Details of alleged Ogden sex trafficking operation emerge as victims testify
Terrance Jones and Lynnsie Reddish appear on Friday, July 7, 2017, in 2nd District Court in Ogden. Reddish and Jones are facing multiple charges related to a prostitution ring that they allegedly ran.
Lynnsie Reddish appears on Friday, July 7, 2017, in 2nd District Court in Ogden. Reddish is facing multiple charges related to a prostitution ring that she allegedly helped run.
Terrence Jones appears in court in Ogden on Friday, July 7, 2017. Jones is facing multiple charges related to a prostitution ring that he allegedly helped run.
OGDEN — An alleged human trafficking and prostitution ring was exposed last January after an assault of an Ogden woman led investigators to a house on 2777 Harrison Boulevard, court testimony revealed Friday.
In Ogden’s 2nd District Court, Assistant Attorney General Daniel Strong played a muddled recording in the preliminary hearing against Lynnsie Reddish, 20, and Terrance Chavez Jones, 31, who are accused of running the underground operation.
On the recording, which was muffled and seemed inadvertently recorded, there were sobbing sounds, along with a man’s voice yelling and another female voice. In the clearest portion of the four-minute audio, the female voice said what sounded like, “This is how you want to play with me now? This is how you want to play with me?”
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Victim 1, as she is identified in court documents, testified that the female voice belonged to Reddish, and was taped on Jan. 18, the date Victim 1 claims Reddish and her boyfriend, Jones, beat her with a belt, cut off her waist-length hair and punched her with closed fists in the face and upper body. The beating, the victim said, happened because Reddish and Jones discovered that she intended to leave the prostitution operation and seek clients independently.
The Standard-Examiner does not publish the names of alleged victims of sex crimes.
Reddish and Jones are each charged with seven counts of aggravated exploitation of prostitution, a second-degree felony; seven counts of human trafficking for forced sexual exploitation, a second-degree felony; aggravated kidnapping with domestic violence, a first-degree felony; pattern of unlawful activity, a second-degree felony; money laundering, a second-degree felony; and aggravated assault with domestic violence, a third-degree felony.
Victim 1’s testimony touched on the most serious allegations leveled against the defendants, but the state didn’t get through all of their evidence in Friday’s all-day preliminary hearing in front of 2nd District Judge Scott M. Hadley. In a preliminary hearing, the prosecution attempts to prove to the court that enough evidence exists to take the case to trial. On Friday, just four of the alleged seven victims had time to testify.
The attorneys for the defendants — Michael Bouwhuis for Jones, and Logan Bushell, representing Reddish — were permitted to cross-examine each witness, but as is the case in preliminary hearings, only the prosecution’s theory is presented.
Strong, with the attorney general’s office, said that the victims were “recruited, harbored or detained” by Reddish and Jones, and that “if they did not continue working, they would suffer serious harm.”
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BENJAMIN ZACK/Standard-Examiner
Terrence Jones, left, and Lynnsie Reddish appear in court in Ogden on Friday, July 7, 2017. The pair are facing multiple charges related to a prostitution ring that they allegedly ran.
The first witness called to the stand on Friday was Scott Eggerman, a member of Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes’s SECURE Strike Force. Eggerman had previously been an Ogden City police officer for 10 years and said his assignment was specifically to focus on human trafficking in the Weber County area. When Victim 1 reported her assault to Ogden police, one of his former colleagues handed the case over to Eggerman to investigate.
The woman identified as Victim 2 in court documents took the stand and testified that she’d been giving non-sexual “body rubs” at spas in the area when she encountered Reddish, who she recognized from high school.
“I knew her as the bad girl in school,” Victim 2 said.
Reddish told Victim 2 that if she joined her operation, she’d make more money than at the spas, Victim 2 said. She initially declined, but reached out to Reddish when she was feeling desperate — she needed money for a place to stay and she’d given care of her young son over to her mother.
“I didn’t want to feel like a failure as a mom,” Victim 2 said, near tears. “I didn’t think about how I would be making money, I just wanted to make money fast so I could have him back, so he could be with his mom.”
Victim 2 said Reddish posted ads for her on Backpage.com, but unbeknownst to her, Reddish was placing them in the section for escorts, rather than the section for massage services. As a result, Victim 2 said, her clients, who she had no contact with until they walked through the door, were often expecting her to perform sexual acts. She said on a few occasions, she did provide hand-to-genital stimulation to clients while topless. She said she split the money she made with Reddish.
Victim 2 said she walked away from her role in Reddish’s operation, an escape that was far easier than for some of Reddish’s other alleged victims.
“I didn’t get hurt, I didn’t get addicted, I didn’t get caught in a very vicious cycle of fear,” she said.
The woman labeled Victim 5 said she rented a room at the house on Harrison, and described Reddish and Jones as roommates and business partners.
“Everything I did was on my own accord because I chose to,” she said. She had a heroin addiction at the time she lived with Reddish and Jones, and sometimes relied on Reddish to score her drugs, but was never in debt to Reddish for more than a day, she said.
Victim 5 said she left the operation after Reddish proposed taking a larger cut from Victim 3’s earnings with clients.
When Victim 6 took the stand, she testified to being diagnosed as autistic, which she said makes her “more naive.”
She said she met Reddish at a Halloween party in 2015. Reddish suggested making money with her in Ogden, but Victim 6 said she wasn’t interested. Later, she accepted a ride from Reddish, who told her she’d take her back to Salt Lake City. In the car, Victim 6 said that someone slammed her head into the dashboard. “I woke up in Ogden,” she said.
Victim 6 said she was taking clients and having sex for money by the next day, despite her protestations. All of her earnings went to Reddish, even tips, she said, and she had no choice. “She would say I’m allowed to leave, but they wouldn’t let me leave,” she said.
She testified that she had done methamphetamine before meeting Reddish, but her use increased dramatically while with Reddish, who would hold her money and her drugs for her. Victim 6 denied that drug addiction motivated her to take client calls for Reddish.
Of Jones, Victim 6 said, “I didn’t know him very long, but he was actually pretty nice to me.”
When asked why she never called the police or reported Reddish to any authorities, Victim 6 said, “I was too scared at the time, and I don’t really like talking to cops, myself.” She said she gave Reddish the benefit of the doubt.
“People could change, you never know,” she said.
The remaining three victims, along with any other witnesses the attorney general puts forth, will appear in court in a continuation of Friday’s hearing, now scheduled for July 17.