Woman says she regrets keeping silent

A 50-year-old Colorado mother of two feels guilty she didn’t tell the world her secret sooner. Perhaps it could have saved others from the horror she endured.

Perry Allison Hood adopted Terry Timm in the early 1980s, supposedly rescuing the teenager, she said, from sexual abuse at the hands of her biological father and grandfather.

Hood, a Nye County school psychologist was arrested recently in Pahrump on multiple child pornography charges. Timm said the allegations are the tip of the iceberg.

She first met Hood when he and his former wife, Deborah, began work as school counselors at a middle school in Monmouth, Maine.

According to Timm, the couple appeared like the perfect family — smart, loving, concerned with helping abused children.

“When these people took me in, that was the first time I got to wear a pair of blue jeans; I was getting to do things that made me feel like the kid that I should. Then months down the road and it started to get, to be more like living in a cult than anything,” Timm said.

Hood eventually adopted six children. Some Timm has met; some she hasn’t.

“We lived a rock ’n’ roll life — sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” she said. “If we wanted concert tickets, we got them. If we wanted weed, we got it. We wanted alcohol, we got it. We were kids that kind of liked to party, and he provided anything that we wanted,” so long as Hood got what he wanted, Timm said.

Hood was brazen about the abuse, she said. He once raped her in the basement of his mother’s homewhile she was upstairs, Timm said.

Timm said the abuse didn’t stop until she was 19, when she left home and joined the Army.

She hasn’t looked back since, she said. That is, until his arrest.

That is when the memories came flooding back.

Timm said she is in therapy today and has been for years, trying desperately to mend the broken heart she lives with, the nightmares and the memories.

She fears there are hundreds of victims of her father’s out there. Arizona police say they want to speak with Timm. Officers in that state are planning multiple felony charges against Hood.

An allegation of inappropriate touching and photos taken of a girl in Peoria, Ariz., led to Hood’s arrest Jan. 22. A search of Hood’s home uncovered a cache of child pornography, authorities said.

Hood is being held on $1 million bail by Nye County authorities. He is charged with one count of use of minor in producing pornography or as subject of sexual portrayal in performance and four counts of possession of child pornography.

Nye County School District officials are refusing to comment on Hood’s contact with students.

Timm said she just wishes she had said something sooner.

“He’s gotten away with it, gotten away with it, gotten away with it, but he’s not getting away with it anymore.”

Hood will be in Tonopah Justice Court on Tuesday at 10 a.m.