GLENWOOD, Ark. — Last year, while campaigning for the top prosecutor’s job in the rural district that surrounds this close-knit river town, native daughter Jana Bradford cited a tough-on-crime record that she said had brought the worst offenders to justice and comfort to their victims. 

“The most important thing that I’m able to do is relate to our victims,” Bradford, a part-time deputy prosecutor in Pike County for more than two decades, told a crowd at a Rotary club meeting. “The child who has been molested by her parents, I’ve held her hand before she testified.”

But time and again, Bradford used her clout and legal skills behind the scenes to assist her pedophile uncle, according to a paper trail of letters and other legal records.

Over the years, she helped her uncle Barry Walker try to get a pardon from the governor for his first felony sexual abuse conviction in another Arkansas county, vigorously disputed a girl’s abuse allegations when he faced more possible charges and tried to get his name removed from Arkansas’ sex offender registry, records show. 

Bradford’s efforts to assist Walker have surfaced in recent months as part of a swirling scandal in the wake of what some legal observers describe as one of the worst pedophilia cases in Arkansas history.

Last June 9, just 16 days after she won election as chief prosecutor in a four-county judicial district, investigators from the state and county, responding to new allegations from three girls, seized a cache of more than 400 homemade videos and thousands of photos and downloaded images of child pornography from Walker’s residence and arrested him.

The videos dated back a quarter century and captured Walker committing hundreds of acts of rape and other sex crimes on dozens of pre-pubescent girls, ages 2 to 14 — including a 4-year-old girl whose claims Bradford had vigorously disputed to a neighboring prosecutor years earlier.

Four months later, Walker, 59, who ran a successful construction business, pleaded guilty to more than 100 felony counts in two counties related to raping or molesting 31 children, some repeatedly. He received 39 life sentences totaling 1,710 years in prison with no chance for parole.

Since his conviction in October, investigators have shifted their focus to Walker’s closest relatives and associates, amid allegations that they enabled Walker to keep preying on little girls for years.

Another of Walker’s nieces and his former longtime girlfriend each have been charged with felony counts of permitting child sex abuse, while Walker’s brother faces a misdemeanor charge of failure to report child sex abuse, court records show. 

The special prosecutor overseeing Walker’s case and related ones, who was assigned in part due to Bradford’s conflicts of interest, said in a recent interview that a criminal investigation of “secondary targets” remains ongoing. Neither the prosecutor nor a state special agent leading that probe would say whether Bradford is among those targets.

A growing number of Walker’s victims, meanwhile, have joined a lawsuit that lays out a litany of explosive claims alleging a broader scheme and cover-up orchestrated by the child rapist’s “inner circle,” including Bradford.

“You don’t rape this many girls this many times in a small Arkansas town unless someone is running interference for you,” said David Carter, a Texarkana lawyer representing at least 14 of the victims or their parents and guardians.

The lawsuit includes allegations that Walker’s relatives and a former girlfriend intentionally delayed reporting two girls’ sex abuse claims last year to avoid hurting Bradford’s election chances. Following Walker’s arrest, the lawsuit alleges, his family schemed to hide Walker’s business assets and property in case any of his victims later sued.

The lawsuit also details Bradford’s repeated legal efforts over the years to protect and defend her uncle. It contends she  wouldn’t allow her own daughter to be left alone with him, but failed to warn other parents that he was a sex offender who posed danger to their children.

Bradford, 54, a married mother of two who has not been charged with a crime, remains the prosecutor for Arkansas’ Ninth West Judicial Circuit. She did not respond to messages left by phone, email or at her downtown Glenwood office, where she displays a sign reading, “Honest Lawyer.”  

Erin Cassinelli, an attorney representing Bradford in the civil case, said in an email to NBC News that Bradford isn’t doing interviews and is “instead focusing on litigating the issues in court.” Cassinelli said all of the lawsuit’s allegations about Bradford are “absolutely false,” and have not been verified or supported by factual evidence. 

“Ms. Bradford denies in the most emphatic terms possible that she knew Barry Walker was molesting children or that she did anything whatsoever to conceal his depraved behavior,” Casinelli’s email said. “Since Ms. Bradford did not even know about Barry Walker’s continuing criminal acts, she certainly cannot be held responsible for his actions and the harm he caused.”

Walker did not respond to a letter sent to him in prison. His attorney in the civil case did not return a phone call. 

One of Walker’s victims, now 22, who is identified in court records as “Juvenile 20,” said in a recent interview that she was afraid and ashamed to tell anyone about what Walker did to her as a child during playdates and slumber parties at his home. But she added that she believes those around Walker knew — and could have stopped him years earlier.

