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.
n 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.
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.
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.
“She said she would make it to where nobody ever loved or cared for me again, and I wouldn’t have a roof over my head,” C.H. answered.
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.”
Soon there was a photo on the screen in front of the jury of a gravel road surrounded by trees. It was there, C.H. testified, up the secluded switchbacks, that Naylor-Legg took her to meet Clay the first time. The chief unzipped his uniform, but never took it off. His gun belt stayed on.
C.H. tried to describe it without feeling it. Her head being forced down. Then her body on the hood of the chief’s car.
“He was raping me,” C.H. testified.
“Did you say anything to him during this?” Herrald asked.
“Too scared,” C.H. said, balling her hands in her lap.
She testified that she saw Clay give Naylor-Legg the cash. She would later learn it was $100.
Around a week later, C.H. told the jury, her stepmother informed her they were going to meet Clay again, this time in the old police office in the basement of the former high school. A picture of the room appeared on the screen. A Gauley Bridge Police banner was hanging on the wall. Again, C.H. explained, she obeyed Clay’s instructions.
“He’s chief of police,” she said. “If he thinks he can get away with this, who knows what he could have got away with.”
She was closing her eyes, waiting for it to be over, she said, when Clay asked to ejaculate inside her.
“What did you say?” Herrald prompted.
“I said, ‘I would prefer you not to,’” C.H. testified.
Clay did what he wanted, C.H. said, then told her and Naylor-Legg to wait 10 minutes before leaving. Her stepmother gave her a rag to clean herself up with.
The prosecutor paused, emphasizing the importance of the question that came next: “What did you do with the rag?”
When Clay was suspended from the sheriff’s department, he was given a letter informing him that “a female has made allegations that you have engaged in sexual misconduct while working as the Chief of Police of Gauley Bridge.” He was placed on paid leave. Pack, his longtime friend, watched as the sheriff confiscated his badge and gun.
To avoid any potential conflicts of interest, the Fayette County Sheriff’s Department quickly turned the Clay investigation over to the West Virginia State Police. But that didn’t create much distance. The state detective, Pack told The Post, also knew Clay. Pack, who was still grappling with what he was learning about his friend, hoped he would be left out of it.
But a few days later, Pack came home from work and found Clay in his driveway, saying he needed advice. The sergeant recounted what happened next to investigators, The Post and the jury.
“I’m your friend because we’ve always been friends,” Pack said he told Clay. “But I can’t be your support system.”
Pack encouraged him to go home and stay home until investigators called. But the next night, the sergeant said, Clay was knocking on his door.
“You’ve got to help me,” Clay pleaded, according to Pack. Clay, who had initially appeared dumbfounded about the accusation against him, admitted that yes, he did know the family that was involved. He claimed that all of this was a misunderstanding over some guns that he bought from C.H.’s stepfather. He asked Pack to tell investigators that he was willing to return the guns to the stepfather, if that would help. Pack said he would relay the message.
Around a week later, Pack’s friend was back. This third time, Clay was crying.
“I've seen other officers do stuff and it gets fixed,” Pack remembered Clay saying.
On Pack’s porch that day, Clay offered to resign from the sheriff’s department, as long as he could keep his law enforcement certification so he could find a job at another agency.
“He said, ‘James, you’ve got to take care of this. Make this go away,’” Pack recalled.
Pack said he made Clay no promises. But he did give him advice: “If you did this, then own it. If you truly didn’t do this, and you’re totally innocent, then fight it.”
But while Clay was making visits to Pack, the state police were making a crucial decision. Recognizing that buying and selling a minor for sexual acts is a federal crime, investigators alerted the Department of Homeland Security, which has expertise in sex trafficking investigations. What was once a case handled primarily by people who had known Clay for years was now a federal investigation in the hands of a special agent, with the potential for much harsher penalties.
That agent, Brian Morris, brought C.H. in for a second forensic interview. This time, the teen mentioned wiping herself with a rag. He immediately called the mayor of Gauley Bridge.
He needed to be let into the old high school.
Agent Morris knew the building well. He’d gone to school there in the 1990s. Back then, Lee Edward Jones was chief of police.
When Jones was arrested in 1998 and charged with sexually abusing three boys, the town was outraged — but not at the chief. Along with their protest rally, community members hung blue ribbons on houses, cars and telephone poles in Jones’s honor. According to news reports at the time, a sign in the center of town declared, “Chief Lee, we stand by you.”
There was also a candlelight vigil organized by those who believed the victims. Far fewer people showed up.
