Related story, A-13.

Out of the depths of darkness comes the nightmare:

A man slips in through the bedroom window, grabs a sleeping child, takes her to a nearby patch of grass and viciously rapes and sodomizes her -- threatening the child with death when she cries out.

That is the horror story told by 8-year-old Alicia when doctors discovered her brutal injuries in May of 1989. That is the story that Alicia told police detectives, social workers, lawyers, judges and counselors for more than a year.

But no one believed her.

Then police detectives learned of a man who was molesting little girls in Alicia's neighborhood, sometimes crawling through bedroom windows to get at them. The man, a registered sex offender and methamphetamine abuser named Albert Raymond Carder Jr., was arrested and convicted of the crimes not long after Alicia was raped.

Yet police and prosecutors insisted he could not have been the man who attacked Alicia.

Instead, they decided from the outset that her father, Jim, a 20-year Navy veteran with no criminal history, had brutalized his own daughter and that Alicia's mother, Denise, knew it and covered up the crime. They took their daughter away and put her in foster care.

The 37-year-old father, ravaged by grief and anger, vehemently denied knowing anything about the attack on Alicia.

For 2 1/2 years, Jim pleaded with officials to let him see her, or at least tell her that he loves her and wants her back. And he begged them to stop the adoption that would take his daughter away from him and Denise forever. No one listened. Instead, using the most graphic language, they accused Jim of raping Alicia. Eventually they got their proof when the daughter, after 13 months of therapy and almost total isolation from her family, changed her story and identified her dad as the rapist. They arrested and charged Jim with the attack. His wife was hospitalized after openly contemplating suicide.

But last week, tests of evidence gathered the day after the rape -- but overlooked until recently -- proved beyond any doubt that Jim is not the man who raped Alicia. And it proved that Alicia's second story can not be true.

That same evidence, semen samples taken from Alicia's panties, points squarely at Albert Carder Jr. as the rapist.

Until further investigation is completed, however, the rape charges against Jim stand. His trial is scheduled for Feb. 28.

Jim and Denise, 32, say the child protective and criminal justice networks -- police, social workers, counselors, the district attorney's office, judges -- have brutalized Alicia far worse than the man who assaulted her. And they feel the whole system has made their family's life a living hell. None of the authorities involved would discuss specifics, because the case is pending in juvenile and criminal courts. But they acknowledged that the increasing number of child abuse cases -- 80,000 reports hit the county's hot line annually -- can overwhelm the system and leave it susceptible to mistakes.

"Sometimes," said Napoleon A. Jones, presiding judge of the San Diego Juvenile Court, "we make inferences that are just stupid." A child is raped

On the night of May 8, 1989, the family -- Jim, Denise, Alicia and Joshua, age 6 -- were living on Afton Road in Cabrillo Heights, a plain Navy complex in Serra Mesa. The family's last name is not being used to protect the girl's identity.

Alicia, who had just received a citizenship award at nearby Angier Elementary School, was sleeping in her brother's bed, as she often did, her parents say. The room's window faces onto an interior courtyard. Joshua was sleeping with his parents in the adjoining bedroom. Jim, a burly man with a crew cut, arose at 5:30 the next morning to go to work as head of an equipment-maintenance unit aboard the aircraft carrier Independence.

"As I walked by Alicia's room, on the way out, she looked fine," he said. "She was lying in bed, covers pulled up to her chin, nothing remarkable about it."

Denise, who ran a day-care program in the house, said she thought it unusual that the curtains were blowing from the open window in Alicia's room. But children were arriving and she quickly put it out of her mind. Just after 7 a.m., Denise called Jim at the ship, telling him that Alicia had blood spots on her nightgown and was complaining that it hurt to go to the bathroom and to sit down. But generally, Denise said, the child acted normally.

Denise, who has only one kidney herself, said she assumed her daughter had another of the kidney infections that have bothered her for years. Since Denise doesn't drive, Jim came home to take them to the doctor. (A neighbor came over to watch the kids.)

