice that was against the law,” he said.

He said corrections officers spat on him in prison, another prisoner threatened him and he witnessed a man’s head being smashed in. He also underwent counseling and asked himself why he had committed the offense. He says he has been sober for more than 12 years.

After prison, Edwards moved back to Illinois, registered as required and found work baking at the Apple Barn near Chatham in 2016. He said he disclosed his conviction and checked with the Macoupin County Sheriff’s Department, where he lives, before taking the job. Edwards purchased a part-ownership stake in the business in 2019 and increased his share in 2021.

“I’ve always been upfront and honest with every employer or every person that my past could produce a negative result like it has now,” he said.

On Sept. 1, Bast made multiple posts on his Millstone the Klown Facebook page about Edwards’ employment at the Apple Barn, writing: “You hire a known pedophile, we boycott your business and spread it far and wide that the communities (sic) kids are not safe anywhere around this establishment. Shut down the Apple fest NOW!!!” Another post included Edwards’ photo and information from the sex offender registry, with Bast asking his followers to “Give them a review on their page. Share it. Shut down this apple fest this fall.” More than 180 people shared that post and calls to boycott Apple Barn began to widely circulate on social media. 

Bast saw the Apple Barn as a place where Edwards could encounter children. Families visited, and the business sometimes hosted school trips. 

“He’s a partner,” Bast said. “He could have cameras set up.” Bast offered no evidence that Edwards had done so. He also called Edwards’ presence in public a kind of “grooming.”

Edwards said he took care to limit his interactions with minors and did not have underage employees work alone with him in the bakery. He rejects the idea that every person on the registry will offend again. Some people he encountered in prison posed grave risks, he said, but most want to comply with the law, work and move on. Edwards estimates that “95% of us” follow the law.

Edwards said the store began receiving pressure to disassociate itself from him. The Apple Barn closed in mid-September while a sale of the business was in progress.

Edwards said the online pressure accelerated the closure and left nine workers without jobs. He said an Apple Barn worker was verbally confronted in a grocery store over that business’s controversy. 

“We closed for the protection of the staff,” he said. “The sooner we closed, the sooner the lynch mob stopped.” 

He blames Bast for the sudden end of the business as he knew it, though the sale was also part of the decision. Edwards said the sale of the business is now final, and while he declined to identify the buyer, he said he expects the store to reopen soon. 

The Apple Barn’s employees were caught in the public arguments. On the morning of her last shift, bakery worker Mary Wichmann wrote in a public Facebook post, “I am a regular person who is allowed to be upset about losing my livelihood.”

Wichmann had started at the store four years earlier, expecting to leave for college. A temporary opening in the bakery revealed a talent she had not known she had. She stayed, studied baking and pastry arts, and came to think of her co-workers as family. Now the job that had changed her life has ended.

Wichmann remembered the long hours filling Thanksgiving orders and co-workers willing to try her new recipes. She acknowledged that the workplace had its flaws. 

“But it was mine,” she wrote. “And I will miss it for a very, very long time.”

A family at the courthouse

The anger behind the demonstrations Bast holds is real. Lisa says her daughter was sexually abused by a man she had trusted. The man has been accused and was being held while the case proceeded, Lisa said. Her daughter has been working through the trauma in therapy. IT is not using Lisa’s full name to protect her daughter’s identity.

“She is a strong little girl,” Lisa said outside the Scott County Courthouse in Winchester during a Sept. 15 rally, where she stood with Bast and several other protesters.

Lisa and her friend, Michelle Dahl, have helped organize Protect Our Children rallies. They want officials to take allegations seriously and pursue accountability. “We just wanna make sure nothing’s swept under the rug,” Dahl said.

Wearing his scary clown mask and carrying a placard that reads “Dead Pedophiles Don’t Reoffend,” Bast is the most noticeable person at such protests outside various courthouses. He has led protests in county seats across central Illinois: Winchester, Carlinville, Lewistown and Taylorville.

While Bast said Facebook analytics show 30% of his followers are in the Springfield area, he has yet to lead a protest outside the Sangamon County courthouse. He said it’s partly because the county has so many sex offense cases, as well as the logistics.

“It’s hard to get up there, honestly. It’s a little bit of a drive for me,” he said. “And a lot of people from Sangamon County don’t reach out.”

But he is hosting his first Springfield event on Oct. 17, a trunk or treat at American Legion Post 32 on Sangamon Avenue. Are his courthouse protests effective?

Morgan County State’s Attorney Gray Noll says they shouldn’t be. “Look, I try cases the same way whether it gets a lot of media attention or it doesn’t. I only have one client – the people of the state of Illinois. My job is to see that justice is done – no matter whether I’m being watched or not.”

