Finn Rock, Ore.


MY daughter Mary, 14 years old, was undressing for bed one night when she noticed a light in her window. She stepped onto her chair to read a word hanging in the dark night air: Panasonic. Nine floating letters. She saw knuckles, a curled fist around the handle of a video camera, and an arm dropping away as the person who had been filming her disappeared.


I jumped into the hallway when I heard her scream. I found Mary crawling on her hands and knees. While she managed to get out a halting account of the man at her window, I grabbed my phone to punch 9-1-1 and, though my thumping heart warned me not to, hurried across our cool grass in bare feet, to the side yard outside Mary’s window.


No one was there. Whoever had spied on my daughter was gone. The bucket he’d taken from our carport was upside down in the flower bed. Twenty minutes later, a policeman picked up that bucket and tipped his flashlight toward the ground, illuminating circle lapped upon circle in the soil. The bucket had been used many times as a step there.


I hadn’t protected my daughters — neither Mary nor her three sisters — in their own home. That’s a failure I’ve had to live with for more than a decade now. Reading recently about the young victims of sexual abuse in the Penn State case, my old anguish returned, rushing in as raw and frightening as when I first discovered the predation my daughters had been victim to. I remembered the unimaginable bind I’d struggled with: whether to become involved in the prosecution of the man who had invaded our privacy, or to avoid it, utterly — to look the other way.


A year and a half after Mary saw the man at her window, in the spring of 2001, a reporter friend of mine sent me a fax about the arrest of one William Joseph Green. He lived in Eugene, Ore., the small city where I was raising my family. He had turned in a roll of film for processing that contained images of a young girl lying on top of him; when the police searched his house, they discovered dozens of troubling videotapes. I called the police, and the following day, I met with a detective who showed me a stack of still images captured from the videos. The third one was of Mary. I didn’t have to go on, and didn’t, but the detective wondered if my daughter would look at all the pictures and help sort out the identities of the other girls.


This moment was the crux, the Y in the road. I could have refused the detective, gone home and said nothing to my girls. We could have forged on, at least for a while, in the seductive comfort of avoidance. It was tempting to believe that Mary would move on, soon forgetting about the man at the window. But would my daughter forgive me if she discovered years later that I had learned his identity and thwarted her chance to be involved in bringing him to justice?


I did tell Mary about the arrest and the detective’s request, a choice I have sometimes regretted. I remember the sores around her fingernails, her chewed-up flesh, which made me want to keep her at home, away from any police station or courthouse. But Mary stared me down, determined to let other girls find out, too, that William Green had been caught.


The detective came to our house to lay out the photos, cut so that only faces showed, on our kitchen table. Some of the girls were unaware that they were being taped, delighted in that crystallized moment in their rooms, while others seemed to sense a presence outside their windows. Their expressions, to my eyes, betrayed a terrible fear.


Mary recognized in the images her younger sister — a devastating discovery — and also about 10 other girls she knew, from school, from dance class, from hanging around a neighborhood that would never again feel safe to her. Although many residents had filed peeping-Tom complaints with the police over the years, no officer had ever linked those reports. Mr. Green was caught only after he dropped off the film for developing. The girl in those photographs turned out to be 11 years old.