Three Pennsylvania men who pleaded guilty to having sex hundreds of times with horses, goats, dogs and a cow need to keep serving their decades-long prison sentences, a state appeals court has decided.
The men even made videos of themselves as they committed that bestiality, investigators said. And they recruited a teenage boy to help them molest the creatures.
The Superior Court panel upheld the 20- to 41-year prison terms for Terry Wallace, Matthew Brubaker and Marc Measnikoff in an opinion by President Judge Emeritus John Bender. All three had pleaded guilty in Clearfield County court to charges of corruption of minors, 730 counts of sexual intercourse with animals and 730 counts of cruelty to animals.
All three men lived in rundown campers on a farm near Munson and the animals they sexually abused were their own. That abuse occurred for four or five years, police said. It was uncovered when the teen they had help them reported it to the authorities in 2018.
Investigators said the teen told them he would be summoned to retrieve the animals and take them to a specially designed chute where the men would have intercourse with them.
On appeal, Measnikoff, 36, Brubaker, 32, and Wallace, 42, claimed they were sentenced too harshly by county Judge Paul E. Cherry. They insisted Cherry only considered the nature and duration on their crimes and their involvement of the teen and not their needs for rehabilitation.
Bender agreed with Cherry that the three are where they need to be to get treatment for the mental abnormalities that led to their crimes.
The state judge cited Cherry’s doubts that any of the men were capable of rehabilitating themselves. In Meansikoff’s case, for example, Cherry wrote that “a long incarceration will allow (him) adequate time to work on his mental health through treatment and time to refrain from said acts so that he may become a healthy, law abiding, and productive member of society.”
The punishments are even more just, Bender concluded, given that the men “exposed a minor child to (their) abhorrent offenses for years on end.”