Rape lie recanted; WA father freed after 9 years
Apr 2, 2012, 10:34 AM | Updated: 2:57 pm
After serving nearly a decade, Thomas Edward Kennedy was released last week and all charges against him were dismissed. Reached Friday by The Daily News, he declined to comment, saying he's simply trying to get on with his life.
A Longview man who was convicted of raping his 11-year-old daughter back in 2001 has been set free after she told police she lied about the abuse.
Cassandra Kennedy, who is now 23, told police in January that she made up the rape allegations when she was a child. According to The Daily News, it was guilt that led her to recant the story.
“I did a horrible thing,” Kennedy said, according to a police report. “It’s not OK.”
Her father, Thomas Edward Kennedy, denied the rape allegations at the time but was convicted and sentenced to more than 15 years in prison. After serving nearly a decade, he was released last week and all charges against him were dismissed. Reached Friday by the newspaper, he declined to comment, saying he’s simply trying to get on with his life.
Prosecutors, however, are unsure whether his daughter lied in 2001 or is lying now. Cowlitz County Prosecutor Sue Baur said there was sufficient evidence for a jury to convict Kennedy at the time.
“It’s impossible for anyone to know what the truth is, isn’t it?” Baur said. “There is basically no way that a jury now would be able to convict … when she’s recanting now. But, technically that doesn’t mean that anybody has made a finding that she lied back then.”
Baur said her office will not seek to have the case tried again, and that the statute of limitations prevents her office from charging the daughter with false reporting.
In recent months, Cassandra Kennedy has been staying at Mountain Ministries, a Christian addiction treatment center. Gary Miller, the organization’s director, said she was in Mexico doing missionary work and couldn’t be reached.
She told detectives this year that she wanted to talk about her father’s conviction, according to investigative reports. Kennedy told police her father never touched her.
“I just want him to be out and freed,” Kennedy said in her interview with detectives. Then, she said, “I will be free on the inside.”
Kennedy said she got the idea of setting up her father from a friend whose stepfather was sent to prison for a child sex crime.
“I thought that is what I would do to make my dad go away,” she told police. “I wanted him to love me, and I didn’t think he did at that time.”
Kennedy said she made up the rape story largely because her father disappointed her. “I took my own vengeance,” she told police
The jury convicted Thomas Kennedy of three counts of first-degree rape of a child and the conviction had been upheld on appeal.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
