Police: Woman’s Vegas ‘dream’ smashed by sex industry torture

She was done with Las Vegas, about to catch the next bus for home, when the pimp targeted her.

He was friendly and charming. She was young and impressionable, barely an adult. She decided another day in Sin City couldn’t hurt.

They were driving back to the bus station the next day when he revealed his true intentions.

The pimp promised a life of luxury — they’d “get to the top together,” he said. The woman had never worked as a prostitute. But she had almost nothing to her name.

She wanted to believe him.

On June 30, four months after being conned into a life of prostitution in Las Vegas, the woman was left for dead near University Medical Center, a pawn in the city’s sex trafficking industry who was discarded when he had no more use for her.

She wasn’t even taken to the emergency room. The pimp left her in the Wendy’s parking lot across from the hospital, tossing her away like fast-food trash.

In addition to the numerous bruises, she had spinal fractures and severe internal injuries to her kidney, liver and spleen. The lacerations on her back and butt, from being beaten with a pole dozens of times over several months, were so infected that they stunk.

Her middle finger on her right hand, ravaged by gangrene, needed to be amputated.

The woman, malnourished to a point she lost 70 pounds, was reluctant at first to tell police who nearly killed her. For days she claimed she had been homeless, attacked in her sleep by an unknown man.

But Las Vegas police detectives knew there was more to the story and gently pressed her to reveal the truth. Despite fearing that the pimp would kill her for talking, she eventually spoke.

Her courage paid off, police said.

On Tuesday the suspect, Robert Sharpe III, 28, was booked at the Clark County jail on a mountain of felony charges, including sex trafficking, attempted murder, involuntary servitude, kidnapping and domestic battery.

SELLING ‘THE DREAM’

The woman’s story was documented in a lengthy Metro report obtained by the Review-Journal on Thursday.

It’s a common thread — smooth-talking pimp convinces a down-on-her-luck woman he can change her life. The woman said Sharpe gave her a home and promised to protect her.

“We call it selling them the dream,” Metro Lt. Karen Hughes said.

Pimps beat their prostitutes to establish mental and physical dominance, she said. But Hughes said Sharpe’s disregard for humanity made him one of the most violent suspects she had encountered in her eight years leading Metro’s vice unit.

“In the cases we’ve investigated, the length of the brutality and the torture that he put this young woman through was incredible,” Hughes said.

The woman told police Sharpe initially treated her well after she started working for him in March. He bought her clothes and gave her a room in his North Las Vegas home at 2502 Spanish Fork Ave., near Ann Road at Camino Eldorado Parkway.

Sharpe’s most trusted prostitute, Kariah Heiden, was ordered to teach the woman “the game,” the report said. Heiden was several months pregnant at the time, but together the pair began arranging “dates,” targeting older men in casinos who returned their smiles.

Heiden and the woman gave their money to Sharpe, who often was waiting in a car outside, the report said. At $300 to $500 per half hour, Sharpe was collecting a large fee.

But the beatings started just a few weeks later, the woman said. Sharpe beat Heiden and the woman with a leather belt after he suspected they lied about their earnings, the report said.

The woman wanted to leave after the attack, but Sharpe and Heiden kept a close watch on her, she said. She didn’t believe she was free to go, the report said.

The beatings intensified in May, the woman said, after another prostitute Sharpe recruited to the home sneaked away on her first night.

Sharpe blamed the woman for not keeping watch, she told police, and struck her in the face and body with his fists and a belt.

The next month and a half Sharpe began beating her with metal poles, wires, a wooden paddle and a chair, the report said.

The wire whippings were among the worst beatings, she said, opening deep wounds.

She was afraid to look at herself for several days because “she was afraid of what she looked like,” the report said. The woman recalled Sharpe looking at her butt and laughing, saying “it looked like blackened ass.”

The woman told police the beatings were “torture” and described being scalded with hot water during one attack; in another, Sharpe used waterboarding as punishment, the woman said.

She said Sharpe placed a shirt on her face, forced her into the bathtub and dumped water on her face. The woman thought she was drowning and fell unconscious, she told police.

Sharpe later told her he had to perform CPR to “bring her back,” the report said.

PSYCHOLOGICAL ATTACKS

In addition to the physical attacks, Sharpe also started locking the woman in an exercise room for hours without a bed, blanket or food. She would have to ask Sharpe for permission to use the bathroom, the report said.

Sharpe kept telling the woman “if she wanted to leave just say it,” the report said. But when the woman worked up the courage to ask, Sharpe immediately beat her in an assault that lasted hours, she said.

Because she was already bruised and battered, that beating was even worse. Sharpe didn’t make her work for three weeks because she was “too beat up,” and he feared someone would call the police, the report said.

The woman said Sharpe threatened to kill her family and then kill her if she ever told anyone about the abuse, the report said.

Hughes said it’s hard for some to understand why a woman would stay with a violent pimp, or even an abusive husband.

“The threats aren’t idle to them. They’re real,” Hughes said. “When you are being beaten and tortured, it doesn’t take much for the victim to believe you’re only one moment away from death.”

The abuse was so bad in the final weeks that the woman told police she barely recalled it. She often would pass out during the attacks, in which Sharpe inflicted blows to her head, the report said.

When a detective noticed a scar on the woman’s foot during her interview with police, the woman said Sharpe burned her foot with an iron.

He also beat her with a sock filled with oranges, she said, and sliced her tongue with a knife then poured Tabasco pepper sauce on the cut.

Her finger was broken after she tried to protect herself when Sharpe was striking her with the pole, she said. She tried to make a splint for her finger with a piece of wood she found in her room.

The mental assaults were sometimes worse, she said.

The woman said Sharpe once pointed a gun at her chest and played Russian roulette. He made a point of showing her the gun was loaded, she told police.

Sharpe once struck her in the head with the firearm, causing severe bleeding, she said. Heiden helped her clean the blood after the pistol-whipping, she said, but that was the only time she recalled Heiden offering aid.

Sharpe often complained he couldn’t beat Heiden because she was pregnant, the report said.

After the woman’s wounds began to smell from infections, Sharpe decided to sell her to another pimp, the report said. But the other pimp saw the severity of the her wounds and told Sharpe to take her to hospital “before he had a homicide on his hands.”

Sharpe pushed the woman from the car near the Wendy’s and told her to walk to UMC. If anyone asked about her injuries, the woman was told to say it happened during S&M, in which a person receives sexual pleasure from pain.

The woman was only willing to tell her story to police months later in the safety of a different state, away from Sharpe.

Police arrested Sharpe on Tuesday. During a search of his house, they found blood spatter on the walls, the pole the woman described in her assault and a Glock handgun.

Heiden was also arrested on the same charges as Sharpe, Hughes said. Heiden was Sharpe’s “bottom girl,” who watched the abuse happen without reporting him, she said.

On Thursday a Clark County judge set Heiden’s bail set at $500,000. Sharpe’s bail was set at $1 million.

Contact reporter Mike Blasky at 702-383-0283 or mblasky@reviewjournal.com. Find him Twitter: @blasky.