LAKELAND — Less than an hour after being raped by her adoptive father along the side of a country road, the 13-year-old girl stood in the darkness, clutching the cell phone that held video and photographic evidence of his crime.
Preparing to dial 911, the girl paused, thinking back to a year earlier, when she had gone to law enforcement to report Henry Cadle’s sexual abuse, only to have an investigator from the Polk County Sheriff’s Office accuse her of lying.
Taylor Cadle worried: Would that happen again? Still, she overcame her fears and made the call in 2017, and hours later she saw Henry Cadle being led from their home in handcuffs, the last time she would ever see him.
Taylor Cadle remained anonymous until Tuesday night, when PBS NewsHour carried a 10-minute segment exploring her story in a manner critical of the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. The story has since spread on social media, gaining more than 1 million views on TikTok as of Friday.
“It’s definitely scary but also, like, very shocking that it has reached this much attention,” Taylor Cadle said.
The NewsHour segment emphasized that Taylor felt it necessary to gather evidence on her own to prove that her adoptive father had raped her. She took those brave actions knowing that about a year earlier, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office not only declined to arrest Henry Cadle but charged Taylor with filing a false report.
At the suggestion of her adoptive mother — Henry Cadle’s wife — Taylor pled guilty. As part of her probation, she was required to write letters of apology to Henry Cadle and to Polk County Sheriff’s Deputy Melissa Turnage, the officer who interviewed her after the original complaint.
Rachel de Leon, a reporter with the Center for Investigative Reporting, based in San Francisco, spent about a year communicating with Taylor before the segment ran on PBS NewsHour. De Leon, featured in the 2023 Netflix documentary “Victim/Suspect,” specializes in reporting on cases of girls and women who face charges after law-enforcement authorities discount their allegations of sexual assault.
As The Ledger reported in 2017, Henry Cadle pleaded no contest to sexual battery on a child 12-18 years of age. Circuit Judge Keith Spoto sentenced him to 17 years in prison, along with lifetime probation and a designation as a sexual predator.
De Leon reported that the Polk County Sheriff’s Office declined her request to interview Sheriff Grady Judd for her report, and Turnage — who is still with the agency — did not respond to her inquiries. Judd declined an interview request Wednesday from The Ledger through his spokesperson, Scott Wilder.
“We refused comment to ‘The Center for Investigative Reporting’ because it became clear they were not interested in accurately reporting an investigation that occurred in 2016,” Wilder said in an email. “They produced a story with half-truths and a misleading narrative. Henry Cadle was arrested by our agency in 2017 for custodial sexual battery of a minor and he was convicted and sentenced to 17 years in Florida State Prison.”
Abuse began at age 9
Sitting on the screened patio of her North Lakeland mobile home Wednesday afternoon, Taylor Cadle, now 21, reflected on her experiences with a mixture of lingering anger and mature acceptance. An elfin woman with dark hair and alert brown eyes, she said she has found contentment amid a quiet life with her fiancé and her two children, ages 3 and 10 months.
Taylor described a chaotic early life with her biological mother.
“We never had a stable home growing up,” she said. “We always were either homeless, or we were sleeping on other people’s couches. We were sleeping in our car. I never had a place to call home until I was adopted.”
Authorities removed Taylor from her mother when she was 7, and she spent the next two years shifting through foster care placements before being adopted by her great-uncle, Henry Cadle, and his wife.
Cadle began abusing Taylor when she was 9, within months of her arrival in the home, according an affidavit from Cadle’s 2017 arrest. Taylor told an investigator of a time when she was sick and sleeping on her adoptive parents’ bed, and Cadle began rubbing her back before molesting her.
Taylor did not report the incident for fear of being sent back to foster care, an experience she said had been traumatic.
The sexual abuse progressed, and one Sunday morning, when Taylor was 12, she arrived at the family’s church in tears, drawing the attention of a youth pastor. Taylor divulged what Cadle had been doing to her, and the pastor called the police.
The Polk County Sheriff’s Office sent a team to the church, and Turnage led the interviews, Taylor said. Turnage conducted a series of separate interviews with the girl and her parents at difference locations, Taylor said, and appeared swayed by her parents’ descriptions of her as “materialistic” and “a brat.”
From the beginning, Taylor said, Turnage spoke to her as if she were an adult, showing no compassion or sensitivity to her allegations.
“She looked me in my face numerous times and told me I was lying, that there was no evidence, that they couldn’t find anything, that I was going to go back to foster care, that I was turning everybody’s world upside down,” Taylor said. “She never once listened to me, and from the moment that I met her to the last time I had ever spoken with her, she was rude. She spoke to me like I was an adult. There was never a time where she tried to be gentle, tried to see things from my eyes, or anything like that.”
