A Missouri man who had asked for custody of his now 13-year-old daughter after confessing to raping and sodomizing another daughter when she was 14 has been granted an early release from prison after serving only five years of his sentence.
A third daughter of Charles Haynes—Mikaela Haynes—made national headlines in 2018 when she killed herself at age 14 after her own court-appointed advocate recommended her father be granted custody of her despite his conviction for raping her older half-sister.
Court records and transcripts show that the teen said Mr. Haynes was also molesting her routinely.
She said she would rather die than be forced to live with Mr. Haynes. She shortly after hung herself.
Mr. Haynes was paroled on Aug. 10, two years before his scheduled release date, for sexually assaulting his 14-year-old stepdaughter. Haynes was 53 at the time he committed the assaults.
He was sentenced to seven years in prison for the assaults.
In a confession to prosecutors and later a court hearing where he pled guilty, Haynes said he repeatedly sodomized and raped his stepdaughter, Mikala’s older half-sister, and forced her to perform oral sex on him.
When a judge asked him if he “had deviate sexual intercourse” with the child, Haynes replied yes.
According to Evita Tolu, the girl’s attorney, there was also substantial evidence collected against Haynes including traces of his semen, recovered from his 12-year-old stepdaughter’s mouth. A mixture of her seamen and the girls’ DNA were also recovered from places where the girl said she took him to rape her.
Haynes attorney Ramona Gau did not respond to repeated inquiries from The Epoch Times. She is the latest in a string of attorneys who have represented Haynes.
Tolu, who represents all three of Hayne’s daughters and his ex-wife, told The Epoch Times that “it should be an absolute outrage” to the entire world that an abuser like Haynes who committed the most vile act imaginable and against his own little girls, has already been freed.
“We have a growing court system that seems to award child molesters,” she said.
Haynes’ stepdaughter, Melissa Hogg, told The Epoch Times she is terrified for herself and her little sister, whom Haynes said he would seek custody of when released from prison.
“I don’t know how the system does not see how dangerous it is,” said Miss Hogg.
In a series of jailhouse phone recordings, which were released to The Epoch Times, Mr. Haynes can be repeatedly talking about a cache of guns he has hidden at a friend’s house that he plans to retrieve after being jailed.
Under state law, parolees are not allowed to possess guns.
Referring to them as “Christmas presents,” Mr. Haynes tells relatives and the friend keeping them to make sure they are safely hidden away. The friend in one of the audios assures Haynes they are locked up in a wall safe in the master bedroom of his home.
“I‘ll never go to the court system again. I guarantee you that. The old way always works better than this. I’ll guarantee you that,” Haynes said in one of the recordings.
He also brags about being treated exceptionally well by jail officials and says that Tolu has “stepped on the toes of the good old boy network.” He refers to Tolu, who is Lithuanian, as a Russian communist.
When Miss Hogg turned the recordings of Haynes to the Ripley County Sheriff’s Department in hopes they would cite him for violating his parole condition, they told her, in a taped phone call that was provided to The Epoch Times, that they needed probable cause to act on his comments about the guns.
Melissa Hogg filed a civil lawsuit against her stepfather, who was granted early release from prison despite his confession he repeatedly raped Hogg when she was just 14. Courtesy of Melissa Hogg
Miss Hogg also sent the audio along with an emotional email to the department and several other agencies, including the district attorney’s office, pleading for help.
“I can’t imagine how he can get away with stealing over 100 firearms as a felon and making plans to retrieve them FROM PRISON,” wrote Miss Hoggs.
The Sheriff’s department, including Sheriff Michael Barton and county attorney Mathew Michel, did not respond to repeated inquiries from The Epoch Times about the Haynes case.
In an emailed response to inquiries from The Epoch Times, Steven D. Mueller, Board Operations Manager of the Missouri Parole Board, said that the board is mandated to grant Haynes a conditional early release and cited the law that shows that. Under the part he highlighted is an outline of conditional release terms based on the original prison terms..
However, language in the same law cited by Mr. Mueller stipulates that the “date of conditional release from the prison term may be extended up to a maximum of te entire sentence of imprisonment by the parole board.”
It also cites dangerous felony convictions as an exception to Missouri’s condition release laws. Those dangerous felony convictions include a range of several sexual assault convictions, from first-degree rape to forcible sodomy.
While Mr. Haynes admitted to raping his daughter, he received a lighter conviction of statutory sodomy in the second degree for pleading guilty. Second-degree statutory sodomy is not specified under the state’s definition of dangerous felonies.
Mr. Haynes was not convicted of a dangerous felony,” said Mueller.
Mr. Mueller refused to explain or provide a copy of the board’s decision to grant Haynes conditional early release saying they were “considered closed records.”
Miss Hogg, who told The Epoch Times she went into hiding after learning of Haynes’s release, has filed a civil lawsuit against the trauma he caused her for sexually abusing her.
Mikaela Haynes, 14, killed herself after a family court judge ruled she had to live with her father who had already admitted to molesting her older sister. Courtesy of Cynthia Haynes
Last year, Tolu filed a lawsuit against Mikaela’s court-appointed child advocate for recommending Charles Hyanes get custody of Miss Hogg’s younger sister when he is released from prison.
The advocate, called a guardian ad litem, has since resigned from the case.
After her suicide, the court-appointed advocate then recommended Haynes be granted shared custody of Mikaela’s younger sister, who is now 13.
The lawsuit set a national precedent as the first known case where a federal court judge, overturning a lower court’s decision, ruled that court-appointed child advocates do not have automatic immunity and ruled that Tolu could continue with her suit against the court-appointed advocate.
