2 county men receive dozens of indictments each

An Albemarle grand jury handed down dozens of indictments Monday, charging two county men with separate sex-related crimes.
James Gardner Dennis, 34, was charged in 28 indictments, 20 of which charge him with distributing child pornography in January. Dennis’s indictments also included charges of abduction, forcible sodomy, rape and enticement of a minor through the use of communications systems.
Dennis was charged Feb. 20 with the four aforementioned counts after police allege he convinced a 17-year-old girl he met on the Internet to fly here from Connecticut for a modeling job. According to police, the victim said Dennis picked her up and drove her to an apartment in the Turtle Creek condominiums, where he is accused of sexually assaulted her. She later escaped when Dennis went to run errands, according to court documents.
Dennis also received four charges of engaging in the production of child pornography on Oct. 23, 1999; Feb. 23, 2003; Jan. 10, 2005; and Jan. 11, 2005. According to the indictments, the subjects of the pornography were between 15 years old and 17 years old.
Police executed a search warrant at Dennis’s home in February and took several computers, CDs, electronics equipments, clothes and linens. According to a search warrant affidavit filed in early March, a forensic computer analyst found pictures on a media storage device that appeared to be of juveniles.
“The juveniles, one being prepubescent, were unclothed and were being pictured in a sexual nature,” the affidavit said.
Timothy Ray Shifflett, 45, was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy and two counts of failure to register as a sex offender for two
incidents in October. Shifflett’s sodomy indictments refer to incidents with a child under 13 years old that took place between September 2005 and July 2006, according to arrest warrants.
Shifflett was arrested in February after dodging police for about a month. Con-victed sex offenders such as Shifflett are required to update authorities whenever they move to a new address.
Shifflett previously was convicted of forcible sodomy in the mid-1990s. The victim in that case was a juvenile.
Dennis, who is being held at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, is scheduled for a June 13 trial in Albemarle Circuit Court. Shifflett, who is being held at the Middle River Regional Jail in Verona, is scheduled to appear July 23 for a trial in Circuit Court.