Molester on the Run for Three Decades CaughtReprinted with permission of The Miami Herald and Herald.Com Undercover agents caught a man in Fort Lauderdale who had been convicted almost three decades ago on child-molestation charges in Southern California. BY JAY WEAVER Posing as boat buyers, State Department undercover agents didn't know who they had when they arrested ''Stephen Arthur Seagoe'' on passport fraud charges aboard his sailboat in Fort Lauderdale. But as soon as they ran his alias and fingerprints through a computer database last Thursday, the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service uncovered that ''Seagoe'' was really George Joseph England--a man wanted in a 28-year-old child-molestation case in Orange County, Calif. England, 60, whose boat was undergoing repairs but is docked along the Miami River, had disappeared for decades after assuming the name of a dead infant. ''When you have someone on the run for so long who goes to these lengths to hide his identity, you're going to come up with something big,'' said Edgar Moreno, special agent in charge of the Diplomatic Security Service in Miami. ``It's not your run-of-the-mill criminal case.'' England's story begins in the early 1970s, when he served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. He returned to the United States with a Vietnamese girl he informally adopted, authorities said. England lived with her in Southern California and used her to lure playmates to their Costa Mesa motor home, according to the Orange County District Attorney's Office. An Orange County jury convicted him in 1977 of molesting his daughter's three playmates, but he fled before being sentenced to six years in prison. INTERNATIONAL TRAVELS England, said authorities, traveled to Vietnam, India and Guam with his unofficial daughter, then moved to the Florida area years ago. It was unclear when they settled here, but the daughter told authorities that she had not seen England since 1995. It was only in recent weeks that Diplomatic Security Service agents received tips about his alias and began investigating his whereabouts. Agents went to his sailboat, which was undergoing repairs in the Sailboat Bend area, and suspected they had their man. They eventually arranged to meet England at his lawyer's office to talk about buying his boat. They all drove over to the boat last Thursday afternoon and agents arrested him. YEARS OF ABUSE FBI agents were also investigating him at the time of his arrest. The woman told WFOR-CBS 4 in an interview broadcast Tuesday that England molested her repeatedly for years. The U.S. attorney's office is prosecuting the passport fraud charges, but England is expected to be extradited to Southern California. |
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