Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard
Link copied to clipboard

An Upper Merion man admitted to breaking into women’s apartments, stealing underwear and installing hidden cameras

Ryan Selleny, 28, pleaded guilty Friday to burglary, theft, indecent assault, and related crimes.

Ryan Selleny, seen here after his preliminary hearing in April, will be sentenced in the coming months on burglary, theft, indecent assault, and related crimes.
Ryan Selleny, seen here after his preliminary hearing in April, will be sentenced in the coming months on burglary, theft, indecent assault, and related crimes.Read moreJose F. Moreno / Staff Photographer

An Upper Merion man pleaded guilty Friday to breaking into two of his neighbors’ apartments to steal underwear and other items belonging to three women, and to using a hidden camera to film one of the women in various states of undress.

Ryan Selleny, 28, also admitted to filming himself masturbating on the woman’s bed, and to mixing his bodily fluids into containers of juice and water that she later unknowingly consumed in a case that Assistant District Attorney Lauren Marvel said was one of the worst burglaries she could possibly imagine.

“He not only violated these individuals’ sense of safety and comfort in their own home, but he physically violated the body of one of our victims without her even knowing until we uncovered the evidence of it to be able to disclose that to her,” Marvel said Friday.

Selleny pleaded to burglary, theft, indecent assault and related crimes during a hearing before Montgomery County Court Judge Wendy Rothstein. Rothstein accepted his plea, and deferred sentencing for three months to allow him to undergo a psychosexual evaluation.

As part of his plea, Selleny must register as a sex offender for 25 years.

Upper Merion police began investigating Selleny in March, after one of the victims found a recording device disguised as a smartphone charger plugged into an outlet in her apartment. She didn’t recognize the device, and hadn’t placed it there.

On the hidden camera, investigators found footage of Selleny masturbating in the woman’s home, and entering the apartment while she wasn’t there.

Police later determined that he broke into the victim’s home at the Kingswood Apartments five times between Oct. 30 and March 24, according to the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest. During one burglary, he stole the woman’s spare key, which officers said they later recovered in his apartment in the complex, along with her underwear and sex toys.

He would often wait, prosecutors said, until the victim had left her home, and obsessively filmed himself throughout each home invasion.

While investigating, detectives discovered other underwear and sex toys in Selleny’s home that the first victim said didn’t belong to her, as well as footage from a different apartment in the same complex.

They interviewed the two women who previously lived in that second apartment, who said they did not know Selleny, and had not given him permission to enter their apartment.

The women told detectives that they had noticed several items had gone missing from their apartment between October and February, with the majority disappearing in February, the affidavit said.

They also said they had returned home to find piles of laundry in disarray, and doors that they had left closed were open.