Mother Goes Online To Nab Molester Woman Pretends To Be Gay Teen To Find Man Who Abused Her Son

A Mercer Island man has pleaded guilty to molesting the son of a friend after the boy’s mother, masquerading as a gay teen on the Internet, arranged a meeting with an undercover police officer.

“I did not want to see this guy get off,” said the mother, a 44-year-old Federal Way resident who asked to be identified only by her first name, Patty. “Anything I could do to get this guy, I was going to do.”

After his arrest, Otis “Jerry” Fellows, 46, of Mercer Island, pleaded guilty to second-degree child molestation of Patty’s son. He faces up to 21 months in prison on that charge and possibly more time for charges stemming from the arrest and a probation violation.

The story dates back to 1993 when Patty’s son, 12 or 13 at the time, was molested. The boy kept the assault secret until last May, when he told his mother.

Fellows was arrested June 3. But after he posted bail, the case was slowed by various delays. Patty’s son, meanwhile, grew uneasy about testifying against him, she said.

“To this day, he has an extremely hard time dealing with it,” Patty told the Eastside Journal, which published the story Wednesday. “My concern was this guy would get off because of my son’s inability to testify.”

In January, after an acquaintance told her Fellows was an America Online subscriber, Patty created the user name “gboy” and set out to learn what she could.

She says she found him alone in a private “chat room,” an area where people can meet online to talk.

Patty told him she was a gay teenage boy with green eyes, a slim build and strawberry-blond hair. He responded with sexually explicit messages that included an invitation to have sex.

The next day, Patty called police, who told her to continue playing “gboy.”

The meeting took weeks to set up, as Patty made up endless excuses why “gboy” couldn’t call Fellows or meet him sooner.

“I put my mindset as an immature young male. I played naive and inexperienced,” Patty said. “It was scary because I was afraid I was going to blow my cover.”

“She played it really cool,” Mercer Island Police Detective Sgt. Alan Lacy said.

Fellows agreed to a meeting one day last month.

“I will be there waiting for you like I said,” Fellows said in a message the day of the meeting. “I am a little nervous that this is not a setup.”

Later that morning, police officer Leslie Burns, disguised as “gboy,” approached Fellows in his car near a Bellevue shopping mall. Fellows was arrested after allegedly saying he wanted to have sex with the officer.