Pawhuska Preacher Convicted of Sex Abuse, Molestation
By Louise Red Corn
A Pawhuska preacher who admitted to police that he had touched a teenage girl to “prepare her for her future husband” was convicted late Wednesday of three counts of child sexual abuse and one count of lewd molestation. Creth Dean Hopkins, 62, was taken to the Osage County Jail at 11 p.m. with no bond allowed as he awaits formal sentencing June 13. The six-man, six-woman jury recommended he serve 20 years on each of the sexual abuse convictions and three years for lewd molestation, centering on the four most specific allegations that Hopkins himself described as part of his “teaching modality.” The jury acquitted him of seven other counts of sexual abuse. Defense attorney Trevor Reynolds told jurors that the case was impossible to defend because only one charge, alleged to have occurred on the girl’s 14th birthday, was specific; the others were alleged to have occurred within a broad, four-year time frame. “Years ago in Salem, Mass., people pointed a finger and said, ‘You’re a witch,’?” Reynolds told jurors. “Nowadays, an accused sex offender is that witch. How does a man two, three, five years later defend himself?” The accuser in the case, Reynolds added, was relating fiction, “a movie in her own mind.” A Navy veteran of the Vietnam War who has preached since 1966 in Texas and Oklahoma, Hopkins has pastored Pawhuska’s Grace Community Church for the past six years and previously pastored Osage Indian Baptist Church, also in Pawhuska. The victim, now 22, went to police in 2010 after seeking counsel from older female relatives who had been raised by Hopkins in Texas but had grown estranged from him. The elder women said they urged the girl to tell her story to the police, telling her they were legally bound to make the report if she didn’t. “I needed to do something to stop this,” the victim testified, referring to her desire to protect a much younger female member of the family. She told police that Hopkins had repeatedly touched her inappropriately when she was between the ages of 13 and 16 during private movie nights, kissed her breast on her 14th birthday, and put her hand on his crotch during a drive on the tallgrass prairie, saying it kept him “awake.” She said that he told her the touching was “something holy” and part of her education as she reached womanhood. When police and Oklahoma Department of Human Services supervisor David Clifton interviewed Hopkins, Hopkins echoed the girl. “She had stepped into the next level,” Hopkins said on the recording played to the jury at trial. “She looked so beautiful … In that moment I saw a precious thing. It sounds corny but I wanted to honor her, to show her adoration, that I was pleased with her. I leaned forward and I kissed her, telling her how beautiful she was, how precious she was.” Hopkins’ wife, Rhonda, and another family member testified that the victim had invented the allegations.
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