TAMPA –A puppeteer who has entertained children for years around the Tampa area had a sickening secret, according to a federal complaint. Ron Brown collected pornographic images of children and fantasized about strangling, dismembering and cannibalizing children, court documents state. The 57-year-old Largo man is under arrest in the Pinellas County Jail, facing federal charges of conspiring to kidnap a child and possession of child pornography.

In 1977, Portland police questioned Jeffrey P. Cutlip in the death of a 15-year-old Milwaukie girl found dead in Johnson Creek after a trip to a local store. Cutlip, then 27, said he had walked the girl, Julie Marie Bennett, back to Johnson Creek Park, after buying beer and cigarettes at the market. He then headed home, he told police. Thirty-five years later, Cutlip, 63, suddenly confessed to Bennett’s killing, as well as the strangulation death two years earlier of a 44-year-old Portland woman, police said.

CHICAGO, Illinois — William Balfour, who was convicted by a Cook County jury in May in the 2008 murders of singer Jennifer Hudson’s mother, brother and nephew, was sentenced today to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Judge Charles Burns imposed three consecutive life sentences for the murders and 120 years for the underlying felonies of home invasion and aggravated kidnapping. An emotional Burns told Balfour his crimes “send a chill through all of us” and said Balfour’s “soul is as barren as dark space.”

There are many, many missing persons in the United States. You will find these missing person lists, cold case files, unidentified persons, and unidentified remains categorized by state along with some helpful links to help you if you find yourself missing a family member or loved one. These sites are maintained by law enforcement sites such as the Department of Public Safety, Police Departments, Sheriff’s Offices and the FBI. If you recognize any of these missing persons, please contact the appropriate agency. These are offered here as public records in hope of helping to find people who are lost or missing. NOTE: If you are missing someone, call law enforcement immediately…. time is of the utmost importance. With each tick of the click when someone is missing the odds of finding them is going down.

You are not alone. Welcome to the Male Survivor community, which provides resources and support for men who were sexually victimized as children, adolescents, or adults. We are committed to preventing, healing, and eliminating all forms of sexual victimization of boys and men through support, treatment, research, education, advocacy, and activism.

Child sexual abuse is a difficult thing to define. While an adult having contact with a child is easily defined as abuse, especially if that adult is related to the child, more difficult issues come into play when the perpetrator is another child in the family, especially when the child is 10 years old or younger. Cantwell (1988) reported several cases investigated in Denver in which children under the age of 10 years were molesting younger peers, sometimes siblings or cousins and sometimes unrelated children, in a variety of settings including multi-family households, school buses, and neighborhood children’s homes. Parents may interpret this behavior at times as normal child sexual curiosity, or may spank the children to halt this behavior. Often in these cases, the child perpetrators were abused themselves at a young age, but, due to the shock experienced on discovery of the abuse and the focus on the “victim,” they did not receive services and their own history of abuse was not discovered until later.

Mandatory polygraph testing for sex offenders is set to be rolled out across England and Wales following a successful pilot scheme, ministers say. It found offenders who were tested were more honest and gave better information, which meant they were managed more effectively. The pilot took place in the East and West Midlands probation areas from April 2009 to October 2011.

CHESTERVILLE, SOUTH AFRICA — A 15-year-old South African girl who was kidnapped and then repeatedly raped during a three-and-a-half month ordeal managed to escape on Monday, local police said. A suspect has been taken into custody and is facing charges. The teenager, who is from the town of Madadeni in KwaZulu-Natal province, went missing at about 8 p.m. local time on March 29 after she was threatened with a knife and a firearm. She was taken to the town of Chesterville, nearly 250 kilometers (155 miles) southeast of Madadeni, where she was repeatedly drugged and raped for months.

A Broward County man who filmed himself performing sex acts on two children he was helping care for described that time in his life as “a period of madness.” But the judge, the federal prosecutor and Randy Jerome Pozdol’s own defense attorney all agreed on one blunt word to describe the crimes: “Reprehensible.” Pozdol, 68, was sentenced Monday in Miami federal court to the maximum term of 30 years — akin to a life sentence — on his conviction for one count of producing child pornography. U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard rejected the defense argument for a lighter sentence based on Pozdol not having a prior record, saying, “There aren’t many offenses in the U.S. code more heinous than this.”

Although no evidence was presented that Brittney N. Betzold personally caused any of the bruises that covered her 14-month-old son’s body, the Salina woman was bound over for trial Monday on charges of first-degree murder, aggravated endangerment of a child and child abuse because she allegedly did not act to protect him.

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT. This story contains graphic details of sexual violence against children and may not be suitable for young readers. PROVO — Even with an extra cushion on her seat, the little girl could barely see out of the witness stand Monday morning as she clutched her favorite blanket and told the court she had been molested. “He touched me on,” the girl said, pausing to look around the courtroom, her pigtails swinging, “right under my leg.”

A 41-year-old convicted sex offender — who resigned nine years ago as principal of Sherwood High School — is facing new charges of molesting a 12-year-old boy and possessing child pornography. A judge in Multnomah County Circuit Court Monday raised Robert Paul Patton’s bail by $250,000 — to a total of $700,000. Judge Eric Bergstrom said he was raising Patton’s bail because it is “paramount” to protect the community. Bergstrom said he took into account the nature of the pending charges and Patton’s 2003 sexual-abuse convictions for taking a 16-year-old boy he’d met online to motels in Tigard and Tualatin for sex.

Father James Brennan will be retried in the landmark priest child sex abuse case. He’s accused of sexually abusing a 14-year-old boy in 1996. Jurors could not agree on a verdict in his first trial. On Monday morning, Philadelphia prosecutors announced they’ll put Brennan on trial again.

It’s hard to pin down the numbers. The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry says child sex abuse is reported 80,000 timesa year. But experts acknowledge those numbers are just a drop in the bucket. Many more child sex abuse cases never go reported. “Most of the kids don’t report that someone did something to them; there’s the whole shame factor,” said Steven Lancaster, executive director of the nonprofit Childhelp Alice C. Tyler Village, a residential treatment center for abused children in Lignum, Virginia.