Daddy’s Girls : Before Raymond Lewis Was Brought to Justice, His Daughters Had to Share Their Darkest Secrets

A LAZY SATURDAY MORNING IN MARCH, 1979. TWO SISTERS SIT IN A GARAGE SORTING through old family photos, looking for images of their heritage they can pass on to their children.

Donna Friess, a college professor married to the mayor of San Juan Capistrano, has driven to nearby Laguna Niguel, to the home of her sister, Jackie Lewis Stack, a dentist. The women go through the big cardboard box of mementos taken from their grandmother’s house after she died, hoping to make four albums--for themselves, their father and their half sister Deirdre.

The sisters pull out studio portraits of their great-grandfather Charles Henry Vincent Lewis, a state senator from Los Angeles, then find the 1901 Los Angeles High School diploma of their grandfather Raymond W. Lewis, his pharmacy license, the early-1900s photos of the first Lewis pharmacies in downtown Los Angeles. There he is again, a man of about 30 posing in an orange grove with his future wife, then a 9-year-old girl in a turn-of-the-century hat. The couple’s only child would be the women’s father, Raymond W. Lewis Jr.

Then, rummaging through their grandfather’s tintypes and memorabilia, they find several bundles of postcards. They are not typical Victorian cards filled with lace and flowers. Donna picks up a sepia card. A girl about 5 years old, a stranger, is smiling, tilting her face against her index fingers. She is adorable. And she is nude.

Quickly, Donna flips to the next card: A 2- or 3-year-old, partially clothed. Donna feels an adrenaline jolt in her chest. She rushes through the cards. A mischievous girl of about 4 draped only in a garland of flowers. Another--two smiling girls lying in the forest. Naked! Oh God. More and more. Naked. Smiling. Little girls.

Her grandfather, too?

Heart thumping, she looks at her sister. They have never spoken of these things. They stare at each other, a beat too long. They say nothing.

The women continue sorting in silence, retying the cards in tidy bundles.

IT WAS A LONG TIME BEFORE JACKIE AND DONNA UNCOVERED THE FULL EXTENT OF THEIR family’s secrets and could speak freely about what had happened in their childhoods. Like the box of photos, their entire adult lives had concealed bundles of memories so disturbing that everyone preferred silence.

But on a brilliant morning this past March, Donna, Jackie and Deirdre, with about a dozen well-dressed relatives, found themselves in a Santa Monica Superior courtroom, hoping to help send their father, Raymond W. Lewis Jr., to prison for the longest term possible.

As deputies unshackled Lewis, the 67-year-old retired aerospace designer sat, turned and, with no expression except curiosity, surveyed his family--his victims.

Donna, 48, Lewis’ firstborn, stared into her lap. Jackie, his second child, 46, watched her father, her chin high as she held her husband’s hand. Deirdre, 40, sat on a bench in the hall outside the courtroom, pressing herself into a corner, afraid.

She, perhaps more than any other sibling, had felt the range of mixed feelings. “I feel sorry for him,” she said that morning. “He always said, ‘Smart people don’t get caught.’ ”

Moments later, her father was sentenced to the maximum 12 years and eight months in prison for molesting Deirdre’s 5-year-old daughter and for committing incest with Deirdre. But the proceedings also revealed that Deirdre and her daughter were not Lewis’ only victims. Seven members of the family--girls and women--disclosed to one another and to the police that they had been molested by Lewis. In some cases, he had intercourse with girls as young as 9.

Donna, who was the last to admit the secret, said she might have kept quiet forever were it not for her desire to protect Deirdre’s younger daughter.

Now the women want the public to know that, however shocking, incest happens even in the most “normal” families. The daughters of Raymond Lewis say they hope to stop the abuse of young children and encourage other victims and their mothers to seek help and, perhaps, justice.

Not all family members are willing to be named here, and Deirdre’s name is changed to protect her 5-year-old daughter, but all other details come from court documents, personal journals and extensive interviews.

