Do you want to know what incest is? What it really is? No ...

defended him. Then they began to talk—16 relatives, including his daughters, told the
same story.
Most of his crimes were wiped out by the statute of limitations. He was charged with
only four counts of child sexual abuse against his five-year-old granddaughter, and one
count of incest—a lesser charge in California, as in most states—against her mother,
DeeDee, whom he had coerced into sex when she was a grown woman by promising to
leave her daughter alone.
During the trial Lewis's daughters—all professional women, one a college professor—
were unable to meet his gaze in the courtroom. It fell to his five-year-old granddaughter
to face him. Although Lewis had threatened that he would kill her if she ever talked
about what he had done, the judge ordered her to tell the truth. Seated on the witness
stand, shaking and crying, she testified for two days. Lewis denied everything.
Three times the judge asked him if there wasn't anything he was sorry for. "How could
they say such terrible things about me?" Lewis asked by way of an answer. "I drove a
rusted wreck of a car so that I could give them good cars."
"Isn't there something you think you did to make your family say these things about
you?" the judge asked.
"Well, maybe," Lewis replied. "A long time ago. "
The five-year-old handed the judge a note she had written. "My granddaddy is a bad
man," it read. "I want him to go to jail for two hundred years."
Lewis was convicted of one count of incest against his daughter and three counts of
lewd acts, including oral copulation, involving his granddaughter. Expressing the opinion
that Raymond Lewis, Jr., represented a threat to all females and that the only place
where he would have no access to them was in prison, Superior Court Judge Leslie W
Light sentenced him to the maximum: 12 years and 8 months. But with time off for good
behavior, he will probably serve only half his sentence, which means that he will be
released from Mule Creek Prison in 6 years.
Says DeeDee: "Until I was twenty-three, I thought I was retarded. He told me I was
brain damaged. He told me I was neurotic, manic-depressive, a damaged genius. He
thought he was a genius. He said we could have a child together and it would be a
genius. Six months before going to jail, he offered me one hundred thousand dollars to
bear his child.
"I always hoped he would love me. I just wanted to be his daughter. But now I have my
own home, my own checking account. I give sit-down dinners. I feel special. I have
knowledge. I am a great mom and I'll be a great grandmom. I love myself, finally. And
now I can die without that secret."
Lewis never said he was sorry. In the letter to Donna—one of a stream that he
continues to send to his daughters—he wrote: "Loneliness was the reason that I had
enslaved myself in my youth to raise kids, and now in the illnesses of old age 14 of my
Page 20 of 56