THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 11, 1996 TAG: 9608110074
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON FRANK, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 101 lines
They are a generation apart in age. They live in separate cities. They have different parents.
But the two females - one 33 and the other 14 - shared a dark secret. They say the same man, 53-year-old Howard W. Edwards Sr., molested them at an early age and continued during their teenage years.
It took the 14-year-old Virginia Beach girl to blow the whistle on Edwards, a retired Chesapeake firefighter, before the 33-year-old Chesapeake woman filed charges against him for crimes she alleges took place in the 1970s.
Edwards was sentenced this week to 42 years in prison by Circuit Judge A. Bonwill Shockley in Virginia Beach after he pleaded guilty to seven sex crimes against the 14-year-old. The sexual activity began when the girl was 8 or 9.
Shockley suspended 25 years of the sentence. Edwards probably will serve about 10 years in prison.
After his release, he will be on supervised probation, and he was ordered by Shockley not to live in households with juveniles.
On Aug. 29, Edwards will have a preliminary hearing in Chesapeake on five counts of criminal sexual acts against the older woman, who had been his stepdaughter. The woman says the abuse began as early as 1975, when she was almost 12, possibly earlier.
``It happened hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times,'' the woman said during an interview.
But for years, she remained silent - partly, she said, because Edwards was in many ways a good father.
Every year, he took the family, which included two other children, on vacations to Tennessee, North Carolina and Busch Gardens. He provided them with homes at different times in several middle-class Chesapeake neighborhoods. And he provided the family necessities with the salary he earned during a successful career in the Chesapeake Fire Department, where he won two lifesaver awards and was regarded as dependable and competent.
``In a lot of ways he was a good person,'' said Roger Schafer, the Virginia Beach attorney who represented Edwards, in an interview after the sentencing. ``Sometimes that is hard to believe for somebody from the outside looking in, that he has a good side to him.''
But Edwards' darker side also included an intimidating violent streak, which allowed him to enforce a code of silence about the illicit sexual activity, the 33-year-old woman said.
``He threatened to kill me, and he threatened to kill my mom,'' the woman said. ``And he beat the hell out of me on several occasions.''
The intercourse began when the woman was about 12, she said.
``I know he took my virginity when I was one month short of being 12,'' she said. ``Before that, I can remember only bits and pieces.''
Often, Edwards would come to her bed in the middle of the night, with her mother asleep in another room, she said. Other times, he would wait until the two were alone in the house before he approached her.
But the abuse occurred almost every day, she said.
``He did it every chance he got,'' the woman said.
It turned her adolescent years into a bizarre time when she wasn't allowed to date, couldn't stay out after dark and was forbidden to have normal friendships with boys.
``Heaven forbid if a boy called my house,'' the woman said.
``He stole what should have been the most memorable years of my life,'' she said. ``It was like I was his girlfriend.''
The abuse went on until the woman turned 17, she said.
``That's when I realized I couldn't take it and ran away from home,'' she said.
She borrowed $55 from a friend, she remembered, and took a bus to Tennessee, where she had family.
By the time the woman returned to Hampton Roads, Edwards was no longer living with her mother. Eventually, they were divorced.
The lives of Edwards' two female victims first became intertwined in 1988.
That's when the woman said she attempted to head off Edwards' abuse of the young girl when she visited Edwards in Virginia Beach. She claims that she confronted Edwards, and promised that if he repeated his abuse, she would see him burn in hell.
Edwards ignored the threat and began abusing the girl. It was not until the fall of 1995 that the girl's abuse came to light.
Friends at her school in Virginia Beach noticed that she was depressed. Once school officials got involved, the girl reported the abuse.
Then, in November 1995, the woman got a telephone call from Virginia Beach authorities who were investigating the girl's claims.
They wanted to know whether, as a child, she had been molested by Howard W. Edwards Sr. ``It did not surprise me one bit when I got that telephone call,'' she said.
Almost immediately, Edwards admitted to authorities that the girl's allegations were true. He pleaded guilty in June.
Edwards admitted to sexually abusing the girl hundreds of times from about 1990 until 1995.
``It happened often, frequently,'' Prosecutor Afshin Farashahi said in an interview. ``The victim said every day.''
The young girl's courage in coming forward was a double-edged sword for the woman. On the one hand, it brought back the horrors of her childhood.
But it also gave her the confidence to file her own charges against Edwards, something she had sworn she would do if Edwards ever molested again.
``I was only keeping the promise I made to him,'' she said.
Edwards, who was being held in the Virginia Beach city jail, has yet to enter a plea in her case. He declined to be interviewed last week.
The woman, who is now raising a family in a town west of Hampton Roads, said she is not seeking revenge. She doesn't want Edwards to go to prison.
``He is sick, he could not stop,'' the woman said. ``I don't believe he needs jail time. But he does need help.''
KEYWORDS: CHILD MOLESTER by CNB