The Marine Predator Gets Sent To The Brig

Petaluma, California. This past month, I've highlighted predators Norberto Avalos, Jaswinder Cheema, and Maurice Wolin, who, like Yancy Shane Wallace, all surfaced in the Petaluma sting. I think this episode has to be one of my favorites. Sandwiched between the Silicon Valley and the military bases of Central California, it features immigrants working high-paying IT jobs, active-duty and former military members, a prominent doctor, and everyone in between. It's set in a town that became synonymous with crimes against children. In 1993, 12-year-old Polly Klaas was abducted and murdered there by a then-39-year-old man named Richard Allen Davis; Davis would later be sentenced to death. In 2006, less than two weeks before the Petaluma sting, local resident Alexis Valoran Reich (known as John Mark Karr before coming out as transgender) was arrested in Bangkok after falsely confessing to the decade-old murder of JonBenét Ramsey, giving details already known to the public, claiming he drugged her when no drugs were found in her system, and providing a DNA sample that did not match any found on the scene. At the national level, Mark Foley, a leading advocate for stopping child sex crimes, resigned from Congress after being asked by House Speaker Hastert (who would later go to prison for molesting boys as a wrestling coach) when it was revealed that Foley had sent sexual messages to teenage boys who worked as pages in his office,

This was the setting for a sting between August 25th and August 27th, 2006, that saw watchdog group Perverted Justice team up with Chris Hansen of Dateline NBC to catch online sex predators. Despite the fact that the prior six episodes had seen 150 men busted, 31 still decided to show up in those three days, putting Petaluma in the spotlight for the third time. Of the men who showed up, three were military-- Joseph Roisman, Jonathan Stemen, and Yancy Wallace-- and all three stuck out for different reasons. Roisman dragged his case out for five years before being acquitted, one of only a few predators to escape conviction and a part of a trend of Petaluma predators spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on their legal battles. Jonathan Stemen was a disgraced veteran who brought a shotgun with him to the sting house. That leaves Yancy Wallace.

Born on March 18th, 1981, Wallace was a lifelong military man, as far as we can tell. Sergeant is the E5 rank in the military, and it would have taken the 25-year-old at least three to six years to earn that rank. He lived in San Clemente and was stationed in Camp Pendleton, just north of San Diego. He served actively in the Iraq War and, according to Wallace himself, killed at least one person in battle, something he "didn't talk about much." He was also a newlywed, which would prove tragic for more reasons than one.

On August 8th, 2006, Wallace, using the screen name "persuasion2032," began chatting with a 13-year-old girl named Ariel. Knowing that she was underaged and that her mom had recently died, he began the sexual chat immediately. He asked if she liked older guys, how old the oldest guy she dated was (18), if she would go older than that, if she met older guys online, if she had pics, if she had a cam, and if her daddy was okay with her dating older guys in those first 15 minutes. He asked if she was a virgin, told her she was beautiful and cute, asked her how she liked to be kissed, how much tongue she wanted, where she wanted his hands to be, and if she had ever made a guy ejaculate. He then asked what she did with that, saying "I like a girl to swallow" but that he wouldn't mind them licking it or spitting it out if that's what they preferred. He asked if she would try anal (saying it would hurt "at first"), if she had her pants on in her previous encounters with men, if she was still bald "down there" (and, if not, how much hair she had and if she shaved), and what types of bikinis and mini skirts she liked to wear. She was his "gf" now, according to Wallace, so he needed to know if she masturbated and where they would have sex if they did. He said he didn't have a girlfriend and that he wanted to get married to Ariel and have children with her; she said she would cook for him when he showed up. He said the sound of her voice turned him on, that he would smother her in kisses as he took off her clothes, that he would undress her slowly, and that the chat was making him aroused. On the afternoon of August 27th, Wallace made the nearly eight-hour trip from San Clemente to Petaluma.

Showing up that afternoon in the sting house, the decoy invited him to the hot tub before heading behind a room divider to "get changed." Like too many men in Petaluma, he tried to follow and wound up meeting Chris Hansen, who told him (what else?) to have a seat. He called himself stupid immediately, saying he thought it was an online game and claiming he didn't know why he did it. Chris asked why a man who served his country "so bravely" would end up in this situation and asked Wallace where his next tour was, to which Wallace notably replied, "Probably jail." He knew he was going to be arrested and tried to put his hands behind his back on the spot; he would have to wait until he left through the garage to be arrested.

Yancy Wallace was in more trouble than any other predator caught in Petaluma for a couple of reasons. As an active-duty marine, he was released into the custody of the military in February 2007 to be court martialed. Searches of his computer revealed that he had a massive stash of child pornography and that he had at least one explicit online chat with an actual child in Washington state. While he did not meet her because of the distance between them, she was undoubtedly damaged for life. He was convicted and faced up to 86 years in the brig, a virtual life sentence. His sentence was substantially smaller but still the longest sentence in the Petaluma sting: 4 years and 7 months (55 months) in military prison; he would be released on February 17th, 2010, after serving 42 months behind bars. He was demoted to a private (a loss of four ranks) and dishonorably discharged from the military, which meant all pay and benefits were forfeited. He also had to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

Soon after his arrest, his wife divorced him. I truly feel sorry for that woman. She had presumably just married the man of her dreams, a man two years away, according to Wallace, from ending his military career at the rank of staff sergeant. She probably planned on having kids, and Wallace did say in his chat he wanted two or three. She was never named or featured in the Dateline episode, but she still received all the humiliation and all the guilt. How could she not have seen that the man she married was a monster with at least three different sex crimes under her belt? To be fair to her, the United States military couldn't see it either, and that's the scary part. On the surface, he was a military veteran ready for a civilian career and a family, but he still went undetected in his victimization of children.

After his release, Wallace moved to 12814 Cloverwood Drive in Cypress, Texas. It is a four-bed, three-bath home valued at about $350,000, and (in my opinion, at least) it is actually quite beautiful. Wallace is registered as a sex offender in the state of Texas and will be for the rest of his life. He's put on a considerable amount of weight, and that may be the perfect visual representation of the burden he has placed on himself and his loved ones over the past 15 years.

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