‘It is the end of the world,’ Shortey told Moore police
MOORE — A state senator told police last March “it is the end of the world” after being confronted with evidence he offered to pay a boy for sex, a video of the interview shows.
Ralph Shortey, who would resign later that month, looked more and more dejected as Moore police detectives revealed what evidence they had against him.
Police on Tuesday released an edited version of the March 13 interview. He denied throughout the 54-minute interview that he took the teenager to a hotel March 9 for sex.
During the interview, police read to him graphic Kik messages he sent under a fake name to the boy.
“It’s not me,” Shortey said. “We communicated by phone. There was no sexual intentions that night.”
The two police detectives encouraged Shortey over and over to tell the truth.
“Ralph, that’s a lie,” Detective Scott Carpenter said after one denial. “You’re lying to us right now.”
“This is a bad deal,” Detective Jason Sparks said.
Shortey, R-Oklahoma City, finally admitted wrongdoing months later over the hotel incident. He pleaded guilty in November to child sex trafficking.
He is now in jail awaiting sentencing. He faces at least 10 years in federal prison.
He admitted in court that he offered to pay the victim, then a 17-year-old boy, for sexual “stuff.” He also admitted in court that he knew the victim was underage at the time.
In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors will drop three child pornography counts against him at the time of sentencing.
In his interview last March, Shortey told police the two had met over a year before at his coffee shop, Wholly Grounds Coffee. Shortey said at that time “he told me he was 20 years old.”
A detective said the teenager reported the two actually met through a Craigslist ad.
“He’s telling me ... that he had posted an ad in ‘casual encounters’ and that he had a lot of responses for it but that you said that you wanted him to mess around with your wife while you watched,” Carpenter said. “He said ... he found out your wife is pregnant and then that it never happened.”
The detective also said the teenager reported Shortey knew his age.
The interview revealed some new details of the case that has attracted widespread attention.
At one point, for instance, the victim wrote Shortey, “I’ll be your slave,” a detective disclosed during the interview. Shortey replied, “That sounds nice.”
Shortey claimed in the interview he got the teenager a hotel room to study for the GED exams the next day. “I did not show up there for any sexual thing,” he said.
Near the end of the interview, Carpenter made one last pitch to Shortey to tell the truth.
“Man, you made a bad decision,” the detective said. “That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It just means you made a bad decision. It’s not the end of the world.”
Shortey replied, “If I can’t prove otherwise, then it is the end of the world.”
Moore police last year released edited bodycam videos of officers questioning Shortey at the Super 8 in Moore.
Shortey is seen in those videos wearing a white T-shirt referencing the Bible verse about “wives submitting yourselves to your husbands.” Underneath “Ephesians 5:22” is a cartoonish drawing of a sandwich. Underneath the drawing is the phrase, “Now go make me a sandwich.”
Police went to Room 120 at the Super 8 early March 9 to conduct a welfare check at the request of the victim’s father.
The victim’s girlfriend saw Shortey pick him up and followed them to the hotel. She then notified the father.
The girlfriend had been watching the victim’s house because he had talked about “getting paid tonight” and she worried he was going to sell drugs. Shortey was not arrested at the hotel.
His case attracted national attention because he was an early Trump supporter and first won election in 2010 as a “family values” conservative.