“The people who knew about Barry are equally complicit in what happened to me and all those other girls,” said the woman, who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity. “Every adult that was around, honestly. Nobody did s—. They failed us.”

Decades of allegations

In February 1999, Walker was a married Army veteran and ex-Air Force flight surgeon practicing medicine in Fort Smith, Arkansas, when an 8-year-old girl told her mother that “Dr. Walker had touched her in ways that made her feel uncomfortable,” according to charging papers.

Walker, then 35, and his wife had been over to the home of the girl’s parents for dinner. At some point during the evening, when he and the girl were alone in a home library, Walker sexually assaulted her, the court records say. The girl later told an investigator Walker also had “rubbed her privates on two previous occasions.”

A few months after he was charged with two felony counts of child sexual abuse, Walker’s wife divorced him. In March 2000, he pleaded no contest and was sentenced to five years in prison. Following his conviction, the state required Walker to register as sex offender and his medical license was revoked.

In 2001, after serving only about 11-½ months, Walker was paroled early for good behavior, a state Department of Corrections spokesperson said. He returned to live near his hometown of Glenwood, a 2-1/2 hours’ drive south from Fort Smith into the rolling pastures and ragged pine stands of rural Pike County — three counties away from where he’d been convicted. 

Before his release, court records from his 2000 criminal case show a state psychologist and counselors had assessed and advised him that, to avoid re-offending, he should refrain from alcohol, attend regular therapy sessions and avoid being alone with children.

But Walker quickly blew off all of those recommendations — and his family members knew it, the victims’ recent lawsuit says.

Walker initially moved into a house within an enclave of homes along a wooded, gravel road just outside of town, where several of his relatives lived, records and interviews show. He started his own landscaping business about a year later and moved a few miles away, into an isolated rambler surrounded by pastures.

By then, Bradford was several years into her career as a part-time deputy prosecutor in Pike County, with a private practice on the side.

According to the lawsuit, she and other family members regularly “saw prepubescent females riding in Barry’s truck around Glenwood, riding horses with Barry at the fairgrounds, hanging out at Barry’s house and regularly spending the night,” but they did nothing to intervene. 

During weekly family meetings, Bradford and at least two of Walker’s siblings discussed “how it was strange how Barry always had young girls around him,” despite being a registered sex offender, the lawsuit states.

New claims of sex abuse surfaced against Walker in February 2004, when a 3-year-old girl reported he had abused her, prompting the Arkansas State Police Crimes Against Children Division to open an investigation, a state sex offender assessment report shows. 

Six months later, in August 2004, court records show Bradford helped prepare Walker’s application to the governor seeking “executive clemency” for his 2000 child sex abuse conviction.  In his application, Walker wrote: “I would like a second chance to be a fully productive citizen of this state and practice medicine again in rural Arkansas.” The request was later denied by then-Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Over the next several years, Walker ran a landscaping business and then built a construction firm that became a thriving enterprise.

Meanwhile, more allegations surfaced, leading to more investigations. Girls came forward in 2006, 2010 and in 2014, the sex offender assessment report shows. 

Based on a 2014 allegation involving the sexual abuse of a 4-year-old girl, Walker was arrested and booked into jail later that year, court and police records show. Bradford and other family members posted his $25,000 bond, hired a lawyer for him, paid his employees and kept his business running, the lawsuit says. The state police division made a referral to charge Walker, but that referral was overturned on administrative appeal, records show.

Why none of the other allegations resulted in charges against Walker isn’t fully clear because most of the records are under seal, said Carter, the victims’ attorney.

Bradford clearly was aware of various reports of sexual abuse against her uncle over the years, Carter said, and argued in the lawsuit. “She was actively working to protect her uncle against these claims even while she was a deputy prosecutor,” he said.

In response to the 4-year-old’s claims in 2014, Bradford sent a letter disputing them to Blake Batson, then the top prosecutor in neighboring Clark County, where her uncle lived. In it, Bradford referred to a private polygraph test she had Walker take, accused the girl’s parents of concocting the claims and contended that Walker never had been alone with the girl.

Batson didn’t charge Walker in 2014.

Now Clark County’s circuit court judge, Batson last year presided over Walker’s multiple convictions and sentencing in that county, including his guilty plea to raping the same 4-year-old girl.

During Walker’s sentencing hearing in October, the girl, who is now 13, stood to face him in a packed courtroom and read aloud a statement.

“You made my whole family turn against me, and think I was lying and imagining all of it,” she said. “And they trusted all of you people over me. That hurt just as bad as raping me.”