originally published on Monday, April 25, 2005 
Mike Harden 
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Catherine Harper Lee was 18 when she stood at the lip of the ocean, toes dug into the Carolina sand, and tried to convince herself that the beach and the dunes behind her were part of one cosmos; the waters of the Atlantic, another.

By such thinking, she could believe that wading waist-deep into the water would consign the ugly history of the part of her body that had been violated to a distant, fading nova. There, it no longer would belong to her. All the twisted sins visited upon it in her childhood would be gone for good.

Fresh out of high school and away from Lancaster and her abuser’s clutches, Harper Lee had neither the strength nor the stomach to mount the crusade for justice that would ultimately come to define much of her being. She had no taste for reliving the abuse, the gut-sick dread that swept over her when her mother was away.

‘‘I was playing in a sandbox with my friends," she said recently from the breakfast nook of her home on the Far North Side. ‘‘I had to be 6 or 7, and I saw my mom’s car leaving. All of a sudden, he’s calling for me to come in."

"Your dad’s calling you," a playmate pointed out.

‘‘I know," she said. ‘‘I know."

‘‘That time, I got into trouble because I dawdled. He told me how hurt he was that I didn’t love him. At 6 or 7, I felt guilty.

‘‘He told me about Lot in the Bible and how Lot’s daughters had taken up the duties of their mother after she had been turned into a pillar of salt.

‘‘He had this bedroom. One wall was covered with gold-flecked mirrors. The wallpaper was black and-gold naked women. This one woman had the most beautiful and peaceful face in the world, and I could fixate on that gentle face and remove myself."

Harper Lee might have gone to her grave never giving voice to her scars had not her stepfather — the man she says abused her for a decade — done something that shook her to her marrow.

‘‘After he divorced my mother, he married another woman and fathered a daughter," she said. ‘‘I found this out at the time she was about the same age I was when the abuse started.

‘‘I had a successful career in advertising production. I had convinced myself that I was not going to let past circumstances ruin my life. . . . Then I learned that he had a child. I thought, ‘How could I be so selfish and stupid? I know what he is, and I know what he is doing.’ "

Redemption

That moment of truth would ultimately lead Harper Lee to found The Justice League of Ohio, an organization that is attempting to establish itself as a safe anchorage for those who think the defendant’s rights often seem a higher priority than the victim’s.

The league, founded in 2003, has its headquarters in a room off her kitchen. It is operating with volunteers and two grants totaling $80,000 from the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services. Harper Lee, now 41, works with crime victims who have been referred to her by prosecutor-based victims’ advocates, rape-crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, mental-health agencies and statewide organizations such as the Ohio Coalition on Sexual Assault, Parents of Murdered Children and MADD.

At her left hand, a squat bookcase holds volumes on the law and sexual abuse, case studies on pedophilia, bound copies of the Ohio Revised Code. Above it is a sign: ‘‘Faith is the strength by 
which a shattered world shall emerge into the light."

Some of her clients view her as a role model.

‘‘I have a chance to be as strong and willful a woman as Cathy is," said Amy, 18, who said she was sexually abused by a family friend for two years, beginning at age 8, and asked that her real name not be used.

‘‘Scars let us know that the past is real. I want to be able to put the past on a shelf and get on with my life and not be carrying baggage, because it will crush you."

Amy was 15 before she told anyone about the abuse. ‘‘I didn’t know what was going on," she says today. ‘‘I just knew that I was depressed."

The man was ultimately brought to trial in Franklin County, though only after Harper Lee protested a dozen continuances granted the defense and skirmished with the prosecutor over whether Amy’s mother could be in the courtroom. The prosecutor said her presence could hurt the case.

‘‘It lasted over two years," Amy said of the investigation and trial. Throughout it all, Amy’s mother said, Harper Lee was there.

‘‘Amy’s case was a classic example of why we exist and what we do," Harper Lee said. ‘‘We 
investigate and mediate claims of victims’-rights violations. Amy and her mother were being denied the right to object to the continuances and to be present during the hearing."

‘‘The justice system was leaving me hopeless," Amy said. ‘‘I was trying to fight my depression, live my life and just go to school and do what other kids do."

The man Amy said attacked her was found not guilty. ‘‘We were told later that the jury believed all 
the testimony, believed her," Amy’s mother said, ‘‘but there wasn’t enough physical evidence to convict on felony counts." 

Heartbreak

Harper Lee knew only too well the disconsolation and anger that Amy and her mother felt. At age 23, she had returned to Fairfield County to file charges against her former stepfather, Norman Ackison, and implore law-enforcement and child-welfare officials to investigate the well-being of the 6-year-old daughter he had fathered in a marriage that followed his divorce from Harper Lee’s mother.