Jamie Mosser, president of the Illinois State’s Attorneys Association, agrees that public pressure should not change how a case is handled. But prosecutors and judges are elected, she noted, and “people are fallible.” She said the hope is that they do their jobs to achieve justice, rather than to keep their jobs.

Mosser sees another potential consequence at the courthouse door, which jurors use as well. 

“If jurors are coming into the courthouse while this is happening, and it feels intimidating to them, a juror may be more likely to find somebody guilty,” she said.

Bast says he shows up when people ask for his support. He worries that defendants accused of harming children may be released while families live with the consequences. Asked whether someone who commits a sexual offense can change, he answered, “Not really, no.”

State Sen. Steve McClure, R-Springfield, a former prosecutor, insists that any discussion of an offender’s future must account for the person harmed. 

“If someone commits a sex crime, the victim or victims have to face the consequences of that crime for the rest of their lives,” he said. 

He believes parents and employers should be able to use registry information to protect children.

“There has to be a balance,” he said, “but you always have to err on the side of public safety.”

Reid, the woman who took down the signs in Winchester, does not object to a family gathering supporters outside a courthouse. She objected to the signs filling her town – and to the conclusion that removing them meant she supported abuse. 

“Most abuse victims just want to move on and not think about it every 50 feet driving down Main Street,” she said.

What a registry can tell us

David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said a registry entry alone tells little about a person’s likelihood of another offense. Some offenders have a persistent sexual interest in prepubescent children, a serious risk factor. Others offended under different circumstances. Prior offenses, broader criminal history, attitudes toward the harm done, relationships and impulse control also matter.

Depending on those factors, Finkelhor said, estimated rates of sexual reoffending can range from as low as 5% for some groups to more than 50% for others. Those group estimates do not predict what any single individual, such as Edwards, will do. Finkelhor said the rate across the full range of people who have committed sexual offenses against children is relatively low.

The word “pedophile” is often stretched beyond its clinical meaning, Finkelhor said. Using it for every person convicted of a sexual offense against a minor may express outrage, but it does little to distinguish one person’s risk from another’s.

Finkelhor understands the appeal of Bast’s campaign. 

“Being a champion of children,” he said, “makes you seem very righteous and popular.” A person warning others about an offender can “feel like you’re a white hat.” 

Finkelhor cautioned against letting that certainty replace the work of courts and the officials monitoring people after release.

Kristen Budd, a sociologist and analyst for the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice reform group, has studied sex offense policy for about two decades. She said research challenges the assumption that someone who has offended will always offend again. She cited an analysis of more than 7,000 people showing that even among those initially assessed as high risk, the likelihood of another sexual offense declined the longer they lived in the community without one.

Budd said housing and employment help people remain crime-free. Harassing someone at work can destabilize that person, the employer and coworkers. 

“If you want people to come home and you want your communities to be safe,” she said, factors that matter include employment and housing.

Wanda Bertram, who studies incarceration policy and works for the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative, said most studies she has examined found no significant reduction in new sexual offenses after public registration requirements were adopted. Some found higher rates, she said, although that does not establish that any particular registry or online campaign caused an individual to offend. Bertram’s concern is that public exposure can make work and housing harder to keep. 

None of the experts who spoke to Illinois Times have assessed Edwards personally. Their shared point is that a list of convictions cannot substitute for an assessment of an individual’s risk.

Life after the crime

Bast is easy to understand at a courthouse. Lisa’s account of her daughter’s suffering gives his cause urgency. He is harder to understand at a bookstore, where Reid lost her income after removing signs she was tired of seeing. She is not on a sex offender registry.

Edwards committed a serious crime against a student under his authority. He served his sentence and remains subject to the registry. He asks whether compliance, years of work and a life without another accusation can ever count for anything.

Karen Swanson, director of the Correctional Ministries Institute at Wheaton College, believes accountability and restoration must both be possible. 

“What does this person have to do to receive redemption?” she asked. Bast’s view, she said, appears to leave no path.

Swanson also questions his use of a biblical name. Scripture speaks of “forgiveness, restoration, redemption for everyone, not just people without a sex offense,” she said. That does not require a survivor to forgive. It asks what society expects someone who has completed a sentence to do next.

“A lot of times too, we want justice, accountability, punishment, unless it comes to us,” Swanson said. “Then we want mercy, redemption, forgiveness.”

Lisa wants the justice system to protect her daughter. Bast wants the laws changed so that child sex offenders receive the death penalty and are not released back into society. Edwards wants the chance to keep working. Wichmann mourns the job she lost. Groves wants families to feel safe entering her business. Reid wants to go home without wondering who might be outside.

A crowd can demand an answer in an afternoon. Living safely together after a crime takes longer – and requires more care than a sign or a registry entry can provide.  

This article appears in October 15-21, 2026.