Kentucky man forced a 13-year-old Bucks County girl to have sex with men in trafficking scheme, DA says
Zachary McCauley forced the girl to create an online dating profile and solicit sex with men, under threat of harming her mother, police say.
A 13-year-old Buckingham Township girl thought Zachary Lee McCauley, a 29-year-old Kentucky man, was a teenage boy who was attracted to her when he befriended her on Snapchat last fall.
Gradually, he whittled down the teen’s inhibitions, police said Tuesday, and persuaded her to send him nude photos and videos. Later, he created a fake dating profile for her on Grindr in which she pretended she was 18. And eventually, police said, he coerced her to have sex with men who responded to the profile.
McCauley threatened to harm the girl’s mother if she didn’t comply with his demands, said Bucks County District Attorney Jen Schorn.
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“Predators are so good at manipulating these children,” she said. “They think they’re doing this out of love, or out of fear that they’ll harm the people they love.”
McCauley, of Louisville, Ky., was charged this week with trafficking a minor, sexual exploitation of a minor, criminal solicitation, and related crimes. He remained in custody in Kentucky, and there was no indication he had hired an attorney.
The two men who responded to the Grindr profile and sexually assaulted the girl — Jon Van Ingen, 67, of Doylestown, and Randy Quinn, 42, of Coopersburg, Lehigh County — have also been arrested and charged with statutory sexual assault. They were released on $150,000 unsecured bond.
Quinn also faces charges alleging that he filmed himself having sex with the girl and shared the images with McCauley.
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Van Ingen’s attorney, Thomas Logan, declined to comment. Quinn’s attorney, John Fioravanti Jr., did not respond to a request for comment.
Schorn said her office first learned of the trafficking scheme when the girl’s mother contacted them after seeing news reports in February about Matt Wills, a Hulmeville man charged with producing child pornography and sharing it online.
In announcing Wills’ arrest, Schorn had put out a public plea to parents to keep a close eye on the people their children interact with online.
The girl’s mother had grown suspicious of her daughter’s behavior: In October, she caught her daughter taking risque photos, and confiscated her iPhone, according to the affidavit of probable cause for McCauley’s arrest.
A month later, authorities said, the girl had a new phone, on which the woman found pornographic pictures of her daughter and messages from McCauley, posing as a teenage boy and saying the girl’s mother was interfering with their relationship.
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Investigators later learned that McCauley had befriended the girl in September, telling her he was originally from Georgia but had relocated to the Philadelphia area, the affidavit said. In coercing her to use the Grindr profile, he told her that he knew where she lived because she had accidentally shared her address with him while chatting on Snapchat.
McCauley controlled the Grindr profile, and coached the girl on what to say to the men who solicited dates from her, according to the affidavit.
She met with Van Ingen twice in October, and on both occasions he drove to the girl’s home and picked her up in his pickup truck, according to the affidavit. On their second meeting, the two had sex in the back of the truck while it was parked in a school parking lot, the affidavit said.
Quinn had sex with the girl twice, once in a park and another time in a motel in Doylestown, according to the affidavit. Both times, Quinn streamed the sexual encounters to McCauley through Snapchat, the document said.
A third man who picked the girl up at her home for a planned date called off the encounter after realizing she had lied about her age, according to Schorn. He does not face any criminal charges.
The prosecutor urged parents to balance their desire to give their teenagers privacy with keeping them safe.
“This case encapsulates just how long the reach of a child predator is while using these social media platforms,” Schorn said.