For his part, Lewis, now serving time, has repeatedly claimed that his conviction was based on perjury and says he knew of nothing he had done “in the last many years” to hurt his family. His attorney is appealing the verdict.

But the accounts of Lewis’ offspring--told in court and in interviews--paint Lewis as a master manipulator who isolated his children psychologically, pitting one against the other. He justified his abuse with arguments from the Bible, Darwin and agnostic philosophers and protected himself with real and implied threats of violence.

He was able to ensure their silence, or selective amnesia, year after year through friendship, fear, financial entanglements and, ultimately, with the belief that each alone had been “Daddy’s special girl.”

It was to protect the clan’s youngest girl that the adults finally were able to face what had happened to them, rally together and risk confronting their patriarch--a man whose sexual appetites, according to Superior Court Judge Leslie W. Light, inflicted some of the most devastating emotional damage he has ever witnessed.

The worst, say some, is that while Lewis debased his girls, he also doted on them, encouraging them to excel in school and set high goals. Says Jackie: “That conflict--caring and not caring--is what drove us all crazy.”

IN FAMILY PHOTOS TAKEN ABOUT 1948, Raymond Lewis appears as a handsome young father, sitting bare-chested with his two towheaded daughters by their home on Venice beach. As Donna and Jackie play in the sand, he smiles at the lens, relaxed and confident, one arm propped loosely on a knee.

As she testified in court, Donna remembers that the abuse began on her first day of kindergarten. Instead of taking her to school, Lewis drove her back home, where he tickled and chased her, then told her to hold still and then, never, ever, to tell what he had done.

When she was in the fourth grade, he began the “lessons.” Two nights a week, while his wife, Dorothy, was at rehearsal for community light opera, he read to his girls from anthropology books, from atheist philosophers, from Darwin, from the Kinsey Report and from the Bible as they sat up in bed waiting for the light to be turned out.

He read them the anti-Biblical arguments of Robert Ingersoll, a 19th-Century agnostic. Then he would pull out the Bible and show them the commandment to “honor thy father” and tell them to obey men as Eve was told to obey Adam.

He lectured from library books about groups of South Sea islanders who taught sexual practices to young girls to make them better wives. The most accomplished maidens were chosen by the chief.

Both Donna and Jackie suspected that this did not happen in America. They knew their friends didn’t talk that way, so they never talked about it either. “I knew on some level it was not right,” Donna says. “But we didn’t discuss it.” The lessons, like being molested, were all shameful things that made them different , things not to be discussed.

Lewis also detailed his theories that upper-class people--which he considered them to be--were beyond the rules of middle-class society: Upper-class men made the rules.

Lewis instructed them in evolution and took them on field trips to the Museum of Natural History and to the La Brea Tar Pits to underscore another of his beliefs: that human beings were simply animals who had not evolved far from the cave.

A few times, Donna says, she tried to tell him to stop, that the abuse was wrong and that she was unhappy. Once he replied, “Donna, I decided a long time ago to allow myself anything that dogs do.”

“All I could think was, ‘But, Daddy, I’m not a dog,’ ” she says. But the words remained unspoken. “I was afraid to carry the argument further, afraid of what would happen to me.”

Secretly, she dreamed of freedom.

Among the lessons of wild animals, one story about an ancient fish lodged in her mind. The fish made itself a papery cocoon for the dry season. It would lie still in its cocoon, breathing through a lunglike structure until the rainy season returned. Then, when a lake formed on top of it, the fish would be set free.

TO OUTSIDERS, THE LEWIS FAMILY appeared happy and accomplished.

An aggressive charmer invariably equipped with a new car, Lewis had married in 1942 after courting Dorothy during his years at Fairfax High School. Much of his family’s money had been lost in the Depression, so, after a one-year stint in the wartime military, Lewis took an entry-level job in the defense industry and continually sought to better his lot.

