Decades after dad's sexual abuse, someone finally listened (Ruckersville, Virginia)

Usually the media likes to play up "false accusation" cases. This one is really more typical. Authorities who just ignore (and protect) sexually abusive fathers like RICHARD CLINTON MOORE, JR.

http://www2.dailyprogress.com/news/2011/jun/04/decades-after-abuse-someone-finally-listened-ar-1085739/

Decades after abuse, someone finally listened
Woman's drive for justice changed state law

Malinda Kail's father went to prison for abuse he confessed to 21 years prior.

By Sharon C. Fitzgerald
Published: June 04, 2011

For years, Malinda Kail wondered if her childhood memories were skewed.

The 42-year-old Ruckersville woman remembered years of sexual abuse at the hands of her father, but he wasn’t criminally charged, despite in the 1980s admitting the abuse to child protective service workers.

As an adult, Kail wrote letters and sent emails to every county and state official she could think of and anyone still alive who worked the original case. But no one had any record or memory of the accusations against her father, Richard Clinton Moore Jr., and those who did would not speak to Kail about her case.

It would take 22 years and two of her letters getting into the right hands to start turning the wheels of justice for Kail.

But by then, it was nearly too late, she said.

“I wanted some answers to why they didn’t do anything to him all those years ago,” Kail said. “Then they went and arrested him and didn’t give me a chance to have a say in anything. I feel like they took the power away from me all over again.”

Old records found at the Region Ten Community Services Board offices in Charlottesville in the summer of 2008 showed Moore admitted to abusing Kail and another of his daughters from the time they were preschoolers until they were teenagers.

Moore, who was arrested in 2009 and later pleaded guilty to charges of sodomy and taking indecent liberties with Kail, received a 13-year prison sentence, of which some seven years were suspended.

Virginia Department of Correction records show Moore is scheduled to be released on parole in September after serving just a little more than two years of his sentence.

But her father’s conviction and a change in state law requiring jurisdictions to keep records of substantiated child molestation cases for at least 25 years have done little to ease Kail’s suffering or answer her questions.

“I still want to know what happened all those years ago,” Kail said of the handling of her case. “I want to make sure it won’t ever happen again.”

Running away

Growing up, Kail saved her pocket change for the day she could leave home for good.

The oldest of four children, Kail describes her family home as being a powder keg ready to explode at any moment. She believes the abuse from her father started when she was just in diapers, and Region Ten records from 1987 that Kail provided to The Daily Progress corroborate her memories.

Kail and her younger sister fled their family home in Louisa County on Oct. 24, 1987, after years of abuse from Moore and what she considered disregard from her mother, court records show.

“Dad ruled with an iron fist in our house,” Kail said.

The three sisters were taken out of the family home for good after meeting with social service workers and talking with Louisa County sheriff’s deputies.

“We went into foster care and that seemed to be it,” Kail said. “After that night we didn’t see the sheriff’s investigator again. I felt like we were on our own.”

Looking for answers

Kail tried to make a life for herself in the years after leaving her family’s home.

She eventually aged out of the foster care system and went to live with her boyfriend and his family. The couple eventually married, had a daughter and then divorced.

Kail would later marry her current husband, Clay Wilcher, and have two children with him. Although she would see her nuclear family from time to time, she said they remained fairly distant. Over the years, she would ask questions about why her father wasn’t charged with a crime.

“I wanted some straight answers as to what happened,” Kail said. “I was digging in my brain and I couldn’t leave it alone because things didn’t add up to me.”

At first, Kail said she contacted Louisa County social services in search of her records. When those leads fell dead she started a letter-writing campaign that would last more than six years.

“I just couldn’t give up,” Kail said.

In the summer of 2008, Kail wrote two letters — one to the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Services Council and one to Del. Rob Bell, R-Albemarle — sharing details of her story and her need for answers on what didn’t happen long ago.

Those two letters would open a criminal investigation and lead to new legislation.

Justice delayed

Louisa County sheriff’s Maj. Donnie Lowe was a rookie deputy in the police academy in 1987, but he remembers stopping by the office on the night Kail and her sister were brought in after running away from home.

He sat and talked with the two young girls and left them his business card, something the soon-to-be deputy said he gave to all residents he came in contact with.

Lowe was surprised to see that card more than 20 years later when Kail came to talk to him about her case.

“I had completely forgotten about that night,” Lowe said. “When she came back and told us what was going on it freaked me out because I thought I would have remembered that case.”

Lowe could not find any records of Kail’s case at the Sheriff’s Office. And the deputy who worked the original case was dead and the investigator had moved on to another job.

“I never heard another thing about the case when I came back from the academy,” Lowe said. “I don’t know if we’ll ever know why it wasn’t prosecuted.”

