Victim said she learned ‘that monsters were, in fact, real’

Before a South Point man found guilty of two counts of rape and one count of kidnapping and kidnapping on Wednesday found out what his sentence would be, his victim gave her impact statement to Lawrence County Common Pleas Judge Andy Ballard on Thursday.

Frank Thacker, 55, sat in a wheelchair, as he listened. The victim did not want to be publicly identified and it is the policy of The Tribune not to identify victims of sexual crime without their permission.

She was shaking and near tears as she spoke to the court. She began with a countdown on how long she had been waiting for her attacker to come to justice.

“Nineteen years, six months and 19 days, 7,142 days – that’s how long this has haunted me, how long I have had to live in fear, ” the victim said. “You said you were teaching me a lesson… all you taught me is that I couldn’t trust men, adults. That monsters were, in fact, real.”

She said the real lesson she was taught was the strength to call the police and report the crime. She said that Thacker ruined her childhood.

“It wasn’t bad enough you took my childhood, you also caused my best friend and I to drift apart. We couldn’t speak, we couldn’t see each other, without being reminded of that terrifying night,” she said. “The only memory I have of that school year is the stares in the middle school gym on my first days back.”

“All of these years later, I find out it was you, the father of the same girl who lectured me on the bus that I shouldn’t have been out having sex,” she continued. “A man who lived only blocks away. Our community hasn’t been safe for almost 20 years.”

The victim said she did not wish death on Thacker.

“That is far too kind,” she said. “I hope you get the maximum with no parole, so you can live to suffer through every single day of it.”

Thacker is already serving a prison of 27 years in the Noble Correctional Institute after being found guilty of rape, kidnapping and burglary in a separate case in 2018.

The charges in the 2019 case stem from a 2018 case against Thacker.

Thacker’s DNA was to Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation who put it into the national The Combined DNA Index System. It came back as a match for DNA from a 20-year-old rape case in South Point, in which a 14-year-old girl was abducted from the side of the road, taken to a field and raped.

After the victim’s statement, Judge Ballard gave Thacker the maximum 10 year sentence on all three counts, to run after each other and to run after he serves the 27 year sentence from his previous case, for a total of 57 years in the two cases.

Ballard said 10 years was the maximum under guideline sentencing for 1999 when the crime was committed. Under current Ohio law, he could have been sentenced to 12 years for each count.

Thacker was also sentenced to five years of post-release control, if he ever gets out of prison and was labeled a sexually violent offender.

Since Thacker is already a prisoner, Ballard said the sheriff could take him back to prison as soon as they had the manpower to do so.