GRANBURY, Texas — A 35-year-old Granbury man has been sentenced to serve 50 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to filming himself molesting a 9-year-old girl, officials said.
In a release from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Texas, Stephen Wayne Ashley pleaded guilty in May to sexual exploitation of a child and possession of child pornography. He will serve 600 months in prison – 360 months for the first charge and 240 months for the second, which will run consecutively.
Ashley was also ordered by the judge to pay $13,500 in restitution to several victims, and he will have to register as a sex offender.
“This defendant chose to repeatedly sexually exploit a child and then made a conscious decision to film himself conducting these egregious offenses,” said HSI Dallas Assistant Special Agent in Charge Jesse Woods in a statement. “HSI is grateful for the collaboration of all our law enforcement partners for their role in this investigation, ensuring that this individual will never harm an innocent child again.”
Court documents said the investigation began in Australia, where New South Wales police started looking into someone sharing child pornography over X, formerly known as Twitter. One of those links reportedly contained more than 1,600 files of mostly child pornography and was traced to Ashley.
Police executed a search warrant on March 11 at Ashley's residence. During the search, they found a hidden folder on Ashley's phone with videos of him sexually molesting the 9-year-old girl, police said.
Ashley admitted to police he had begun filming the victim when she was 7 years old and continued doing so for years, police said.
