“I’ve been trying for the last 30-odd years to get my life back,’’ said Sheehan, 42, an office manager of the South African Golf Association. “I haven’t recovered yet.’’

Sheehan said she was 10 in 1979 when Hewitt began making sexual advances toward her.

And interviews with others in professional tennis circles showed that numerous individuals were aware of complaints by underage girls or their parents about Hewitt’s alleged abuse or harassment.

But one of the accusers has filed a police report in Massachusetts. Independently, their stories paint the same or a similar picture.

Hewitt, who declined to discuss the allegations, has never been charged with a crime, and it is difficult to confirm the women’s accounts.

“He destroyed me as a person,’’ said Suellen Sheehan, one of the four alleged victims who agreed to go public with accounts of their experience.

Criminal prosecution may be out of reach, because so many years have passed, but the women say there is no statute of limitation on their pain.

The women, some seeking justice, others just hoping to heal, look at their experiences as a test case for the sport: How tennis will respond to allegations of the abuse of vulnerable junior players by a Hall of Fame champion.

As the eyes of the tennis world turn this week to the US Open, where Hewitt won the 1977 doubles title, the sport’s leaders are publicly confronted for the first time with the accounts of women who say their lives were scarred and the game tarnished by a scandal that some in the tennis world knew or suspected, but which went unpunished.

Hewitt’s alleged misconduct spanned nearly a decade, with his fame flourishing even as the number of victims, Conner among them, rose.

In his secret life, Hewitt had begun exploiting his marquee name to build a career as a coach and to sexually abuse or harass some of the underage girls he trained, one of them just 10, according to a six-month Globe investigation that involved dozens of interviews both in the United States and in Hewitt’s South African homeland.

In his everyday life, Hewitt coached tennis. On his first day teaching at a club in Danvers in 1976, he offered to coach Conner, then known as Heather Crowe, for free. She was 14.

Bob Hewitt was tennis royalty, one of the greatest doubles players of all time, fresh off a star turn with the Boston Lobsters. He was 36, bound for the International Tennis Hall of Fame and, by numerous accounts and sources within the tennis world, living a double life.

In summer 1976, Heather Crowe Conner was a Girl Scout and honor student who had never put on makeup or kissed a boy.

But beyond the four who shared their accounts, none were willing to be interviewed or could be reached.

It is unclear how many girls were involved. His students and contemporaries, in interviews with the Globe, mentioned nine women in the United States and South Africa who they believed may have been harassed by Hewitt.

Hewitt’s alleged misconduct “was a terrible, terrible thing,’’ said Raymond Moore, who played on three Davis Cup teams with Hewitt. “We were all praying and hoping he would get his comeuppance, but he never did.’’

Many of his contemporaries support the effort by the women to hold him accountable. They said his alleged misdeeds were no secret in the tightknit South African tennis community and should have been condemned long ago.

“I’m not saying anything,’’ Hewitt said, his home surrounded by lemon and orange groves in a lush river valley. “I don’t want to talk about it.’’

He also rejected several opportunities to rebut her allegations and those involving other underage girls.

Hewitt declined the reporter’s invitation to look at Conner’s police complaint and a five-page memoir she wrote about her experience with him.

He then acknowledged knowing her as Heather Crowe and asked, “What’s she bringing it up now for?’’

He initially denied knowing Conner, whose name at the time was Crowe.

In an interview with a Globe reporter outside his farmhouse in Addo, South Africa, Hewitt, 71, declined to address the allegations. Unloading groceries from his BMW after his wife of 46 years, Delaille, stepped away, Hewitt was asked first about the allegations made by Heather Conner, the 14-year-old girl he coached in Danvers in 1976.

“He told me I couldn’t tell anyone or he would be in big trouble,’’ said Conner, 50, a teacher at Reading Memorial High School. “He called it statutory rape and said he could go to prison.’’

Conner, like other alleged victims, said Hewitt began preying on her soon after he recruited her as a student. She had recently turned 15, she said, when he first had sex with her in the fall of 1976 near the tennis courts at Masconomet Regional High School in Topsfield.

Nicole Gold, 42, of Sea Island, Ga., the fourth woman who came forward, said she was 13 when Hewitt began sexually harassing her and tried coaxing her to have sex with him.

“I was devastated then, and I’m devastated now,’’ Read said. “He screwed up my life and broke down my belief in people.’’

Gina Read, 42, of Johannesburg, said she was 14 when Hewitt began sexually harassing her. She said he threatened more than once to rape her.

