Police Chief Pays $100. to Have Teen Raped
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CHARLESTON, W. Va. — The jury had reached a verdict, and the former chief of police still seemed relaxed. He leaned back in his chair. He nodded to his supporters. He was facing up to life in prison, but during the four-day trial, he never looked rattled by the testimony against him.
His attorney had made his position clear: Chief Larry Clay Jr. wasn’t the type of guy to be involved in child sex trafficking.
Clay, the jury learned, was an HVAC tradesman who’d left his family business in his 40s to fulfill a lifelong ambition of becoming a law enforcement officer. He was a sheriff’s deputy in Fayette County, West Virginia, and also served as the police chief in one of its small towns: Gauley Bridge, population 550, a poor community nestled on a picturesque river. Clay was frequently the only man on duty, cruising the town’s hills with a gold badge on his chest.
“In Gauley Bridge,” prosecutors told the jury, “Larry Clay was the law.”
Clay was the law until one day in the fall of 2020, when a teenage girl made a startling report to the sheriff’s department. In the federal courtroom, she would be called by her initials, C.H.
C.H. was also known in Gauley Bridge. The town had watched her barefoot, blissful childhood come to an end when, at 13 years old, she learned the lump on her mother’s collarbone was a fast-growing lung cancer. Within a year, her mom was gone, leaving C.H. with her stepfather. He soon found a new wife, who moved into C.H.’s house.
The new stepmother and C.H. never got along. Shortly after C.H. graduated from high school, the teen left town and the only place she’d ever called home.
A few months later, Clay was stripped of his gold badge, and it wasn’t long before all of Gauley Bridge knew why.
C.H. had reported that her stepmother sold her to be raped for $100 when she was 17 years old. The buyer, she told the sheriff’s department, wasn’t just anyone — it was Police Chief Larry Clay. While he was in uniform and on duty. The first time, against his department-issued vehicle. The second, inside a police office.
Clay, 55, and the stepmother, 27, were both charged with sex trafficking of a minor.
It was the second time in Gauley Bridge’s history that a police chief had been charged with child sexual abuse. The first time, in the late 1990s, nearly 100 people had protested the arrest, declaring their loyalty to the chief.
This time, too, the chief was adamant about his innocence. Clay, who declined to comment to The Washington Post, hired an attorney and pleaded not guilty. C.H.’s furious stepfather told his neighbors that C.H. was just an angry teen, lying to get her stepmother in trouble.
Clay’s attorney told the jury that they should believe the same. He’d held up a box of the game Jenga and said that, one by one, the building blocks of the teen’s story had come crashing down.
“C.H.,” he warned, “is playing with Larry Clay’s life.”
When law enforcement officers are charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse, they usually avoid trials like Clay’s. The Post examined the cases of 1,800 of these officers, who were arrested from 2005 through 2022. The majority of those convicted took plea deals, which frequently allowed them to evade lengthy sentences and public reckonings over their crimes.
Other cases quietly fell apart when children said they were too afraid to continue. Or when local prosecutors, who often work closely with the accused officers’ departments, dropped the charges. Or when investigations were thwarted, as in dozens of cases identified by The Post, in which officers reportedly intimidated victims and witnesses, destroyed evidence or used their connections to derail criminal proceedings.
What happened in Gauley Bridge almost ended the same way. A teenager terrified. A police chief visiting an old friend in a powerful position. A request to make all of this “go away.”
Instead, the case had only gained momentum at every step, a lesson in what was possible when a girl and the adults around her chose the more difficult path, even when it cost them.
Now here was Clay, miles from where he once wielded power, facing decades behind bars. Here was C.H., shoulders hunched, testimony over, waiting for the verdict.
And here was the jury, returned to the courtroom, ready to announce who they were going to believe: C.H. or the chief of police.
In September 2020, Sgt. James Pack, a detective at the Fayette County Sheriff’s Department, was called into his boss’s office. They needed to talk about Larry Clay.
Pack and Clay were high school buddies who hung out and hunted together through marriages, kids, divorces and, in Clay’s case, a midlife career change. In 2011, Pack, who was known on the force as “Pac-Man,” helped Clay prepare for the law enforcement hiring process. He was a reference on Clay’s application to the sheriff’s department, promising the 45-year-old tradesman “would be a very well trusted policeman.”
