A convicted sex offender from Oklahoma who had been on the run from law enforcement since he faked his abduction 13 years ago was arrested last week in New York State, where he was enrolled under an alias at a university near the Canadian border, the authorities said.
The man, Anthony Lennon, 44, was on Oklahoma’s 10 Most Wanted list, and had been a fugitive since March 2012, when he went on the run to avoid charges that he possessed child sexual abuse imagery, officials said.
That month, Mr. Lennon went to the Super 8 Motel in Moore, Okla., where he worked, and “staged an elaborate and bloody abduction and robbery scene, leaving behind falsified evidence to make it appear he had been abducted,” the U.S. Marshals Service said. Detectives found a pool of blood, one of Mr. Lennon’s shoes, shirt buttons, bloody shoe prints and money missing from the motel money drawer, according to court records.
The police, who were called to the motel on March 12, 2012, “figured out pretty quickly it had to be staged,” Johnny L. Kuhlman, the U.S. marshal for the Western District of Oklahoma, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Clint Byley, a spokesman for the Moore Police Department, said that detectives were suspicious that Mr. Lennon had “conveniently left his shoe” at the scene as well as his employee name tag. “There were just a lot of weird things that you wouldn’t think would be placed there like that,” he said.
The “large amount of blood” at the scene was found to be Mr. Lennon’s, “which would take quite a bit of effort,” Todd Gibson, the police chief in Moore, said at a news conference last week.
Just before Mr. Lennon staged the crime scene, he had “emptied his bank account” and told the tellers that he was “in trouble with the law and needed all his money,” according to an affidavit in support of a federal criminal complaint that was filed last week.
Mr. Lennon was wanted at the time on eight counts of possession of child sexual abuse imagery, the authorities said. He had already been convicted in Cleveland County, Okla., on similar charges in 2010 and was required to register as a sex offender, officials said.
For 13 years after his disappearance, Mr. Lennon successfully evaded law enforcement officials, but left behind several possible clues indicating he might have been moving around the country. In February 2020, his Amazon account was accessed in North Carolina, and a phone charger was placed in the purchase cart, the federal affidavit states.
In 2022, patrons at a Dallas-area event identified in the affidavit as “A-Con” told investigators that they believed they had seen him. A-Kon is the name of an anime convention held annually in Irving, Texas, just northwest of Dallas.
It was not clear how the authorities finally managed to track down Mr. Lennon last week, but Mr. Kuhlman said that the investigation had led to the execution of search warrants in northern New York. “We’ve chased leads all over the country over the last dozen years, but this was the most definitive to know where he was,” he said.
On Thursday, the authorities took Mr. Lennon into custody in a supermarket parking lot in Canton, a village in northern New York, near the Canadian border. He had enrolled at the State University of New York at Canton in the fall of 2024 under the name Justin Tyler Phillips and was a commuter student studying for an associate degree in engineering science, a university spokesman said.
The Marshals Service said that investigators were able to confirm his identity through fingerprints.
According to the affidavit, which said Mr. Lennon had failed to register as a sex offender, he had used an alias to obtain a state ID and a birth certificate and had made multiple attempts to obtain a U.S. passport. The Marshals Service said that Mr. Lennon has a master’s degree in computer science and was working toward a doctorate in computer science at the time of his disappearance.
“He was very computer savvy,” Mr. Byley said. “He had all the means he needed to escape.”
Mr. Lennon was in federal custody on Tuesday in Syracuse, N.Y., as the authorities sought to have him returned to Oklahoma to face the eight counts of possession of child sexual abuse imagery from 2012, officials said.
Gabrielle DiBella, a federal public defender in Syracuse, said in an email that she was representing “a man who is alleged to be Anthony Lennon.”
“I have no comment about the charges, other than that he is entitled to due process and the presumption of innocence just like everyone else in this country who has been charged with a crime,” she said.
Michael Levenson covers breaking news for The Times from New York.
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