Fatal car crash led to man's arrest for drugs, sex trafficking

WASILLA — A man who showed up to the scene of a fatal Parks Highway car wreck in December and claimed to be a family member of one of the victims was actually using the woman in his prostitution business, authorities allege.

An Anchorage grand jury indicted Terry Keehn II, 42, of Wasilla, on seven counts on Jan. 21 following an investigation involving federal, state, and local authorities. Keehn also faces a separate single federal count in U.S. District Court for possession with intent to distribute more than 50 grams of methamphetamine, according to federal court documents. Keehn remained in Cook Inlet Pretrial Friday afternoon on a $100,000 cash performance and $100,000 cash appearance bond with a third-party custodian requirement, corrections and courts documents show.

Investigators had suspected Keehn played a role in the Southcentral sex trade as early as October 2015, following a tip from the Federal Bureau of Investigation about a suspected trafficker operating out of Wasilla, according to a bail memorandum filed along with the charging documents. FBI agents furnished a phone number, which Alaska State Troopers with the Special Crimes Investigation Unit of the Alaska Bureau of Investigation were able to link back to Keehn.

However, officials were unable to locate Keehn until Dec. 1, when he showed up at the scene of a deadly car wreck, according to the memorandum written by Office of Special Prosecutions attorney Adam Alexander.

The only crash that matches that description was a head-on collision near the intersection of Parks Highway and Rainbow Street that left three people dead and seriously injured another person. In charging documents filed against Keehn, the initials identifying the victim in the collision are “SJ.”

Troopers “learned from SJ’s actual family that Keehn was in fact a drug and sex trafficker who had misidentified himself as her next of kin, and that SJ had been living with and working for him before her death in the vehicle collision,” Alexander wrote.

Investigators retrieved SJ’s phone from the wreckage, and connected her back to Keehn.

Wasilla Police served an eviction notice on Keehn Jan. 2 at a residence on East Kinzi Circle in Wasilla. A woman who lived in the apartment where Keehn was evicted was incarcerated on an unrelated probation matter, and investigators monitored phone conversations between them.

“In those conversations, Keehn discussed the mechanics of his sex trafficking operation in Anchorage and Wasilla,” Alexander wrote.

When the woman, identified only as S.S. in the memorandum, left jail, troopers followed her to an Anchorage apartment she shared with Keehn and other women in the 2100 block of West 80th Avenue.

Troopers and DEA agents obtained a search warrant for the house and a red Ford F-250 pickup on Jan. 13. Later that day, an investigator spotted Keehn driving a pickup to a parking lot on Dimond Boulevard, then back to the apartment. When law enforcement officers stopped Keehn and another resident outside the 80th Avenue house, they discovered 138 grams of meth and 14 grams of heroin, according to the memorandum. Keehn told federal investigators that he had made drug runs three times over the last six weeks to Sterling, according to a federal complaint written by DEA officer Rick Pawlak.

Along with the drugs, troopers seized computers and phones from Keehn, and discovered a video Keehn made of himself attempting to recruit an unidentified young woman for work at an “incall” location, an apartment or house where clients go to have sex in exchange for money, according to the memorandum.

“I have girls,” Keehn allegedly said at one point. “I’m a pimp. Don’t call me a pimp, but I’m a pimp.”

Keehn also allegedly told the girl she could make as much as $500 for sex in the Valley, and $600 in Fairbanks, and gave her meth on the video.

“Evidence subsequently uncovered by SCIU indicates that Keehn was successful in his attempts to recruit and traffic the young woman in the video,” Alexander wrote.

The charges constitute the first felony charge against Keehn in Alaska, though the memorandum includes a list of charges for sexual assault and aggravated criminal sexual abuse on a victim between the ages of 13 and 16 in Winnebago County, Illinois in 1998.

Contact reporter Brian O’Connor at 352-2270, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.