Pennsylvania Man Pleads Guilty After Molesting African Girls In Orphanage He Setup

Gregory Dow of Lancaster, Pennsylvania pleaded guilty to four counts of having illicit sexual conduct with a minor in a foreign place. Reports say the separate incidents that happened between 2013 and 2017 involved four underage girls, with two of them, said to be 11 years old at the time. He also asked them to call him “dad.”

Opening An Orphanage

Dow, reportedly, went to Kenya and opened the Dow Family Children’s Home there in 2008. He presented himself as a Christian missionary from Pennsylvania. According to the FBI, he used his position to prey on young girls and then exploited their vulnerability to satisfy him. Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Stengel, in a teleconference with U.S. District Judge Edward Smith, presented the case of the government against Dow.

Stengel said that the 61-year-old missionary “engaged in grooming behavior by providing things of value to his victims,” which included mobile phones. The government attorney also revealed that the wife of Dow took the victims to a clinic in Kenya where birth control devices were implanted in their bodies sans their consent.

According to reports, the other two victims were 12 and 13 years old. Stengel told Judge Smith that as a consequence, the missionary “was able to perpetrate these crimes without fear that the abuse would result in pregnancy.”

Strict Discipline

Court documents show that one of the victims claimed that Dow kept on accusing her of engaging in sexual acts with someone else and, in doing so, she had to have sex with the missionary as well. Several witnesses also told federal investigators they saw young girls being asked to enter the room of Dow. They also revealed physical abuse is rampant at the orphanage and is always being referred to as “strict discipline.”

Mary Rose Dow, the wife of the missionary, was arrested in Kenya and charged in the court of child abuse concerning the birth control implants. A fine was imposed for her crime and she was also meted some jail time. Her husband was able to flee to the United States just as investigations in Africa as regards his sexual exploits and conduct was gaining ground.

Authorities in the U.S. got involved after someone contacted the district attorney's office in Lancaster County sometime in 2018. The terms of the plea agreement stated that Dow will be imprisoned for 15 years and eight months, after which he would have to register himself as a sex offender. He had also entered a guilty plea in 1996 in the state of Iowa in an assault charge with the intention of committing sexual abuse.