A 40-year-old woman accused of helping her husband sexually abuse her children told a Denver jury Thursday that there was no escape from her violent marriage.
For nearly two decades, she said, her husband told her he would kill her if she left. She said he threatened to kill the children, too, if she didn’t force them to participate in sex acts with him.
She said she had a duty to protect the children.
“You can’t leave,” she said. “My children’s lives depended on me being there.”
The husband has pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual assault on a child and faces up to life in prison for the assaults on the boy and girl.
The woman is facing 24 criminal counts, including sexual assault on a child and aggravated incest. The Denver Post is not using her name to avoid identifying the children.
The woman is accused by prosecutors of dressing her son as a schoolgirl, painting his face with makeup and then leading him to his stepfather. She also is accused of taking her daughter, now 10, to her husband regularly so he could rape her.
She testified that she never wanted to participate but was often beaten until the moment she went to the boy and gave him the clothing.
“He said I had to watch and if I didn’t he’d hurt (the boy) and he’d hurt me,” she told the jurors. The visibly distraught woman frequently wept.
She said she met her husband in 1986 when she was 20 and that within two years he became obsessively controlling, telling her she couldn’t even visit her mother. It was about this time the physical abuse began, usually once or twice a month.
But by 1994, when they moved to southwest Denver, the abuse occurred almost daily, she said. From 1994 until August 2004, she said, she routinely suffered severe physical abuse.
On one occasion, she testified, her husband was so angry about a dirty bathroom that he made her lick the toilet bowl.
But the regular abuse came in many forms, she said, including being hit with a closed fist, slapped, kicked, violently grabbed, choked and hit by flying TV remote controls and shoes. She said she was also shot once with a “high-pressured BB gun.”
She said other “punishment” included being forced to eat soap, hot peppers and hot sauce.
Over the decades, she said, her husband claimed he belonged to the Mafia and could track her down if she fled. And he warned her never to talk to police.
“He said if I ever talked to the police, he’d come and find me and kill me and then kill the kids,” the woman said.
Her death would be “slow and painful” and then he would kill himself, she said he warned.
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at hpankratz@denverpost.com or 303-820-1939.