After his two eldest daughters were born, Lewis went back to school, earned an AA degree from Santa Monica City College in 1961 and took professional courses at USC. He became a senior designer in the engineering department of Aerospace Corp.; he also obtained a general contracting license and invested in properties. He sang with the Santa Monica Civic Opera Company and was committee chairman for the Santa Monica Yacht Club. In his spare time, he wrote unpublished detective novels.

From the beginning, his family says, Lewis dominated the household with his temper tantrums, his insatiable appetite for money and material items, for power and control, for sex.

He demanded that his wife serve dinner the minute he arrived home and ordered her to “be permissive” when he began to date other women. Soon, an 18-year-old girl who worked in his father’s drugstore was living in a trailer in the driveway. Not long thereafter, she became pregnant and, when his first two daughters were 7 and 8, gave birth to Deirdre.

To cover up the eccentric arrangement, Lewis concocted stories for his children to tell at school. Secrets would become a way of life. “If you have a lie,” he used to tell Deirdre, “take it to the grave.”

Dorothy, a gracious blonde, would later explain that she was unable at that time to understand the symptoms of her daughter’s anguish. “I simply couldn’t understand why (Jackie) was so unhappy, and she didn’t talk to me,” she says. “He was really a monster. It’s difficult to describe the domination, the control he maintained. We were all afraid of him.” Convinced by her husband that she had failed as a wife and mother, Dorothy escaped into community-opera rehearsals and eventually a full-time job as a county recreation director. When she announced that she wanted a divorce and would take the girls, by then 13 and 14, Lewis exploded. He threatened various ways to harm her and obtain custody.

The divorce was settled in 1958 with joint custody, but the girls lived with Lewis and visited their mother. Dorothy says she gave in because she had little money, and Lewis threatened to get her fired from her job. In retrospect, decades later, Dorothy would say that, realistically, “the best I could do was to (move away and) live as close to the children’s school as possible.

“In that era,” she says, “we didn’t know anything about psychology or sex, we never discussed it. I trusted him with his own children.”

Lewis played with his daughters on the beach, took them on trips, helped them with homework. He made sure they drove new cars.

He encouraged Donna, telling her she could accomplish anything because she was “smarter than hell and not afraid of hard work. You could be a judge. Go to law school.” He took her to courtrooms of women judges. He taught her real estate and construction.

But inside his house, life after the divorce was anything but normal. Instead of sofas and coffee tables, their living room was always dominated by Lewis’ queen-size bed. He kept a gun under the mattress. In addition, a copy of “Homicide Investigation” was usually left open, revealing a grisly photo.

The combination of the gun and the book was “an implied threat,” Jackie says. “I thought, ‘He knows how to kill me and get away with it.’ ”

And he was waking up his daughters in their separate bedrooms several nights a month.

EACH OF THE YOUNG WOMEN WAS FORCED to cope in her own way with what therapists call the ultimate betrayal. A perfectionist, driven to appear “normal,” Donna was an honor student with an A average and student-body vice president at Santa Monica City College. She taught summer charm classes to pre-teen girls through the Recreation and Parks Department.

“We did everything we could to be normal,” she wrote in her unpublished memoirs. “Always we acted as young ladies.”

Lewis had decreed that Donna date only college-bound boys and be a “nice girl.” But he waited up for her to return home.

He never used alcohol or drugs. Sometimes, to get his way, he twisted back Donna’s wrist. Mostly, she says, “He’d whine, cry, throw tantrums. He’d bug you and bug you and bug you.”

At 19, she moved into a sorority house at USC. The relief was overwhelming. She remembers it as “the beginning of the rest of my life.”

That same year, 1962, Lewis went to Sears and bought a diamond ring. He told Deirdre it was for her and that they could marry in Nevada. She was 12. After she turned him down, Lewis married her mother. They started a new family: two boys and two more girls.

