A 63-year-old retired Delta Air Lines flight attendant pleaded guilty Friday in U.S. District Court to sexually exploiting a child by recording still and video images of him having sex with an underage girl in Thailand and transporting the images into the United States.
Ronny Lee Waldrip told a federal magistrate judge Friday that "I traveled to Thailand, and I had video of the underage girl. … I took digital images and brought them into Honolulu."
Waldrip said images were on a digital camera and laptop computer.
He was facing child pornography, sex tourism and two other sexual exploitation charges, which the federal prosecutor promises to have dismissed at sentencing in May, according to the plea deal.
In exchange, Waldrip agreed to accept a prison term of between 171⁄2 and just under 22 years, and pay $15,000 restitution to each of three underage girls he exploited. The restitution will be deposited into a trust.
Waldrip also has agreed to cooperate in any government investigation against others.
Whenever he gets out of prison, he will have to register as a sex offender and will be under court supervision for the rest of his life.
The Department of Homeland Security said it started investigating Waldrip in January 2011, after a person with whom Waldrip was living in Bangkok reported that the former flight attendant was involved in child pornography activities in Thailand.
The DHS said the person later allowed Homeland Security agents to enter the residence, where they found compact discs and digital video discs containing images of child pornography.
The person also told the agents that Waldrip had traveled to a Thai village in an attempt to procure a minor for sex.
When Waldrip arrived in Honolulu in February 2012, special agents confronted him about his activities in Thailand and seized his cellphones, camera, two laptop computers and two spy cameras. Agents found images of Waldrip having sex with three minor females on one of the computers.
Agents later tracked down the females, and all three identified themselves and Waldrip in the images. Two of the girls said they were 15 when they had sex with Waldrip, while the other said she was 12 or 13. One girl said Waldrip agreed to pay her family the equivalent of $33,000 for her to have sex with him.