When the case went to trial in 1999, Jones was convicted and sentenced to a minimum of 49 years in prison. One victim testified that, as a child, he’d confided in his mother about what had happened but asked her not to tell anyone. Jones went on to violate another boy. That boy, too, disclosed to an adult that he had been abused. The adult did not make a report. Then there was a third victim.
C.H. was too young to remember the old chief. But her longtime neighbor did. And when the teenager confided in that neighbor about what Clay had done, she warned C.H., “It will end up happening to somebody else.”
That had persuaded C.H. to come forward, which eventually led Agent Morris to the old high school.
Inside the police office in the basement, the rag C.H. wiped herself off with was on a bookshelf, right where she’d said she left it. And even though months had passed since she’d placed it there, a lab would soon confirm, a mixture of DNA from the teen and the chief were still on it.
She stared at Clay’s defense attorney, confused by what he seemed to be implying.
During his cross-examination of C.H., Sebastian Joy projected a photo onto the screen. It showed Clay, C.H. and her stepmother together. It was taken on a day in 2020 when the chief had given the teen and her stepmother a ride because it was raining.
“You voluntarily entered his cruiser, correct?” Joy asked. “Do you recall Mr. Clay giving you towels to wipe off that day?”
C.H. wondered if the attorney was really trying to explain away the DNA evidence by saying she’d wiped herself off with a towel and then later, Clay ejaculated onto that same towel?
Joy pointed to C.H.’s face in the photo. Her expression betrayed nothing about how she felt about Clay and her stepmother.
“Would you kindly tell the jury who this person in this photo is with a big smile?” Joy asked.
“Me,” C.H. answered flatly. “I always smiled in pictures.”
“Larry Clay actually never said anything about threatening you or doing any harm to you, correct?” Joy asked her soon after.
C.H. disagreed, saying Clay had “offered to get me out of any trouble to keep my mouth shut.”
“Okay,” Joy responded. “So he said he was going to help you, correct?”
And so went the defense attorney’s questioning with her and, then, other witnesses: Wasn’t it possible that the DNA was some kind of false positive? Wasn’t all of this really about C.H. being mad at her stepparents?
She wanted to yell. She wanted to leave. Instead she sat quietly, taking notes. Clay sat feet away, never taking the stand to defend himself or be cross-examined by prosecutors.
Then they called up a man C.H. hoped she’d never have to see again: Christopher Osborne, a police officer from another town. During her forensic interview, C.H. disclosed that Clay had also arranged to have her sold to a cop from a different department. Homeland Security investigators had tracked him down.
Osborne testified that when he and Clay were dispatched to the same incident in 2020, the chief showed him a nude photo of C.H.
“You’d be interested in this one if you could get with her,” Clay said, according to Osborne. He testified that the chief offered to set it up, and that “money talks, the price could be right.”
Osborne told the jury that one night when he was on duty, he met C.H. and her stepmother at the old high school. But the officer decided he wasn’t interested and left.
Months later, Osborne raped a 16-year old girl in another town. In 2022, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. As he testified against Clay, Osborne was wearing an orange uniform and shackles.
“You’re not coming here to testify because of the kindness of your heart, right?” Clay’s attorney asked him. “You’re hoping to get a sentence reduction, right?”
“I mean, yes, sir,” Osborne answered.
When Clay’s old friend, Sgt. Pack, took the stand, Joy suggested that he, too, had credibility issues. Pack, the attorney informed the jury, had himself been accused of sexual harassment at the sheriff’s department.
Pack didn’t deny that he’d been reprimanded. He’d once been put on probation for six months after a colleague reported his behavior toward a woman in the department.
As Pack was quizzed about his own history, he stared at Clay. For nearly 40 years, they’d been friends. When Pack spoke to prosecutors, he’d spared no detail about their relationship, including that he and Clay once had a consensual threesome with a woman they knew. Maybe their closeness, Pack thought, was why Clay believed he would interfere with the investigation.
But because Pack had reported Clay for begging to make his case “go away,” federal prosecutors were able to charge Clay with another crime: obstruction of justice, which could carry an additional sentence of up to 25 years.
All Pack had to do was testify against his friend. As he did, he found himself wishing that Clay would look him in the eye, to see on Pack’s face how he felt about being dragged into all of this. Their friendship, he wanted Clay to understand, was over.
“I explained to him that there was nothing I could do to help him,” Pack told the jury. “The victim was the one in control.”
But even Pack was not aware of all that Clay was accused of doing to try to derail the investigation and the trial.
