When Mormon priest Paul Rytting offered Chelsea and Lorraine Goodrich $90,000 hush to shelve pursuit for justice for sexual abuse the girls’ father John Goodrich, they were stunned. To them, church was a refuge for emotional and spiritual justice that was being undermined with bribery. Determined to bury the truth about entrenched carnal sins in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or Mormon Church, Rytting raised the offer to $300,000 investigations have revealed.

With his family and marriage in turmoil, John Goodrich revealed details of his relationship with Chelsea – his daughter – to visiting relatives, according to a written statement from the relatives which was ultimately submitted to the police. They urged him to go to the police. When John said he’d rather talk with a Mormon bishop, the Goodrich relatives drove him to Miller’s home, where John made his confession.

Less than a year later, on September 1, 2016, Chelsea and her mother met with Mountain Home police and played the recordings of their conversations with John. The next day, after a nearly two-hour interview at police headquarters, officers arrested him.

“Nothing happened,” John protested, as police cuffed him during a video interview obtained by the AP. “I’m not ashamed of anything.”

It was then that Chelsea decided to enlist Rytting’s help and began corresponding with him by email to persuade him to allow Miller to testify against her father.

Chelsea and Lorraine also let Rytting know that church officials may have known about John Goodrich and his daughter for years. John told them, in conversations that were also recorded, that he’d “repented” details of his relationship with Chelsea to several local church leaders. Rytting told them that church leaders said they did not recall hearing any such confessions.

Then, 10 days after John’s arrest in Mountain Home, another woman stepped forward with additional allegations of sex abuse after learning of the case against John. The 53-year-old single mother accused him of having nonconsensual sex with her after giving her the drug Halcion, a controlled substance John often used to sedate patients during dental procedures. She alleged that Goodrich drugged her the previous July after she cut off a sexual relationship with him.

The AP is not naming the woman because it does not identify people who make allegations of sexual abuse without their consent.

As detectives investigated the new allegations, John Goodrich, who was still facing charges in Chelsea’s case, called the woman at least four times, in conversations she recorded and which the AP obtained. In these conversations, Goodrich asked her to lie to police while admitting he drugged her even as he tried to minimise his actions and repeatedly apologised.

“It was fun as heck, but it was wrong,” he said in a recorded conversation. “Just out of principle it was wrong, and I’m just mad as hell at myself.”

In July 2017, prosecutors dropped charges against John Goodrich related to Chelsea’s allegations. Six months later, a prosecutor in a neighbouring county was crafting a plea deal in which he again would escape sex crime charges.

In the end, John Goodrich pleaded guilty to distribution of a controlled substance, Halcion, and a judge sentenced him to 90 days in jail and three years of probation.

At the initial meeting with Chelsea and Lorraine, Rytting said the clergy-penitent privilege law made it next to impossible for Miller to testify against John Goodrich. Now, four months later, he was back in Hailey with an offer.

Much had changed for Lorraine and Chelsea in the meantime. They’d begun to feel ostracised by the Mormon community. Miller’s wife had even removed them from a local church community “sisters” email list, they told Rytting.

Miller had been an advocate for Chelsea.

During the first meeting with Rytting, Miller said John Goodrich, before his excommunication, had tried to backtrack on what he’d told Miller in confession.

“John told me one thing, and then kind of toned it way down to the stake president,” said Miller, referring to a higher-ranking church official who oversees several local jurisdictions. “He told the stake president, ‘Well, that’s not a big deal.’ I go, ‘Yeah, it’s a big deal.’”

“So we know he’s lying, and we know he’s lying at every level,” Rytting responded.

Reached by phone by the AP, Miller refused to discuss details. “It’s clergy privilege,” he said. “If I say anything, (John Goodrich) can sue me for millions of dollars.”

With Rytting in town again, Lorraine and Chelsea first made it clear that they were devastated the prosecutor had dropped the criminal case, according to the recordings.

“(The prosecutor) said ‘Too bad the bishop couldn’t testify,’” Lorraine told Rytting.

Rytting sounded surprised. He had not known coming into the meeting that the case was dropped, he said. He told them that the church perhaps could reach out to the prosecutor to help get things restarted.

“The message to this prosecutor is, you’ve got several pretty clear-cut instances where a predator, a sexual predator, has admitted,” Rytting said. “And then the victims have provided information. But you don’t feel any need to protect the general public?”

“She did say that if the bishop could come forward and tell, then we would have had a case. But there’s nothing,” Lorraine repeated.

The prosecutor, Jessica Kuehn, now works for the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office and did not respond to a request for comment. The AP couldn’t determine if the church ever followed up with her about the case.

About an hour into the meeting, Rytting changed the subject abruptly.

“Well, should we talk about why I’m here?” Rytting asked. “I have authorisation up to $300,000.”

The offer stunned Chelsea and Lorraine. Months earlier, Rytting told them by email that the church was prepared to pay them $90,000, an offer the women were considering. The payment would be made on the condition that Chelsea and her mother sign an agreement in which they promised never to use Chelsea’s story as a basis for a lawsuit against the church, and that they never acknowledge the existence of the settlement.

And there was another key provision: “Second paragraph, I’ll be interested in your response,” Rytting said, while reviewing the document with them.

“The recommendation is that you acknowledge that there’s been some recordings made of all of our communications and that you agreed to destroy those recordings within 10 days of signing this,” he said.

Nondisclosure agreements or NDAs, as they are commonly known, have been used frequently by the Mormon church and other organisations, including the Catholic Church, as well as individuals, to keep sex abuse allegations secret. In addition to her settlement with the church, Chelsea also settled a lawsuit against her father.

In one of their recorded conversations, Rytting told Chelsea that he could check Helpline records, used by Miller to report details of John Goodrich’s confession, to see whether her father had ever previously confessed to another bishop to abusing her.

But in the West Virginia abuse case against the church, Rytting gave sworn, written testimony in which he said no one at the Helpline keeps records. And another ranking church official testified in a case in Arizona that the records are destroyed at the end of each day. In comments to the AP, the church declined to clarify Rytting’s apparent contradiction about whether the church keeps records on the Helpline.

Still, at their final meeting, Rytting assured Chelsea and Lorraine that church officials denied hearing John Goodrich confess previously to abusing his daughter, a claim the church backed in its statement to the AP. He urged them to accept the funds the church was offering and sign the nondisclosure agreement promising they would never sue the church.

“When John Goodrich engaged in abuse or any other criminal or sexual misconduct, he was acting in an individual capacity and NOT as an agent of the Church,” Rytting wrote, ignoring the fact that Goodrich was a bishop at the time. “Accordingly, any damages arising from such misconduct will be apportioned to Mr Goodrich and not to the Church.”

Chelsea and Lorraine, distanced from their family and community and struggling financially, accepted this assessment and signed the agreement, which did not prevent Chelsea from telling her story. Earlier this year, Chelsea decided to share it with the AP.

She had tried going to the church for help. She’d tried the criminal justice system. But John was free with access to children through his family and dental practice.

“Right now, my main concern continues to be other children,” she said.

• An AP report