Jackie had experienced a taste of freedom living on campus her freshman year at UCLA but was forced to move back to her father’s home for summer break. Because the house was full with Deirdre, his wife and new baby, Jackie was to live in the trailer.

But on the first Saturday of summer, he approached her, demanding sex. Jackie knew her tuition and future education were tied to compliance. But now, she says, “nothing would force me to do it. I was willing to jeopardize my entire college education.”

He came into the trailer and made his demands. “When verbal tactics didn’t work, he actually pinned me down to the bed in the trailer. I fought and kicked and threatened to scream.”

The beach was full of sunbathers, and he backed off, she says. “I’m not going to take this anymore,” she yelled. “I won’t live like this. I’m going to live with my mother.”

Then, in a typical reversal of mood, he said in a defeated tone, “Well, if you really are going to leave, you’ll need a better car.” He reached into his pocket and tossed her the keys to his 1961 Ford convertible.

In 1964, Donna married her high school sweetheart, Ken Friess. They raised a picture-perfect all-American family, two boys and a girl, in a horsy, semirural neighborhood in San Juan Capistrano. Ken became a high school principal and coach, a civic leader and businessman. Donna, blond and energetic, taught communications at a community college and turned their investments into financial independence.

On family get-togethers, Donna made sure her daughter and father were never alone.

Jackie, spunky and serious, became a dentist. She married, divorced and had repeated failed relationships, never understanding why. In 1980, she bought the house next door to Donna and Ken and moved in with her two daughters. Outcast by choice from her father, she and her girls rarely had any contact with him. “Once or twice a year, for no more than two hours at a time,” she says. “And obviously never alone.”

Over the years, Donna heard her father refer to Jackie as “treacherous and disloyal.” Deirdre and her second husband were “savages.” But even after what he had done, Donna considered her father a good friend. Her bad memories had been boxed and shelved, she explains. “It’s too terrible to live side by side with ‘Daddy’s a good guy’ and ‘Daddy’s a bad guy,’ ” she says. “So you extinguish one of them.”

They became investment partners. They saw each other rarely but spoke nearly daily over the phone. He ended all his conversations with “Kisses.”

While Donna compartmentalized her past, Jackie internalized it. For Deirdre, the incest continued.

But by 1985, the wall of secrets had begun to crack.

Jackie, driven to therapy because of her inability to trust men, had begun to speak out. She tentatively began to “throw out statements” about her abuse to Donna and a niece. But no one responded.

Then, one afternoon in June, 1985, Donna answered a knock on the door. It was Deirdre. As they talked, the purpose of her visit became clear. Their father had “bothered” her older daughter, a teen-ager, Deirdre complained. “And he bothers me, too.”

Cute and youthful, Deirdre had sought a niche in Hollywood as a booking agent for a disco. But, divorced with four children, she had remained financially dependent on Lewis. Even after she remarried in 1986--the couple had an infant, a girl, and would later have a boy--her father made sexual demands.

Outwardly, Donna was sympathetic to her sisters, but inwardly she was threatened that someone would find out about her.

She wanted to finish raising her children in a “normal” family, protected from the knowledge of her abnormal past. She feared scandal, violence or divorce if her family and the community found out. There was the possibility, she thought, that her father might kill her.

As she calculated the risks of disclosing her story, she also considered that her father had undergone three recent operations--prostate surgery, a hip replacement and surgery for an abdominal hernia. In his weakened state, her father, she thought, was surely harmless.

It seemed to Donna that Deirdre’s daughters would be safe. “I had finally arrived at the decision that no good could come of some showdown with Dad, and perhaps considerable bad could come of it,” she wrote in her journal. “I knew that my Daddy loved me. . . . What good could be accomplished by blowing up the family?

“Probably I would be excommunicated as Jackie was, and I was not ready to deal with that. I did not want to be on the outside looking in. I needed my family.”

So, on that June afternoon, she advised Deirdre only to become financially independent from their father.