At Navcare, a Navy clinic on Murphy Canyon Road, the couple got the shock of their lives.

A doctor sat Alicia on an examining table, and asked her to take off her clothes. Even from a distance, there was no question about what had happened to her.

"She wasn't so much bloody, but just torn," Jim said. "It looked like somebody had hit her in the crotch with an ax...It was torn, raw flesh." Jim said he went to pieces. He left the room. He tried to call his boss to say he couldn't come back to work.

"He had broke down," Denise said. "He was just crying, and couldn't even talk on the phone."

When the couple came back to the examining room, the doctor told them, "I am going to have to report this," Jim recalled.

"I said, `You're damn right you are! Somebody hurt her.'

"I didn't know how it could have happened...Hell, I was there, I was asleep!" Jim said in a recent interview.

The couple sat with Alicia in the waiting room for four hours until police arrived. They tried to ask Alicia what happened, Jim said, but she said she couldn't remember.

"I didn't feel that pushing her, maybe, was the right thing to do," he said. "I just held her."

The police took Alicia and her mother to Children's Hospital, and Jim followed in his car.

Doctors who examined Alicia told them she would need surgery and might have to be fitted with a colostomy bag because her injuries were so serious. In her notes, one of the physicians quoted Alicia as saying a man had come through her bedroom window, taken her out and hurt her. About 4 p.m., the parents were taken to separate rooms for questioning. William Montejano, a child-abuse detective, told Jim the obvious -- that his daughter had been sexually assaulted. Detective Renee Black told Denise the same thing.

The officers asked Jim if he would consent to a search of his house, a lie-detector test and a probing of his body for rape evidence.

"I told them I'd cut off an arm, a leg, whatever they wanted," he said. "Just satisfy themselves that it wasn't me, and go out and look for who the hell did it."

With their permission, police went to the house early that evening and carted away bags of evidence, including the sheets from Alicia's bed and her nightgown and panties. An officer also took a picture of a footprint outside the window, Jim said, after he requested that it be done. Jim was ordered to have no contact with his daughter. Denise was told she could be in the room with Alicia only if someone else was present, and she could not talk about what happened.

Both were warned that any violation of the orders would mean they could lose custody of Joshua, who remained at the home.

About five minutes before her daughter was to be taken away for surgery, Denise said, two guards arrived and escorted her out of the room. A social worker told her she could not stay in the hospital. When she returned to her daughter's room with the guards to say goodbye, Alicia had already gone.

"The time when she needed us most, they completely took her away from us," Jim said, choking back tears. "She had to go through a damn surgery all by herself." The surgery was successful, and the physical damage wasn't as bad as originally feared. Investigation begins

That night, Jim went to the police station for a lie-detector test. The results were inconclusive. The polygraph expert said he moved too much. Jim said that was because he could not stop flinching as he was asked graphic questions about what had been done to his daughter. "At the time, it was a lot harder to hear than it is now," he said.

The next day at the police station, the couple were questioned again.

"They just absolutely, flat-out accused me of raping my daughter, of doing the most sadistic, nasty things to her," Jim recalled. " `Why didn't I act like a man, come clean and admit it?' "

Then the officer asked what Jim thought about a story from Alicia about a man taking her out her brother's bedroom window, the one with the foot-high concrete box beneath it.

Although both Joshua and Alicia frequently climbed through the window to go play, Jim told the detective that the story sounded ludicrous. But he could not explain Alicia's injuries.

At the end of her interview, Denise says, she was told: "You just stood there and watched your husband (expletive) your daughter, and got off on it!" She said she stood up and left the room.

Alicia had told detectives that "a man came to my brother's window and carried me out," according to the police report of the interview with the child. It was the story, later recorded on videotape, that she would tell for the next 13 months.

The story was very detailed. The man, she said, "told me he was my uncle, but he's not." Alicia described her attacker as wearing a short-sleeved, striped shirt and brown pants. He had a blemish on his face. She said he took her to a car, a green one like her grandfather's, drove a short distance to a grassy area, where "he put his private parts in my butt and my crotch."

