On the Job 

The depravity of the crime goes beyond anything adjectives can describe.

Evil. Heinous. Incomprehensible. The words merely hint at the hell Matthew Case inflicted on seven little girls, their families and the Rio Grande community.

Now serving a 180-year prison sentence, Case pleaded guilty to raping the girls in 2016 and 2017 while they attended an in-home day care operated by his wife.

The girls ranged in age from 3 to 7 years old. Gallia County Prosecutor Jason D. Holdren, who had been in office just four months when the accusations surfaced and began snowballing, said some of the children were so young that they couldn’t truly voice what they had experienced.

Holdren, Gallia County Sheriff Matt Champlin, and Dr. Amy Sisson, a clinical counselor in the survivors services section of the Prosecutor’s Office, will lead a plenary session at the 33rd annual Two Days in May Conference on Victim Assistance titled "From Tragedy to Triumph: A Rural Community's Resilience in the Face of Unthinkable Crime."

They will discuss how, with limited resources, they developed a plan and assembled a multidisciplinary team of law enforcement, prosecution and mental-health professionals to get justice for the victims and help the children and their parents recover from the trauma. Through it all, they said, the assistance of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office — including its Crime Victims Services Section and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation — proved indispensable.

BCI’s Crimes Against Children Unit, the Gallia County Sheriff's Office, and the FBI Columbus Child Exploitation Task Force arrested Case in April 2017 after two victims confided in an adult about the abuse. An ensuing investigation revealed five additional victims.

At the time of his arrest, Case was a volunteer firefighter. He pleaded guilty in May 2017 to 10 counts of first-degree rape and six counts of third-degree sexual imposition. His wife was not charged.

The day care was not required to be licensed by the state because it cared for fewer than six children at a time. As stunned as community members were, they also wondered whether the revelations were the tip of the iceberg, whether the abuse had been going on for years but went undetected.

“I was bombarded with calls from families that had sent their children to the day care in years past — They’d ask, ‘How do I know if my kid was hurt?’ ” Sisson said. “Everybody was freaking out. It was very far-reaching in the community, so that was another component of the case we had to deal with.”
Thankfully, investigators found no evidence of additional abuse.

The theme of this year’s conference — “Every Step Is a Victory” — reinforces the importance of crime survivors celebrating step-by-step progress in the healing and recovery process.

In addition to the plenary session, the conference — organized and presented by Ohio Attorney General’s Office — will feature opening remarks from Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, followed by a keynote presentation from Teresa Stafford-Wright, CEO of the Hope & Healing Survivor Resource Center in northeastern Ohio. She will share an inspiring story of resilience, healing and post-traumatic growth as a sexual-abuse survivor who entered the criminal-justice system at 14 years old.

Thirty-five workshops will be presented over the two-day event, offering professional development opportunities for victim advocates, social workers, health-care professionals, law enforcement officers and others serving the criminal-justice system.