IN AUGUST, 1985, THE FRIESS AND LEWIS families took a family holiday, anchoring their two boats in Avalon Bay. One hot morning, with the Santa Anas blowing, Donna swam over to her father’s boat. Lewis asked her to listen while he read aloud from a book he was writing. It was a murder story set on Catalina called “Escape From Evil.”

She pulled up a plastic chair and closed her eyes.

She heard him describe the murderer as a treacherous high-roller who owned a 70-foot yacht moored in Avalon Harbor. In a calm voice, he read to her how the man had dispatched his bodyguard to bring back to his boat an 8-year-old girl for sex acts.

Her eyes flipped open. Donna couldn’t believe what her father was saying to her. Once again, she felt a sharp stab in her heart. “I can’t hear this,” she said finally.

He looked up, puzzled, and asked with an air of innocence, “What’s wrong?”

For the first time as an adult, she told him that she objected to what he had done to her as a child and as a teen-ager. She recalled that he mumbled an apology, then began to scribble notes in the margin of his pages.

At that moment, a half sister approached from the cabin below. Donna stammered a goodby, slipped into the cold water and swam back to her boat.

After that, Donna’s memories refused to stay in their boxes. She was haunted by flashbacks. The memories she never spoke of aloud startled her when she least expected them.

Finally, in 1989, as Deirdre’s youngest daughter approached kindergarten age, Donna had to decide. She knew Deirdre, still financially strapped, was preparing to take her daughter out of preschool and have their father baby-sit. Already he had baby-sat the child overnight.

Donna thought: No one had been there to protect her at that age. Someone must protect this girl. “Once I made up my mind about what I had to do, I was not so tortured.”

In September, she told her mother, her husband and her three children, taking them aside one at a time.

Her daughter took it the hardest. After a shopping trip, Donna told her as they sat in the sun room of the coffee shop at Nordstrom. “She just teared up,” Donna says. “To see that it was so painful for her to hear this made my own locked-away pain become a little more real.”

After that, “it kept pouring out,” Donna says. She was surprised that rather than running away in disgust, “everybody was amazingly supportive.”

She went into therapy and read every book on incest she could find. She started writing her memoirs for catharsis. Her mother, Dorothy, also started therapy.

In October, Jackie reported the incest to Dorothy’s therapist, who contacted investigators from Child Protective Services; they questioned Deirdre and all her children. But despite her earlier disclosure to Donna, Deirdre denied any abuse. To investigators, she attributed her sisters’ allegations to sibling rivalry and arguments over their father’s estate.

A week later, Lewis molested Deirdre in his bathroom. She broke down and was finally ready to tell the truth.

Just the day before, Deirdre had received a letter from Donna disclosing her own story and pleading with Deirdre to protect her daughter. After Lewis molested her, Deirdre called Donna. Ken answered the phone and urged her to come down to San Juan Capistrano to talk about it. Now, Deirdre told herself, “This is it.” Her husband and oldest daughter drove her down to Orange County for the first of two family meetings.

Bit by bit on that October evening, the women told their tales and glimpsed for the first time the mind-boggling extent of abuse in their family: Donna, Jackie, Deirdre and Deirdre’s two daughters, all had been molested by Raymond Lewis. Deirdre told them again that their grandfather--the owner of the postcards of naked little girls found in Jackie’s garage--had also molested her when she was a child. Even though she had told them before, they hadn’t been able to deal with it. This time they listened.

Donna recalled “a night of tears and yelling” as the revelations spilled out into her home.

“It was really ugly,” says Jackie. “When the demons within were released into the room, it was ugly. The emotional energy in the room was so high, we could have drowned in it.”

Empathetic but tired of “swimming around in the cesspool,” Jackie left.

As they paced the kitchen and sipped herbal tea, Deirdre told them she had been molested and raped by their father continually for more than 30 years. As with the others, he advised her financially, telling her never to rent, always to buy. And when she could not afford the payments on a new house or a new car, she found herself dating her own father so that he would bail her out.

