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station to turn him in, but no one would believe her. They called her stepfather to come pick her up, which is why she knew she had to flee.
    And there was one more thing, Brianna said, her voice softer than ever. Earlier that summer, just before coming to Evergreen,she had gotten to know a security guard who worked in downtown Vancouver. One day while the two of them were sitting in his car, she said, he pulled down his pants, then pulled down her pants, and forced her to have intercourse. “He raped me. He raped me. He raped me,” she repeated over and over, tears streaming down her face. “I wanted to kill myself. I began to think about standing on an overpass and jumping off.”
    “Here was this beautiful girl who had been forced to endure unimaginable atrocities,” Ken would later say. “And yet here she was at Evergreen, wanting to make something of herself in life. I wanted to help. I wanted to make her happy. I wanted her to know that someone cared for her.”
    He took her to the school’s Sadie Hawkins dance, where they dressed in matching blue overalls and crimson shirts. When the disc jockey played Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One,” he escorted her onto the dance floor, looked her in the eyes, and said, “I love you.”
    “I love you, too,” Brianna replied.
    Ken pushed her hair back and kissed her on the mouth. Then he kissed her again.
    “I was sixteen, and she was sixteen,” he recalled. “It was the perfect teenage romance. I couldn’t imagine that anything could go wrong.”
WICHITA FALLS, TEXAS—1986
    After Treva had spent five months at the state hospital, the doctors declared that she was no longer suicidal or severely depressed. Her biggest issue, said her adolescent-unit therapist, was that she was “unpredictable.” She was discharged in October 1986, yet even then no one was sure what to do with her. Treva begged her social workers not to return her to her parents, which suited Carl and Patsy just fine. They didn’t want her home, they said, until she recanted her rape story.
    It was finally decided that Treva would be sent to the Lena PopeHome, the Fort Worth residential treatment center for troubled adolescents. There, counselors came up with a therapeutic plan to improve her skills in “self-confidence” and “to develop and maintain interpersonal relationships.” She was enrolled at nearby Arlington Heights High School so that she could finish her senior year.
    In June 1987 she wore a beautiful blue graduation gown as she walked across the stage to receive her diploma, smiling politely at the principal. Treva had just turned 18, and by law she could no longer be under juvenile supervision. She was completely on her own. When her counselors at Lena Pope asked what she would do next, she said she planned to apply to a Bible college that didn’t require an SAT test. “All I want is to be and to feel normal,” she wrote to one of her social workers before she left state care. “I want to live life, but I want it to be normal and most of all, I want to live a normal life.”
    Treva did return to Electra for a couple of days. Although she refused to go to her parents’ home, she visited with her three older sisters—Carlene, Kim, and Sue. “Treva, honey, what you said about Daddy is still breaking his heart,” said Carlene. “You need to go apologize.”
    Treva did not respond. She kept her eyes locked on the floor.
    Each of the sisters asked Treva what was bothering her, but the truth was that they didn’t really need to be told. They knew why Treva didn’t want to return to that house. They knew what she had endured there—because they had endured it themselves. When they were children, they too had lain awake in their own beds at night, praying that he would not come to touch them.
    “He” was not their dad. “He” was their father’s older brother, Uncle Billy Ray. He was a Vietnam veteran, divorced and a heavy drinker, and he often stayed at the