Taylor told investigators that Cadle had stopped at a store to buy a box of condoms and had later parked along the road and raped her. She said Turnage told her that the Sheriff’s Office could not find surveillance footage showing Cadle’s truck at the store she named and questioned her for not being able to recall what brand of condoms Cadle bought, among other details.
The NewsHour story included audio of Turnage interviewing Taylor.
“If you’re mad because you got your phone taken away, let’s say that now and be done with it,” Turnage said in a flat tone. “Do you want to go live back in foster care? Because more than likely, if he’s arrested, they’re not going to let you stay there. But if it’s not the truth, you’re fixing to hurt a lot of people.”
Taylor was taken to a hospital for a sexual assault forensic examination but said she was not told of the results. The tests detected no semen in Taylor’s underwear and no male DNA in the sample, according to records from the first investigation of Cadle, provided by the Center for Investigative Reporting. Those test results were used to support the charge of filing a false report.
The Ledger requested Turnage’s personnel file Wednesday and had not received it by Friday.
Taylor said that she believed her background in foster care made sheriff’s deputies less likely to believe her allegations.
“I was definitely angry,” Taylor said. “I was a scared preteen that was looking her (Turnage) in the face and bawling my eyes out, and I’m telling her, ‘I’m not lying. This happened. This is where it happened.’ And it’s like she was looking right through me, like everything that I was saying was going in one ear and out the other.”
Faced with unrelenting skepticism, and afraid of being sent back into foster care, Taylor eventually recanted her story and faced a charge of filing a false report. As she prepared to enter a court hearing, her adoptive mother told her that she had three options: guilty, not guilty or no contest. Taylor did not know what “no contest” meant, and her mother suggested that she plead guilty and put the matter behind them.
Taylor, who had been living with an older sister in Tampa, moved back with her adoptive parents “like nothing ever happened.” Her probation agreement required her to write letters of apology to Henry Cadle and Turnage.
“I wrote enough to make it look like an apology, but I also didn’t write a whole page of, ‘I’m so sorry. I was mad,’” she said. “Like, that wasn’t the case. You did what you did, and you know you did. And in my head, I almost wonder what he felt like, receiving an apology letter, knowing what he did.”
Teen captures own evidence
Taylor said she did not fear violent retaliation from Cadle, thinking he was secure in having gotten away with his crimes.
About a month after Taylor’s court appearance, she joined Cadle on a drive to his business and as he dropped off a customer. As they headed home, Cadle stopped at a store, saying he needed to get a drink. When he reentered his truck and tossed a pack of condoms on the seat, Taylor — then 13 — realized what he had planned.
“If I’m going to be honest with you, I never thought he would have been stupid enough to try it again,” she said. “I genuinely thought that I would have been 18 years old and packing my bags, moving out of that house, because he completely got away with it. I guess he didn’t think I’d say anything, because I wasn’t believed the first time.”
As Cadle drove, Taylor frantically considered ways she might capture evidence she could present to authorities.
“I had about 10 to 15 minutes to come up with a plan, from the time that we stopped at the store to the time that he pulled over — because every time that he had pulled over, it was always in the same spot,” she said. “So, from then, I knew that I had to come up with something, and I had to come up with something fast.”
As she sat beside Cadle in the passenger seat, Taylor thought of the evidence the Sheriff’s Office could not verify from her previous allegation — the time, the location, the condoms. While playing games on her mobile phone, she opened her camera application, which allowed her to take pictures by touching any point on the screen.
When Cadle parked near the junction of Rockridge Road and Deen Still Road in North Lakeland and left the truck, Taylor took a quick photo of the radio’s clock. She recorded a video snippet of Cadle walking outside the truck. As her father ordered her to lie with her head on the center console, Taylor surreptitiously snapped photos while Cadle exposed himself.
A quick glance confirmed that Taylor had captured at least one incriminating image. Cadle barked at her to put the phone away, and she said she was just closing some apps. She worried that if Cadle realized she had taken photos, he would discard her phone and she would lose the evidence she needed and she would be “trapped in a house with a monster until I was 18.”
Taylor, who weighed about 80 pounds, considered trying to fight off the 200-pound Cadle, but a thought occurred to her: “I told myself, in my mind, basically, ‘If I’m going to get this evidence to somebody, I have to be alive for it.’ So I let it go — just kind of sat there and held it in.”
After Cadle finished his act and returned to the truck, Taylor carefully observed him out of the corner of her eye, mentally marking the spot where he tossed napkins he had used to wipe himself and where he threw out a pair of unused condoms. She secretly kicked the condom package under her seat to save as further evidence.