“I thought I’d better stick with Dad and be Daddy’s girl,” she said later. “I really didn’t have anybody else in the world.”

Deirdre let her father baby-sit her children with what she thought was the tacit understanding that she had bought their safety with her compliance. But her 5-year-old daughter had recently told her that she had already been molested by Lewis.

Deirdre’s younger sisters had also been molested. According to statements her children and sisters later gave to police, Lewis’ pattern of behavior had not only continued but escalated in an alarming, almost exponential progression over the years. Some of his victims told investigators that he had played sex games with them in the bathtub as babies. Others had observed sex games with teen-age relatives in which he paid the participants for intercourse. A granddaughter reported he told her that “when people do not keep their mouths shut, people get put six feet under,” according to Lewis’ probation report.

A relative testified in court that he had witnessed Lewis molesting Deirdre’s younger daughter when she was only 2.

Deirdre lied to investigators originally, she later explained, because Lewis had convinced her that if she admitted to incest, her youngest daughter would be taken away. He also convinced her that Donna was trying to take her daughter away.

Now hearing the full story--that his wife and his 5-year-old daughter had been molested in his own house--Deirdre’s husband, 30, became enraged. He wanted to kill Lewis. Ken managed to calm him. “I didn’t try to diminish his anger in any way,” he says. “I knew exactly where he was coming from.”

Ken had also wanted revenge. He had gone so far as to drive toward Los Angeles with a 20-pound sledgehammer in the car, intending to smash his father-in-law’s legs. “As I was driving along, I realized this is not an intelligent approach. All you do is end up in jail yourself,” he says.

Persuading Deirdre’s husband to follow his example, Ken then organized the rest of the family, urging them to give the system a try and encouraging them when they faltered. The women, he says, were “panic-stricken” that Lewis would find out they had told one another the truth.

Donna knew they were about to commit the ultimate act of defiance--not only telling one another but also the authorities. “We were scared to death,” she says. “We knew to go up against Daddy was to be dead.”

The following morning at 8, almost all of Lewis’ children--Donna, Jackie, Deirdre and three of the four children from his second marriage--along with their children and spouses met at the oceanfront Santa Monica home that Lewis co-owned with Deirdre. They hid their cars around the neighborhood so that Lewis, who lived a few miles away in Venice, wouldn’t see them if he came by. Only one of Lewis’ daughters didn’t participate; her husband likened the gathering to a “witch hunt.”

A week before Thanksgiving, they gathered at Stuart House, Santa Monica’s “one-stop center” for child-sexual-abuse victims in the West Judicial District of Los Angeles Superior Court.

There, among the animal murals and stuffed toys meant to comfort children, six adults and one child clung to one another on the verge of tears and told their stories of abuse as therapists and police detectives listened.

“Once it was in the open,” Ken says, “everyone started figuring out that all of them were involved in some way. They were corroborating one another’s stories.”

For him, it explained a family of in-laws that had seemed simply unusual. The facts were deeply disturbing. “I had nightmares; I couldn’t sleep. I had a tough time with the cruelty of it all.”

At 7 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1990, two months after the family’s first visit to the Stuart House, police surrounded Lewis’ three-story stucco home in Venice. They called him on the phone from one of their patrol cars. He surrendered.

LEWIS WAS DENIED BAIL and held in jail on charges of child molestation and incest until his trial.

In the midst of the family uproar, one of Deirdre’s childhood friends, Marsha Racine, an Orange County forensic worker, began having nightmares about the Lewis family.

One night she sat up in bed perspiring. She called Jackie and learned that the proceedings were underway. Then she admitted for the first time that Lewis had molested her, too, from the time she was 10 until 16. Even after 30 years, she still thought it was her fault.

