By Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje. Behind the wheel was Issac Lynn Williams. For months, he and the teenage girl had been trading messages over Facebook, their tone increasingly flirtatious. When she confessed to him one day that she had run away from home, he told her to meet him at the park. Inside the Cadillac, Williams spoke to her in a way she'd never been spoken to before. I can take care of you, he said. Buy you things. Love you.
Afterward, Williams told her she was going to become an "escort" and that they were "going to make a lot of money together. For the next eight months, Williams controlled everything in her life. He gave her the name Amber and arranged for her to be sold for sex through Backpage. In Texas, an estimated 79, youth at any one time are being exploited for sex. Many are never rescued because so few cry out to police or other authorities for help.
Read Maria's story here. Read Rene's story here. Read the victim's story here. Read more about the way forward. He would do the same to his year-old girlfriend, Deborah Ameia Cooper. On Backpage, her name was Kandy. Amber had sex with men 10 to 15 times a day on average.
She and Cooper worked six days a week, seven if they hadn't reached the weekly quotas he set. He booked them into mid-priced motels in Killeen, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio, wherever the money and customers were. Each week, they turned over thousands of dollars to him. He kept all of it, except for what he spent on fast food, cigarettes, marijuana, condoms and lubricant, the necessities to keep his business going.
On some Sundays, if the two had met their quota, Williams would take them to church in Killeen, where he knew the preachers β his father and stepmother. Sex traffickers like Williams have long preyed on vulnerable girls and women. What's changed in recent times is how the internet has amplified the sex trade. Customers have round-the-clock access to an inexhaustible market of online ads where with a simple click, they can order up young girls delivered to their door.
