“He moved my hand to touch him sexually and he did touch me in return,” she said.
Woods explained that Bickle would get remorseful after they had sexual contact, saying that she “witnessed him genuinely weep and repent, like ask the Lord’s forgiveness, ask my forgiveness.”
“I saw at 14, a man in anguish over failure, and he would always be like, ‘I can’t, we can’t do this again. And please forgive me.’ I believed all of that to be genuine…but it didn’t stop. We’d do good for a while and then crash,” she added.
Woods said that Bickle warned her that if their relationship was ever made known that she would have to “own” it due to him being a father and someone in ministry.
Woods shared that she remembers being devastated when the Bickles moved to Kansas City but never told anyone of the relationship. “I made a vow to him, and also in my own little young heart, that I would cover him in love to the grave,” she said. “And the reason why I made that is because I saw and experienced the moral failure, but also the repentance.”
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Bickle saw Woods again when she was attending Covenant College in Georgia. He called her and said he was going to be at a conference three hours away. Bickle came to see her, took her to dinner, and met her now-husband, who was her boyfriend at the time.
Woods said nothing sexual took place at that time, but when she transferred to the University of Missouri for her junior year, Bickle visited her once. Woods recalled that he laid on top of her fully clothed on her bed, and she said that was the last time they had sexual contact.
Woods said the two kept in touch over the years, but that Bickle wouldn’t attend her wedding in 1988 because he said it was too painful for him—although his wife and sons were there.
In 1996, Woods said that Bickle told her they needed to stop communicating all together, “cut things completely off.”
“And I remember just feeling that devastation again,” Woods added. “Like everything I had felt when I was 16. That abandonment, it was just unearthed again.” Woods said it made her “really seek the Lord, for me to go after wholeness in my heart.”
Woods said that Bickle “got literally a get-out-of-jail card. And he was doing it right. We were doing it right.”
