The young woman in the Sanders County Courthouse witness box Wednesday had just testified, often through tears, to years of being raped by her father.
The sexual abuse began, she said, with inappropriate touching when she was 6 years old and escalated as the years went by - through unsuccessful attempts at intercourse starting at age 8, to countless successful attempts later, until finally her father allegedly forced her to engage in three-way sex with him and his girlfriend.
When Guzynski, special prosecutor for the Montana Attorney General's Office, asked the 23-year-old woman if the man who had done this to her was in the courtroom, Guill stood as his daughter raised her head to look over the judge's bench.
Looking directly at him for the first time, she pointed at Guill, and quickly turned away and broke down sobbing again.
Douglas Guill's trial - on felony charges of two counts of incest, two counts of rape and one count of sexual abuse - entered its second day as a jury of seven women and five men try to figure out just what happened on Golden Pond Lane outside the remote western Montana community of Heron, near the Idaho border.
According to Guill's daughter and his ex-wife, Candace, who wrapped up her testimony earlier Wednesday, it was a strange life, whether the allegations of incest are true or not.
The couple's two children - the Guills have a son as well - and Candace were not allowed to have friends, only allowed to leave Douglas Guill's property once or twice a year, and received only the barest of a home-school education until the alleged victim was 12 years old.
At that point, the daughter testified, the home-schooling essentially ended and the children were put to work on the property and, later, for their father's successful heating and air-conditioning business, Advanced Systems - although mother and daughter said they were never paid.
The only money they were allegedly given was their yearly income tax refund, usually around $300 to $400, after their father filed returns indicating Advanced Systems had paid them $11,000 to $12,000 annually.
Douglas Guill allegedly convinced his family that he would determine whether they went to heaven or hell, and that everyone outside their small world was evil.
Meantime, their mother lived in an outbuilding called the storehouse for years, then in an unfinished room in the basement of a house the family built, cooking, cleaning and doing yard work for the family, while upstairs their father lived with his girlfriend, Nicole Christensen.
On cross-examination, defense attorney Mike Sherwood of Missoula sought to establish several things.
The family was never forcibly detained or otherwise held hostage on the property, located on Cabinet Gorge Reservoir. Indeed, Sherwood's questioning pointed out, when Candace and the children did leave the property, they usually traveled without Douglas Guill.
They also had access to keys to all eight or so vehicles on the property at all times. The keys, Candace testified, were left in the vehicles' ignitions.
Not only that, Douglas Guill and Nicole Christensen would leave the property together, for up to a week at a time, going as far away as Mexico on vacations. Douglas Guill even bought his daughter a Corvette when she was 21.
There were, the suggestion to the jury was, ample opportunities for Candace and the children to escape if things were so bad.
Candace also admitted to Sherwood she is involved in a lawsuit seeking more than $500,000 from her ex-husband.
However, Guzynski established that the lawsuit sought to overturn her divorce settlement, in which she signed away her rights to all the Guill property, and what she's asking for is half the marital estate - which a district court judge in Libby has already awarded her.
The ruling is under appeal.
In his opening statement, Sherwood told the jury they would likely have to look at a photograph of Douglas Guill's pubic hair. When he interviewed her, Sherwood said, the daughter had told him the color of the hair was gray - same as the hair color on her father's head.
“But it's brown,” Sherwood said.
However, when asked about it Wednesday, the daughter said it was “black with some gray.” She said she didn't remember saying it was only gray when Sherwood interviewed her several months ago, even after rereading a transcript of the interview.
It also became clear the testimony of a Sandpoint, Idaho counselor that both Candace and her daughter see, and Sherwood will call as a witness, could become critical.
Normally confidential, the counselor's notes from her sessions with the women became fair game in the trial when both Candace and the daughter waived their rights to the confidentiality of the notes with law enforcement officers investigating the case.
Sherwood's lines of questioning, often objected to by Guzynski, suggest that several key details concerning the alleged sexual abuse that the daughter has supplied to attorneys differ from those she told the counselor.
One winter night when all the Guills and Nicole Christensen were in the hot tub, the daughter said Douglas Guill forced Candace to get out of the warm water and stand in the snow.
“It was supposed to cleanse her or something,” she said. “She was soaking wet. He made her lay in the snow for 45 minutes to an hour.”
When her brother tried to make friends with some kids his own age who were visiting the area where the Guill property is located, her father became angry, she said.
“Dad picked him up by his shirt and threw him to the ground,” the young woman testified. “He said, ‘Why are you talking to people?' He was mad.”
She and her mother told of another alleged incident where her father put a “huge” bruise on her mother's thigh when the family was going camping.
Her father was riding in a sports car with Nicole while she and her brother rode in a crew cab pickup, being driven by Candace and towing a boat, when her father became angry because the pickup wasn't keeping up.
Her father pulled over and waited for them, then attacked her mother, kicking her in the thigh (Candace testified he hit her in the thigh).
Judge Christopher cautioned jurors that they cannot convict Douglas Guill of anything but the sex-related charges against him.
Guill's daughter described the alleged sexual acts with her father in detail. Asked why she never told her mother, she said her father told her: “If I ever told anyone, he said he would kill himself and it would be all my fault. I didn't know what would happen if I told her - to her or to me.”
Why did she finally leave, at the age of 22 - an escape planned, with the help of her mother, for a year?
“I just wanted to get married and have kids,” the daughter said. “I knew he wouldn't allow it if I stayed. He thinks everybody is evil except him.”
The Corvette her father bought her, she said, she took as a bribe for her to remain silent.
She finally told the people who took her in in Sandpoint, where she went after leaving Heron, about the alleged incest, and they pressured her to get professional help. The professional help, in turn, pressured her to go to authorities, she said.
When she left Heron, Guzynski asked, was it ever her intention to tell anyone about the alleged abuse?
“No,” she answered.
Why not? he asked.
“I didn't ever want to go through all this,” the young woman said. “I just wanted it to go away. And I promised him I wouldn't tell. I keep true to my word.”
The trial resumes at 9 a.m. Thursday. It's expected to last through next Tuesday.
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