This is awful. Four innocent women in Texas have been freed after spending 18 years behind bars, for crimes they didn’t commit.
Elizabeth Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh, Anna Vasquez and Cassandra Rivera were wrongly being convicted of gang raping two young girls.
They told Daily Mail Australia they “were victims of a hysterical witch hunt, false evidence and anti-gay sentiment”.
The nightmare began in 1994 when the two girls who later accused them, went to stay at the home of their aunt Elizabeth Ramirez, while their mother was away. Ramirez’s former girlfriend, Kristie Mayhugh, lived with her and another couple Vasquez and Rivera were visiting.
When the two girls, then aged seven and nine, returned home their grandmother said they were acting peculiarly.
The girls were allegedly playing with their dolls in ‘a sexual manner’ and one of the children claimed she had been sexually assaulted by the four women in her aunt’s apartment.
They said the women held them down and inserted various objects into them, while threatening them with a gun or knife.
All four were arrested and so began the 22 year legal battle.
Ramirez, considered the ringleader, was sentenced to nearly 40 years in prison, the others receiving 15 years each, on the word of the two children.
The stories from the children changed several times and one doctor who examined them questioned if the crimes may have been ‘satanic’, reminiscent of the Salem Witch trials.
The four women repeatedly refused offers of early parole if they agreed to embark on rehabilitation for child sex abusers.
Then, a breakthrough. Four years ago, one of the alleged victims said she coerced into making a false accusation.
Now in her twenties and a mother herself, she retracted her statement and categorically denied she had been sexually assaulted.
The courts slowly began ordering their release with Vasquez let out in 2012 and the others given their freedom in 2013.
The four were finally exonerated last week in an announcement from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
They will share a $20 million pay-out but they say it won’t ever get back their lives.
Cassandra Rivera, now 41, told Daily Mail Australia that her biggest regret was missing out on seeing her two children grow up and “tucking them in every night”.
She’d married, had kids and divorced before coming out as gay. Her children were 7 and 8 when she was jailed.
“It is the worst feeling ever when you now you haven’t done anything and they are constantly saying you did and are a child molester.”
We can’t even imagine.
