By Jeff Lehr
jlehr@joplinglobe.com
An Iowa truck driver was ordered Thursday to stand trial on a charge that he sexually abused a 10-year-old girl in 2006 while hauling a hazardous-materials load through Jasper County.
Charles R. Ragsdale, 41, of Waukee, Iowa, was ordered bound over for trial on a charge of first-degree statutory sodomy after a preliminary hearing in Jasper County Circuit Court in Joplin.
The alleged victim, who is 14 years old today and lives in another Missouri county, told the court that Ragsdale took her with him on an over-the-road haul in March 2006. She testified that during the trip from Missouri to Kansas and back, they stopped in Jasper County, and he molested her inside the cab of his truck rig.
The girl said Ragsdale threatened to harm her family if she did not take her pants down and allow him to do what he wished. She said she believed the alleged abuse took place at night. But the girl could not initially tell the court exactly where in Jasper County it allegedly took place.
Susan Sullivan, an attorney from Columbia representing the defendant, questioned the girl on cross-examination about her disclosure of the incident more than two years later, in August 2008.
The girl said she told a girlfriend about it, and the girlfriend’s mother told the girl’s mother. She denied telling an investigator that her father was the first person to whom she disclosed the alleged abuse.
Sullivan called the owner of the trucking company for which Ragsdale works to testify as to the daily trucking logs the defendant turned in for the trip. The owner, who acknowledged that she is currently in a relationship with Ragsdale, testified that he left Seymour, Mo., at 8:30 a.m. on March 27, 2006, stopped briefly an hour later in Bois D’Arc and did not stop again until 1 a.m. the next day in Garnett, Kan.
On the way back with a hazardous-materials load, he stopped in Lamar to make a required inspection of his tires, she said. He made no recorded stops in Jasper County, she said. But she acknowledged in response to a question from assistant prosecutor Theresa Kenney that Ragsdale did pass through Jasper County on the return trip.
Ragsdale’s mother testified that she met her son for breakfast at a Hardee’s restaurant in Rogersville, Mo., the morning of March 28, 2006, and that the girl was asleep in the sleeper of his cab while they ate.
At that point in the hearing, the judge asked to see attorneys for both sides in his chambers. When they returned, the assistant prosecutor recalled the girl to the witness stand and asked her if she remembered accompanying a state child-abuse investigator on a drive in an effort to determine where the abuse allegedly took place.
The girl recalled taking the drive with the investigator and, with the aid of photographs introduced into evidence by the prosecution, identified a Conoco station off U.S. Highway 71 at Jasper as the location. She said the incident took place in a parking lot behind the station.
Sullivan asked the girl why she failed to mention the Conoco station when she was repeatedly asked about the location on previous cross-examination. The girl said she did not understand what the attorney was asking her previously. But the girl also acknowledged on further questioning that she had told an investigator at one point in time that she thought the incident took place on an exit ramp.
The defense told the court that hazardous-materials trucks are not allowed to park on exit ramps. Sullivan argued that the girl’s story had changed too many times, and that the trucker’s logs did not reflect any hour of unaccounted travel time. But the judge decided that those would be matters for a jury to decide and ordered the defendant bound over for trial.
