A TV Employee and a Bigamist Among Today's Pedophiles and Perverts

Former TV employee gets 52 years for child sex abuse

Tom Steele 

A former employee of WFAA-TV (Channel 8) has been sentenced to 52 years in prison for child sex abuse.

Michael Chappell, 44, was arrested at the downtown Dallas TV station in July. He worked in the company’s IT department.

Chappell was charged with three counts of indecency with a child and one count of aggravated sexual assault of a child. Court records show that the incidents occurred from 2008 to 2011

Little Elm police, who conducted the investigation, said the charges involved a family member.

On Monday, a jury found Chappell guilty of all four charges. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the sexual assault charge and nine years for each indecency charge. He will have to register as a sex offender.

Chappell had previously been arrested on similar charges.

In June 2012, he was charged with injury to a child, elderly person or disabled person with bodily injury stemming from an alleged 2011 incident. That charge was dismissed.

In May 2014, he was charged with indecency with a child from an alleged 2008 incident. That charge also was dismissed.

Convicted bigamist now facing child sex abuse charges

By John S. Hausman

MUSKEGON, Michigan – A Michigan man once convicted of polygamy has been charged with a potential life felony for alleged sexual assault of a girl when she was 10 years old.

Steven Charles Ogle Jr., 36, of Coral was arraigned Friday, March 11, on a charge of first-degree criminal sexual conduct with victim younger than 13. The felony, which alleges that he sexually penetrated the child, is punishable by up to life in prison.

He's charged as a fourth-time habitual offender based on prior felony convictions, one of which – polygamy – made headlines at the time.

Ogle in 2003 pleaded no contest to that charge, acknowledging he was married to two wives at once.

He claimed it was unintentional, maintaining he thought he was divorced from his first wife when he married a second woman in Muskegon County in August 2002.

Ogle wound up with a one-year jail sentence that didn't add to his time behind bars because, by that time, he was already in state prison serving a sentence for larceny from a building. The sentences were served concurrently.

At Ogle's probable-cause hearing in the polygamy case, his first wife testified they lived together only a short time after their June 2001 marriage, until Ogle went to jail on another charge. She testified they had never divorced nor even started divorce proceedings.

Each woman gave birth to a child in the summer of 2003 that each said was Steven Ogle's.

In the new rape case, investigated by the Muskegon Police Department, the Muskegon County Prosecutor's Office alleges that Ogle sexually assaulted the girl sometime between 2008 and 2009, when she was 10, in the Muskegon home where Ogle then lived.

The girl, now 17, recently told a friend, who told her mother, and the second girl's parents called police, according to Chief Assistant Prosecutor Timothy M. Maat.

Besides the polygamy conviction, Ogle has also been convicted over the years of breaking and entering a building with intent, larceny in a building, domestic violence, multiple cases of insufficient funds checks, retail fraud and, in 2003, arson, Maat said.

Jury finds Wyoming man guilty of child sexual abuse

Lillian Schrock For The Gazette

CASPER, Wyoming — Following a five-day trial, a jury on Friday found a Casper man guilty of sexually abusing two girls.

Desmond Otto Triplett is being held in the Natrona County Detention Center pending his sentencing.

The 12-person jury found Triplett, 65, guilty of four of six charges. Authorities had accused him of sexually abusing three girls in the 1970s and assaulting a girl over a three-year period starting in 2010.

The jury convicted Triplett for taking immodest, immoral or indecent liberties with a 15-year-old girl from 1975 to 1977. He was also found guilty of three counts of second-degree sexual abuse of a child for assaulting a 13-year-old girl beginning in 2010.

Triplett had also been accused of taking immodest, immoral or indecent liberties with two 13-year-old girls from 1976 to 1977. He was acquitted of those two charges.

Defense attorney Rob Oldham maintained during the trial that Triplett was not guilty of abusing any of the girls. He also accused the police department of conducting a “horrific” investigation based on no evidence. For example, detectives failed to make copies of text messages Triplett had reportedly sent one of the victims, Oldham said.

“They haven’t come close to proving their case,” he said of the state prosecutors. “They have the same things they had when they started: people making accusations.”

Prosecutor Stephanie Hambrick shot back at Oldham’s assertion that the girls had “jumped on the bandwagon with accusations,” saying it is difficult for victims to come forward and testify about their abuse.

“Why would she want to come in and share her story with a room full of strangers?” Hambrick said of one of the victims. “It’s not easy for victims to come forward.”

The first victim said Triplett sexually assaulted her at a party in 1975. Triplett continued to assault the girl until she became pregnant, and then he forced her to get an abortion.

He then forged the girl’s birth certificate so they could get married. They had a child together, and she eventually divorced him.

The more recent victim told police Triplett plied her with gifts, telling her she had to pay him back by sleeping with him.

The charges Triplett was acquitted of were based on accusations he supplied two young girls with alcohol and sexually assaulted them.


The Casper Police Department began investigating the case in October 2013. Triplett was arrested in November 2014 and bonded out of jail.