Hewitt lasted only one season with the Lobsters. When an elbow injury after the 1975 season cut short his stay, Hewitt found temporary work as tennis director of the Village Green Racquet and Swim Club in Danvers.

Hewitt - a broad-chested man of 6 feet 3 inches who was balding, bearded, and prematurely graying - quickly became a face of the Lobsters as the team ran ad campaigns featuring him and the fiery coach, Ion “Count Dracula’’ Tiriac.

Two weeks later, Hewitt joined the Lobsters, a World Team Tennis franchise newly owned by five businessmen, including New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

Times were different then in South Africa. In the eyes of the world, South Africa’s greatest scandal was apartheid, its policy of racial oppression. The country was routinely banned from international sporting events, as Hewitt and McMillan experienced in 1975 when they were deported from Mexico while trying to defend their world doubles title.

He began teaming with Hewitt, a native Australian, soon after Hewitt became a South African citizen in the mid-1960s.

“It comes as a shock,’’ said McMillan. “I would never have imagined it possible.’’

By all accounts, including McMillan’s, he and Hewitt were never close off the court.

McMillan, who has lived primarily in England since the mid-1970s, said he knew nothing about the allegations.

In an era when professional tennis captivated much of the sporting public, Hewitt won 15 Grand Slam doubles titles before he retired in 1983.

By then, Hewitt was a titan of professional tennis. With Frew McMillan, the only other South African in the Hall of Fame, Hewitt formed one of the most indomitable doubles teams in history, capturing 57 career titles, including victories over teams led by Arthur Ashe, Bjorn Borg, and John McEnroe.

“That was the end of it,’’ said Brebnor. “Unless somebody was going to put their money where their mouth was, nothing was going to happen.’’

He said Franklin agreed that the process would have been “horrendous.’’

Keith Brebnor, who managed tennis events in South Africa, said he privately expressed concern about the allegations involving Hewitt in the mid-1970s to Blen Franklin, then the president of the South Africa Tennis Union, which is now defunct. Brebnor said Franklin, who has since died, told him the girls had only one recourse, to take Hewitt to court.

Complaints began early While there is no indication American tennis authorities knew of Hewitt’s alleged transgressions, complaints were lodged as early as the 1970s with leaders of South Africa’s tennis community.

“I may look fine and dandy,’’ Conner said, “but I’m still kind of a mess.’’

Those who came forward say the emotional trauma has yet to recede. All four women said the fallout has damaged their self-image, and in some cases their ability to maintain loving relationships.

The owner, Alan Greenberg, helped the Hewitts and their preschool daughter settle at an adjacent motor inn, and soon Hewitt was coaching Conner.

In a complaint she filed last year with Topsfield police, Conner said Hewitt was driving her home from babysitting his daughter that October when he detoured to the school and first had sex with her.

“He raped me!’’ Conner stated, according to the police report. She was referring to statutory rape; it is illegal in Massachusetts for an adult to engage in sex with a 15-year-old.

Conner said Hewitt “told her not to say anything, and she told no one,’’ according to the police report.

Greenberg was shaken by the news. “Heather was a wonderful girl,’’ he said recently. “I feel terrible something like this happened.’’

Conner said Hewitt had sex with her again when she was 15 at a Springfield hotel in February 1977. She had just turned 16 in the summer of ’77, she said, when Hewitt engaged in sex with her twice more, first in a car at the Longwood Cricket Club in Chestnut Hill, then at a house in Louisville.

The alleged Louisville encounter occurred just weeks before Hewitt became the oldest man (37 years, 243 days) to win a US Open doubles title.

“I was the innocent one in all of this,’’ Conner said. “I don’t want to sound vindictive, but I want him held accountable for his actions.’’

Essex County prosecutors believe Conner “certainly is credible,’’ spokesman Steve O’Connell said. But an investigation has stalled, he said, largely because so much time has passed since the alleged incidents, Hewitt’s foreign location, and the lack of additional evidence.

In Conner’s case, she maintained a sexual relationship with Hewitt while she won the Massachusetts high school singles championship in 1977, captured a national singles title at Indiana University in 1982, and played professionally against the likes of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova until she retired at 27 in 1988, the last time she saw him. She said she was vulnerable to Hewitt’s overtures of love and believed him when he assured her they would be together one day as adult partners.

“As someone who considers herself a logical and rational person, it’s shocking to me that I was so completely brainwashed for so many years,’’ said Conner, who is the mother of two girls.

Penalties may still apply Authorities on sexual abuse of adolescents said it is not uncommon for underage victims to remain involved with adult abusers after they are beyond the legal age of consent, which in Massachusetts is 16 or 18, depending on the circumstances.