Would she be believed?
When Cadle’s truck arrived at their isolated home, Taylor volunteered to walk the family’s two dogs — not a task she normally performed — so that she could be alone with her phone. She confirmed that she had captured images that would incriminate Cadle.
She prepared to call 911.
“So I walked the dogs, and basically, in my mind, I was like, ‘I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to do this. If I do this, they’re not going to believe me again,’” she said. “I had probably a 5-, 10-minute conversation with myself, whether or not I was going to do this. I finally worked up the courage to do it, because I knew once I dialed it and clicked ‘call,’ there was no going back at that point. And again — now or never.”
Taylor made the call and talked to an emergency operator. Worried that her parents would grow suspicious, she ended the call and went inside, where she anxiously awaited the possible arrival of Polk County sheriff’s deputies.
“I’m pacing around the house, crying,” Taylor recalled. “I didn’t know what was going to happen this time, because I knew what happened the first time. But I kept telling myself, ‘I have evidence. I have evidence. I have evidence.’ But the trauma that they caused me the first time — I still convinced myself that I wasn’t going to be believed.”
When a team from the Polk County Sheriff’s Office arrived, heeding Taylor’s plea to avoid using sirens, she was relieved to see that the unit did not include Turnage. The deputies, all men, seemed “shocked” by the photos on her phone, she recalled.
Still, she waited hours in the darkness, standing outside and sitting in sheriff’s office vehicles, before the deputies arrested Cadle.
“And then, at some point, I was sitting in the cruiser, and I see him, handcuffed, walk by the car, back to the car behind us,” Taylor said. “And then I seen them back down the driveway, and I never seen him again.”
Cadle’s plea of no contest spared Taylor from having to testify at a trial. Court records show that the State Attorney’s Office for the 10th Judicial Circuit filed a motion to vacate the previous case and withdraw Taylor’s guilty plea. The office then entered a “no prosecution” order, dismissing the charge against her.
“The ‘false information’ has since been determined to be true,” the order stated.
The Ledger asked the Polk County Sheriff’s Office about the training given to deputies on how to interview minors who may be victims of sexual abuse and whether the agency has changed any policies or training since Cadle’s arrest. The communications office did not respond to those questions.
No one from the Polk County Sheriff’s Office ever apologized to Taylor or acknowledged any errors in investigating her initial complaint, she said. She considered filing a lawsuit but said that she assumes too much time has passed now to take action.
Learning to love herself
For a long time after Cadle’s arrest, Taylor carried a deep bitterness, she said.
“I was, for lack of better words, hell on wheels,” she said. “I didn’t know how to love. I didn’t know how to be loved. I was mean, I was angry with anybody and anything. Like, it didn’t matter who you were, what you were, why you wanted to talk to me. I hated everybody. I had a very ‘I don’t care’ mindset.”
Taylor has seen “many counselors,” starting during her time in foster care. She was ordered to undergo anger management therapy after the Sheriff’s Office charged her with making a false report in 2016, on the assumption that she fabricated the allegation out of anger toward her adoptive parents.
She credits that counselor with believing her allegations, even before she was vindicated.
Taylor continued to live with her adoptive mother until she turned 18. She got pregnant at 16 but took classes online and managed to graduate on time from Florida Virtual School. She has worked as a cook and host in a restaurant, but after she became pregnant with her daughter last year, her fiancé persuaded her to give up working.
When de Leon first got in touch with Taylor last year, she at first thought it was a scam. After confirming de Leon’s identity and watching “Victim/Suspect,” which made her cry, Taylor engaged in a series of conversations that led to the PBS NewsHour story.
“And I was like, ‘Wait, is this actually happening?’ ” she said. “Like, am I going to get a chance to tell my story?”
As for her motivation: “Little me wants the department to know the things that they put me through, the trauma that — like, specifically, Melissa Turnage, the trauma that she gave me from not listening to me, not believing me, not speaking to me as, something as simple as speaking to me as a child.”
A small tattoo in black script above Taylor’s right ear reads, “Love fearlessly.” Another on her chest, in a place usually concealed by her clothes, declares, “Love myself.”
Though she still carries emotional residue, Taylor said that her experiences have helped make her the person she is today, a devoted mother in a stable relationship.
“I have, because of my kids, worked hard to be the person that I am today, and I would say that I am a much better person today for those around me and for myself, especially my kids,” Taylor said. “But I still hold some sort of baggage. I still have my everyday struggles that I fight through and continue to try to overcome and hope to one day be better, even though what happened will never go away.”
Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on X @garywhite13.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Story of Lakeland woman’s rape as teen gains national attention
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