Family members had wanted to avoid a trial to spare Deirdre’s 5-year-old daughter from taking the stand, but Lewis rejected a plea bargain. “He refused to admit he had done anything wrong,” says Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Bill Penzin, “even when the evidence started becoming overwhelming.”

In the end, Deirdre and her 5-year-old daughter testified against Lewis. Donna, Jackie, Marsha Racine and Deirdre’s husband told their stories at the sentencing.

A jury convicted Lewis of three counts of lewd acts, including oral copulation, involving Deirdre’s child from the time she was 2 to 5, and one count of incest involving Deirdre. Lewis was not charged with crimes involving the other women because the state’s six-year statute of limitations for child molestation had expired.

According to the report prepared by Lewis’ probation officer, filed in Superior Court in February, Lewis showed no signs that he could be rehabilitated--a typical finding with many child molesters. In denying probation, Judge Light called him a “grave and ongoing threat to the well-being of young females wherever he may be. As long as he lives and breathes, sex will be No. 1 after self-preservation.”

At Lewis’ sentencing, Donna and Jackie told their stories of rape. Deirdre’s husband told about his family’s trauma. Listening to Donna detail her repeated abuse, Ken reached for a handkerchief. One of her sons grimaced, his fists tightly closed. Her daughter cried.

Three times, the judge asked Lewis whether he believed he had wronged the women in his family. Without answering the question, Lewis talked at length about his love for his children, his sacrifices for them and his ailing health.

Later, Lewis told the court that his conviction was based on perjury. He admitted no remorse but said he was “grief-stricken.”

Lewis is now serving his sentence at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego. He writes Donna letters quoting the Bible and blaming Deirdre as the ringleader against him. Donna doesn’t read them. “I’m trying to have him be dead in my mind,” she says. Lewis will be eligible for parole in four years, and when the parole board considers his case, the relatives vow that they’ll be there.

BEFORE LEWIS’ TRIAL, in the process of disclosing her abuse, Deirdre’s younger daughter one day stuffed a rag in her mouth and tried to stay underwater during her bath. She remains in therapy at the Stuart House. Sometimes she has nightmares that her grandfather hears what she says to her therapist.

After years of peace, Donna went through a yearlong “horrible dark tunnel of sadness and grief” in which she experienced anxiety attacks, panic attacks, nightmares, sweats, vomiting and more flashbacks. “Part of me still cares for him,” she says. “I have to shut that down.”

Jackie, now in a happy and stable marriage, remains angry. “I didn’t trust anyone until 1985, at the age of 41,” she wrote in a letter her therapist advised her to read to her father in 1989. “It would have been better to have never known life than to go through what you forced me to go through. The shame and devastation made me want to die. . . .

“I want you to get uncomfortable as the abuser. You see, Dad, we’re all talking about it now, out loud in the open. There is no more Big Secret.”

Deirdre says she’s relieved that the days of lies and deceit are over, but nothing can ever really make up for what happened to her.

“If I had my life to live over,” she says, “I’d say, ‘No, I’ll pass.’ ”

Occasionally, Lewis’ daughters ponder the ironies of their survival and triumph, wondering if Lewis himself is partly responsible.

Perhaps, says Jackie, they survived his abuse, outwitting insanity and suicide, because he taught them to love life. Perhaps they were finally able to stand up to him because he trained them to be strong.

“He told us we could do anything,” Donna says.

It was a lesson well-learned.

The Times first learned about the family story of Raymond W. Lewis Jr. early this year when Ken and Donna Friess contacted reporter Lynn Smith.

Because of the sensitive nature of incest, family members who appear in the story are named or unnamed according to their wishes. Family members named in court documents but who declined to be interviewed are not named.

Asked for an interview, Raymond Lewis replied with two lengthy letters detailing the flaws in his prosecution. The letters were marked “confidential--not for quotation.”

Donna and her sisters want their story made public. To that end, Donna is writing a book and has located a buyer for film rights.