Stow Couple Facing Rape Allegations
Parents who fought to create law are now charged with breaking it
By Phil Trexler, Beacon Journal staff writer
Originally published in the Akron Beacon Journal, July 25, 2001
Five years ago, John and Narda Goff were outraged when their daughter's rapist slipped through a loophole in Ohio law and walked free.
They were so angry, they went on a crusade, lobbying lawmakers, speaking before committees, winning the support of prosecutors and politicians and eventually helping close the hole in the state's rape laws.
Yesterday, the Goffs were in Summit County Common Pleas Court, charged with the very rape law they fought to create. And their accuser is their teen-age daughter, who claims the Stow couple worked together, using a syringe to impregnate her with her stepfather's semen.
The parents has pleaded innocent and have a trial scheduled for Oct. 1. They are free on $500 bond.
Prosecutors say paternity tests have confirmed that John Goff is the father of his stepdaughter's 22-month-old son.
The Goffs could not be reached for comment. Their attorney, Walter Madison of Akron, called the case "a family tragedy."
"The family has suffered a lot through all of this and they are awaiting their day in court," Madison said, declining further comment.
John Goff, 39, is charged with two counts of rape and sexual battery and a single count of child endangering. He is a former U.S. Marine and an auxiliary Windham police officer.
Narda Goff, 42, is accused of complicity to the same charges. She suffers from multiple sclerosis and doesn't work outside the home.
The daughter went to Stow police in January with the claims against her mother and stepfather. It was the first time she ever revealed the sexual abuse allegations.
The Akron Beacon Journal does not normally identify victims of rape.
The daughter said she was first abused by her friend's father at the age of 8. The man went to trial in 1993 and was acquitted of rape. Jurors could not convict the man because under then Ohio law, only a penis could be used to commit the crime. The man had used his finger.
The case spurred John and Narda Goff to go public and fight for a change in law. Eventually they persuaded lawmakers to include penetration with any object as a component to rape. The law was changed in 1996.
"The minute the (jury) decision came back, we worked at closing that loophole so that no one else could walk through it," Narda Goff said in a 1996 interview. "They expected her as a child to see what was penetrating her. Grown women won't even look."
In the same interview, John Goff said, "What's the difference what he raped her with? Rape is rape."
At about the same time her parents were meeting with state leaders, the daughter claims John Goff began molesting her. His actions also were followed with death threats if she ever told, the daughter said yesterday.
The threats, she said, stopped her from telling anyone.
"He was going all around the state saying, 'Don't do this to children' when at the same time he was doing it to me," she said yesterday.
Now 18, engaged and working at a pizza shop, the daughter spoke of a childhood filled with unhappy memories. She said she attended four elementary schools, her last in Kent.
She was supposed to be home-schooled, but says she spent her days cleaning the house. She says she can neither read nor write.
At 16, she says her mother came to her with a plan. Because Narda Goff could no longer give birth, she wanted her daughter to bear John Goff's child.
The daughter claims her parents monitored her menstrual cycle to gauge her most fertile time and then used syringes to inject John Goff's semen.
"She told me John wanted a child," the daughter said yesterday. "I was injected so many times I couldn't count. I thought it was normal. I had been molested for so long, I thought every family does this."
After repeated tries over four days, it worked. On Sept. 1, 1999, she gave birth to a boy.
The daughter left home in January and moved in with her fiance's family in Ravenna. She has not spoken to her parents since then.
A month later, she won a court order and had police remove the boy from her parents' home. She later gave the child to the county and hopes to have her aunt adopt the boy. She said she would consider the boy her cousin. "Every time I looked at him, I saw John and I couldn't deal with it. I had to give him up for a chance at a better life," she said.
