Joe Lavigne, Jr.

Joe Lavigne vividly remembers the February morning he found his five-year-old daughter naked and crying in their second floor bathroom. She looked pale, sick and there was a thick, dark substance covering her legs. She told him she'd had an accident while trying to use the bathroom, so he started to help her clean herself.

It didn’t immediately occur to him that something far worse was wrong, it didn’t occur to him that his daughter hadn’t suffered an accident, but something intentional. It didn’t occur to him that this would be one of the last times he'd see her until his trial for her rape almost a year later.

According to his trial testimony, Mr. Lavigne went for his wife, Jamie, to get help. It was just after 7 a.m. and Mrs. Lavigne was finally drifting back to sleep again after waking up an hour or so before to take some pain medication. She ran some water in the bathtub and started lecturing her daughter about how to properly use the toilet. But the dark substance on her legs turned the water a bright red and they realized something was wrong.

Mrs. Lavigne asked her daughter, "did someone do something to you?"

"Daddy took me outside to the church parking lot," she told her mother. Mrs. Lavigne looked at her husband, who'd been standing in the bathroom doorway. He looked as shocked as she did. It was impossible, she thought, because she knew her husband had been asleep in bed with her all night, according to her own testimony.

Mrs. Lavigne asked her daughter again what had happened and she said "Daddy took me outside and put his pee pee in me." She turned to her husband and said "I think someone hurt our daughter," glancing over the fact that her daughter was calling that someone "daddy." To Mrs. Lavigne it was an off-handed statement from a hurt and confused little girl that had been through a traumatic—devastating— experience. She didn't give the notion of her husband as suspect a second thought, even when he bolted from the room.

He went to the kitchen, where he found their back door hanging open. He called out, asking his daughter if she'd left it that way. Yes, she had, she told her parents. It was how she came back in the house after being left alone outside.

They both teetered for a moment, unable to decide what had really happened and how serious the situation was, knowing that if they involved the police they'd have to admit to themselves that their five-year-old had been raped. "You know there'll be an investigation," Mr. Lavigne told his wife, and with that, called 911. What he didn't say at the time was that he knew he'd also be a suspect.