An evil stepfather who subjected children to torture and abuse worse than victims of war crimes for almost six years has been jailed for life.
David Michael Calhoun, 38, was found guilty of unimaginable cruelty at a trial in Gainesville, Texas, on Tuesday and received 10 life sentences.
He abused at least four children including stepkids and nephews who lived with him in a run-down trailer in an isolated lakeside village near the Oklahoma border.
Calhoun’s wife Ashley Elizabeth Calhoun, 37, and Mireya Grace Evans, 19, face trial next month accused of similarly horrific torture of the children.
David Michael Calhoun, 38, was found guilty of unimaginable cruelty at a trial in Gainesville, Texas, on Tuesday and received 10 life sentences
He abused at least four children including stepkids and nephews who lived with him in a run-down trailer in an isolated lakeside village near the Oklahoma border
Abuse four of the victims, aged 16, 15, 12, and 10 when they were rescued, suffered included being tied up for hours at a time, and being raped with objects.
They had fingers and toenails ripped out, were shocked with cattle prods, were set on fire, and had their genitals burned with lighters.
Cooke County First Assistant District Attorney Eric Erlandson said the abuse was on the same level as suffered by prisoners in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
‘The prolonged period of torture that the defendant put the children through in this case is the worst abuse that I have ever seen,’ he said.
‘The mental, psychological, and physical torture that they endured for the better part of six years is unimaginable.’
The torture began in 2017 when Calhoun began looking after his nephews, and was only stopped in 2022 when one of the victims escaped.
The 16-year-old boy got help from a co-worker who spirited him out of Texas to Omaha, Nebraska, where he was found by local police on August 2.
Mireya Grace Evans, 19, faces trial next month accused of similarly horrific torture of the children
Calhoun’s wife Ashley Elizabeth Calhoun, 37, will also face trial on similar charges
He detailed the horrific abuse to investigators, and all three accused were arrested days later and indicted in November 2022.
‘David Calhoun uses white zip ties and black and grey duct tape around his wrist and forces him to lay on the ground under the table for what he described as ‘feeling like days’,’ a search warrant read.
The teenager had scars on his wrists from where the zip-ties cut into his flesh.
He described how in March 2022, Calhoun poured flammable liquid on him and set him on fire with a long lighter.
The boy was able to put out the fire by rolling on the ground but was severely burned and showed investigators a huge burn scar across his abdomen.
Every day he was zapped with a two-pronged red cattle prod, causing scars all over his body, including on his genitals.
The sadistic man also set his penis and testicles on fire with a lighter, leaving more scars.
In yet more abuse to the boy’s genitals, Calhoun put a yellow hair tie around his testicles for 24 hours.
A jury took less than an hour to convict Calhoun (left) of five counts of sexual assault of a child, seven counts of aggravated assault, and one count of assault strangulation. Evans (right) faces trial accused of other shocking crimes next month
Calhoun another time used pliers to rip out fingernails and toenails, and the boy showed police how one of his fingers only had half its nail.
The teen said Calhoun and Evans beat him so hard with knuckle dusters that two of his teeth were knocked loose.
Calhoun ripped one of them out, and one of the other children extracted the other. His abusers put both of them in a plastic ziplock bag that police found.
The teenagers was frequently bashed with a two-to-three-foot metal pipe, showing investigators a five-inch scar on his leg for a particularly savage beating.
He was also stabbed with a utility knife, wounding his thumb. He was also forced to eat human and animal feces.
Another time, he was forced to pick up a red-hot welding rod and hold it in his hands, causing burns scars.
Evans’ alleged abuse, in addition to beating the boy with pink knuckledusters, was of a more sexual nature.
‘Mireya wore a latex glove on her hand, covered the glove in hot sauce and inserted her lingers into [the boy’s] rectum,’ the search warrant detailed.
‘He also reported on a separate occasion, Mireya cut a lemon in half and inserted one half into his rectum.’
Detectives discovered that more children were abused at other locations across East Texas, including Harleton, Jefferson, and Athens.
‘The abuse increased until it reached its climax in the summer of 2022 in Cooke County, Texas,’ Erlandson said.
Evans’ alleged abuse, in addition to beating the boy with pink knuckledusters, was of a more sexual nature
‘The resilience and strength that the children showed in this case is awe-inspiring. They never gave up and showed tremendous courage from the very beginning.
‘The lasting legacy of this case is that evil will not prevail — even when things seemed hopeless the children were determined to make their story heard.’
Pamela Miller, a senior policy analyst with the APSAC Center for Child Policy classified it as ‘intrafamilial child torture’.
Erlandson said this was ‘almost indistinguishable from the type of torture that POWs and political prisoners suffered during the Korean War and the Vietnam War’.
A jury took less than an hour to convict Calhoun of five counts of sexual assault of a child, seven counts of aggravated assault, and one count of assault strangulation.
They took the same amount of time to hand him 10 life sentences, a 10-year sentence, and two 20-year sentences.