MARTINEZ — On Sept. 26, the mother of a 7-year-old San Ramon girl was saying goodbye to her daughter’s guitar teacher, 69-year-old Rex Bell, when the young girl asked her teacher a parting question.
“Mr. Rex, should I tell her the secret?” the girl asked.
“Don’t share it,” Bell replied, the girl’s mother would later tell police. “Keep it secret, don’t tell mom and dad.”
The mother assumed the “secret” was a song the two were working on to surprise the parents with the girl’s progress. But what it turned out to be, according to prosecutors, was more than a dozen separate acts of child molestation. Bell — a registered sex offender for convictions involving music students in the early 2000s — now sits in the Martinez Detention Facility in lieu of a $42.5 million bail. Prosecutors have charged him with 13 counts of lewd or lascivious acts on a minor, all felonies, and he’s eligible for a life sentence if convicted.
Bell was teaching guitar lessons around the Bay Area through his company, Guitar Confidence, authorities said.
Court records say Bell, a Vallejo resident, has been teaching guitar for nearly a decade and was previously investigated for a potential violation of his sex offender conditions in 2015, when police found out he was teaching children in San Ramon. At the time, no technical violation was found — authorities determined he was telling parents to stay in the house during guitar lessons, which technically kept him in line with a requirement he not be alone with children, according to court records. .
San Ramon police are still investigating the possibility that additional victims are out there.
But last month, when the 7-year-old girl’s family reported Bell to police, they told investigators that they would leave the room for lessons because Bell tended to get easily distracted and talk to the adults in the room, rather than focusing on the music. They said they hired Bell last February, and would leave him alone with their daughter in their San Ramon home, starting in April until late September, when the alleged crimes were first discovered.
The girl’s parents told police they had no idea Bell was a registered sex offender, despite the fact that he’s listed on Megan’s Law, a website that tracks and includes photos of Californians with sex crime convictions. The reason Bell is registered dates back to 2006, when he was charged with molesting two 13-year-old girls during lessons. At his trial, the girls testified Bell inappropriately touched them, made comments about wanting to sexually abuse them, and offered to teach them various sex acts.
“My main motive behind starting Guitar Confidence is one and one thing only and that is to provide the gift of guitar to as many people as possible by teaching them how to play guitar,” Bell wrote on the teaching company’s website, which has been taken down since his arrest. He later added, “Lots of people – from kids to grandparents – learn the guitar every day. And if you’re one of them then Guitar Confidence is the right place for you.”
Bell was convicted and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison. But in 2008, an appeals court overturned the sentence, and ordered prosecutors to give Bell a plea deal with a three-year prison term that had been offered to Bell before trial. Bell’s attorney at trial, Joseph Tully, wrote a post-verdict declaration saying he was unaware Bell faced 15 years to life and that Bell would have likely taken the deal if he’d known, court records show.
Bell was released from jail that year, but in March 2009 he was sentenced to another 365 days in jail for a parole violation after the Contra Costa Sheriff’s office arrested him on suspicion of two counts of child molestation, court records show. In addition to the jail term, he was given five years probation.
After his release, Bell started Guitar Confidence with another Vallejo resident, police say. In 2015, San Ramon police investigated Bell, determined he was violating his sex offender conditions by teaching children, and forwarded a case to prosecutors, who ruled he wasn’t teaching children unsupervised and therefore couldn’t be charged, according to authorities.
Then, on Sept. 29, the 7-year-old girl’s parents told police that two days after her last lesson with Bell, she’d revealed the “secret” to her parents. She said Bell had touched her inappropriately and kissed her on the lips multiple times. One time, she said, he stuck a stick of gum halfway out of his mouth and had her bite the other piece off, according to police.
At one point during a lesson, he allegedly told the girl, “If you were 40, I would date you and you would be my girlfriend.”
Then the girl’s parents told police the kicker: they had a home surveillance system that had captured the Sept. 26 guitar lesson. Police say the video shows Bell forcibly kissing the girl “no less than eight” times, and that the only time he did anything with a guitar is when he heard the girl’s mother walking into the room and snatched it off of the floor.
When police tried to interview Bell he refused and requested an attorney, authorities said.
Anyone with information on Bell can call San Ramon police at 925-973-2779, or email Detective Brady McKinney at bmckinney@sanramon.ca.gov or Lt. Tami Williams at twilliams@sanramon.ca.gov.
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