When she cried out because it hurt, she said, he warned her to be quiet or he would kill her. She said the man then drove her back to her house and put her inside the bedroom.

She told detectives she went to her parents' room and got her toy kitty, and went back to bed.

Sometime shortly after the attack, San Diego police criminalist Annette Peer examined Alicia's panties and her nightgown. She reported no trace of sperm on either.

That would prove to be a devastating oversight of evidence that could have cleared Jim more than two years ago.

After her surgery, Alicia had a nurse call home, Jim said. He answered. "I could hear Alicia there, in the background, `let me talk to my daddy, let me talk to my daddy,' " Jim said. But because he had been ordered to have no contact with his daughter, he had to tell the nurse he couldn't speak to her.

Denise arrived home minutes later. "He was just standing in the kitchen, just crying," she said. "The first thing I thought was Alicia had died. It took him 10 or 15 minutes to tell me what had happened." Social worker Diane Anderson directed the couple to see Kathleen Goodfriend, a private marriage, family and child counselor who was assigned to work with their daughter.

Jim and Denise lay much of the blame for the horror they have endured at the feet of Anderson and Goodfriend, who work closely together. County officials said Anderson could not talk about the case; Goodfriend declined comment.

A long series of court appearances began. Jim was ordered not to be alone with his son; both parents were told to submit to psychological testing. Back at home, Joshua was terrified that every knock on the door was someone coming to get him. He began wetting his bed. Still baffled about what had happened, the couple put a sensitive alarm on their son's window. On May 23, 1989, two weeks after their daughter was attacked, the alarm went off at 12:30 a.m., Jim said. Joshua came running into their room and jumped on his father's chest.

Jim said he saw a car speeding off into the fog. They called the police, and officers came and took fingerprints. At 4:30 a.m. that same morning, the couple say, the alarm went off again, and once more police were called. The next day, Jim set about moving his family to a new housing complex. Simultaneously, Albert Carder Jr., the convicted child molester, was reporting that his car, a green 1972 Chevrolet Nova, had been stolen, according to police reports.

Carder said the car disappeared sometime between 10 p.m. May 22 and 8:30 a.m. the following morning.

At that point, though, the couple had never heard of Albert Carder Jr. On June 1, Denise and Joshua were allowed a brief supervised visit with Alicia, the first time they had seen her since she was raped a month earlier. They were not allowed to mention the attack or talk about daddy, Denise said.

A few weeks later, Jim got his first visit with her. "When that child saw her dad she jumped into his lap, hugged him, was thrilled to see him," said Marilyn Tyler, Alicia's first foster mother. "I don't think she would have done that if he'd been the one to attack her." Jim, Denise, Joshua and Alicia were assigned court-appointed attorneys. Denise said she was in a bathroom stall during a break in one court hearing when she overheard her daughter's attorney, Kandy Koliwer, tell Anderson, the social worker: "I don't know why we're here -- we know they did it." Koliwer declined to comment about the case. On June 9, the complaint against the family was amended in Juvenile Court. Although no one had examined or even talked to Joshua, Jim and Denise said, the new complaint alleged that he was in danger of being sexually assaulted.

Joshua stayed at home, but the threat remained. "That was the hook they held over us the whole time," Jim said.

A few days later, Jim and Denise were offered a plea bargain. By pleading no contest to a charge of neglect, they said, a family reunification plan could begin.

As long as they agreed to hire a live-in caretaker and to submit to psychological tests, Alicia could be home in as little as a week.

Jim says he was adamantly opposed.

"I didn't then, and I certainly don't now, think we did anything neglectful...It was like a plane crashed on our house," he said. Denise said her attorney told her he would quit the case if she didn't take the deal.

"I was hysterical," Denise said. "All I could see was Alicia coming home in a week. I forced Jim to agree, more or less."

A Navy man long accustomed to following orders, Jim said he figured "it must be legal." They signed the papers.

