LIVINGSTON PARISH — Abby Crosby hates azaleas. She had her husband dig up the ones in their yard when they bought their home.
She hates them because when she was eight, two teenage cousins began raping her. It went on for two years. Some of those attacks happened under the azalea bushes at the cousins’ home.
Now, at 55, she has put both of those cousins in prison.
“I couldn’t play in the front yard because I’d get pulled underneath azalea bushes,” she recalled. “I cannot stand an azalea bush.”
Crosby said she, her mother, and four siblings moved into the cousins’ family’s one-bedroom pool house when she was eight because they didn’t have anywhere else to go. That home was in Livingston Parish.
“We were dirt poor. We had no money and we depended on them to have a place to live,” she said.
The cousins, James Campbell and Marcus Campbell, were teenagers. They would catch her under the azaleas, in the barn at their property on Walker South Road or corner her in other places. She couldn’t get away, she bravely told UWK.
“James was the roughest one on me. He would rape me more. He would force me to have oral sex on him and then he would perform oral sex on me,” she said.
The attacks also included threats.
“He threatened me that if I told anybody, that my dog would go missing,” she said.
She didn’t tell, but her dog disappeared.
“They showed me the fur of my dog,” she said.
She said the repeated assaults left her with life-long physical injuries.
“James was brutal,” she said.
Her bladder was damaged and remains about one third the size it should be. She required medication and has had treatments to try to expand it. And she had psychological scars that went just as deep.
“My husband still has never been able to put his hand on my face”
She’s been with her husband nearly three decades. She still cannot tolerate having his hand on her face.
“My husband still has never been able to put his hand on my face, maybe on the side of my cheek or my ear, but he’s never been able to touch my chin or around my nose area,” she said.
The gentle stroking of a hand on her jaw or lips as a prelude to a kiss activates terrible memories. That’s because Crosby tells UWK the abuser would put his hand over her mouth while raping her.
“I would have the hand going over the face and (I was) screaming,” she said. “So I think that’s the next thing I’m going to work on.”
Crosby moved away from that house and grew up. She had a child and married a man with two children. They adopted a fourth child. It’s a happy life, she said, but the abuse cast a long shadow.
“I am a walking miracle,” she said. “I’ve been through depression. I’ve been through feeling ‘less than.’ I’ve stopped eating. I’ve been miserable. “If your own family can’t love you right, who’s going to love you right?”
As adults, some of the women in Crosby’s family knew about the abuse. When her mother died in 2020, relatives told the side of the family that included the rapist cousins that they were not welcome at the visitation or funeral, Crosby said.
James Campbell and his mother came anyway, after family visiting hours ended. Other relatives intervened to protect her, but it caused a scene.
That led to phone conversations about the abuse, conversations Crosby recorded.
And it got Crosby thinking. She thought that her abuse was so far in the past that her cousins couldn’t be held criminally responsible. She talked to Sherman Mack, a lawyer and former state representative who is now running for district attorney. He looked into it and told her that because of her age at the time of the crimes, the law still allowed for prosecution.
“Sherman Mack was a trooper,” she said, calling to check on her and her husband throughout the process.
She spoke to a detective and then to Sheriff Jason Ard.
“Sheriff Ard was a rock through this whole thing,” she said.
He dispatched detectives to Mississippi and Tennessee to find the Campbells.
The arrests happened quickly, but it took nearly five more years for the cases to make their way through the court system.
James Campbell, now 63, pleaded guilty to aggravated rape last week. Marcus Campbell, now 62, was convicted of the same charge in a bench trial in 2024. Prosecutors said their ages at the time of the crime – they were still juveniles in 1978 and 1979 — meant that their sentences had to match the maximum sentence for juveniles at the time. James Campbell was sentenced to three years in prison. Marcus Campbell was sentenced to four years.
Crosby said the credit for her making it through the abuse, her marriage, parenting and the criminal prosecution goes to God.
“The number one thing we depend on was our our faith in God, and that is the foundation, the Super Glue, concrete that keeps it all together. And I knew that no matter what, I was going to be okay through it. And I just needed to continue to breathe, and I had a great support system because I was open, and I talked to people about it. And I’m not embarrassed because I did nothing wrong. The shame, people need to know that they shouldn’t be shamed. They didn’t do anything wrong. They didn’t ask for it,” she said.
She said she shared that perspective with the judge when she gave a victim impact statement at James Campbell’s sentencing.
“There’s some of us that just know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that God’s watching over us and we’re relying and depending on that,” she said. “I told the judge in my impact statement, I said sometimes you got to walk through hell to get to heaven. And I said, that way, you can bring other people with you that have gone through the same thing, and you can bring them to where you’re at.”
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