Police looking for victims of suspected Net predator

Police allege that Mark Anthony Turner spent as much as eight hours a day online, trolling for sex with underage children.

"He came online and approached a couple of our local, undercover operatives. He sought them out on multiple occasions and was aggressive in his sexual chats," said Ken Wallentine, the chief of law enforcement for the Utah Attorney General's Office.

Now, authorities are looking for more possible victims that Turner may have met both on and off-line.

Turner was arrested in the parking lot of a Sandy gas station last week after police said the 45-year-old man traveled from Twin Falls, Idaho to an arranged meeting with a 13-year-old girl named "chantel2009_." The girl was really an undercover agent with the Utah Attorney General's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

According to charges filed Tuesday in federal court in Salt Lake City, Turner told the officer in an Internet chat session, "some times I wanna come steel u." He then laid out a plan for her to run away from her family and not return until she was 18.

"He asked what color she would dye her hair. He also asked if she had written a 'runaway' letter. He instructed her to write a note that she had run away with two friends," Utah Attorney General's investigator Jessica Eldredge wrote in a probable cause statement filed with the charges. "He also asked her to bring any money she had with her. He asked if she had her 'bags packed.'"

Turner was booked into the Salt Lake County Jail. He is scheduled to appear before a federal magistrate judge today on a single charge of coercion and enticement for illegal sexual activity. If convicted, he faces up to 30 years in federal prison.

Meanwhile, the Utah Attorney General's Office issued a public plea for other possible victims to come forward.

"We have strong evidence that he has been in Utah on at least two occasions in the last two months. We have some reason to believe that he's come to Utah for purposes of sexual liaisons," Wallentine said. "What we don't know is who he's meeting with and what his activities are in the last couple of months."

Wallentine confirmed to the Deseret Morning News they have identified one person they believe is a victim, but he would not say how the two met. He said Turner had also met a number of single mothers in the area off-line. Detectives have questioned some of those women.

On Wednesday, investigators were reviewing Turner's background and who he may have contacted under the screen name "mark_2424t." Wallentine found it disturbing that he tried to encourage someone to run away from home.

"We were going to have a kid that would go missing and we would never find the kid," he said. "That's the scary thing."

Although there is no evidence of it, investigators were also looking into whether Turner had any links to other missing children, Wallentine said.

---

E-mail: bwinslow@desnews.com