The Juvenile Court subsequently found that either Jim or Denise had caused the injuries to Alicia, or they had allowed someone else to do it. But Alicia did not come home in June of 1989. She still has not come home. Counselor's interpretations

Psychological tests of Jim and Denise were delayed. Kathleen Goodfriend, Alicia's counselor, reported to Juvenile Court that Alicia's life would be in danger if she were returned to the family, Jim said. (Jim and Denise would later appeal the plea bargain to an appellate court and to the state Supreme Court; both upheld it.)

At every turn from then on, Jim and Denise say, Goodfriend and Anderson saw evil where there was good.

When Jim sent his daughter a Valentine card, on which he wrote, "I love you and need you; Daddy," Goodfriend told the court that she regretted ever giving it to the girl. Goodfriend described Alicia opening the card and becoming "transfixed with fear" when she read the words, Jim said. When Alicia happened to see a picture of Jim and Joshua, Goodfriend described her reaction as "abject fear," the couple say. But a psychologist hired by them described Alicia looking at a picture of Jim as "a little girl happy to see her father."

While Jim and Denise were in Juvenile Court that June signing their plea bargain, detective Montejano -- the officer who had interviewed Jim about the rape of Alicia -- was investigating a sexual abuse case in Cabrillo Heights, the same Navy housing complex where Jim and Denise used to live. On June 16, 1989, Montejano arrested Albert Carder Jr. on child molestation charges.

Police soon learned that he been kicked out of the Navy in 1988 after his conviction for molesting two children in San Luis Obisbo.

In violation of his probation, Carder had moved to San Diego and was staying with a Navy buddy who lived on Larkdale Avenue -- about half a block from the house where Alicia and her family were living when she was raped.

Montejano developed a case against Carder that resulted in eight charges of committing lewd acts on four young girls.

The attacks occurred between Feb. 1, 1989, and June 14, 1989, several in the home where Carder was staying. All of the girls were under 11, and all lived within a stone's throw of where Jim and Denise had lived. In May of 1989, Carder crawled through the bedroom window of a girl named Angelique, court records say. "He shook her until she woke up and then told her he had come to say goodbye because he was going to jail." Carder told the girl he wanted to perform oral sex on her, and warned her not to tell her parents "or she would be taken away from them." The girl said he left without doing anything.

In another case, a father found Carder hiding in his daughter's closet. Carder eventually pleaded guilty to the molestations, and was sentenced to 17 years in prison. He admitted abusing methamphetamine and alcohol and becoming so drunk that he could not remember whom he had attacked. A psychologist described him as a predator and a "fixated pedophile." No one told Jim and Denise anything about him.

In mid-July, Jim and Denise were asked by Montejano to go to the police station to look at a photo lineup of six men. They didn't recognize any of them, Jim said, and they weren't told why they were looking at them. The court hearings and tests continued. Once, for an hour a day for a full week, Jim sat in a room with his pants pulled down and with a rubber band around his penis, watching a television and listening to sexual images. The band was supposed to measure his arousal.

He took at least six psychological tests, some taking many hours to complete, and was interviewed numerous times by psychologists. Jim says he passed every test.

He was told to attend regular meetings of Parents United, a group that treats perpetrators of sexual abuse and some victims. Moving through the program, Jim said, requires admitting guilt.

"I can't say that," he said. "I didn't do it. So we couldn't continue on with that."

Jim said he then had to go to Deniers Group, "for people who haven't admitted their guilt." Denise, meanwhile, was in another treatment group, where she says she was told again and again: "Jim did this, Jim did this." In their new home in Pacific Beach, they proudly put out Alicia's pictures next to Joshua's. When neighbors asked where she was, they tried to explain. But no one believed them. To this day, only one of their neighbors speaks to them, the couple said.

Children walking on their street, they say, often cross to the other side when they pass in front of their house. One neighbor's children run whenever they see Jim or Denise. The testimony of a child

In August 1989, four months after the attack, a friend from their old neighborhood called the couple with a rumor of a molester there who had crawled into little girls' bedroom windows.

