Behind a Model Family Was the Shadow of a Molester

Sitting on the couch of her apartment in San Juan Capistrano, with a fan managing to stir up a faint breeze, Valerie is digging through a pile of fading newspaper clippings.

Here a photograph shows Valerie and her husband, Ron, the one with the handlebar mustache, at a church rummage sale. There they are delivering Christmas presents to a Mexican orphanage. The family floats, labors of love built after school and on weekends in the garage, won first place in San Juan’s annual parade three years in a row.

Valerie and Ron, each with two children from previous marriages, were like that, always involved, out front, cheerleaders for the American way.

The local Kiwanis Club named them Family of the Year for 1982-83.

It was, in hindsight, all part of a hateful fraud.

Valerie begins to cry now, softly, wiping at her tears under oversize glasses. She is 41 years old, but with her head of thick, gray hair, she looks years beyond that.

Her name is not really Valerie, nor is her husband Ron. These are names that I have given them to make an ugly, common story somewhat easier to tell.

Today Ron is in state prison, in Chino, sentenced in Orange County Superior Court in late June for a term of three years. He gave up his right to a jury trial. To this day, he denies that he did anything wrong.

Judge Ronald E. Owens, however, found this man guilty as charged, of six felony counts of molesting Valerie’s daughter, whom I’ll call Jill, from her days as a preschooler until about the age of 12.

He was, Ron told Jill as part of his threats, simply exercising his paternal rights. He fondled her and forced her to sexually satisfy him. If she told--which for all those years, she did not dare--she would be branded a bad girl, thrown out of the house, without a mother, and not even him, to count on for love.

“He told me that it was OK,” Jill, now 17, says through her tears when we are alone, “He said that this is what people do when they love each other.”

But what Ron did to this girl, abandoned by her natural father when she was 2, had nothing at all to do with love. He systemically isolated her from the rest of the family, always under the guise of fatherly attention, and always simply to facilitate his abuse.

He took her on countless outings alone, “cared” for her after four chin surgeries and brought her into his bed when his wife was not home. During school vacations, he would take her to his job and leave her outside in the family RV. On his breaks, he would visit Jill and demand that she satisfy his perverted needs.

Ron, 42 years old, had never been in trouble with the law before this squalid tale came to light. When he was arrested in the fall of 1988, he was a Kiwanis Club president. His job, as a civilian service center manager at Camp Pendleton, was going well. He taught Sunday school at church.

Valerie says, now, that she should have known. As a mother she is convulsed with guilt and shame. But, really, she asks herself, how could she have read the signs? Most of the time she was at work. And she never suspected that anything could go so wrong.

As it happened, authorities learned of the child abuse when they were called to the family’s home after Valerie had threatened to throw her husband out.

Ron had been seeing another woman, Valerie learned, and had been quietly moving his things out. Her first husband had left Valerie the same way. So this time she surreptitiously changed the locks.

When Ron arrived that night, jiggling his key in the new lock, Valerie opened the door and a fight began. He demanded this, she demanded that. Words exploded into screams. Jill, at her mother’s urging, called 911.

“During all this, I went out to try to comfort Jill,” Valerie says. “The police were with her. They asked me to go back inside. They took her downstairs, for about an hour and a half. That’s when she was telling them everything that had gone on.”

Ron left the family home that night, on orders of police, and a few days later he was arrested. From that night forward, it took more than a year and a half for this molestation case, six violations of California Penal Code section 288 (a), to end--at least in the strict legal sense.

Yet the emotions swirling around this story, like too many others, may never be put completely to rest.

Jill, who received counseling for four months after her stepfather’s arrest, says now that she needs more help. Maybe more therapy will enable her get on with life. She feels adrift and confused.

She dropped out of high school in her sophomore year after her mother told her teachers about the abuse. She says she felt singled out, different. She couldn’t take the stress.

“I thought they knew what he did to me,” Jill says. “And I didn’t like it. I felt disgusted. . . . I just didn’t want to ever go back.”

Today Jill, who works as a drugstore cashier, says hatred sometimes consumes her, and still there is so much fear.

It comes out, she says, in ways she cannot often control.

“I always argue with my mom and my brother,” she says, hardly able to squeeze words from her tears. “Sometimes I think they don’t understand. They don’t see what I’m going through, that I have other things on my mind.”

Child abuse experts say the story of this family is one that they know well. Only Valerie and Ron could be Stephen and Jennifer, or Juan and Yvonne, or anybody else.

Despite what we read in the newspapers, about a stranger, or perhaps a teacher or baby-sitter, molesting one child and then going on to the next, most such abuse happens in the home. Often, though certainly not always, where no one would ever suspect.

Moreover, at times, those closest to the victims simply refuse to see that anything is amiss. They may be ignorant, or willfully blind.

“Can you lay down at night and thank God for what you have done to Ron?” Ron’s mother wrote Valerie in a letter that arrived this week. “We are all for Ron and we know he is innocent and God knows it too. You have to live with it.”

And Ron’s girlfriend, the same he had at the time of his arrest, has stood by his side. She believes that it was Valerie and Jill who simply concocted a string of lies.

Yet years ago, Valerie too might have had trouble believing that something like this could have happened in her home. She trusted Ron and loved him. He had seemed so good with her children.

“It’s hard to realize that you can be with someone for so long and not know them,” she says softly, her voice choking with remorse. “He hasn’t victimized one person, he’s done it to us all. We are all victims of Ron.”