Tennessee suspect in dozens of rapes is convicted of producing images of child sex abuse

[November 15, 2024] GREENEVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A Tennessee man who is accused in lawsuits of drugging and sexually assaulting dozens of women while police deliberately botched investigations into him was convicted Thursday of producing images of child sexual abuse.

Sean Williams, 53, faces a minimum mandatory term of 15 years in prison and up to 30 years in prison as to each of the three counts in the federal indictment. Sentencing is set for Feb. 24.

According to a police report, a Western Carolina University campus police officer found Williams asleep in his car last year. A search of his vehicle uncovered cocaine, methamphetamine, about $100,000 in cash and digital storage devices with more than 5,000 images of child sexual abuse. Williams was also in possession of photos and videos showing him sexually assaulting at least 52 women at his Johnson City apartment while they were in an “obvious state of unconsciousness.”

Jurors in Greeneville federal court found Williams guilty Thursday of all three counts related to the images of a 9-month-old boy, a 4-year-old girl and a 7-year-old girl. Prosecutors said Williams also raped the children’s mothers while they were unconscious and that there were images and videos of them as well. Williams took the sexually explicit photos of one child in 2008 and the other two on separate occasions in 2020, all in his apartment, prosecutors said.

The mothers testified at trial but Williams did not. He has not yet been charged with sexually assaulting any of the dozens of women.

Williams also faces charges in Tennessee including child rape, aggravated sexual battery of someone under 13 and especially aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor. And in a North Carolina federal court, he is charged with possessing child sexual abuse images and illegal drugs.

In October 2023, Williams escaped from a van taking him from Kentucky’s Laurel County Detention Center to the court in Greeneville for a hearing. Authorities caught him in Florida more than a month after the escape. A jury convicted him in July of the escape, for which he faces a maximum prison sentence of five years. Sentencing on that charge is scheduled for February.

Separately, three federal lawsuits accuse the Johnson City Police Department of refusing to properly investigate evidence that Williams was drugging and raping women in their east Tennessee community for years. Those lawsuits, which do not name Williams as a defendant, were filed by a former federal prosecutor; nine women listed as Jane Does 1-9; and another woman individually. One of them alleges Williams paid police to obstruct investigations into sexual assault allegations against him.

This Sept. 19, 2020 photo shows a downtown Johnson City, Tenn. building where Sean Williams reportedly lived. (WJHL via AP, File)

The first of the trials in the federal lawsuits is scheduled to begin in August 2025.

The city has denied the allegations of corruption, as have the officers named in the lawsuits. The parties are expected to depose Williams in at least one of those lawsuits.

Williams told The Tennessean he was framed by law enforcement to cover up a broader public corruption scandal.

The former prosecutor’s lawsuit claims police deliberately botched her effort to arrest Williams on a federal felon-possessing-ammunition charge in April 2021, enabling him to flee. He was on the run from that charge when he was arrested on the Western Carolina University campus two years later. The city countered that she took five months to obtain an indictment when police requested one in 2020.

At least half a dozen names on the folders of videos of women were consistent with first names on a list labeled “Raped” that Johnson City officers found in his apartment, a police affidavit says.

Facing public criticism, Johnson City ordered an outside investigation into how officers handled sexual assault investigations in the summer of 2022. That November, the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI opened a federal sex trafficking investigation.

The results of the city’s outside investigation, released in 2023, found police conducted inconsistent, ineffective and incomplete investigations; relied on inadequate record management; had insufficient training and policies; and sometimes showed gender-based stereotypes and bias.

The city said it began improving the department’s performance even before the findings were released, including following the district attorney’s new sexual assault investigation protocol and creating a “comfortable space” for victim interviews.

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