Man given life sentence for sexual abuse of child

A former Wise County resident was sentenced to life in prison Thursday, a day after being found guilty of continuous sexual assault of a child under 14.

Audie Lee Butler

The verdict was issued by a Wise County jury in 271st District Court in Decatur after about 20 minutes of deliberation, roughly the same amount of time the jury needed to find 67-year-old Audie Lee Butler guilty of the first degree felony offense after a day of testimony from three witnesses Wednesday.

The victim in the case, who went by Jane Doe during the trial to conceal her identity, testified the abuse took place multiple times over the course of several years when she was younger than 14.

She recounted — often through tears — that Butler made inappropriate sexual contact with her at his Wise County home.

When asked why it took her several years to make an outcry, she said she spent years trying to convince herself it didn’t happen, but as she got older, she realized just how inappropriate the conduct really was.

“I knew it did happen, no matter how many times I said that it didn’t,” she said.

Not wanting to put her family through any difficulty, she said she instead decided she would try hard to be perfect so that no one would ever know, but at one point, “it got to be too much.”


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“I didn’t want to wake up in the morning anymore,” she said.

The jury also saw a recorded interview of Butler and an investigator with the Wise County District Attorney’s Office. In that video, Butler admitted to the sexual contact.

He faced a punishment range of 25 years to life in prison for the continuous sexual assault offense.

Read more in the weekend Wise County Messenger.

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