Chilhood lies nothing new please read this article, this happened in America in 2002 the same is still happening here in Scotland, even in Lewis, we must be more proactive to make these things public knowledge...

Childhood lie tears family's lives apart

July 28, 2002

By Matthew Boedy

HILDA, S.C. - This is a story about a lie - the kind of lie told with one hand on a Bible.

Two people now say that lie, which they told as children in a Barnwell courtroom, branded two people as child molesters.

The lie sent their mother and her boyfriend to prison, where she was raped and he was almost stabbed to death.

The boyfriend - Tracey Aaron Hutson - is haunted by the lie.

"It's affected me in ways no one will ever know. It's affected me in ways I would never tell people about. It's basically destroyed my life," the 41-year-old said.

Since getting out of prison April 12, Mr. Hutson has tried continually to find work.

He lives in obscurity, staying with his mother outside Barnwell. But he wants people to know why he spent 12 years and seven months behind steel bars, although he would not meet with a reporter or agree to be photographed for this story.

"There were a lot of lives changed because of this," Mr. Hutson said. "There were a lot of lives destroyed because of this."

The children who told lies about Mr. Hutson are now responsible for his freedom.

In 1991, when they were 7 and 6 years old, they were the key witnesses in a trial at which Mr. Hutson was convicted of child molestation and sent to prison for 40 years. As they grew older, the children insisted that they were forced to lie. In 1999, Mr. Hutson filed an appeal based on that and won a new trial.

Prosecutors decided not to try Mr. Hutson again, thereby giving him his freedom from prison. Without the children's testimony, they said, they didn't think they could have obtained a conviction again.

In 1990, Mr. Hutson was a successful auto body repairman in Barnwell County. In January, he met a young woman - Patricia Owens. She lived in a manufactured home behind her parents' house, just inside the city limits of Hilda. Patty, then 24, had two children and an ex-husband.

Mr. Hutson liked her, and the children liked him. By spring she was pregnant with his baby.

Children were the center of Ms. Owens' life. Frank Owens was named after his father, though his family called him "Bo" because in a crowd there often were too many Franks.

Her daughter, Alicia Robertson, was protected by her brother, as she is to this day.

Ms. Owens had dropped out of school in the seventh grade. She married at 14 and became a stripper in south Florida at 20. She returned to South Carolina so her parents could help raise the children.

Today, she is a short, worn woman with long, ragged hair. She lives in the trailer where she lived 12 years ago. But now she has two more children, one from a prison rape, she said, and one from Mr. Hutson.

Unlike Mr. Hutson, Ms. Owens, 36, still bears the scarlet title of child molester. She pleaded guilty the day Mr. Hutson was convicted, fearing a longer sentence if she put the state and her children through another trial. She was sentenced to 10 years but served only four, getting out in 1995.

The same fear of a hefty punishment drove Mr. Hutson's brother Michael Zorn to plead guilty to molesting Alicia, although he denies his guilt.

Then 17, Mr. Zorn was sentenced to 20 months in prison. He must have his picture taken annually for the state's sex offender database.

"I believe it was like a life sentence," said Mr. Zorn, 29.

Today Patricia Owens (center) is again living in her manufactured home in Hilda, S.C., with Alicia Robertson and Frank "Bo" Owens, and she now has two other children.
When he looks at his 3-year-old daughter, Mr. Zorn wonders what could be done to clear his name. She's the one who will be most affected by this, he said. Someday some parent is going to bar a child from spending the night with her because of her daddy.

"I think about it every day," Mr. Zorn said. "What else can I do? What else can I do?"

Like Ms. Owens, he said he doesn't have the money to try to clear his name.

Ms. Owens said the lie her children told haunts her as well.

"Ever since this happened, I've never had a normal life," she said.

One night in September 1990 she and Mr. Hutson had eaten dinner at a seafood restaurant in Blackville. Ms. Owens' brother Robert McGill and his wife, Sherry, had the two children, but when the couple returned from dinner the children were not at the relatives' house. Ms. Owens and Mr. Hutson decided to go home and wait.

The people who showed up hours later were Barnwell County sheriff's deputies. That night, the children now say, they were tricked by the relatives into telling lies about their mother and Mr. Hutson.

"Most of this stuff, they put in our heads," said Mr. Owens, now 19.

Talk of abuse began when Alicia was in the bathroom, the children recalled. Ms. McGill, now Sherry Renew, and her sister Tammy Collins came in and started asking questions.

At a hearing on Mr. Hutson's appeal last year, Mr. Owens said his aunts "wouldn't take no for an answer." He and his sister said they were physically examined by the aunts for abuse and then were taken to a hospital. The aunts would not comment for this story.

