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He wouldn't know until the trials started what information, if any, he could include about the other girls. There were no witnesses. Acquittal or probation were definite risks of trial.
"They've had to eat, sleep and drink this thing right in their face in Beaumont," she says. "I had pulled myself away from it."
According to Leslie and Rilea, Thompson told them from the beginning that all three girls could be tried together. It wasn't until the last minute, they say, that Thompson sprung the plea bargain on them and steered them in that direction.
Ashlee and Brea appear to have been satisfied with the plea bargain, although Ashlee isn't exactly sure what the plea bargain was. ("I don't really understand what he got," she says).
Randee had no say, because her case was in Harris County. But Thompson allowed Tina and Randee to be there through the whole process — they were all like family.
Randee says she would have been okay with a similar plea bargain in Houston.
"This is my senior year," she says. "I don't want to have to be pulled out of school for this stuff. I want my life back."
She's doing much better now. She's not cutting herself anymore. She's not around Klem anymore. And because her mom was constantly talking about the case and upsetting Randee, she's not living with her mom anymore. She's over at her father's, in a more mellow environment.
The ultimate call for the plea bargain seemed to lie with Ashlyn, who bit her tongue and left it up to her sister and stepsister. They were younger, and they hadn't endured what she'd had to. If they wanted to drop everything and move on, Ashlyn would respect that. She already felt bad enough for not defending her sisters in the first place.
"I didn't know what to do," she says. "I was so scared, and I wanted to stick up for [them] then. And I'm feeling a lot of guilt because I didn't."
Like Randee, Ashlyn had turned to self-mutilation. For the last two years of Klem's touching, she'd cut herself with a bobby pin or a nail. She has no clue why she did it. But through tears, she takes a guess.
"It's like it wasn't me," she says. "It wasn't me, it was all the anger held up in me, because I didn't say anything and I needed to, I know I needed to do. And I ignored it because I wanted to make them [Beth, Buck and Patsy] happy...I loved them and I didn't want to hurt them. And I wanted to be mad at myself because I was close to Beth and I let it happen. I trusted her and...she was there almost every time and she could've seen it."
In the end, she lost Beth anyway. And Paw-Paw. And Sweetie.
She lost her church family, too. People who she considered friends, but chose to believe she and her sisters were liars and whores.
"It's just like hit after hit after hit. You're just like, 'You know what? I'd just rather lay here and let it all hit me. Just lay here. I don't feel like fighting it.'"
So right now, Ashlyn's lying there. College is on hold. She had wanted to be a dental hygienist. But college is the furthest thing from her mind because, as she says, "I'm so screwed up in the head right now."
If Ashlyn didn't bite her tongue during the plea bargain discussions, if any lawyers had asked her how she felt, she could have told them. The words would have been choppy, garbled by tears, dripping with anger, like she was slashing herself with that nail deeper than ever before.
"This is a freakin' joke. It's taken as a freakin' joke now because, you know, our system's not doing anything. The doctor's, you know, getting to work and he's happy and he's smiling....Yeah, if that's how it is, this sucks. It sucks, and I don't have any respect for it. [Klem] should be put up somewhere. He's not a good person. He needs somebody to do that to him. He needs to live with the guilt and he needs to go somewhere where he can be, you know, hurt for seven years. He needs to be molested for seven years. By somebody bigger than him. And then he'll know."

