62°
John Wrenshall
Under federal law, he must serve just about all of that time — and that was through a plea bargain. If this low-life ever sees the light of day again, he’ll be pushing 90.
That’s right: A news story can still be “objective” by calling it for what it was — more than barbaric.
“John Wrenshall created a place where innocent children were sexually brutalized as a vacation pastime,” New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman said. “It fitting that a man who has condemned children to live with unimaginable scars for his pleasure and profit should spend decades of his own life in a prison cell.”
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 — engage in anal, oral and other types of sex with young innocents.
On top of that, they could videotape and photograph the abuse.
Wrenshall 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 learned that Wayne Nelson Corliss of Union City was one of Wrenshall’s customers.
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. God Save the Queen.
Corliss got 20 years in federal prison. Two other customers got 6½ years each.
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.
Click here to follow Daily Voice South Passaic and receive free news updates.