But then, Pack was repeatedly tasked with keeping his friend in line, he said in an interview with The Post. When Clay spent his shifts doing nothing but parking his cruiser and waiting for speeding cars, Pack was asked to counsel Clay on taking more initiative. When Clay hastily pulled a gun on a hiking tourist, Pack was told to coach him on being less impulsive. Eventually, Clay was assigned to be a bailiff at the courthouse, where he’d have more supervision.
Pack saw Clay less often then, he said, and was surprised to learn that his friend had begun working a second job. In 2019, Clay had been hired as the chief of the Gauley Bridge Police Department, which only employed one other officer at the time.
Though being chief was a part-time position, Clay had free rein to patrol as he pleased. He drove the unmarked Crown Victoria that everyone knew belonged to the chief. He had the key to the former high school, where the police had a locked office in the basement.
Gauley Bridge quickly embraced Clay, Mayor Robert Scott recalled in an interview. Clay had dinners at the mayor’s home. He shook parents’ hands while their kids posed for pictures with Santa. He lived with a woman in a house a few blocks from C.H.’s family.
In the fall of 2020, Pack learned, the concerns about Clay became far more serious. A teenage girl had already spoken with a forensic interviewer. Because Pack typically led child sex crimes investigations for the sheriff’s department, his supervisors wanted him to watch a recording of the interview.
Pack knew that sex trafficking rarely looked like it did in the movies, with strangers abducting kids. Far more often, it involved people who knew each other, one taking advantage of the other’s vulnerabilities. He also knew what to look for in interviews like these: how kids sounded when they were coached, the inconsistencies that could mean something was being made up.
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In his office, Pack pulled up the forensic interview on his computer. The teen was clearly nervous. She’d waited three months to report the chief, and had done so only at the urging of a neighbor she’d confided in.
Pack listened as she vividly described her encounters with Clay. There was a secluded road. A police vehicle. A locked basement.
Before the video was over, Pack knew what he would tell his supervisors: He believed this girl.
She raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth. It was the first day of the April 2023 trial at the federal courthouse in the state’s capital. C.H. was the first witness that the jury would meet.
Two and a half years had passed since she’d made her report. She’d turned 20. She’d been living with a friend outside of Gauley Bridge and enjoying her job at a day care. But the closer the trial came, the less food she could keep down. She’d slept two hours the night before.
“Scoot right up real close to the microphone,” the judge instructed her. “I can tell I need to tell you to talk loud.”
She wore a long-sleeved sweater and pants that covered the self-inflicted scars on her legs, reminders of those first months after she reported Clay, when her entire town was debating whether she was a liar. She remembered the cruel names the girls she’d grown up with had called her. She wondered if the jury would see her that way too.
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Before reporting Clay, she’d had a plan for her life: Work shifts at the gas station and save for college. Become a nurse and care for patients the way she’d cared for her sick mom before she died. Meet a great guy and start a family of her own. One where there wouldn’t be a padlock on the kitchen door.
The lock was installed, C.H. told the jury, after her stepfather, Charles Legg, married Kristen Naylor-Legg and took in her four children under 8 years old. There wasn’t enough food for everyone. C.H. got by eating at her neighbor’s house and accepting fast food from her chemistry teacher as a reward for earning As in class.
“Are you familiar with the defendant in this case, Larry Clay?” the prosecutor, Jennifer Rada Herrald, asked her on the witness stand.
As C.H. answered yes, Clay kept his eyes on her. Since his arrest in early 2021, he’d been incarcerated at a small county jail. For the trial, he’d changed into a dark suit. As a bailiff for the sheriff’s department, he had spent his days observing court proceedings. Now he was at the center of one.
C.H. kept her voice a controlled monotone as she answered questions about late spring 2020, when she was 17. Clay, she testified, had been having sex with her stepmother, Naylor-Legg. The family was struggling to keep the electricity and water paid. Then, her stepmother approached her with a way of getting cash, an idea from Clay.
“He brought it up to her that he was sexually interested in me,” C.H. said. “We needed the money for bills.”
The teen’s response — an absolute no — didn’t stop her stepmother from asking C.H. again, until she was no longer asking.
“Did she say what might happen if you didn’t agree to do this?” the prosecutor asked.
Her carefully practiced composure started to slip, her voice cracking. “I had already lost my mom, and I was so scared of losing everything and every memory in that house of her.”
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