After her father's death, Mary's family moved 100 miles south to New Wilmington, Pa., another small town, where the back roads are filled with brown buggies and white shingled homes. Mary's father was killed in a buggy accident when she was 5 she remembers him pulling her onto his lap and fondling her at their home in the small town of Sugar Grove, Pa. He waited until nearly midnight on a cold evening last February, and then put the letter in the mailbox at the white shingled home of Sam Mast, an Amish minister in the community where Mary's family lived during her teenage years. Mary gave the letter to a friend, who drove 30 minutes northwest of the house where Mary was staying in the Wisconsin town of Viroqua, past a couple of dirt roads, a string of red barns, and frozen cornfields. 'There was nothing I could do about this abuse as it was incest.'

'When I was 4 years old, I was molested, when I was 6, I was sexually abused (rape) from then on till I was 17,' the 19-year-old put down. And she thought about her older brother, Johnny, and his refusal when she'd asked him to go to therapy the day before. Mary fingered her long brown hair as she thought of her sister. The little girl had put the doll's bonnet on backward. Nothing except a stuffed doll that had belonged to her 6-year-old sister. There were no signs of the Amish upbringing she had left behind-no plain wood furniture or chamber pot.

When she wrote the letter that she hoped would protect her sister, Mary Byler was lying on a twin bed, surrounded by rainbow-colored walls and a sky-blue ceiling decorated with bright white clouds. Reprinted with permission from Legal Affairs.

Gross beat half step