Alfred Cash, his daughter said, "doesn't deserve his freedom."
Receiving word last month that convicted rapist Alfred William Cash had been arrested for failing to register as a sex offender in Indiana and Ohio brought back devastating memories for Marcey Renee Williams, a resident of upstate New York.
Cash, 50, is Williams' father.
He is also the man who sexually assaulted her repeatedly during the early years of her life, spent in both Muncie and Clarksville, Tenn., Williams said in a recent interview.
"One minute, he's beating you," she said of her early childhood. "The next minute, he's the best dad in the world. And then that night, he sneaks into your room."
Among Williams' earliest memories is when another relative walked in to find the pre-schooler engaged in a sex act with her father.
The woman at first ordered Cash to pack his things and leave, but later relented, in part because of tears being shed by his young victim.
"He was my daddy," Williams recalled. "I loved him."
That love aside, the former Muncie resident remembers that her father told her more than once "that he would burn my house down with my mother and me in it" if she told anyone about their secret.
Eventually removed from the custody of her parents, Williams was aware her father at some point went to prison, but she didn't know why.
Court records show Cash was living in Muncie in the summer of 1990 when he was arrested on allegations he had raped a girlfriend's 12-year-old daughter in Oklahoma City.
Cash was convicted of first-degree rape and sentenced to 20 years in an Oklahoma prison. He was released on parole in 1998, however, and eventually returned to Muncie.
Indecent exposure
According to court documents, Alfred Cash divided his post-prison years between his hometown of Muncie and Dayton, Ohio, where he was arrested in early September after allegedly exposing himself to residents of a downtown apartment building where he had been staying.
Cash, who most recently lived locally in the 2900 block of East Ninth Street, was charged last November with failing to register with Delaware County authorities as a sex or violent offender, a Class D felony carrying a standard 18-month prison term.
Since his recent arrest, he's been indicted by a federal grand jury in Dayton for violating the Adam Walsh Act, the law adopted in 2006 that made it a federal crime for "unregistered sex offenders to travel in interstate commerce," according to Jerry Rose, case deputy with the U.S. marshal's office in that Ohio city.
If convicted of that offense, Cash faces up to 10 years in federal prison, Rose said.
Authorities in Miami County, Ohio, have also preliminarily charged Cash with two counts of gross sexual imposition, and a single count of attempting to commit the same crime.
Those allegations stem from Cash's encounters with two children under the age of 13, according to Chris Williams, a Dayton police lieutenant.
A brief reunion
Marcey Williams -- at that point knowing little about Cash's history of misconduct other than that directed at her -- had made contact with her father in recent years, prompting a reunion of sorts that saw the sex offender visit his daughter in New York on more than one occasion.
"I called him," she recalled. "He said he had found God in prison. ... How was I to know he was still evil?"
The last visit, in the fall of 2007, saw Cash stay at his daughter's home for a few days.
"We never talked about it," she said of the secrets that marred her childhood. "We were trying to rebuild a relationship."
Williams and her husband did, however, closely monitor Cash's dealings with their children.
"He was the perfect grandpa," she said. He would sing gospel songs and pray with members of her husband's family.
Within a week, however, Williams determined that her father had used her home computer to access pornography, including images of children.
Cash was told to leave and not return.
According to Williams, as her husband drove Cash to the local bus station, he urged his father-in-law to "get help" for the compulsive behavior that he apparently could not control.
Her father's response, Williams said, was, "I don't need no f------ help."
'He's a chameleon'
Williams said she has since done her own investigation of sorts into her father's life in the years after he destroyed her innocence more than a quarter-century ago.
"He's a chameleon," she said, with a history of becoming involved with church youth groups.
"He gets in good with the church," she said. "He gets in good with the parents."
If her father has victimized other children over the years, Williams hopes they will now come forward -- as she is willing to do.
Delaware County Prosecutor Mark McKinney last week said his office would "certainly look at" any allegations of sexual abuse Williams formally lodged against her father.
In Indiana, the statute of limitations on some sex crimes against children runs until the alleged victim reaches their 31st birthday. Williams will turn 30 in early December.
With no physical evidence, such a prosecution of a decades-old crime would have to include "some pretty strong corroborating evidence," McKinney said.
Reliving her childhood trauma on the witness stand would be worth it if it prevented other children from being harmed, Williams said.
Alfred Cash, his daughter said, "doesn't deserve his freedom."
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment