Post Falls Senior Ready To Look Toward Future Corina Noll Hopes To Become A Paralegal, Help Others Who Have Been Abused Get Justice She Couldn’T

Put yourself in these shoes:

Your parents got divorced when you were too young to remember. Your mom moved you to a foreign country, away from your father and friends and all things familiar.

In the new country, your mother’s new husband started raping you in the sixth grade. You told your mother. She did nothing. You kept it to yourself. It went on for five years.

Now you don’t remember an entire year of your life.

You finally brought the abuse to the police, and your mother first backed you, then changed her story in court, leaving you to testify to a room full of people all by yourself.

Is it easy to imagine?

Try living it.

Corina Noll has, and she’s struggled, more than any child should ever have to. But day by day, she’s learned to deal with her past and look responsibly at the future.

Noll, 19, is a quiet girl with big bright eyes and hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, exposing her soft, fair skin.

When she talks, she’s looking down or off into the distance, struggling to piece together the past 19 years.

Her friends and family tease her for being an airhead, forgetful and spacey. But in just a few minutes, it’s easy to see why she loses track of the past.

Noll spent her first nine years in Western Germany, in a small town near Frankfurt. She has fond memories there, of beautiful scenery and good times with her real father.

When she turned 9, Noll’s father agreed to let her mother take her to America. Her mom was headed here with her new husband, Larry Todd, a military man.

Only a few years after they got to the states, Noll says, Todd started raping her and molesting her. In June of last year, Todd was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

For the five years before that, Noll endured hell, abuse so unspeakable that she can’t talk about it.

She can’t even remember her sophomore year of high school.

But she does remember one day clearly:

“My mother came into my room - we were living in Rathdrum - her throat was purple, her eyes bloodshot, caved in, glossy,” Noll remembers. “She said, `Look at me.’ I cried. I knew what had happened.”

Todd had raped his own wife, refusing to back off after she said she was too sleepy for sex. Noll told her mother it had happened to her, too. They embraced.

It was the only time she told her mother about it. Noll’s mother, Doris Todd, first admitted to police that she was raped and later denied it. Shortly after that interview Doris Todd went to Germany and asked Noll to come. Noll said she didn’t want to leave her friends.

“I’ll sacrifice anything for my friends,” she says, with one of the few glimmers of pride that emerge from her broken spirit. “Even if it means getting raped.”

Noll spent the next two years without her mother, living only with Todd, in different cities across Idaho. At one point, she lived in a trailer.

“The roof was caved in. There was water everywhere,” Noll said. “All I had to drink was milk. I cooked on a little propane stove, macaroni and cheese, anything quick.”

Only Noll’s friends knew about the abuse; she still avoided the subject as much as possible. But one day, in her junior year, perhaps as a desperate cry for help, she wore a tank top to school, knowing her bruises would be visible.

A friend asked her if the abuse was happening again. Noll admitted it. That night, Noll went to the police. Doris Todd was still in Germany but was scheduled to return the next day.

Post Falls Police Detective Dave Beck wrote in his report that Noll’s mother had told him she was raped the same night as her daughter.

In court, Doris Todd denied, through an interpreter, that she was raped or knew anything about Larry Todd and Noll’s sexual contact.

She hasn’t spoken to Noll in two years and could not be reached via telephone by The Idaho Spokesman-Review.

Todd is out on appeal and still living with Noll’s mother in Hayden.

Corina Noll will graduate from Post Falls High School in a few weeks, an amazing accomplishment, given all she’s gone through.

Bill Wood, Noll’s counselor at school, said Noll has come a long way since he first started talking with her.

“What I originally saw was depression, a lot of shyness, and when she talked, it was hard to understand her, because she spoke in a low voice,” Wood said. “Now she’s doing very well in school, she went to the prom, had a great time. She’s ready to move on.”

Noll hopes she’ll get to go to college to be a paralegal, to help others get the justice she has been cheated out of. She’s thinking about getting married next year, to a 21-year-old Marine stationed in Japan.

And Mother’s Day still is the worst day of the year.

“I’ll go through graduation by myself,” she says, in a quiet, broken voice. “What if I get married? She won’t be there.”

Noll’s foster mother, Cindy Espe, hopes Noll can emerge through all that.

“I hope she realizes it’s not her fault that her mother doesn’t have contact with her,” Espe said. “She feels like it’s all her fault.”

Noll says she just wants her mother back.

“I would tell her I miss her,” Noll said. “I love her. If she wants a relationship with me, I’m just a call away.”