A Michigan man has pleaded guilty to raping an 18-month-old girl and recording the act to sell to other child molesters, including his older brother, reports say.
The Detroit Free Press reports that Eric Devin Masters, 29, pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct in Kent County Circuit Court on Tuesday.
Masters is already in jail serving a 50-year sentence for a previous charge of exploiting children. Investigators learned of the rape of the toddler during that investigation.
In the previous trial, Masters was found guilty of exploiting, raping, and making still and video images of a number of children between 2010 and 2012. In particular was a video made of his rape of a small girl on Christmas Day in 2011, on Masters’s birthday.
In the latest case, Maters was prosecuted for assaulting the 18-month-old at least three times over an eight-day period in 2012 at a motel near Byron Township, Michigan. One of the videos allegedly shows Masters sexually assaulting the child as she was tied to the bed. Another allegedly shows him urinating on her.
Kent County Circuit Court Judge Mark Trusock accepted guilty pleas on five felony charges and, at the end of the trial, told prosecutors he’d be setting the maximum penalty.
Masters’s brother, Timothy Matthew Masters, was also arrested for sexually molesting a child. The second Masters was arrested when the FBI found communications between him and his older brother in which the two talked explicitly about their crimes.
“Good night last night,” Timothy Masters said in an email to brother Eric. The email “included a pornographic image taken of the victim” while she slept.
A press release from the FBI Detroit division detailed:
The brothers were active collectors of child pornography and regularly e-mailed back and forth about their sexual interest in children. They escalated their criminal conduct to sexual assaults and produced their own child pornography that they shared with each other. Timothy Masters bragged to his brother that he groped several girls he knew, ages 10-14, during trips to an amusement park and in the girls’ homes. He took pornographic pictures of one of the girls while she slept. He was a friend of the family and was invited into the home. That child wrote a statement that her mother read tearfully at the sentencing hearing. The victim described how she has panic attacks in places that remind her of Timothy Masters and continues to experience significant emotional pain and fear.
According to the FBI, “Timothy Masters, 32, of Belding, Michigan, was sentenced to 27 years in federal prison for producing child pornography.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston, or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.