WASHINGTON – A former University of Southern California professor who was on the FBI’s Most Wanted was sentenced to five years in prison for traveling to the Philippines to have sex with minors.
Walter Lee Williams, 66, of Palm Springs, California, was charged with engaging in sexual conduct with minors in the Philippines, and arrested in Mexico in 2013 after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list, officials said.
As part of his guilty plea, Williams admitted that he traveled from Los Angeles to the Philippines to engage in sex acts with minor boys. Prior to his travel, Williams engaged in sexual activity via Internet webcam sessions with minors and expressed a desire to visit them in the Philippines to have sex, according to authorities.
U.S. District Judge Philip S. Gutierrez of the Central District of California also sentenced Williams to ten years of supervised release, and ordered him to pay $25,000 in restitution and to register as a sex offender for life, officials said.
Williams is a is a former professor for Anthropology & Gender Studies at USC and worked at UCLA in the 1980s, according to published reports.
Williams has lived as an retired academic in Palm Springs, California writing, publishing, in the resort town of Playa del Carmen. In January 2011, Williams traveled to the Philippines to have sexual relationships and “[produce] sexually explicit photos” with these and other victims.
He had webcam sex with male minors in Asian countries, traveling to various Asian countries to have sex with children, and sharing child pornography images with friends.