Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times

A letter by Carol Brewer describing her allegations to family members helped drive the family further apart.

For most of her life, Carol Brewer carried a terrible secret: In 1972, when she was 8 years old, her father molested her.

Frustrated when no one listened to her complaints, then tormented by the shame and guilt that followed the ordeal, Brewer resigned herself long ago to take the family secret with her to the grave.

Then, at a Thanksgiving family gathering two years ago, Brewer watched as her father, William Jackson Saul, interacted with her 4-year-old granddaughter. Saul used the same pet phrases, and showed the same behavior, that Brewer recalled from her own abuse by him years ago in their Salem home.

Afraid that her father was grooming his next victim, Brewer finally broke her silence and went to the police.

And on Wednesday morning -- 36 years after the fact and in front of a family torn apart by accusations and denials -- Saul was convicted in a Salem courtroom of two counts of carnal knowledge.

Now 66, Saul entered an Alford plea, meaning that he maintained his innocence but acknowledged there was enough evidence to convict him. As part of a plea agreement, he received a six-year suspended sentence and was placed on probation for three years.

Saul was also required to register as a sex offender, which Brewer hopes will serve as a warning to other potential victims.

"I didn't want to hurt him," she said of her decision to press charges against her father. "I just didn't want him to hurt anyone else."

Normally, The Roanoke Times does not identify the victims of sexual offenses. But Brewer, 45, wanted to speak publicly about the case -- not just to prevent a possible crime in the future, she said, but to remove the shame and stigma from a past one that still haunts her.

"I know there are a lot of people who will say: 'Why did she wait so long,'" Brewer said in an interview Thursday at the Catawba Valley General Store, a family business she took over from her father.

"It's a horrible and shameful thing that happens to a child, and as a child when you ask for help and don't receive it, that horror and shame is put back on you.

"I don't want to be ashamed of this anymore," Brewer said. "It's a horrible thing, just like any sex crime. But for me, I carried it all these years as it being my fault. Because I was 'Daddy's girl,' my little 8-year-old brain turned it into being my fault."

The charges against Saul were the oldest in recent history to be successfully prosecuted in Salem. Sgt. J.B. Mills of the Salem Police Department said he could not recall another case like it.

After receiving Brewer's report, police spent nine months investigating the case, obtaining statements from witnesses and digging up records that made it more than just the word of a daughter against her father's.

"This is a very rare type of case to be prosecuted," Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Matt Pollard said. "But the facts were such that we thought it merited going forward with."

According to Brewer, at least two of her cousins were prepared to testify that Saul had molested them, too. While Pollard declined to discuss details of a case he never had to put on, he confirmed that other family members were subpoenaed as witnesses and that prosecutors had statements from other witnesses that corroborated Brewer's account.

One provision of the plea agreement was that prosecutors agreed to seek no additional charges against Saul regarding any other witnesses in the case for events prior to his conviction.

Had the case gone to trial, Saul would have faced up to 12 years in prison. That's far less than the current penalties call for, Pollard said, but authorities were bound by the laws that existed when the crimes occurred in the early 1970s.

"I didn't want to see him hung in the square, because that's not going to take away my pain," Brewer said. "There's nothing that can take away my pain. So all we can try to do is protect our children."

Greg Phillips, a Salem attorney who represented Saul, said his client categorically denies all the allegations against him.

But Saul also recognized the difficulties raised by the age of the case. "When you're charged with an offense from more than 35 years ago, it takes away many possible defenses that are available, such as an alibi," Phillips said.

Because Brewer's memory has faded over the years, the indictments against Saul covered broad time frames. The first offense happened between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 1972, according to court records, while the second one came between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 1973. Two other charges were dropped as part of the plea agreement.

Had the case gone to trial, the defense was prepared to argue that Brewer leveled false allegations against her father only after they argued about a business deal in which she bought the Catawba general store from him.

But faced with the uncertainly of what a jury might do, "it was just too much of a gamble," Phillips said.

Even though Saul maintained his innocence through an Alford plea, Brewer saw it as an admission to something that other members of her family had refused to deal with over the years.

Not long after she was first molested, Brewer said, she complained to a family member to no avail. Years later, after becoming convinced that Saul was a threat to his great-granddaughter, Brewer tried again, describing her fears in a letter to her mother and other family members.

"It was like everybody was blind to it,' Brewer said.

If the letter accomplished anything, it was to drive a family apart. "For all intents and purposes I have no immediate family left," Brewer said.

Finally, Brewer said, she decided to go to the police.

"If telling my story helps one person, if one child tells someone they need help, if one adult listens when a child says they need help, then it will be worth it to me," Brewer said.

"I just didn't want my granddaughter to ever come up to me and say, 'How could you let this happen?'"