Canadian sentenced to 25 years for child sex tourism

CALGARY — Convicted sex offender who pleaded guilty to pimping children through a Thailand brothel has been sentenced to 25 years in a U.S. federal court.

CALGARY — Convicted sex offender who pleaded guilty to pimping children through a Thailand brothel has been sentenced to 25 years in a U.S. federal court.

John Wrenshall, the 63-year-old man once jailed for sexually assaulting eight choir boys in Calgary, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to engage in sex tourism, conspiracy to produce child pornography and distribution of child pornography.

“John Wrenshall created a place where innocent children were sexually brutalized as a vacation pastime,” said New Jersey district attorney Paul Fishman said following the sentencing Monday.

“Children represent what is best in us, and Wrenshall’s monstrous conduct represents the worst. It is fitting that a man who has condemned children to live with unimaginable scars for his pleasure and profit should spend decades of his own life in a prison cell.”

Wrenshall admitted that from as early as January 2000, he arranged trips for U.S. citizens to his home in Thailand, where they paid him to have sex with Thai boys, some as young as four years old. The customers were allowed to videotape and photograph their abuse.

Fishman said Wrenshall “personally victimized the boys in order to ‘train’ them for his paying customers.”

Wrenshall was convicted in 1997 of sexually assaulting eight choir boys in Calgary.

Pretending he was researching pre-teen boys’ sexuality, he lured his victims to his southwest home while he was serving as a scout master and a choir member at an Anglican church. He was jailed for a year.

Wrenshall was identified by a New Jersey man, Wayne Nelson Corliss, when Corliss pleaded guilty in August 2008 to charges of international sex tourism.

Wrenshall was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport in December 2008 and extradited to the U.S. in July 2009.

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Linda Hohnholz

Editor in chief for eTurboNews based in the eTN HQ.

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