Louisa’s commonwealth’s attorney, Tom Garrett, said his office was just as surprised when Kail’s letter was passed along from the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Services Council, a state agency that provides training to commonwealth’s attorneys across the state.

Garrett, who had been in the office for less than a year, said he had never heard of Kail before getting the letter.

According to Kail’s handwritten notes, she reached out to the Louisa County commonwealth attorney’s office in May 2008. Kail said she met with Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Rusty McGuire only after her father’s sentencing and never met with Garrett.

Once Kail’s letter arrived, Garrett said he asked the sheriff’s investigators to look into the case. Because there were no case files and only old records from Region Ten, the case had to be built from scratch, Garrett said.

Moore was arrested Feb. 25, 2009 — more than 21 years after he first admitted to social service workers that he had sex with his daughters.

“He was totally surprised,” Garrett said. “I don’t think he ever expected to be arrested for having sex with his daughter even though he signed a confession years earlier.”

State law mandated Morris be sentenced under the guidelines he would have faced if he was convicted in the 1980s. He pleaded guilty in July 2009 and was sentenced to 13 years in prison, most of it suspended.

If he had been arrested under current law, Moore would have received more time and more charges, Garrett said.

Kail’s two sisters and brother declined to work with prosecutors on the case in 2008, although in interviews with sheriff’s investigators at the time all of them admitted abuse took place in the house.

Investigators found no solid evidence Moore molested anyone other than his own children, Garrett said. No one has come forward since his prosecution to say they were molested by Moore.

“You don’t roll out of bed one morning and decide to sexually prey on children,” Garrett said. “You don’t go to bed that night and wake up the next morning and feel any differently. When we find someone like Richard Moore, even if it’s 22 years later, we need to prosecute him and make sure that when he gets out he’s on the Sex Offender Registry because scientists will tell you he’ll still be a threat to children.”

‘The ball was dropped’

Malinda Kail logically knows her father deserved prison time for the crimes he committed against his children.

But she wasn’t exactly ecstatic when Moore was sentenced to prison.

“I wasn’t going there to get him in prison,” Kail said. “I wanted some answers. He should have been in prison years ago. But they didn’t ask me what I wanted.”

Garrett said the circumstances of Kail’s case obligated his office to bring charges against Moore.

“This is a casebook example of why there should never be a statute of limitations on this type of crime,” Garrett said. “We had two signed confessions from him that he did this … that is why it was so easy to get a conviction almost 23 years later.”

In his interview with a social services counselor in 1987, Moore admitted to having sex with his daughters. He also said he had been abused in his childhood and that his attraction to his daughters began when they were toddlers.

Although the girls told family members and talked to their mother, the abuse continued for years, records show.

Moore told investigators that he stopped physically having intercourse with them after his wife confronted him for a third time, but he never lost the desire to do so, reports said.

Both Lowe and Garrett said there is no explanation as to why Moore wasn’t charged in 1987 and why there were no records of the case at either agency.

While Lowe declined to speculate on what might have happened, Garrett said he finds it hard to believe a case file was ever turned over to the commonwealth’s attorney’s office.

Henry A. Kennan, who was sheriff in Louisa County in 1987, and then-Commonwealth’s Attorney John Garrett (no relation to Tom Garrett) both are deceased.

“The ball was dropped, there’s no doubt about that,” Garrett said. “One could wonder how it happened, but I just wasn’t there. Our responsibility is to prosecute the crimes of which we’re made aware, and when this case came to us we prosecuted it vigorously.”

Moving forward

Kail has created several large notebooks detailing her life story.

In them are the documents detailing her family’s interviews with social services about the allegations of abuse and notes detailing her long search for answers.

There are also copies of the handwritten notes and emails she sent looking for answers and the few replies she received in return.

A few years ago Kail sent several notebooks out to attorneys around the state, but no one was willing to pursue a civil case against Louisa County or state officials.

But just like prison time for her father, Kail said she was never hoping to make money off her years of abuse. She just wanted some answers as to what happened and gain some hope that it wouldn’t happen to someone else.

Last year, Kail worked with Bell on legislation that extended the number of years agencies must keep records of substantiated sexual abuse cases from seven to 25 years after the original complaint.

Bell said Kail’s story resonated with him and his staff and inspired them to help in whatever way they could.

“She had been so dogged in trying to get answers,” Bell said. “It’s a major credit to Malinda that she fought for those records. She just wouldn’t give up.”

The legislation will help in future cases, but Kail still wonders if it’s enough to keep other cases from falling by the wayside.

“I just want to know this won’t happen to someone else,” Kail said. “I want people to know that if something like this happened to them they should be able to get answers.”