In late 1988, she went to the Fairfield County sheriff’s office. ‘‘I reported the occurrences which happened in one form or another, daily," she said. ‘‘At one time he had held a gun to my head and said, ‘Is this the time?’ and pulled the trigger.

‘‘I told them about the boy who was two years older than me that my stepfather brought over almost every weekend from the time I was approximately 9 until 13 to play sexual board games and take pictures." 

She then persuaded the Lancaster police to wire her when she went to her former stepfather’s home to demand that he give her the photos. He played ignorant. But outside the house, his new wife, Bonnie, confided, ‘‘I told him to get rid of those pictures. I found them again in a metal box in the wall in the basement next to the furnace. I hate that he keeps them." 

Surprised that officers listening in a nearby van did not close in and search the house, Harper Lee said, ‘‘I went around the block and asked the police, ‘Why didn’t you respond?’ " The police officer said Ackison’s wife had not said exactly what photos he had.

Bonnie, recalling the incident in a recent interview, said she had first found the pictures in Ackison’s jacket pocket while doing laundry.

‘‘Cathy, naked," she said. 

In 1996, after Harper Lee paid for a special prosecutor, Ackison was indicted on 14 counts, including rape and pandering obscenity involving a minor. His attorney filed a motion to dismiss, saying he had been denied a speedy trial and that the time limit for bringing a charge had expired. The 
motion was granted, though appeals carried the fight to the Ohio Supreme Court, which, in 1998, refused to hear the case. 

In the meantime, the parents of two neighborhood children reported that their daughters had been abused, and Bonnie Ackison accused her husband of raping their daughter.

In April 1991, a Fairfield County grand jury indicted Norman Ackison on one count of rape and two counts of gross sexual imposition involving his then 7-year-old daughter as well as five counts of gross sexual imposition involving the neighbor children.

‘‘Just about every one of the kids who had spent any deal of time at (Ackison’s) house, they were later diagnosed as victims of sexual crimes or (had) abruptly stopped seeing (him)," Dan Patten, a Lancaster police detective who is now a lieutenant, said at the time. ‘‘We know of at least 15, but I’m 
sure it’s possibly two and three times that amount."

Ackison fled. Months passed. Harper Lee contacted the producers of the TV program America’s Most Wanted.

‘‘Everybody at America’s Most Wanted was moved by the fact that not only had she survived the abuse by Norman Ackison but she had become a strong voice for other victims," the show’s host, John Walsh, said.

Forty-eight hours before the America’s Most Wanted on Ackison was to air, he turned himself in to police.

The parents of the two neighbor girls asked Harper Lee to be their advocate in the proceedings. The lead prosecutor offered a plea deal of three years in prison. Harper Lee wanted the maximum — 39 years. Ackison received eight. In July 1992, he went to prison for four counts of gross sexual imposition.

In 1997, Ackison was paroled. Eighteen months later, he went back to prison for possession of pornography, a violation of his parole. Because of that violation and the nature of the plea agreement, 
he is serving a four-to-10-year sentence in the Hocking Correctional Facility, at Nelsonville. He refused a request to be interviewed for this story.

Triumph

Not long after her former stepfather went back to prison, Harper Lee began work on what would become the Justice League of Ohio. 

Ohio Supreme Court Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton recalls Harper Lee from the days before the league was established.

‘‘I got involved with Cathy way back when I was a trial judge and she was trying to pursue the case against her stepfather. I was a sympathetic ear." Stratton said.

‘‘She is not out to get the system. She knows that there are laws," Stratton said. ‘‘The laws are definitely more in favor of the defendant than the victim. The victim doesn’t have a right to counsel. The victim can’t assert the right to a speedy trial. We often forget that the victim is aggrieved and feels left out of the process."

The Justice League has joined other crime victims’ groups and the Buckeye State Sheriffs’ Association in an effort to establish model policies for victims’ rights and procedures for law enforcement, prosecutors and the courts.

Although Ohio’s counties have victim-advocate programs, many face a staggering number of cases.

‘‘With 9,000 adult felonies a year," Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien said, ‘‘it’s a 
challenge to keep up." He said he could easily use three more advocates.

‘‘That is where Cathy’s advocacy comes in," said Karen Huey, director of the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services.

The office doesn’t expect to be funding the Justice League over the long haul, and Harper Lee is working to make the organization, whose services are free to victims, self-sufficient.

‘‘She wants the police to be better, the prosecutors to be better, the courts to be better," Justice 
League board member David Hyland said. ‘‘She’s tragedy turned triumph."

‘‘The prosecution didn’t even want to touch her case," Stratton said. ‘‘Who was there for Cathy?

‘‘Her organization goes above and beyond. I think it has the potential for enormous good."