Thursday, November 10, 2011

Dad charged with sexually abusing daughters 20 years ago now jailed for raping kids in second family, killing infant (LeFlore County, Oklahoma)

Guys like UNNAMED DAD never change their stripes....

http://www.swtimes.com/news/article_bf6be0e4-0ae0-11e1-abde-001cc4c03286.html

Old Child Abuse Charges Dropped
Posted: Wednesday, November 9, 2011 8:34 am | Updated: 10:10 am, Wed Nov 9, 2011.

Associated Press

LITTLE ROCK — Incest charges against a man now accused of child abuse in Oklahoma were dismissed nearly two decades ago after his three young daughters didn’t appear in court to testify, a Kansas prosecutor said Tuesday.

The burden of proof rested on the children — the oldest of whom was 13 years old, according to court documents. The case disintegrated without their testimony, said Jennifer Brunetti, who prosecuted the 1993 case in Coffeyville, Kan. The man was not convicted of any charges in that case.

“It was heart-wrenching... We came to court and the girls never showed up,” Brunetti said.

The man and a different wife, arrested last week, are jailed in Oklahoma on multiple child abuse and endangerment charges, which are expected to be formally filed later this week. A court document filed by an Oklahoma prosecutor’s office alleges that one of the couple’s nine children taken into emergency state custody told investigators she and her younger sibling had been sexually abused by their father.

Neither the man nor his wife had an attorney listed at the court clerk’s office in LeFlore County. The Associated Press is withholding the names of the man and his wife so as not to identify the children, because the AP does not generally identify the victims of alleged sexual abuse.

Investigators in Oklahoma have been searching the man’s vast, rural property since last week for the remains of a baby the couple’s daughter says he helped deliver. She told authorities she thought a boy she met at camp may have been the father, according to the exhumation request filed by Oklahoma prosecutors. The girl told authorities her father said her infant daughter was dead before burying it near a goat pen.

No sign of an infant has been unearthed so far and bad weather hampered authorities’ search for the remains on Tuesday. Searchers had been using a backhoe, shovels and their hands to dig for answers. Prosecutor Jeff Smith said investigators were considering searching a nearby pond, too.

“The going is absolutely slow because of having to meticulously sift the ground ... to find the smallest of human remains if they exist,” he said.

The man’s attorney from the Kansas case, Roger Gossard, said he didn’t recall the facts of the case from nearly two decades ago.

Court documents show Brunetti charged that the man “willfully, wrongfully, unlawfully and feloniously engage(d) in an unlawful sex act” with his 8-year-old daughter. Brunetti, now a defense attorney in Frontenac, Kan., who also does special prosecutions in southeast Kansas, said she had talked with the girls and even showed them around the courthouse where they would have testified in the incest case. But they did not appear for the court date, she said.

A woman who answered the phone at a number listed for the man’s ex-wife declined to comment last week. A relative of hers told the AP that the girls’ mother took them and fled to New England.

“She must have just decided she couldn’t put them through it,” Brunetti said.