A Texas man was convicted in U.S. District Court on charges he transported a minor for illegal sexual activity. The arrest was made in Oak Grove in 2019.
41-year-old Bryan Douglas Conley was convicted on Friday of fifteen criminal offenses including transportation of a person for illegal sexual activity, transportation of a minor for illegal sexual activity, bank fraud, aggravated identity theft, and interstate threats to ransom.
According to court documents and evidence presented at the trial, Conley used an online dating website to lure and entice a minor from Ohio to travel to Tennessee to meet with him in November of 2018.
Conley created and used a false online profile with offers of money and property to lure the minor across state lines. He ultimately abandoned the minor several days later in Texas and stole her purse and phone.
In January 2019, Conley used an online dating website to lure and decoy an adult victim, falsely claiming to be a modeling agent. Later that month, Conley met the victim in Shepherdsville took the victim’s phone, and provided her with an unknown substance to drink as part of the modeling contract. He bound her and drove around Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, issuing ransom demands to the victims’ parents in Tennessee. The ransom demands included threats to physically and sexually harm the victim if his demands were not met.
On January 30, 2019, Conley retrieved a ransom placed by the FBI in Oak Grove. He was arrested shortly after retrieving the ransom. The victim was located in the car. Before the kidnapping, Conley met the victim took her credit card, and attempted to make purchases at an Oak Grove store.
He also attempted to access her credit card customer profile using the victim’s social security number.
In June of 2019, after Conley had been arrested and released from custody and ordered to wear an ankle monitoring device, he removed the device and fled to Ohio. He was subsequently arrested and detained.
Conley is scheduled for sentencing on March 11. He remains in federal custody pending sentencing and faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 12 years in prison and a maximum penalty of life in prison.
