What Would Jesus Say?

Debbie Vasquez was immobilized, pinned on her back in a car parked somewhere near a field in rural Sanger, a small North Texas town that sits atop a hill in the Blackland Prairie. A man nearly twice Vasquez’s age had driven the girl nearly half an hour away from her hometown to a secluded spot and parked the car.

In depositions filed as part of a 2006 lawsuit, Vasquez said that he next took off her pantyhose, unzipped his pants and hovered above her, tacking her narrow shoulders to the car seat as he forced his flesh into her small body. She gazed upward at him—a man of God, a seminary student who worked with the bus ministry that drove her to church every Sunday—and all she could do was toss her head from side to side as the long locks of her wavy, chestnut brown hair furled beneath her.

When he was done forcing the 15-year-old into her first sexual experience, Dale “Dickie” Amyx, who would soon become the church’s associate pastor, walked down to a creek that snaked its way along the rolling hills of the Red River Valley. As she climbed out of Amyx’s car and allowed him to cleanse her bloody lower half, Vasquez watched the blood-tinged creek water stream down her legs and splatter on the dry Texas ground, according to her deposition. She was scared and confused. She didn’t understand why he had done it or how he could hurt her. She thought she might need to go to a doctor to stop the bleeding, but she was afraid she’d get in trouble if she did.

Then she threw up.

Even then, she knew that if she told, no one would believe her. “I didn’t know what to do,” Vasquez tells the Scene. “I was so young and I was scared. I didn’t know anything. And no one would believe me. Who’s going to believe what I said over a minister?”

Two years before, Vasquez joined Calvary Baptist Church, a now-defunct, midsized church in Lewisville, Texas. When the church’s bus ministry came knocking on the door of her family home and invited her to its junior church services, she boarded the bus thinking that she would find someone to confide in about the physical abuse she had earlier suffered at the hands of her father. Her mother had forbidden her to tell.

When she was 14, she met Amyx, who would eventually rise through Calvary ranks. In Amyx, Vasquez thought she’d finally found a confidante. “He told me he was a man of God, and I thought I could trust him,” she says. “I thought he could help me.”

She says Amyx started taking her on long country drives to talk about her problems. It was then that Amyx began touching her inappropriately. In his deposition, Amyx admits to having sex with Vasquez somewhere between 20 and 40 times—at Lewisville Lake or back out in Sanger, even in his apartment when his wife was out of town for Thanksgiving.

Vasquez didn’t tell anyone because she had been taught to do what the minister said—and Vasquez says Amyx told her that she would “get used to it.” And, according to Vasquez’s lawsuit, Amyx made threats that kept her in a “continual state of anguish, hurt and tremendous fear.” The suit also alleges that Amyx “often had a gun or knife in hand” and “would intimate to her what he might do with them if she ever ‘betrayed him.’ ” Plus, Vasquez says she simply didn’t have anyone to tell. “When your parents are abusive, and the guy that hurts you is a minister, who are you going to tell?”

So Vasquez hid it until the age of 18, when her pregnancy made three years of abuse hard to hide. When the church’s senior pastor called Vasquez into his office and asked who the father was, she told him. And Vasquez says he made her march to the front of the church during Sunday service and ask her fellow churchgoers for their forgiveness. She was forced to confess that she was a pregnant, unwed teenager. But she was forbidden from fingering Amyx as the father—a fact that was not only proven years later in a paternity test, but which Amyx also has admitted.

Amyx has a different account of what happened. In his deposition, Amyx said that Vasquez was “either 16 or 17” when he first became aware of his sexual attraction to her. But he went on to explain that he believed Vasquez was 17, the age of consent, when he started having sex with her. And while he regretted it, he said Vasquez was OK with it. “I hated it, that it happened,” he said in the deposition. “I told her many times that I never meant to hurt her, and if I did, I’m sorry.”