US police seek sex offender who had underground dungeon

A man sought by US police in connection with the rape of two teenage girls in an underground room behind his home had been recommended for South Carolina’s sexually violent predator programme.

Just before his release from prison in 2000, prosecutors recommended Kenneth Hinson be indefinitely committed to the violent predator programme, but the judge rejected it.

“We thought then that the judge made a mistake,” Attorney General Henry McMaster said today on Good Morning America. “I think events, if all this is true that we hear today, it appears that the man should have gone into the system, certainly.”

Authorities say that late on Monday, Hinson, 47, took the two 17-year-old girls one at a time from a nearby mobile home in Hartsville while they were sleeping.

He bound the first girl’s mouth with tape and took her to a shed on his property, where a trap door led to an underground room not much larger than a closet with a four-foot ceiling, said Darlington County Chief Deputy Tom Gainey.

Hinson sexually assaulted the girl, then left her in the underground room bound with duct tape while he went back to the mobile home for the other girl. She was also sexually assaulted, Gainey said.

After Hinson left, the teens managed to wriggle free, open the trap door and kick down the door to the shed. They walked through some woods and flagged down a passing motorist, Gainey said.

Hinson is wanted on kidnapping and criminal sexual conduct charges. He had to register as a sex offender because of a 1991 conviction in South Carolina for rape of a 12-year-old girl.

In a 2000 decision, Circuit Judge Edward Cottingham said authorities failed to show the man was capable of committing a sexual offence in the future.