Ranger offers facts against Kelly in filing
Statements contradict some details presented by Kelley’s lawyers.
In the weeks before a 4-yearold boy accused Greg Kelley of molesting him, the former Leander football player was obsessed with pornography, spent hours alone with children attending the in-home day care facility where he lived and took a selfie of himself with the victim, according to a search warrant request filed in Williamson County state District Court on Thursday morning.
Even after Kelley was charged with sexually abusing the child and was awaiting trial, he engaged in high-risk sexual behavior by meeting with other people through a website that connects those looking for sexual activity, the document states. And the affidavit goes further, stating Kelley was viewing pornography with more frequency, for longer time periods and with increasingly “deviant” content around the time of the alleged abuse — a pattern described as similar to that of a sex offender who is “about to offend.” The affidavit
doesn’t further describe the content.
Meanwhile, during an ongoing investigation into the case, Kelley was “evasive and or dishonest during his interviews” with law enforcement officials and “was found to be making statements that were direct contradictions to information he had already provided,” the search warrant states.
The statements — which contradict some information Kelley’s lawyers have presented as they seek to exonerate him — were written in three search warrant requests filed Thursday by Texas Ranger Cody Mitchell, who is investigating the sex abuse case. One warrant seeks information from the website adultfriendfinder. com, the site Kelley is said to have used in the months after he was charged with super aggravated sexual assault of a child.
Two other warrants seek from Apple Inc. more online information from Kelley and Johnathan McCarty, who has also been named as a suspect in the sexual assault. The warrants request photos, emails, calendars and bookmarks, among other things.
Williamson District Attorney Shawn Dick said the Texas Ranger investigation into the case has been ongoing and that they have been actively investigating three suspects. Kelley and McCarty are two of them. The name of a third suspect hasn’t been made public.
“They will pursue these leads until they have only one suspect or until they run out of leads,” Dick said.
Kelley’s attorney, Keith Hampton, said that the search warrants reveal no new information to his defense team.
“The ranger testified that he was pursuing three people and he couldn’t rule out Greg,” Hampton said. “I say knock yourself out . ... The more you dig, the more you’re going to vindicate Greg Kelley.”
Kelley and McCarty were high school friends. In 2012, while his own parents were sick, Kelley moved in with McCarty and his parents, who ran the day care facility. In July 2013, the 4-yearold boy said Kelley sexually assaulted him.
Kelly was convicted in 2014 of super aggravated sexual assault of a child and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. But in the years since his conviction, his numerous supporters have cast Kelley’s conviction as a miscarriage of justice.
Since May, Kelley’s appeals attorneys have filed documents stating that Kelley never had a fair shot in court, pointing to the flawed police investigation of the crime and saying Kelley’s trial lawyers did not adequately represent him. They have also filed documents naming McCarty as another suspect.
McCarty’s attorney, Kellie Bailey, has said that her client is innocent.
In a statement to the American-Statesman on Thursday, Bailey said: “Mr. Hampton has bent, hidden, and misrepresented the truth all along. The facts in the search warrants completely contradict Hampton’s own public statements and the sworn evidence he has provided. He has manipulated and broken trust with everyone who has believed him. This has got to stop. This is not justice.”
Hampton has tried to establish in court that Kelley barely knew the victim in the case, and that he had no opportunity to abuse the child in mid-July as he juggled his football team responsibilities with helping his brother move. Kelley said the same thing to the Texas ranger, one search warrant states.
But while reviewing Kelley’s cellphone, Mitchell discovered “text conversations in which he spoke of being all alone for hours with multiple children in the McCarty house and also where he spoke of a ‘selfie’ photo he appeared in with (the victim).”
The ranger’s affidavit was filed just as Kelley’s supporters prepared for his possible release from jail on bond.
Kelley’s release could be possible under a 2003 law that allows a person convicted of a crime to be let out of prison if prosecutors and a judge agree on terms for the release during the sometimes lengthy appeals process.
Legal experts who work in appellate matters say it is still unusual for judges to release an inmate on such a bond and that they do so only about a dozen times a year statewide.
The dramatic developments in the case started in May, when Dick, the newly elected district attorney, reopened the investigation and confirmed McCarty is a possible alternative suspect.
Hampton filed a series of court documents stating McCarty had confessed to at least two people and had pictures of nude children on his phone. In court documents, Hampton also showed a sideby-side photograph of the two men — who had similar haircuts and resembled one another at the time of the crime — to suggest that Kelley’s conviction might be partly blamed on mistaken identity.
Dick asked the Rangers to reinvestigate the sexual abuse case. The new search warrants are a part of that investigation.
Earlier this month, state District Judge Donna King conducted a three-day proceeding to hear evidence in the case during which the prosecutors took aim at the Cedar Park police investigation of Kelley.
Dick called the police work “wholly deficient” and Ranger Mitchell testified that the police work was so bad that it scared him. Cedar Park city officials have since said that they will seek an outside review of the department’s policies and procedures.
After the hearing, Kelley’s supporters were jubilant, and making plans for his release. It’s unclear, however, whether that will happen.