Investigators and social services officials arrived to question Mr. Hutson and Ms. Owens. The children were placed in foster care.

Aa the state prepared for trial, the children were handed dolls to show how the abuse had occurred. They also drew pictures, circling on dolls the places they said Mr. Hutson had touched them. Sometimes, Mr. Owens said, he allowed investigators to draw the circles because he couldn't remember.

Mr. Hutson was charged with molesting the children and forcing them to have sex with him and each other. Ms. Owens was charged with sexual exploitation - knowing about and encouraging the abuse.

In April 1991, Mr. Hutson was convicted by a jury of six men and six women.The children and some medical experts testified during the two-day trial, but their testimony was inconclusive, according to Mr. Hutson's trial attorney, Tim Moore.

According to a transcript of the trial, Bo Owens was asked whether he knew the difference between a lie and the truth. He said yes. He was asked whether telling the truth was good or bad. He said good.

And then he was asked what happens when children lie.

"Something bad," he replied.

Then he started to tell jurors the horrifying details that destroyed Mr. Hutson, then Ms. Owens, and now him and his sister.

He said pictures were taken of them, naked children having sex, although no photos were introduced as evidence at the trial. He said paddles were used when the children didn't have sex.

Today those children and the mother they once put in prison live together in bitterness and silence.

Mr. Owens is angry. He's angry at the police, the social services officials, his aunts. And he's angry that he waited so long to tell.

"I started getting older, and I got to the point where I wasn't going to stay quiet anymore," he said.

Ms. Robertson, 18, barely speaks about what has become of her life, her memory just as weak as it was at the trial. She places her hand over her tummy, growing bigger by the day. Her first child is due in January.

THE TWO SAID THEY lied - and told deeper and deeper lies - to get home to their maternal grandmother, with whom they lived after the trial.

Ms. Robertson is haunted by not only the lie, but also the bad things that came from the lie. She shakes her head with authority when asked whether she will tell her child about what has happened.

"I try not to live in the past," she said.

She thinks that by not talking about it, it will all go away. That hasn't happened.

"That's the thing about this, it's still in my mind," she said. "It's like it happened yesterday."

Mr. Owens knows what his sister is feeling. That's why he's hoping to find counseling, where he can tell someone the truth about it all. That's also why he wants Alicia to talk, to acknowledge the horrible details.

"You can't keep it inside. It'll blow up like a stick of dynamite," he tells her, violently shaking the cigarette in his hand.

He wants the memories of the lie and his silence to fade too. He said he's willing to erase everything he's ever known to
be good, to also destroy the bad.

"The only way for that to happen is for me to get in a car wreck and get amnesia," he said. "That's the way I want it. Seriously, I would. It's just stuck up in there. You know it. You've lived through it."

It could have all been different. The lie could have stayed a lie.

At trial, Mr. Hutson's lawyer said, he knew the children were lying. He knew they had been coached.

He knew that because Bo, during his testimony, described a stage in Barnwell where his mom had made them dance naked. Mr. Moore points out that there was no such place in Barnwell.

"Everybody on the jury knew there was no place like that, and they still convicted him," Mr. Moore said. "Children's testimony is very powerful. What was alleged to have happened was a horrible thing - the only problem was it didn't happen."

MR. MOORE SAID HE doesn't blame the jury. Trials involve believing one person over another. In this case, jurors believed children over adults.

The case raises troubling questions about not only how child sexual abuse is investigated and tried, but also how much weight can be given to the testimony of young children.

"Sexual abuse cases, especially those where family relations are involved, are one of the most difficult cases," said 2nd Circuit Solicitor Barbara Morgan.

Her office handled the case, but she did not personally prosecute it. Ms. Morgan did decide not to retry Mr. Hutson when a judge ordered a new trial.

Ms. Morgan's decision then opened the prison gates for Mr. Hutson.

She said the decision was frustrating because the case is not as black and white as the family believes.

"They're not saying he is completely innocent," Ms. Morgan said.

Ms. Morgan said all recantations must be examined. But she also said today there are better ways to investigate sexual abuse of a child.

Psychiatrists, social workers, prosecutors, family - they all can surround a child so they won't feel the victimization that leads them to keep the abuse to themselves.

Ms. Morgan admits that children do tell prosecutors what they want to hear sometimes. But in most cases, she said, they recant to go home, not dig deeper holes to get the same result.

Given their level of sophistication at such a young age, she said, "these kids had to have been involved in something."

Mr. Moore agrees.

"I'm not saying these children weren't subjected to things they should not have been subjected to," he said. "I'm just saying it wasn't my guy who did it."