Oath Keeper Sentenced to 30 Years for Daughter’s Rape

Charles Dyer, a former Marine with ties to the antigovernment Oath Keepers, was sentenced to 30 years in prison Tuesday for raping his daughter when she was 6, the Stephens County District Attorney’s office in Oklahoma said.

The sentencing was the final chapter in a case that sparked national attention after Dyer failed to appear for trial last summer and soon afterward issued threatening, conspiracy-theorizing communiqués that left no room to doubt his intentions if police were to catch him.

“I have been pushed to the limits by law enforcement and the judicial system in an attempt to cause me to take violent actions against them,” Dyer wrote in an E-mail to his family after fleeing the reach of law enforcement. “Our judicial system is nothing more than a system of liars and crooks working under the color of the law, where the rich go free and the poor are made to suffer injustice. … Something must be done to expose it.”

The trial in April was Dyer’s third on a single charge of sexual assault of a minor following the allegations that he sodomized his daughter. The first ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict; the second ended in mistrial after the district attorney’s office violated protocol and mailed questionnaires to jurors before the trial had begun.

All the while, Dyer adamantly denied the charges. “I believe in my heart that my daughter is a victim of sexual abuse,” he testified in April. “[But] I’ve never hurt anyone in my life, especially not my daughter.”