Costa Mesa Man Sentenced For Raping, Enslaving And Repeatedly Impregnating Girl He Met At 4
SANTA ANA (CBS) — A former Costa Mesa man was sentenced today in Florida to 30 years in federal prison for raping, enslaving and repeatedly impregnating a girl he first met when she was four.
George Joseph England, 66, who had been living in Fort Lauderdale, was sentenced to the maximum punishment by U.S. District Judge Jose A. Gonzalez.
England was convicted Jan. 5 on three counts of enticement of a minor and two counts of transportation of a minor -- from Asia to California in 1974 and from California to Florida in 1977 -- to engage in sex acts with the girl, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami.
England was convicted in 1977 of molesting three girls in Costa Mesa. He fled with the then-10-year-old girl and was on the lam for 29 years before being caught in Florida in 2005.
He was scheduled to be released from prison last March after serving three years for molesting the girls, but at that point, Jackie Zudis told authorities that England had repeatedly raped her for years, leading federal prosecutors in Florida to charge him there.
Zudis said she met England in her homeland of Vietnam in the early 1970s, when she was 4 years old, and that he took her from her mother to Thailand and India, where they lived for two years and he often had sex with her.
She said he told her to distrust police and that she would be forced into prostitution without him.
England took Zudis to Costa Mesa in about 1974, where he continued to have sex with her and encouraged her to invite her friends to sleep-overs in their motor home.
Prosecutors also said England hid a camera in the bathroom to watch and take pictures of Zudis and her friends bathing.
After moving to Ft. Lauderdale, England continued to have sex with Zudis and got her pregnant when she was 13. Zudis gave birth in September 1981.
She was impregnated by England several more times over the next four years, but he forced her to have abortions.
Soon after her last abortion in 1986, she threatened to kill herself if England didn't stop molesting her.
Zudis got married in 1988 and moved out, and she stopped all contact with England in 1994.
Zudis told a neighbor who was an FBI agent about the abuse in 2004, and investigators were able to track him down.
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