When local authorities caught on to one man’s routine in a small Illinois town of using newspaper ads to lure women to his home, he started placing ads in other states, they said.
And after a Cleveland, Tenn., woman answered his ad for a live-in health care provider, she says she narrowly escaped becoming the latest victim of a convicted sex offender.
Jennifer Massingill, 31, said Tuesday from her grandmother’s Cleveland home that she still is “embarrassed and angry” that she never checked out her potential employer on the Internet after seeing his classified ad in June. She said she believed Maurice Ray Sweet’s story completely when she made an initial visit to his home in Herrin, Ill., to make sure she’d be a suitable fit as his live-in health care provider.
“I’ve been taking care of elderly people for 10 years,” said Ms. Massingill, a certified nursing assistant. “I never dreamed anyone I took care of would be dangerous.”
But it turns out Mr. Sweet, 62, is a convicted sex offender who still was on probation from a 2008 incident in which he sexually assaulted a woman, Herrin police said Tuesday. Mr. Sweet since has become well-known in the department, police said, because of numerous complaints that started coming in about him from local women who fell prey to his ads.