Report of Rape Brings Justice 25 Years Later : Crimes: A Sunland woman’s father is convicted after she persuades prosecutors in Wyoming, which has no statute of limitations in such cases, to file charges against him.

In an extremely unusual case that could not have been prosecuted in California, the father of a 38-year-old Sunland woman has been convicted in Wyoming of raping his daughter and niece more than 25 years ago.

Prompted by psychological counseling, Lorretta Woodbury contacted Wyoming authorities in January and asked them to prosecute her father, Lloyd Calvin Woodbury, for sexually molesting her and a cousin in the late 1950s and early ‘60s.

As a result of Woodbury’s efforts, her father was charged in August with five felony sexual abuse counts in connection with assaults on Woodbury, his niece and a third girl, also a niece, whose alleged molestation came to light after Wyoming authorities began an investigation.

Wyoming authorities believe that the case is one of the oldest non-murder cases in that state and probably in the nation. Filing the case was possible because Wyoming, unlike most other states, has no statute of limitations on criminal cases, officials said. In California, the statute of limitations ranges from two to six years for all crimes except murder, which has no time limit, authorities said.

Now 73 and living in Ingram, Tex., Lloyd Woodbury pleaded guilty Nov. 28 in Carbon County to having raped his daughter, then 10, in the summer of 1962 and his niece, then 13, in the summer of 1958.

The assaults occurred in Rawlins, a city of 8,000 in south-central Wyoming, where the family lived at the time, said Lorretta Woodbury, a free-lance commercial artist who moved to the San Fernando Valley two years ago.

As part of a plea bargain, prosecutors dropped additional accusations that Woodbury took “indecent liberties� with another 8-year-old niece in 1958 and with his daughter in 1959 and that he raped his daughter in 1965.

Wyoming 2nd Judicial District Judge Larry Lehman sentenced Woodbury, a retired taxidermist and bronze sculptor, to five years probation and ordered him to undergo counseling and to avoid contact with the victims. He must avoid being around children unless another adult is present, said Carbon County Prosecuting Atty. Kurt Kelly.

Lorretta Woodbury said psychological counseling she received at the Valley Trauma Center at Cal State Northridge made her decide to try to have her father prosecuted.

“I never dreamed for five minutes that they would do anything with it,� she said in a telephone interview. “Basically what I was doing was venting. Instead of keeping all this stuff to myself and letting myself be a victim, I was starting to say I am not going to keep quiet anymore.�

Kelly at first told Lorretta Woodbury that it would be practically impossible to find enough evidence to prosecute so old a case. Undeterred, she provided more details, persuading Kelly to turn the case over to the Carbon County Sheriff’s Department.

Although decades had passed, investigators emerged with what Kelly considered strong evidence: All three women, independently, told similar stories, corroborating each other. Further corroboration came from relatives and other witnesses who confirmed that the assaults had been reported to them decades ago, the prosecutor added.

Lloyd Woodbury, interviewed by phone in Texas, said he waived extradition and pleaded guilty to the charges “to keep from going to court.� He denied raping his daughter or nieces.

“I had relations with one of the friends but there was no rape to it. Just sexual relations,� Lloyd Woodbury said. “She’d been married. It was just one of those things, you know.�

He accused his daughter of making the allegations in retaliation for his accusations against her of committing grand theft seven years ago while living in Texas.

The daughter denied her father’s allegations and said she pleaded no contest to embezzlement charges only to avoid going to trial.

Born in Casper, Wyo., to parents who soon divorced, Lorretta Woodbury lived with her mother and on a welfare ranch before being sent to live with her father and stepmother at age 7.

According to Woodbury, the abuse started almost immediately. She said her father molested her in his taxidermy shop and ordered her not to talk about what he said was “something special between fathers and daughters.�

The abuse escalated to mutual oral sex and, on her 10th birthday, to intercourse, said Woodbury, who remembers her father assaulting her in his truck outside town and then taking her home to eat birthday cake.

Her father threatened to send her to reform school if she told anyone and told her that he had friends at the post office who would intercept any letters she tried to write seeking help, she said.

“At that age, you believe that stuff,� said Woodbury, who only later learned that her father was also molesting a cousin. “I didn’t feel good about it but I didn’t feel there was much I could do about it. I felt it was all my fault and I deserved it.

“He bought me just about anything I wanted. I had motorcycles and horses. I was in 4-H, junior choir, went to church and taught vacation Bible School.� But she recalls having severe problems in school.

“I remember when they had the first class on sex education, I felt like crawling under the table at school because my dad and I had been doing that,� she said.

The molestation continued, about three times a week in her father’s shop, the barn, the truck--even in the house at night, with her stepmother asleep in another room, Woodbury recalled. Altogether, the abuse continued for seven years, she said.

The molestation ended after Lorretta Woodbury’s stepsister came to visit. Woodbury wrote a note to her mother detailing the sexual abuse and sewed it into her sister’s coat, she recalled.

Social workers removed the girl, then 14, from home a few weeks later but her father was never prosecuted. Authorities said law enforcement officials were reluctant to prosecute such cases in past years.

Lorretta Woodbury spent nearly two years in a state mental hospital and held a series of jobs before moving to Texas at 31 to be near her father and her ailing stepmother, whom she loved. There, she said, she began confronting her father about the past abuse.

After receiving probation on the embezzlement conviction, she came West again, settling two years ago in the Valley. She began attending Metropolitan Community Church. Urged by church officials to seek help in dealing with the incest in her background, she sought counseling.

“I feel relieved, peaceful,� she said about reporting the abuse, adding that she hopes that her example will “help other incest victims. Our lives are worth something.