Jim said he called detective Montejano and asked him about it, but Montejano said he couldn't say anything.

A short time later in court, Montejano mentioned the molestations on the witness stand, saying it involved four young girls in the same general area where Jim and Denise had lived. He didn't give the molester's name, however.

"I wanted to jump up and scream," said Denise. But the couple were told that the case was unrelated to theirs, a conclusion they found amazing. In September 1989, Denise felt ill during a court hearing, and later that day had to be taken for emergency appendicitis surgery. Since Jim couldn't be alone in their house with his son, he called his mother in Missouri at 3 a.m. She flew out the next morning.

"That has happened three times since this has gone on," Jim said, his voice cracking again. "I've had to have my mom come out and stay with me, a 36-year-old man."

Jim had been allowed to visit Alicia a handful of times from July to October of 1989 on a strictly supervised basis. But that October, Juvenile Court Judge Christine Pate ordered that all visitation between Alicia and her family be halted, Jim said. Pate did not return a reporter's phone call.

According to Jim and Denise, Pate said she hated to hurt Alicia, but some way had to be found to impress upon the child that "we've got to have a more believable story" about how she was attacked.

Denise would not see her daughter again until December of 1990, 11 months and three weeks after visitation was cut off. Jim has still not seen her. In January of 1990, Jim and Denise first learned the name of the child molester at the Navy housing complex, Albert Carder Jr., when agents from the Naval Investigative Service asked to interview Jim.

The agents wanted him to take a polygraph. Jim says he agreed -- but on the condition that if he passed, the agents would help him.

"They told me it had to be me, no doubt in their minds. They are experts. `You did it, why don't you just admit it?' " Jim said.

Jim says he responded, "I don't have a story for you, and I can't make one up for you."

He passed the lie detector, Jim says, and the agents showed him a police file on their case.

He saw a report on Carder and his molestations in their old neighborhood. Denise said she recognized several of the victims as her daughter's former playmates.

The couple could not believe that police wouldn't consider that Carder was the rapist. Montejano declined to comment about his investigation. "Here's a guy coming through the windows, doing exactly what my daughter reported," said Jim.

"Sure, he did a lot more to my daughter, and took her (out) through the window. But in my mind, it's a lot easier to believe he did it than to believe a father would do that to his daughter," he said. "Especially when there's no indication I had ever done anything like that before." When they tried to impress upon authorities that Carder was the attacker, the parents were dismissed, they said.

Jim insists that Anderson, their social worker, once tried to suggest that Jim knew about the molested girls in the neighborhood and had raped his Alicia to coincide with those attacks, and to use them as a cover story. When the couple tried to bring up Carder's name in court, they were rebuffed again.

In yet another twist in the case, the county counsel pressing the case against Jim and Denise in Juvenile Court was E. Jane Via. In her former job, as a deputy district attorney, Via had prosecuted Carder and sent him to prison. She was well aware of the facts of his case.

When the parents tried to suggest that Carder was the rapist, Jim said, Via stood up at a juvenile court hearing and declared: "I was the DA on that case. There are no similarities to this, it's a waste of time to even consider it."

Via is out of the state on vacation until later this month and could not be reached for comment.

About the time Via was dismissing any similarity between Carder's assaults and Alicia's rape, police were hauling Carder out of Tehachapi state prison and back to court.

Carder was charged on April 23, 1990, with kidnapping a 4-year-old girl from the bedroom of her house in a Paradise Hills Navy complex on Ranger Road. The crime had occurred almost a year earlier, on May 13, 1989 -- five days after Alicia was raped.

The 4-year-old, named Jeannette, was sleeping on a mattress on the floor in the same room with her mother, according to police and court records. Carder came in the window, carried her off, and drove around in his truck with the girl on his lap. She was found later in a phone booth near her home.

Jeannette's father later told a private investigator that the girl had abrasions on her rectum and vagina where Carder had tried to penetrate her. Carder pleaded guilty to kidnapping and committing lewd acts on a child. The evidence included DNA testing of sperm found on the girl's clothing. On Sept. 20, 1990, Carder got eight years for that attack added to his earlier 17-year sentence.

