The little girl's mother found her first suicide note when she was nine years old. That is also around the same time she asked her brother to kill her by pushing her from a tree. For years this little girl had nightmares about being abandoned, and hunted, by her father. And nightmares about him hunting her brother and trying to kill him while she did all she knew to protect him, yet it was never enough. She has suffered suicidal thoughts all her life.

When she was about eleven years old she had just opened the gate up by their house and again, her Dad kept on driving. This time she saw the tiny legs of her pet goat Cocomo, who she had bottle fed since birth, fighting against the truck. I do not know if her Dad intentionally targeted him or if Cocomo just got in the way but she saw underneath the truck that Cocomo was fighting to stand up as the truck pushed against him. It was like it all happened in slow motion. Her Dad accelerated and Cocomo finally fell. The back left tire of the truck ran right across his little belly. The truck bounced up and down terribly - it was obvious her Dad had run over something of significant size but he never stopped, not even when he heard her screaming. The mother met the little girl at the front door. Paralyzed with fear she stood there in cut off jeans with scabby knees – tears rolling down her cheeks - as she was shouting . . . "Daddy ran over my goat, Daddy ran over my goat!" She gathered Cocomo in her arms and ran through the house to the back yard where she laid him down underneath the oak tree where she and Kevin had once gathered acorns for their little pig.

Cocomo did not survive, but it took him a week to die. And that little girl told her mother that her Daddy did it on purpose, but even after all the cruel things he had done to even her she couldn't believe he could be so cruel, so the little girl became afraid and never tried to tell anyone again. As far as his cruelty and control over their mother: their Dad tried to drown her in the toilet for cutting her hair, he almost choked her to death for saying the word 'sure' after he had told her never to reply to him with that word again. They suspected he killed her Beagle puppy, Penny, for barking during deer season when she got out of the fence. I mean they heard the gun shot, they heard the silence, but he denied it, even though that pup never came home again and their mother searched and searched for her.

Long after they were gone, when the kids were in their early 30's, their Dad was arrested for child pornography and sexual abuse of four children that lived on a farm near him. The newspapers printed things such as, "you never know what is living next door to you', and people cut the article out and pinned it to bulletin boards, or taped it on bathroom walls of local restaurants. Can you imagine the shame? He still lived in the very town where they had grown up all of their lives, where many of their old friends still lived, and 'the scum living next door' was once that little girl, and that little boy - or so it felt to them. I mean how do you separate it and not feel this way?

A girlfriend of the little girl she had known for many years worked for a lawyer and called her. She said an investigator was coming to question her. When the police arrested her Dad he quickly posted bail and was at home before they searched the house. He had already burned any evidence. They needed her testimony against him in the trial. But she told them to turn around and go home because she was never going to testify, or answer any of their questions. That decision haunted her because you can only imagine there have been other victims that could have been spared had she had the courage to swallow her fears of him and do the right thing.

It is true, a coward dies a thousand deaths . . .

Anyway, when she was sixteen her Dad was hospitalized for shoulder surgery and that's when she seized the opportunity to tell her mother everything. Her brother was already homeless at this point after a fist fight with his Dad that spattered the walls with blood and his kid sister was made to clean it up. Family came to get them the next day.

At the age of sixteen the little boy had become homeless and addicted to drugs and alcohol; in and out of jail. The little girl, at 17, got pregnant in high school. She did graduate, two years late with two children. Not the best start but at least she did it! But then she had an abortion - fathered by her first husband. They got divorced, then remarried two years later. Within four weeks he was having an affair with her fifteen year old cousin and she soon found out she was pregnant again, and gave birth to another son; a son she almost lost twice to death, and many times to the prison system. They got divorced, and she got pregnant again. This time she did not know who the father was.

She was literally giving her heart, body and soul away to strangers looking for love and acceptance but what she did not realize was that a cancer of self loathing was eating her alive: the abortions would compound the hatred she already held for herself, driving her closer and closer to self destruction.

I guess I could go on and on about these kids but I bet many of you are asking, "So where are they now?" We need to know they are ok!  Did the father get his just deserve?