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Roger Elkins joins Wayne Nelson Corliss, along with the man who created the videos, John Wrenshall, who invited Corliss and other men from around the world his Thailand home in order to sexually abuse boys as young as 4.
Elkins, 45, admitted routinely exchanging the images with Corliss, who is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence. Two other customers got 6½ years each.
Wrenshall earlier this year was sentenced to 25 years in prison as part of a plea bargain, guaranteeing that he has to be pushing 90 before he ever sees freedom again.
Under his deal with the government, Wrenshall admitted that he made money by arranging trips to his home, where U.S. citizens paid him to have anal, oral and other types of sex with Thai boys. Wrenshall also let his customers photograph and videotape the abuse, and admitted he also “trained” the boys by having sex with them himself.
Wrenshall was previously convicted in Canada of indecently assaulting several choir boys at a church. After spending some time in a Canadian jail in the late 1990s, he emigrated to Thailand, where, authorities said, he began sex tourism operation.
The key to catching him a second time came when federal authorities connected him and Corliss.
Interpol in May 2008 sent a sanitized photo of a man sexually abusing young Thai boys to media outlets in the U.S. and abroad, appealing to anyone who could identify him. It took all of 48 hours for federal authorities to identify Corliss — a local theater actor who played Santa Claus for area children — and arrest him in Union City.
A grand jury was empaneled in Newark, and Wrenshall, a Canadian citizen, was indicted in August 2008.
Sure enough, special agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — working with their counterparts through ICE attaché offices at the U.S. Embassies in Thailand, Canada and England — tracked Wrenshall four months later to London’s Heathrow Airport, where he was arrested by Metropolitan Police.
He was extradited the following July and has remained in federal custody ever since.
ICE and Interpol made the case together, and it was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Lee Vartan of the U.S. Attorney’s Office Criminal Division in Newark.
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