By Derek Spellman

dspellman@joplinglobe.com

NEVADA, Mo. — Newton County authorities will again attempt to contact two women who previously accused the pastor of a rural Granby church of molesting them while they were underage, a prosecutor said Tuesday.

The women will play a large part in determining whether the case against George Otis Johnston, the pastor of Grandview Valley Baptist Church, proceeds. The women also will help determine whether there are “additional investigative avenues that have not been exhausted,” said Assistant Newton County Prosecutor Bill Dobbs.

Johnston, 66, originally was one of a half-dozen people connected with fringe churches in Newton and McDonald counties, and who in 2006 found themselves facing multiple charges after a probe into alleged sexual abuse of children.

Ultimately, all charges were dismissed against all the defendants in McDonald County, partially because of problems with witnesses. The case against Johnston in Newton County has encountered its own difficulties over the past year.

Dobbs said he had tried, unsuccessfully, to get in contact with the two alleged victims before Tuesday’s status review hearing, which was conducted in Vernon County on a change of venue. The allegations leveled by the two women culminated in the filing of 17 charges against Johnston: two counts of first-degree child molestation, nine counts of first-degree statutory sodomy and six counts of second-degree statutory sodomy.

A Vernon County judge on Tuesday rescheduled the case review hearing for December. Dobbs said Newton County officials will again try to contact the two women within the next few days.

But Johnston’s defense attorney, Andrew Wood, of Neosho, said he had been unsuccessful in locating the two women last year for depositions. Dobbs said he could not recall precisely when he last spoke with the two women. “At that point in time, they were still interested in pursuing the case,” he said.



Contradictions

Dobbs also acknowledged after Tuesday’s hearing that some of the state’s witnesses apart from the two women have either recanted or altered their previous statements to authorities. He declined to elaborate on specifically what was said and by whom.

Wood confirmed Dobbs’ account but also declined to divulge specifics, except to say that some of the witnesses who the two women had previously claimed would corroborate their accounts ultimately contradicted them.

One of the women, then 17, testified at a September 2006 preliminary hearing that Johnston had abused her over an eight-year period beginning when she was 8, and that she and other children had been taught to regard Johnston as “grandfather.”

The other woman, then 20, testified during an October 2006 preliminary hearing that Johnston molested her in his trailer home when he was supposed to be tutoring her in algebra. The woman said she was between the ages of 11 and 15 during the contact.



Two churches

Grandview Valley Baptist Church was a commune-style church that was headed by Johnston and was an offshoot of another church compound in McDonald County. That church was Grand Valley Independent Baptist Church near Powell.

Both churches became the target of a probe that grabbed national headlines and saw multiple charges brought against their leaders more than three years ago. Johnston, too, had faced a charge in McDonald County, but that charge was dismissed last year.

Dismissed in June 2008 were all charges against Raymond Lambert, the pastor of Grand Valley Independent Baptist Church. It was the second time charges were dismissed against Lambert, who was accused of sexually abusing two teenage girls who were church members between February 1995 and April 2004. Both times, questions about alleged victims’ cooperation were a factor, although those alleged victims were not the same ones as those in the case against Johnston.

Lambert was indicted in February 2008 by a McDonald County grand jury on eight counts of sexual abuse. That indictment replaced eight identical charges filed Dec. 3, 2007, by Prosecutor Janice Durbin’s office. And those charges replaced charges originally filed in August 2006 by then-Prosecutor Steve Geeding that were dropped by Durbin in November 2007.

Charges against Lambert’s wife, Patricia Lambert, and his sister-in-law, Laura Epling, age unavailable, also were dropped at that time and were never refiled.

In addition to the dropping of charges against both of the Lamberts and Epling, charges were dropped in 2007 against Paul Epling and Tom Epling, Laura Epling’s husband. Both men were deacons at Grand Valley Independent Baptist Church.

Robert W. Evenson, a Pineville attorney who was representing the Lamberts and Laura Epling, had previously said the charges against his clients should have been dropped long before they were. He told the Globe that there was a “story within a story” stemming from a family quarrel that he said was behind the allegations against his clients and that was not investigated by authorities.





Up next

The next case review hearing has been set for 1:30 p.m. Dec. 22 in the case of George Johnston. The hearing will take place in Vernon County Circuit Court on a change of venue from Newton County.