Trial begins for man charged with child sex crimes

PALMER — Trial began Wednesday for a man accused of raping two generations of women.

“This is a case about family secrets; a family secret going back to the late 1990s,” prosecutor Trina Sears told jurors on the opening day of trial for Lenard Johnson.

But Johnson’s attorney, Elizabeth Varela, said that Sears would not be able to prove what she claims happened.

“Hold the state to their burden,” Varela told jurors. “I believe they will fail.”

According to Sears, the case began the summer one of Johnson’s stepdaughters was preparing for her freshman year at Colony High School. It began with inappropriate touching.

“It gets much worse,” Sears said.

Eventually, Johnson is getting about as close to full-on sex as a person can get without fully consummating the act. Sears said what he did amounts to sexual abuse of a minor in the first degree, the most serious type of child sexual abuse.

It lasted for years, sometimes happening twice a week. Sears said that the house they lived in then had bats in the attic, bats the family was trying to figure out how to get rid of.

A lot of the abuse happened while Johnson and the girl were in the attic, ostensibly studying the bats.

“Whenever he told her, ‘let’s go look at the bats,’ she knew that’s what was going to happen,” Sears said.

When Johnson moved on to the girl’s sister, the situation came to a head. The sister, Sears said, was always the more rebellious of the two. Johnson’s predations lasted two weeks before the younger sister blurted out what was going on in an argument with her mother.

Police got involved and there was an investigation, but the case fell apart. Varela noted that it fell apart mainly because of what the older sister told law enforcement. Varela said she called her sister a liar.

Sears acknowledged the girl denied there was any abuse. She didn’t want to rip her family apart.

So the younger sister was shipped out of state. Johnson came back to the family, and the abuse stopped for about a decade. Sears said the older sister now felt she could say no to Johnson, even when he begged her for sex.

“He would beg her like a kid begs for candy,” Sears said.

After time in the military, Johnson’s stepdaughter returned to Alaska. She now had children of her own. She worried about letting her daughter stay with her parents.

But the abuse was so long ago and she believed Johnson when he said he’d never abused another girl and never would. And her daughter was only 6 or 7. Johnson hadn’t started abusing her until she was a teenager.

So she let her grandparents babysit when she went to do her duties in the National Guard.

Then, in June 2011, her daughter was playing inappropriately with other children at day care. The workers there talked to the girl and she told them she’d been having sex with her grandpa.

At first the girl’s mother told Alaska State Troopers she’d never been abused by Johnson. Sears said she wanted to wait to see exactly what her daughter told troopers before revealing her own family secret.

When her daughter described essentially the same sort of abuse — everything but fully consummated sex — she decided to tell troopers her own story.

She wore a wire and allowed law enforcement to record conversations she had with her stepfather. He confirmed a lot of her allegations.

On the recordings that the jury will hear, Sears said, Johnson tells his daughter that he would tell her child, “You deserve better from grandpa.”

Johnson asks him if he can forgive himself for what he did to her and her daughter, Sears said. “He says, ‘That’s a good question. I haven’t really thought about forgiving myself.’”

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.