Two men—one, a former librarian at Stuyvesant High School and the other, chief of
police at the Veteran Affairs Medical Center in Massachusetts—were arrested this week on horrifying charges of conspiring "to kidnap, torture, rape, and kill women and children," the FBI announced today.
Christopher Asch, who was suspended from Stuyvesant in 2009 following charges of sexually harassing four male students, was arrested in his tony West Village apartment early Monday morning. Richard Meltz was arrested on Sunday.
“The bone-chilling conduct alleged in this complaint is a chronicle of sadism and depravity that includes the defendants’ very real steps to carry out their plans to kidnap, torture, rape, and kill the women and children they targeted," said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, whose office also prosecuted cannibal cop Gilberto Valle.
According to the criminal complaint, the two men allegedly began exchanging emails in October of last year, with conversations revealing increasingly concrete plans to rape and murder their targets. Here's a sample:
Asch: "Yeah, so anyways, I went to Home Depot and picked up some things I thought we could use, like duct tape and a bucket, and some cable ties...I've got a couple of speculums and I got another mouth gag and so, been collecting stuff like that. At any rate. Got some masks."
Meltz: There you go. You don't want to be recognized either. So that's one of the good things about that.
Asch: Although it's getting to be the wrong time of year to be wearing masks, but.
The danger of the plan was apparently not lost on either man, which both agreed was part of the "excitement":
Asch: So, I think we just have to think. This is a fairly high-risk operation. I mean, as far as I'm concerned. Trying to snatch somebody off the street, home invasion, I think they're pretty high risk.
Meltz: Everytime you do anything it's a risk. And like you said, all you try to do is minimize it. Because the end result is going to be fantastic.
Lengthy discussion was also dedicated to trying to keep DNA from being traced back to their co-conspirators—one of whom the Post reports had ties to cannibal cop—and the men allegedly discussed the degree of difficulty of removing their victims' fingers and teeth.
On April 6, an undercover agent trailed Asch from Manhattan to a Pennsylvania gun show, where he allegedly bought a taser. On the day of his arrest, the complaint alleged that Asch presented the undercover agent with the taser, as well as "rope, a meat hammer, duct tape, gloves,cleaning supplies, zip ties, a dental retractor, two speculums, 12-inch skewers, pliers, a wireless modem, and a leg spreader."
Both Asch and Meltz each face charges of one count of conspiracy to commit kidnapping, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. Asch, whose charges of sexual abuse were ultimately dropped, apparently did an able job of making students uncomfortable during his days as a librarian. As we reported in 2009, "He'd creep the boys out even more by smirking or whispering in their ears to be quiet while he groped them in the library," activities that were ultimately deemed acceptable by a Manhattan judge.
