Defendant faked death to avoid trial expected to testify Tuesday

A 13-year-old girl testified Monday that her mom's then-fiance molested her last year at the Summit apartment complex in Peachtree City, an act the mother discovered when she opened her daughter's bedroom door and turned on the lights.

The victim, whose name is being kept confidential by The Citizen, said she initially refused to tell her mother what had happened because she didn't want her mom to get mad, and she added that her mom was happy with the fiance, the accused Julian Dale Pipkins, 41.

Pipkins garnered national attention in November when he faked his own death in an attempt to avoid the court charges. Police quickly discovered the ruse but it wasn't until several months later that he was located at a homeless shelter in Florida.

The victim's mother testified in court Monday, saying that immediately after discovering Pipkins on top of her daughter in the victim's bed, she drove the victim to the Wal-Mart parking lot so she could ask her what happened. Although the girl initially said nothing was wrong, she began to cry after her mother admitted that she herself was molested when she was a child.

"She said, 'Daddy was on top of me,'" the mother testified. "She said he was trying to put his penis inside of her."

The prosecution is expected to wrap up its case Tuesday morning, and Pipkins is expected to take the stand shortly afterward.

The victim's mother said that after Pipkins was initially arrested she and her children moved back to Texas but she worried that Pipkins would seek out her daughter and possibly harm her again. So she struck up a relationship with Pipkins, who had bonded out of jail and also returned to Texas, and she had sex with him several times, the mother admitted.

Explaining why she did that, the mother said she wanted to protect her daughter, and she hoped to gain Pipkins' trust and convince him to return to Georgia to go back to trial. Pipkins, she said, had been saying that he didn't intend to return to face trial because he didn' t want to go to jail.

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