Tony Alamo News

1/13/2014 – TG: Alamo follower gets life for sexual misconduct with three young girls ***COMMENTS***

Texarkana Gazette
January 13, 2014
By: Lynn LaRowe – Texarkana Gazette

Alamo follower gets life for sexual misconduct with three young girls

A Tony Alamo Christian Ministries member received life in prison Thursday for sexual misconduct with three young girls whose mother was a ministry member as well.

Douglas Christopher, 59, pleaded guilty before a federal judge in Fort Smith, Ark., in August 2013 to transporting a minor across state lines for sex. Thursday, U.S. District Judge P.K. Holmes sentenced Christopher to life in federal prison for his misdeeds with three sisters.

Christopher was married to the girls’ mother while the two lived on Alamo Ministries properties. Christopher, the girls and their mother previously lived at an Alamo compound in Muldrow, Okla. In 2008, a law-enforcement raid of Alamo’s compound in Fouke, Ark., caused Alamo satellite compound residents to go into hiding.

Christopher and other followers moved to Valparaiso, Ind.

While living in Oklahoma, Christopher was assigned to stand watch at properties under the organization’s control.

One location, on Division Street in Fort Smith, Ark., was known as the “mechanic’s shop.”

About June 2003, Christopher began taking a minor, whose mother he had married in 2000, from the family’s home in Oklahoma to the mechanic’s shop for the purpose of engaging in sexual intercourse.

In August 2008, when the minor was 13 years old, Christopher took the minor to the mechanic’s shop, where they then had sexual intercourse in a van parked inside the shop. Shortly after this trip, the minor and siblings were taken into protective custody in response to the federal investigation.

Christopher was originally charged in a five-count indictment on Jan. 16, 2013. His case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kyra Jenner, who acted as lead prosecutor during Tony Alamo’s July 2009 criminal trial.

Alamo was convicted by a jury of bringing five women he wed as children across state lines for sex. He is serving a 175-year sentence at a federal lockup in Tuscon, Ariz.

This month, six properties in Fort Smith, Ark., including the Alamo Ministries church building will be auctioned to the highest bidders by federal marshals to help satisfy a $30 million judgment Alamo owes two men raised in the controversial group. The men were beaten, starved, forced to labor unpaid and denied education as children.

A federal judge in Texarkana is considering the sale of additional properties in Fort Smith and Fouke, where Alamo Ministries members have lived communally in the past. Among the properties in the second group is the mechanic’s shop where Christopher molested one of his victims on multiple occasions.