Anchorage Daily News

Tuesday was the first time both women had been in the same room together though they had known and thought about each other for a decade. One is in her early 20s, the other her early 30s, but they shared something no one else in the Anchorage courtroom did.

Both say that when they were little girls they were sexually abused by Sean Wright, boyfriend to one's mother, husband to the other's.

After 10 years of delays, the two now-grown women watched the trial against Wright wrap up Tuesday. During closing arguments, the prosecutor pointed to them in the gallery and told jurors they were victims who had endured Wright's abuse, while the defense attorney said they were liars.

As is typical in many child sexual assault cases, it is one person's word against another's.

The women did not get to hear Wright's version of events; like most defendants he chose not to testify, relying on hope that the state failed to meet its burden of proof.

The case rests almost entirely on the women's testimony. Both say Wright came into their beds at night when they were little and forced himself on them sexually. But there is no DNA, no fibers, no hair, no medical evidence about signs of physical abuse to corroborate what they say.

The prosecution says the women tell similar stories, though they didn't know each other and one was abused a decade after the other. Both women say Wright told them he was helping them become beautiful women; he was speeding their development.

Defense attorney John Bernitz told jurors the stories aren't really that similar. The women said Wright did different things to them. He said the women lied because they didn't like Wright.

A skilled crane operator, now 51 years old, Wright has spent a long time fighting the 1999 charges, trying to avoid a trial that could send him to prison for many years.

In the years since he was first accused, a lot has happened. Both girls grew up. One became a lawyer and moved across the U.S. Another got married. Memories have faded. In an unusual move, Superior Court Judge Mike Spaan dismissed three of the 16 charges against Wright in the middle of trial because the 21-year-old told jurors she couldn't remember a block of time when some of the allegations occurred.

Prosecutor Clinton Campion told jurors they had one question to answer: Did Wright go into the rooms of two children at night and do things that no one should do to little girls?

Both women testified that their mothers were troubled -- one an alcoholic, the other given to bizarre accusations. The women told jurors Wright gave their mothers comfort. He helped one through a bitter divorce from a man she accused of being the Washington state Green River Killer and also the murderer of Anchorage teen Bonnie Craig.

He helped the other mother fight the cancer that eventually killed her.

Both mothers, when they heard about the abuse, didn't believe or didn't want to believe it.

In many ways, Wright seemed like a good man, Campion said.

"In our society, we want our monsters to look a certain way. We want them to wear a certain uniform," he said in his closing statement.

"To wear a certain type of tattoo, to wear a bandana, to wear a red sash, to wear clothes that indicate that they are a monster. They don't wear white button-down shirts and have a job and graduate from high school and be a good father to stepdaughters and be a good husband to their wives.

"That's not who we think of as a monster. But the decision that you have to make today is whether Sean Wright did this or not," he told the jurors. "This decision is not to determine whether he's a monster. Because Sean Wright is a lot of things to a lot of different people."

Find Megan Holland online at adn.com/contact/mholland or call 257-4343.

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