No one told Jim and Denise of this. And no one saw any similarities to the story Alicia told about the attack on her. `Daddy hurt me'

Denise, for much of 1990, suffered through bouts of depression and once tried to commit suicide. She was in and out of mental hospitals. But in June of 1990, things got even worse.

Jim and Denise, who had no contact with Alicia, learned from a social worker that their daughter had changed her story. Alicia, who was still undergoing twice-weekly therapy sessions with Goodfriend, told her foster family that it was daddy who had hurt her.

The foster family then took Alicia on a three-week drive to Disney World in Florida, according to Jim and Denise. The foster parents also told the social worker and Alicia that they wanted to adopt the child. Jim and Denise are convinced that Goodfriend, Alicia's counselor, coaxed their daughter into accusing her father of the attack. Talking about that sends Jim into convulsions of anger and pain.

"I want you to try to picture this," said Jim, as he openly cried. "Here's somebody who's been raped, and who needs to be helped with that. How could an 8-year-old kid assimilate that? To have her life threatened? To come that close to her own mortality?

"In that situation, you should be placed with somebody who can help you understand how such things could happen to you. `It's not your fault, you didn't do anything wrong.'

"Instead, she's told two times a week for 13 months, `No, that's not what happened, Alicia. Get it straight.' They didn't treat her for what was wrong! I have no idea what my daughter believes or knows to be true right now."

On Dec. 13, 1990, Jim was in uniform at his job on the Navy base when police arrived and took him away in handcuffs. He was charged with raping his daughter, based on her new story of what happened.

When he was being processed in jail, Jim said, a sheriff's deputy pulled him aside and warned him about the paper work on child-abuse charges that he would get when he appeared at his arraignment: "When you get those papers," the deputy told him, "you eat them, shove them up your a--or you flush them down the toilet. But you don't take them back to your cell because they (inmates) will find them and they will kill you." "I have never been so scared, and so looking for a hole to crawl in, in all my life," Jim said.

When Jim was arrested, Denise was in a hospital because she was suicidal. When she heard the news, Denise said, she broke down completely. A hospital social worker calmed her enough so that she could call Jim's mother in Missouri. The hospital arranged for her to leave for Jim's arraignment. With Jim facing up to 24 years in jail, the couple found their way to a criminal attorney, Michael McGlinn. With money from a trust fund his mother had recently inherited, Jim was able to make his $25,000 bail and was released. They hired McGlinn with the same money.

At Jim's preliminary hearing in San Diego Municipal Court on Feb. 26 of this year, Alicia sat in the witness stand with a doll in her lap and with the foster mother who wanted to adopt her at her side. According to court transcripts, Alicia said she was there to testify because "somebody hurt me."

"Do you know who hurt you?" Deputy District Attorney David Rubin asked. "Yes."

"Who is that?"

"My dad."

She said she knew it was her dad because the attacker was "tall" and had "blue eyes." She said she didn't remember many details about the assault, but that he had touched her "private part" with his hands and his "private part."

Alicia recalled some details of her earlier story about the man coming through the window, too, but said she had made it up "because I was scared."

She said she'd been going to classes to get ready for court.

"Do you love your daddy?" defense attorney McGlinn asked her.

"Yes," Alicia answered.

Rubin told the court that from the beginning of the case, authorities knew the girl's story about a stranger abducting her wasn't true.

"She did what I think any of us would have done," he said. "She went into a turtle-like response and she withdrew into a shell and she told a story that she knew was a lie, because she knew when she was able to relax and stay calm, she was able to disclose the truth."

Judge Judith Hayes agreed. "I find that the story relating to the person coming in through the window was made up by the witness because she was, I'll quote her, `scared that I thought I would get in trouble.' " At the end of the hearing, Jim was bound over for trial in Superior Court on the two counts of committing lewd acts on his daughter.

