Prometheus 6

I want to remind you of the original report.

(CNN) -- Six West Virginia residents have been charged with kidnapping, torturing and sexually assaulting a Charleston woman for at least a week, the Logan County Sheriff's Department said Monday.

Sheriff's deputies went Saturday to a Big Creek, West Virginia, residence in response to an anonymous tip that a woman was being held against her will, the department said in a news release.

As they spoke with a woman on the front porch, "a female inside the residence limped toward the door with her arms held out, saying, "Help me."

The 23-year-old woman had stab wounds on her left leg and bruises around her eyes, authorities said. The wounds were about a week old, the release said.

"Deputies found her with two black eyes, part of her hair had been pulled out, she had lacerations on her neck, and she had been physically, mentally and sexually abused," Logan County Sheriff W.E. Hunter said.

Now, why she's recanting anything when the Sheriff's deputies witnessed this much...but as I say, I'm sure it's over now.

Woman Recants 2007 Tale of Kidnap and Assault
By IAN URBINA

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The young woman who was found in 2007 in a backwoods trailer in West Virginia, where she said she had been held captive and raped, recanted her story on Wednesday.

“Megan Williams was 20 years old in September 2007 when she reported that she had been kidnapped, raped and tortured in an allegedly racist attack,” Byron L. Potts, Ms. Williams’s lawyer said Wednesday in a brief statement. “Megan Williams is now recanting her story.”

The turn of events represents a striking reversal in a racially charged case that led to the conviction of seven people, all but one of whom are serving lengthy prison sentences. It also raises questions about whether the prosecutor, who resisted strong pressure to pursue hate-crime charges based on race, should have gone further in checking Ms. Williams’s credibility.

But Brian Abraham, the former prosecutor for Logan County who handled the cases, said the seven people charged with the crimes relating to Ms. Williams’s abuse had been convicted based on physical evidence and their own corroborating statements, not on Ms. Williams’s testimony.

“The ironic part of this whole thing is that we were criticized by Ms. Williams and her supporters for allowing the defendants to take plea agreements,” Mr. Abraham said, adding that the reason he offered plea agreements was that he was skeptical of Ms. Williams’s testimony.

At an early-evening news conference at his office here, Mr. Potts added that Ms. Williams had made up the story to reap revenge on a boyfriend who had beaten her up. Ms. Williams was coming forward because she no longer wanted to live a lie, Mr. Potts said.

The recantation builds on an interview Ms. Williams gave in January to The Call and Post newspaper in Cleveland in which she said she was indeed abused in the trailer. But she said her mother, whom she feared, made her embellish the story for financial gain. Ms. Williams’ mother, Carmen Williams, died in June.

Mr. Abraham said that Ms. Williams’ initial police report corresponded with the physical evidence and crime scene. “But then,” he said, “Ms. Williams began talking to the media and her story grew and changed, and that is when we stopped relying on anything she said.”