Police: Girl raped, forced to stand before the congregation to apologize, then relocated [View All]

[The Straight Story]

Police: Girl raped, then relocated
13 years later, suspect arrested


After being raped and impregnated by a fellow churchgoer more than twice her age, a 15-year-old Concord girl was forced by Trinity Baptist Church leaders to stand before the congregation to apologize before they helped whisk her out of state, according to the police.

While her pastor, Chuck Phelps, reported the alleged rape in 1997 to state youth officials, Concord police detectives were never able to find the victim. The victim said she was sent to another church member's home in Colorado, where she was home-schooled and not allowed to have contact with others her age. It wasn't until this past February that the victim, who is now 28, decided to come forward after reading about other similar cases, realizing for the first time it wasn't her fault that she had been raped, she told the police.

The police arrested Ernest Willis, 51, of Gilford, last week in connection with the case, accusing him of raping the girl twice - once in the back seat of a car he was teaching her to drive in and again after showing up at her Concord home while her parents were away. He was charged with four felonies - two counts of rape and two counts of having sex with a minor, court records show.

In a statement to the police, the victim said Willis came to her home in the summer of 1997 without warning.

....
"He asked me if I wanted him to take me to a neighboring state where underage abortions were legal . . . and he would pay for an abortion," she told the police. "He then asked me if I wanted him to punch me in the stomach as hard as he could because that might cause a miscarriage."
....

She asked why. "Pastor Phelps then said that (Willis) may have been 99 percent responsible, but I needed to confess my 1 percent guilt in the situation," the victim told the police.

"He told me that I should be happy that I didn't live in Old Testament times because I would have been stoned."

....

http://www.concordmonitor.com/article/police-girl-raped-then-relocated