The adoption of Alicia was moving ahead, too. It was due to be completed in August, Jim said. But a paper work mix-up delayed it.

McGlinn, meanwhile, in preparation for Jim's trial, asked to see the evidence in the case. Following that request, Rubin sent Alicia's clothing back to the San Diego police lab. This time, the lab detected the presence of sperm on the clothing.

Jim Stam, the supervising criminalist for the Police Department, said his lab acquired a new piece of equipment in mid-1990, called an "alternate light source," that detected the sperm the second time around. But a report from a private lab, Forensic Science Associates in Richmond, Calif., where Alicia's clothing was sent by the district attorney's office in May for additional tests, tells a different story. The report says a hand examination of Alicia's panties "revealed a stiffened area near the leg hole" that produced "high levels" of sperm when viewed under a microscope. Sperm also was found in several other areas on both the panties and the nightshirt, the report said. It is the same clothing that prosecutors and county counsels had been holding up, waving about and pulling in and out of evidence bags since May of 1989. Evidence clears father

Preliminary DNA tests on the sperm, completed last month, show conclusively that it could not have come from Jim, Alicia's biological father. Albert Carder Jr., the child molester and methamphetamine addict whom police and prosecutors have insisted for 2 1/2 years had nothing to do with Alicia's rape, is among about 5 percent of the population that could have produced the samples.

A more sensitive DNA test that can narrow down its origin to one person in a million or more is being conducted now, but results won't be available for several months.

While Jim and Denise's trip to hell seems near an end, it isn't over yet. The district attorney's office has refused to drop the criminal charges against him, at least for now.

And since the case includes a court order prohibiting Jim from coming within 200 yards of Alicia, he still can't visit her.

"This case has seen a dramatic turn of events, and to put it all in perspective is something we are going to take care to do," Deputy District Attorney Cathy Stephenson, Rubin's supervisor, said last week, explaining why rape charges are still pending against Jim.

Despite the DNA tests, Stephenson said, there is "conflicting evidence" about who did it -- primarily Alicia's testimony against her father. She said investigators want to carefully review the case, and interview Carder, before making any decision on whether charges should be dismissed. "We want to do the right thing," she said.

Police also are reopening their investigation of Alicia's attack, said Lt. Ron Seden, who heads the child abuse division. "We're as anxious to get to the bottom of this as anyone," he added.

Jim said he has been told that investigators want to find out if he or his wife knew Carder, and perhaps allowed him to attack Alicia. Jim and Denise said they don't know Carder. A private investigator who has interviewed Carder said the convicted molester denies knowing them, too. The pain, Jim said, continues.

"I want Alicia to know I'm not mad at her," he said, choking on the words. "I understand. I don't care. She did the best she could. I'm not mad! I just want to tell her that."

While the adoption of Alicia has been halted, and the county Department of Social Services has indicated it would like to see Alicia reunited with her family, Jim said he has been warned that process could take four or five months. Social workers and counselors must make sure she is ready to move from her foster family to her home, he said. If she does come back then, she will be 11 years old. She will have spent three birthdays, three Thanksgivings and three Christmases away from her parents and brother.

And the bills, like a paper river, are flowing in from counselors, psychologists, criminalists, doctors and everyone else.

The couple, who have been married 11 years, already have received more than $12,000 in bills for attorneys from the county, Jim said, a figure he expects will top $25,000. His mother in Missouri, he said, has spent nearly $150,000, her inheritance and her life savings, trying to help them. After his retirement from the Navy on May 31, Jim said, before the sun rises the next day, he wants to be on his way back to Cabool, Mo., and to never see San Diego again. Told of the family's plans, Lana Willingham, deputy director of the county Social Services Department, said: "I don't blame them."

Until they leave, however, Jim would like everyone who has been trampling on his family's lives to leave them alone.

"You've helped us enough, thank you very much," he said. "We'll go on from here."

Library Note: The family's name, Wade, was made public in a story in the Tribune on 16 Nov 91. Names are: James Wade, Jim Wade, Alicia Wade.