Expert Witness

"I kept moving closer to my mother, almost in her lap. But she kept saying, 'Sit back, sit back.' "

She says she told her parents about the stranger after they'd left the theater. They were outraged, but there was nothing to be done. The guy was long gone.

The father of her babysitter also molested her when she was about 6, LaRue says.

"My babysitter took me to her home and her mother wasn't there, but her father was. She busied herself in another part of the house and her father grabbed me and pulled me up on his lap and started putting his hands where they didn't belong and I struggled and got away from him and ran outside and hid behind a tree," she says.

Her sitter found her hiding there later and took her home.

But it is the story that LaRue tells of what happened after her parents divorced that freezes the blood. Her mother remarried and the family moved to a rural area of Illinois -- Sugar Grove, just outside Aurora. On occasion her mother would leave her with a relative.

He "molested me repeatedly and violently for two years when I was 7 and 8," she says. "He actually threatened to kill me if I told anybody about it.

"He would force me down on the ground . . . he would put one hand on my throat and squeeze it after he put his fist in my face and threaten to kill me. I would call it digital rape.

"I did all I could to avoid being anywhere around him," she says, then falls silent.

"You read about what people do to little children and people don't want to think about it."

It was around the same time that her school principal also tried to hurt her, she says. He offered her a ride home one afternoon when she'd missed the school bus. Before she knew it, "he was reaching over putting his hands where they didn't belong," she says. She jumped out of the car just as he was turning into her gravel driveway, she says.

"Before he did it, he tried to intimidate me," LaRue says. "He said, 'You know you have been having trouble in class' and I didn't know what he was talking about. And he said, 'Ever since your baby sister was born you've had a problem.' . . . It was a typical kind of thing that an abusive adult would do to keep a child silenced."