The Washington PostTeen Guilty in 2002 Sex Case Arrested on New ChargeBy Ernesto LondoñoWashington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 8, 2006; Page B01
Andrew Klepper was charged with pandering, a misdemeanor. (Montgomery County Police Dept. - Montgomery County Police Dept.)When he was 16, high school student Andrew G. Klepper pleaded guilty to three felonies for sodomizing a female escort with a baseball bat and an ink marker at his Bethesda home.
Last month, Klepper, now 19, was charged in a case involving another female escort. This time, police say he set up an advertisement for the woman's services on a popular Web site and then drove her to a Rockville hotel to meet a "john" who was really a Montgomery County vice detective.
Klepper's attorney, Paul Kemp, said the new charge is a minor, nonviolent offense that is seldom prosecuted.
"The defendant is charged with essentially providing transportation," Kemp said during a recent court hearing. "He didn't convince someone to become a prostitute."
Prosecutors say the new charge -- pandering, a misdemeanor punishable by up to 10 years in prison -- is a serious offense considering Klepper's background. Klepper also has been charged with violating the terms of his probation. He is in jail.
Two of Klepper's classmates at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda were also charged in the November 2002 case, which drew widespread attention because of the age of the defendants and the brutality of the crime.
In the new case, Assistant State's Attorney Jeffrey T. Wennar said in court that police last month found several photographs taken in Klepper's Bethesda house that show women "in various states of dress and undress." Police also found women's undergarments packaged in small bags, Wennar said.
"There may not have been a victim per se, your honor," Wennar said in court. "But this fetish complex that he has and this entrepreneurial desire to sell these sexual items -- for a lack of a better term -- there's something going on here."
Klepper's latest brush with the law came on May 15, after Montgomery vice detective Thomas Stack logged on to Craigslist -- a free and popular Web site that allows people to advertise a wide range of items such as housing and furniture -- and clicked on an ad posted by a person identified as "Lisa" who was offering "Full Service" for $200 per hour. The ad included two cellphone numbers: Lisa's and one identified as belonging to a friend who could book appointments if she was busy.
According to a police charging document, at 6:15 p.m. the vice officer called one of the numbers and spoke with the woman. After determining the price and type of sex acts to be performed, the document said, the officer and the woman agreed to meet at the Sleep Inn at 3 Research Ct. -- a block from police headquarters in Rockville.
Once at the hotel, Stack called the woman, who police said told him to go to Room 222. Inside, Stack identified himself as a police officer, and he and other officers searched the room, where condoms, the woman's cellphone and $241 were found, the charging document said.
The woman, Melissa Brewer, told Stack that "her assistant Andrew was downstairs in the lobby," the document said. Brewer has been charged with prostitution. Her attorney did not return a phone call yesterday, and her cellphone appears to no longer be in service.
Officers said they found Klepper downstairs with a laptop computer connected to the Internet. Brewer and Klepper agreed to make written statements. They wrote that Klepper was responsible for placing the ad on Craigslist and that Brewer paid him $30 to drive her from Reston to the Rockville hotel, police said.
Wennar said in court that Klepper told detectives he had a videotape he had made at his home of "the prostitute having sex with one of the three johns'' whom he had taken to the house that day.
Klepper promised police that he would turn over the video, but days later produced a videotape that "had obviously been erased," Wennar said. The photos and women's underwear were found in a search of Klepper's home, police said.
Klepper was released on his own recognizance on the pandering charge but turned himself in later after his probation officer charged him with violating the terms of his probation. In the 2002 case, he was sentenced to a 15-year suspended sentence and five years of probation after pleading guilty to robbery, first-degree assault and fourth-degree sexual offense.
Klepper spent several months at a facility for troubled youths in Tennessee. Kemp and Klepper's father said in court last month that the teenager has been working and taking classes at Montgomery Community College.
"He has worked, and shown initiative and desire to do so," Martin Klepper, a lawyer at a Washington law firm who teaches at Georgetown Law School, told the judge at the May 23 hearing. "While the charges against Andrew represent a reprehensible mistake by him, I respectfully ask that you not let this misstep undermine the good that has resulted from the past three and a half years of his rehabilitation."
At the time of the latest arrest, Klepper was carrying a law enforcement badge that Wennar said appeared to have been ordered from a catalogue. Kemp said that the badge was legitimately obtained and that his client was not trying to impersonate an officer.
In his profile on the social networking Web site My Space, Klepper says he is interested in law enforcement.
"i am going to be a cop!" it says under "Andrew's general interests."
Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
