UNDERWOOD, Minn. -- The wife of a man accused of sexually abusing and then killing his daughter has refused to leave home despite her husband's order to pack up and start life elsewhere.
'I'm not going,' Marilyn Rairdon said Thursday. 'School starts in two weeks. And the search for Sarah was so widespread we'd have to go so far. Besides, running away doesn't solve your problems.'
John Rairdon is charged in the May slaying of Sarah Ann, 13, his daughter from a previous marriage.
The complaint against Rairdon says he told investigators he had sexually abused the girl more than 60 times in the past five years, but that she started resisting in March.
He said he took her to an abandoned farm May 20, where she again fought his advances, so he stabbed her in the stomach with an awl and hit her in the throat. He said he hid the body in the farmhouse and later took it to a ditch 25 miles away.
More than 300 residents of Underwood, a town in northwest Minnesota, searched fields and raised more than $6,000 in reward money before Sarah's body was found by a farmer July 6.
Marilyn Rairdon said social workers have talked to the other children in the family and that there was no other abuse. She said she had no idea Sarah was being abused.
Rairdon had four other children from a previous marriage, Marilyn Rairdon had five children from a previous marriage, and they had two children together.
She said she visited her husband shortly before he was charged Wednesday.
'It would have been easier if I could have said, 'I hate you and I never want to see you again.' But I loved John and I still do. I said to him, 'I love you but I don't understand you.''