Kristen Naylor-Legg, C.H.’s stepmother, told prosecutors that Clay had encouraged her to lie to law enforcement, according to court filings. After they were both arrested and placed in the same transport van, Naylor-Legg said, he’d told her to keep her mouth shut. As a result, prosecutors charged Clay with another count of obstruction of justice.
The stepmother was planning to plead guilty and testify against the former chief — until a few weeks before trial, when she wrote a letter to the judge, saying she’d been coerced into lying by prosecutors. She later made similar claims in a letter to The Post.
She’d been advised to pull out of her plea agreement by her husband, Charles Legg, who, according to court filings and transcripts of the couple’s jail calls, had been getting advice from Clay’s attorney.
Her husband was recorded telling her that Clay’s attorney was happy with her actions, saying, “You did exactly what you were supposed to do.”
In a court hearing, prosecutors accused Clay’s lawyer, Sebastian Joy, of trying to inappropriately influence a witness. Joy denied the allegations to the judge and to The Post, saying he did nothing unethical. Charles Legg told The Post his wife is innocent and that her letter to the judge was his idea.
In the end, the stepmother’s letter was never shown to the jury. Naylor-Legg showed up to testify, as planned.
On the stand, she admitted she was still denying C.H.’s story to her husband.
“I didn't want him to know the truth,” Naylor-Legg said.
She described how she started spending time with Clay: The chief had given her husband a ticket. Naylor-Legg said she went to the town hall to pay it. Clay was there.
“He said he had other ways that I could pay it,” she testified. “He told me they were sexual.”
“What did you do?” prosecutor Monica Dillon asked.
“I refused. But he said that if I refused, he would continue to harass my husband and make it to where I couldn't see my kids anymore,” Naylor-Legg said. “I gave him what he wanted.”
She testified that she began having sex with Clay at the town hall. Her husband sold him guns. Eventually, the jury would hear, the couple had a threesome with Clay.
Around this time, prosecutors showed, Naylor-Legg had a total of $17.74 in her bank account. And when Clay found her crying one day about her truck that needed to be fixed, her hot water heater that had broken and her electricity soon to be shut off, she said he offered her a solution: C.H.
Did selling her stepdaughter strike her, the prosecutor asked, as something out of the ordinary?
“It was done to me,” Naylor-Legg said. “My mom used to sell me for money or for drugs if we needed something.”
“And how old were you at the time?”
“It started at 10,” Naylor-Legg answered.
Clay’s defense attorney objected, saying this childhood history wasn’t relevant to the case. The judge agreed.
He instructed the jury to disregard everything they’d just heard. C.H. knew that, for her, it would be much harder to forget.
After two hours of deliberation, the jury’s decision was unanimous. The verdict was handed to the clerk, who leaned forward and read it aloud.
“We find defendant Larry Allen Clay Jr. guilty.”
The verdict was read four times. Twice for charges involving sex trafficking. Twice for obstruction of justice.
C.H. heard the words and tried, as prosecutors had instructed her, not to react. Her cheeks were wet. Her shaking started to ease. For the first time all week, she turned her head toward Clay.
The former chief was crumpled on the table. He’d thrown his glasses down. His head was in his hands.
Two deputy U.S. marshals stood behind him, ready to escort him back to jail to await his sentencing hearing.
“I excuse you now,” Judge Joseph R. Goodwin told the jury. Then C.H. was being led out of the courtroom, down an elevator and onto a floor where the prosecutors were going to hold a news conference to announce the conviction.
Herrald and Dillon had spent months preparing for this trial. Many prosecutors, they knew, wouldn’t have taken a case like this to a jury. With a plea deal, they could have spared C.H. from a grueling cross-examination. Marked the win and moved on.
But then Clay would have been looking at a far shorter sentence.
The prosecutors asked C.H. if she would like to make a statement. She pulled out the notebook she’d clutched through trial and started writing.
As the news conference began, C.H. stood in the back of the room, behind the television cameras, watching U.S. Attorney William S. Thompson share the words she’d written.
“Just because things get scary doesn’t mean that they always end badly,” he read. “Always speak up. Someone will hear you, eventually.”
She’d been ready to stop thinking about Chief Clay as soon as she’d fled Gauley Bridge in the summer of 2020. Instead, the investigation and criminal proceedings had consumed her final years as a teenager. Now that Clay was convicted, she hoped she would finally be able to stop reliving the moments she most wanted to forget. All she had left to do was get through his sentencing hearing, where she would find out how long Clay would be imprisoned. Just 12 more weeks, and it would all be over.
