A former Missouri teacher has been sentenced to four years behind bars for sending three 13-year-old boys nude selfies and begging one of them for sex. Emily L. Edson, of Lamar, pled guilty to the charges against her which included three counts of sexual misconduct with a child and one of promoting child pornography. She was sentenced at the Vernon County Circuit Court on October 22.
- Edson was charged in June 2017. The first complaint against Edson was dated May 20, 2017, after a mother of one of the boys she had been sexting with discovered the inappropriate conversations on her son’s cell phone. Former Lamar Police Department chief Rusty Rives called the conversations “sexually provocative.”
- The initial allegations led to two more. Once the first student’s mother came forward, police were able to uncover two more inappropriate relationships Edson was having with eighth-grade students at Children’s Center in Nevada, Missouri, where she was teaching at the time. Soon after, Edson was arrested.
- The Southwest Missouri Cyber Crimes Task Force came on board soon after. Working with Lamar police, they seized several electronic devices from Edson’s home including CDs, a tablet, and a computer as well as her cell phone. This eventually led Barton County Prosecutor Mike Smalley to file an additional charge against her in February 2019 after it was discovered she had been sending nudes to the three boys, all of whom were 13 at the time.
- One of the boys was regularly begged for sex. The texts between Edson and one of the boys was particularly sexual, with Edson said to have begged the boy for sex repeatedly and talked to him in an extremely sexual manner.
- Edson eventually took a plea deal. While she was initially facing charges of sexual enticement of a child as well as three counts of sexual misconduct and two of possession of child pornography, a plea deal saw one of the child pornography charges dropped and the second was amended to promoting rather than possession.
