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Melvin Morse, 60

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Taking the stand in his trial for allegedly waterboarding his stepdaughter, now 12, Melvin Morse doubled down on his hair-washing defense. The 60-year-old former pediatrician from Delaware testified Monday that both he and her mother became exasperated trying to wash the girl's hair after she started taking showers instead of baths. The girl was about 8 years old at the time.

"Always the problem is soaping up her hair and it gets in her eyes and she doesn't want the water on her hair to get the soap out of it," Morse said, adding that the girl's mother, Pauline Morse, had given up trying, according to the Associated Press.

"It pretty much was always a thrash," Morse testified. Morse added that he tried no more than four or five times before he gave up, too.

"I did say to her, 'I'm not waterboarding you.... This isn't some kind of torture,' " he told jurors at his Georgetown trial, using a term that both Pauline Morse and the girl have testified that he used at home.

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