She wanted to be sure to arrive on time, so she woke up early, didn’t fuss with her hair and kept her makeup simple. All day, she knew, people would be looking at her, assessing her, asking her how she was feeling. Lately, she always answered, “tired.”
It was a crisp October morning as C.H, now 22, drove toward the courthouse. But when downtown Charleston came into view, she took a different exit and navigated toward a park.
She pulled up to a picnic shelter and found her friends hanging streamers, blue ones that matched the blue tablecloths, the blue cupcakes, the blue gift bags that said “little one.” Her friends were throwing her a baby shower. C.H. was nine months pregnant. Her boy was expected to arrive in less than three weeks.
And days before her due date, Larry Clay was scheduled, yet again, to be sentenced by the judge.
“Are you tired of waiting?” a friend asked C.H. at the shower.
“For the baby, or the court?” she answered.
Seventeen months had passed since Clay had been convicted by the jury. He was still being held in a small county jail. The longer he remained there, the longer he postponed what was likely to happen next: being sent to a federal prison as a former police chief and convicted child sex offender.
Clay had successfully petitioned to have his sentencing delayed 11 times.
“I ain’t worried about the baby,” C.H.’s friend said. “The baby is gonna come.”
C.H. changed the subject to her pregnancy cravings. She was tired of trying to keep her past out of her present.
Since the trial, she’d gotten a clerk job at a hospital, working as many hours as she could to save up for her own car, then her own place.
She’d fallen in love with a guy who didn’t mind that she panicked every time she saw a police cruiser, who really listened as she explained why she had a hard time with trust.
She’d faced her stepmother at a 2023 hearing where Naylor-Legg was sentenced to nine years in prison. “When my mom passed away, all I wanted was a mother figure,” C.H. said, reading from a statement she’d prepared. “In your eyes, I was nothing more than a pawn.” When she was finished, she looked at her stepmother and said something she hadn’t planned: “I forgive you for what you did.”
Soon C.H. was thinking about what kind of mother she was going to be. But as she took bump selfies in the mirror and found nursery furniture to borrow and calculated how many extra shifts she could work before her son was born, she kept receiving apologetic updates from the prosecutor’s office.
In court filings and hearings, Clay had asked the judge to launch an investigation, declare a mistrial or acquit him entirely, claiming he had been denied a fair trial. He blamed the prosecutors. He blamed his own lawyer. He requested a new lawyer, and was assigned an attorney named Timothy LaFon. LaFon, who declined to comment, then asked for more time, citing his need to prepare and hospitalizations for his ongoing medical issues.
Every time, Judge Goodwin granted the delays. Every time, C.H. grew more worried that her child would arrive before Clay was sentenced. She cried on the phone to her friend, imagining having to leave her newborn to go to court and explain, again, why her trafficker should be in prison.
At the park, she thanked her friends for always listening to her. They teased her about her waddle and cooed over gifts of tiny socks and tiny mittens. They were encouraging her to get second helpings of food when they heard a car approach.
They turned to see a police cruiser coming up the hill. They turned toward C.H.
This time, she remained relaxed. She lowered herself onto a park bench. She leaned back. She placed her hands on her belly and let the cruiser drive by.
Two days later, she went into labor.
While C.H. was pacing in the hospital, waiting to meet her child, her abuser’s attorney filed another request, asking for Clay’s sentencing to be postponed for a 12th time. She would find out only after the baby was born that the judge had granted the delay.
About this story
Reporting by Jessica Contrera and Jenn Abelson. Data reporting and analysis by John D. Harden. Hayden Godfrey, Razzan Nakhlawi, Nate Jones, Mirika Rayaprolu and Alex Angle also contributed to this report.
Photos by Carolyn Van Houten. Photo editing by Robert Miller and Troy Witcher. Design and development by Tucker Harris. Design editing by Christian Font.
Lynda Robinson was the lead editor. Additional editing by Christopher Rickett, Peter Wallsten, Courtney Kan, Amy Nakamura, Brandon Carter, Laura Padilla Castellanos, Ashleigh Wilson.
Additional production and support from Sarah Murray, Jordan Melendrez, Andrea Platten and Victoria Rossi.
Read more about how this series was reported, our methodology and our project team here.
Abused by the Badge: Read more from this series
Soon there was a photo on the screen in front of the jury of a gravel road surrounded by trees. It was there, C.H. testified, up the secluded switchbacks, that Naylor-Legg took her to meet Clay the first time. The chief unzipped his uniform, but never took it off. His gun belt stayed on.
