Kenai resident Michael Keith Ellis stands accused of raping or sexually abusing multiple children from infancy, some victims until they were about 8 and 9 years old and others into their early teen years, despite inquiries from the Alaska State Troopers and the Office of Children's Services.
"As far as how many times I abused you, I didn't keep scorecards," Ellis said in a jailhouse conversation with one of his victims, according to the charges.
Ellis is currently serving time for a an October 2010 conviction for second-degree sex abuse of a minor. He was sentenced to 20 years with 12 years suspended and is serving out that term at Wildwood Correction Complex, a state prison on the outskirts of Kenai.
The state charged the 55-year-old with 18 additional felony sex abuse charges on Sept. 11, though the crimes are alleged to have happened as far back as 1998. In all, he faces 14 first-degree and four second-degree sexual abuse of a minor charges.
Court records indicate the police obtained search warrants to listen in on conversations during jail visitations between Ellis and his victims. Ellis' statements reveal a fascination with pedophilia that started when he was working in some sort of emergency response capacity, picking up patients in an ambulance and taking classes in Oregon.
The search warrants and an investigator's interviews with the victims are the basis of the laundry list of new charges.
"Over a period of time from her earliest memories to the time she was 14 years old" one female victim was sexually abused by Ellis "on a regular basis," according to the charges; the abuse occurred in Anchorage and more recently in Kenai.
Some of the abused kids, including at least one boy, said they witnessed abuse on several occasions, while others said they heard screams emanating from behind locked doors and were aware of what was happening.
The boy reported Ellis to the Department of Family and Youth Services, now OCS, in 2001. He said he had walked in on Ellis molesting a young girl. In another instance, the boy said, when he was a young teenager, he witnessed Ellis doing inappropriate things, standing over a baby girl only 2 to 8 months old.
A year later, a 16-year-old heard a girl screaming in Ellis' home and reported it to OCS. The children told the department's personnel what Ellis had instructed them to say in such a situation "and the investigation was (determined to be) unsubstantiated," according to the charges.
Ellis allegedly snapped nude photos of his female victims, which he would then load onto his computer. The victims also told the investigator that Ellis had additional child porn on the computer, including videos he forced at least one of the girls to watch when she was about 8, according to the charges.
The jailhouse conversations reveal a man partially coming clean with victims who were too young at the time of the alleged abuse to remember all the buried details. He also spoke with his ex-wife. The charges don't indicate when the meetings took place, only what Ellis is accused of having divulged.
According to the charges, in one such conversation with his ex-wife, Ellis said, "I took that sex offender treatment program in Juneau. There are a lot of things I want to share with you. But unless they can be shared confidentially, safely, I can't share them with you. A lot happened ..."
He began during another meeting by apologizing to a victim for the trauma he'd caused in her life but avoided being specific about the abuse, according to the charges.
"There were so many incidents and it was always the same actions. It's hard for me to apologize about one particular action because there were so many," the charges quote Ellis as having said.
He said in another conversation that those behaviors started "a long time ago" and served as a form of release, "like drugs or anything else, and over time became habits and were just natural," the charges say.
Ellis shared his first memory of "looking at and exploring" a child in another conversation, according to the charges. Responding to an emergency call involving a child fatality, after determining there was nothing he could do to save the young victim, Ellis said, he looked at the child's genitals. The charges say that initial curiosity escalated when he molested a boy.
The experience scared him, but several years later in Oregon, he was required as part of his job to take mandatory child abuse recognition classes. "That was what really kicked up my curiosity," the charges quote Ellis as having said. The classes included videos of actual abuse, he said.
"From that point on things started."
According to his confessions as described in the charging documents, Ellis mentioned having abused patients in Anchorage. He would go to nursing homes to pick up "Down syndrome babies" for transportation; sometimes, he would molest them.
"I could justify it to myself by telling myself they would never know about it, they would never know sexual feelings," the charges report that Ellis said.
Ellis made an initial court appearance on Friday at the Kenai courthouse. A public defender was appointed.