A 55-year-old Cabot man who is a registered sex offender has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Little Rock on charges of enticement of a minor and sexual exploitation of children after federal agents say he bragged via text message that he had a home-made "sex machine" he hoped to use on a 14-year-old girl.
Robert Nathan Hensley, whose home address is the same as Last Place Heat and Air, a heating and air conditioning business at 8313 Peters Road, has been in custody since his arrest Oct. 16 at the address, where an agent said he admitted upon his arrest to having such a device.
A call to the business Monday was answered by a recording in which a woman, identifying herself as "Robert's mother," told callers that "Robert has been called away on an emergency," and asked them to leave a name and phone number.
The indictment was handed up Thursday in Little Rock, although court records show that Hensley has been held in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service on a criminal complaint since his arrest last month. The records show he asked Oct. 18 to be released on bond, but U.S. Magistrate Judge Patricia Harris denied the request, finding that he posed a potential danger to the community.
According to an undercover FBI agent's affidavit filed Oct. 16 in support of the criminal complaint, Hensley's arrest stemmed from an advertisement that agents with the FBI's Denied Innocence Task Force posted on Craigslist on Oct. 12. It advertised "young, fresh, petite," and, according to the affidavit, "received hundreds of responses."
The affidavit said the agent replied to many of the texted responses but ended up focusing on one in particular -- the one later traced to Hensley.
A transcript of the text-message conversation is included in the affidavit. It indicates that once the agent replied to the response, a cat-and-mouse game emerged over a period of hours, with the undercover officer pretending to be a father traveling from Texas to Tennessee with his 14-year-old daughter, and Hensley trying to figure out if he was corresponding with a police officer.
"Not much she cant and wont do to please her daddy," the agent wrote, eliciting a response from Hensley's phone saying, "Bring her to me, I am a Dom with lots of gear and a f------ machine."
The affidavit said Hensley then sent a photograph of himself wearing a shirt and tie, saying he was in Cabot but could meet his correspondent in Conway, where the officer indicated he was.
The transcript indicates that the caller at one point insisted the girl must be 18. But after the agent told the caller to "f--- off," the caller kept talking, asking if the agent wanted "to sell her?"
The caller also asked for photographs of the girl's body parts, and offered to buy her for $3,000, saying, "She gets a lifetime of bondage and sex."
The officer refused to send the requested photographs, saying, "You want the goods you have to pay for it."
The caller responded, "LOL, yep didn't get your name. Officer Who?" and urged the officer to "stop pimping kids."
But the next day, according to the affidavit, the conversation resumed, this time with the caller urging the officer to "stop by, strip her down," and describing how he would like to tie the girl's legs and wrists together and "work over her."
He then asked if the "father" would be interested in tying his daughter down and using the "machine" on her. According to the transcript, the caller described the machine as a "hand-held rip saw" with an attachment, and described how the girl would be "tied blindfolded gaged."
The affidavit states that once a meeting was arranged, the undercover agent and five others went to meet the caller at an undisclosed location, but that the caller got nervous after about an hour of waiting in his truck to see the girl, and drove away. But later, it says, the caller sent another text, with his address, offering to perform a sexual act on the officer.
The affidavit said agents went to the address, where they arrested Hensley.
The affidavit said Hensley told officers that he was merely trying to help catch a suspected child abuser. It said that after Hensley claimed to have reported the agent's text messages to the Human Trafficking Hotline, the agent checked and found that, indeed, an anonymous call had been placed the previous day to the hotline. The caller had reported the officer's telephone number and described the officer as someone trafficking an underage minor between Texas and Tennessee.
But the agent said Hensley made a mistake in claiming that someone from the hotline had urged him to "get more information regarding the trafficker," which he told officers he was doing when he supplied his address.
The affidavit said Hensley surrendered his mobile telephone to federal agents, where they found "several pictures of women being bound and gagged as Hensley described to the [undercover officer] that he would like to do to the minor."
Hensley's indictment states that he was convicted on Nov. 18, 1996, of sexual solicitation of a child in Hot Spring County, and on March 21, 2003, on four counts of criminal attempt to engage children in sexually explicit conduct.
Metro on 11/07/2017