Man Sentenced in Sex Tourism Case

A Garden Grove man convicted of planning a trip to the Philippines to have sex with underage girls was sentenced Monday to 20 years in federal prison, a term the judge called “tantamount to a death sentence” for the 87-year-old widower.

John W. Seljan “is not likely to survive the sentence imposed by the court,” U.S. District Judge Alicemarie H. Stotler said in her Santa Ana courtroom.

In November, Seljan became the first person convicted under a 2003 federal law banning sex tourism. He was convicted of charges including attempting to travel to the Philippines to engage in illegal sexual conduct with a minor, producing child pornography and possession of child pornography. He could have been sentenced to as much as 270 years in prison.

“Before this case I would have assumed an 85-year-old man wouldn’t be sexually abusing 9- and 12-year-old girls,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Richard Y. Lee. “His age in this case, frankly, didn’t slow him down when committing this conduct.”

For sentencing, Lee asked Stotler to consider Seljan’s guilty plea in 1977 to first-degree sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl in Wisconsin, a crime for which he was sentenced to five years’ probation and fined $5,000.

Seljan declined to address the court, and his lawyers declined to comment afterward.

He was 85 when he was arrested in 2003 at Los Angeles International Airport before boarding a flight to the Philippines. His briefcase contained photos of him in sexual positions with children, copies of dozens of letters he had sent to young girls and about 100 pounds of chocolate.

The letters are rife with references to “lovemaking.”

“Yes, Honey, I like little girls like you,” said a letter written to a 9-year-old girl. He added later, “Just save all your loving for me.”

He wrote in several letters that he would send the children “to heaven.”

Seljan told federal agents that he had been traveling to the Philippines for 20 years to “educate” girls about sex with their mothers’ permission -- something he believed to be legal there.

Agents had started tracking Seljan, who once owned a cleaning-products business, after an unrelated probe of currency being sent to overseas terrorist groups turned up his explicit letters.