Man gets life for abduction
LAS VEGAS, Nev. — A 32-year-old Texas man has been sentenced to life in federal prison for stalking and abducting his ex-girlfriend in Las Vegas, Nev., chaining her to the floorboard of his van and driving her to New Mexico last year in what authorities said was a shocking attempt to “brainwash her to be his wife.”
Jack William Morgan was sentenced Tuesday after a jury found him guilty in December of conspiracy and kidnapping.
A co-defendant, Samuel Brown, was previously sentenced to more than five years in prison after pleading guilty before trial to conspiracy to commit kidnap-
ping. Brown identifies as a woman and uses the name Sophie.
Jurors were told that after a year of planning the incident, Morgan and Brown bound and gagged the woman in her apartment in January 2017 and drove the van toward a secluded cave in New Mexico.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department had launched an extensive search for the woman after a neighbor reported seeing her dragged from her home bound in chains. Her photo appeared in news broadcasts throughout the region, and law enforcement agencies in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas were alerted to be on the lookout for a white minivan with Texas license plates.
Hours later, New Mexico state and local police located the van in La Puebla, a small community near Española, where they arrested Morgan and Brown and rescued the woman.
According to a state police search warrant affidavit, the woman, then 28, was wearing only undergarments and was bound by handcuffs and chains padlocked around her body when officers rescued her. The woman also had cuts and scrapes on her arms, legs, neck and face.
During her interview with police, she said Morgan, whom she had dated years earlier as a college student, had wrapped duct tape around her face, neck and hair when he kidnapped her at her home in Las Vegas.
She also told officers that Morgan had choked her.
The state police affidavit said the woman believed Morgan was going to take her to a cave, where he planned to brainwash her and force her to become his wife.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that prosecutors called the case “shocking and disturbing on many levels,” citing Morgan’s planning and that he never expressed remorse about the crime.
“He stated at least twice during the trial that he would engage in the same conduct again if given the chance,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo.
Information from The New Mexican was used in this report.