MEMPHIS, TN—Billy Ray Wyatt, age 54, of Hazel, KY, was sentenced to 10 years or 120 months in federal prison Friday following his guilty plea to one count of coercion of a minor to engage in sexual activity, announced Edward L. Stanton III, United States Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee.

Beginning in February of 2012, Wyatt used the Internet and social media to meet young females and groom them for sexual encounters. After meeting one 16-year-old girl from Paris, Henry County, Tenn., Wyatt drove to Tennessee and picked her up and took her back to Kentucky with the intent of having a sexual encounter. Wyatt is a former Henry County, Tenn. resident. Wyatt also communicated online and made overtures to an agent acting in an undercover capacity as a teenage female. In a recorded phone conversation, Wyatt talked to her about masturbation and what sexual acts he wanted to perform on her.

In addition to the prison sentence, U.S. District Judge J. Daniel Breen ordered Wyatt to serve five years of supervised release. There is no parole in the federal prison system.

This case was investigated by the Henry County Sheriff’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation Child Exploitation Task Force. Assistant U.S. Attorney Debra Ireland represented the government.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood (PSC), a nationwide initiative of the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the United States Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, PSC marshals federal, state, and local resources to locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims. For more information about PSC, please visit http://www.justice.gov/psc/. For more information about Internet safety education, please visit http://www.justice.gov/psc/resources.html and click on the tab “resources.”