How Air Force enlistee in Delaware allegedly used Snapchat to recruit, rape 15-year-old girl

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Petrified, the mother of a 15-year-old girl dialed 911.

Not long after waking up, she’d received a prescheduled text message from her daughter that said she’d run away from their home in suburban Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Frantic, she raced to the girl’s room. The teenager wasn’t there. She checked footage from the home’s security camera and was horrified to see the petite girl slipping out of a back window at 3:18 a.m. — four hours earlier.

The girl had left her cell phone behind, though. It showed that she’d likely been picked up by an unidentified male she’d been exchanging sexually charged messages and images with for more than two months on Snapchat, a mobile app in which messages automatically delete after a 24-hour period. The guy’s display name was “Dil.”

A Falls Township, Pennsylvania, police detective rushed to the girl’s home and realized she might be in serious danger.

It was about 7:30 a.m. on Aug. 20.

“We realized that this was not a typical runaway,” Falls Township Police Chief Nelson Whitney told WHYY News. “We had a fear for the safety of this girl, and we realized we had to scale this up into a full response.”

Police sent an emergency request to Snapchat for the phone number the girl was messaging. They called in other law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, to coordinate a manhunt in hopes of rescuing the teen.

They soon determined the alleged perpetrator’s phone was in Delaware at, of all places, the Dover Air Force Base —  a major U.S. military installation more than 100 miles from the girl’s home.

The device belonged to an enlisted airman, 27-year-old Dylan Drake Williams, according to police. When officers descended on the base about 3 p.m. that day, Williams admitted the 15-year-old was at his rental home about 5 miles away, according to court records.

Minutes later, police found the girl in the basement.

Interviewed by police later that day, Williams allegedly told detectives he knew the girl was a minor and only hugged her after picking her up, though they did sleep together in his bed. He would not answer questions about further physical contact, but acknowledged his actions “could ruin his life,” court records state.

The teen later told the FBI, however, that during the 12 hours after Williams picked her up, he raped her in the woods near home, in his car and at his house, court records state.

Federal prosecutors and police in both states have since charged Williams with rape and other child sex crimes that could put the military man behind bars for decades.

WHYY News does not name victims or alleged victims of sexual assault.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware is taking the lead in prosecuting Williams, who is currently being held at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia.

Conor Wilson, the federal public defender representing Williams, did not return calls from WHYY News.

Danielle Williams, the mother of Dylan Williams, said that her son “is innocent until proven guilty” when reached by phone in Colorado, where he grew up.

The Air Force referred inquiries about Williams’ arrest to “police and appropriate prosecuting authorities.” A spokesman would not tell WHYY News how long Williams had been with the military, his job duties or his official rank.

Whitney, who spent several anxious hours with the girl’s family during the agonizing ordeal, said the account she gave authorities and the Snapchat messages illustrate the frightening threat that sexual predators pose in society.

“Everybody has to be careful but you know how teenagers are, like they always have been,” the police chief said. “These predatory offenders want to take advantage of the innocence that comes with being a younger person and it’s terrible.”

FBI: Airman sent crude, degrading Snapchat messages to girl

The harrowing story of how Williams and the teen communicated, the middle-of-the-night flight from her home, his alleged sex crimes and the girl’s rescue and return to her family is detailed in criminal files at U.S. District Court in Wilmington and state courts in Delaware and Pennsylvania.

WHYY News also interviewed Whitney and Assistant U.S. Attorney Claudia Pare. No one from Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings’ office, which is prosecuting Williams for second-degree rape, would comment.

Williams and the girl began communicating as early as June after she accepted his friend request on Snapchat, according to the court records.

While the app’s default setting deletes messages from user’s phones immediately after they are viewed, authorities recovered multiple exchanges between the girl and Wiliams that at least one of them saved, according to the federal complaint.

The messages from Williams, many of them crude, vulgar and degrading in nature, allegedly suggested that he had raped her within a few days of connecting on Snapchat.

On June 13, the first message that authorities said they recovered, the girl told Williams she lived in the Levittown area of Bucks County.

Five days later, he asked, “you wanna see me again,” and she replied, “ofc I do.”

There was some lapse in their correspondence, but she initiated contact again by June 30 and told him that her parents had been going through her phone, so she blocked him.

She later elaborated on their early interactions in an Aug. 26 interview with the FBI, six days after she was found in his home.

She told an agent then that Williams knew her age and told her he was 27.

Their exchanges quickly became sexual in nature, she allegedly said. He initially asked her for nude photos and videos, and she complied, and he also sent explicit videos of himself, court records state.

She told the FBI, Williams drove to Levittown in his 2018 Nissan Sentra soon after they began communicating and met her and a friend at basketball courts near her home.

After her friend left, he raped her, recorded the crime on his phone, and sent her the video afterward, the federal criminal complaint states.

She also told the FBI agent that another reason she had blocked Williams in June after the first rape was that someone she told about the older man said the situation “wasn’t right.”

But after several days without contact, the federal complaint stated, she “missed Williams, so she unblocked him and they resumed exchanging sexually explicit messages” on Snapchat.

They also talked about him picking her up and “taking her away from Pennsylvania” and he asked if she wanted to be “kidnapped.”

Girl rescued from basement of airman’s rental home

At about 3 a.m. on Aug. 20, she left her home and he was waiting down the street, the federal complaint states.

She later told the FBI that Williams raped her repeatedly after picking her up — and recorded the crimes with his phone — the complaint states.

At some point, the complaint states, Williams left for work at the air base, but first told her “not to use the bathroom until he came back.”

Williams never returned home.

Authorities said that the Snapchat account the girl had been communicating with was registered to a phone that belonged to Williams and that he was an active duty airman at the Dover Air Force Base.

The base is known worldwide for its mortuary that handles the remains of U.S. servicemen killed in action. President Donald Trump had been at the base on July 22 with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top military commanders for the dignified transfer of four Army soldiers killed in Iraq and Jordan during the war with Iran.

But on Aug. 20, the base was the focus of the FBI, which had made an emergency data request with his cellular provider, AT&T, to find out where the phone — and likely their suspect — was located.

AT&T provided location pings that showed Williams was near the Dover base’s housing units. Authorities contacted the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, which joined Dover police, FBI agents and U.S. marshals at the base to confront Williams.

He told them the girl was at his rental home. Dover police took him into custody and back to their headquarters.

Police sped to Williams’ home, where his roommate answered. Officers searched the two-story home and found the girl in the basement.

The time was about 3 p.m. — some 12 hours after she’d left her own home.

Police in Delaware notified their counterparts in Pennsylvania, who had been providing services to the girl’s family and getting information from them as they waited with trepidation in a room at the Falls Township police station.

Chief Witney rushed to notify the family that she had been found.

“It was one of those emotional scenes that you’ll never forget. The mom hugged me, the dad hugged me,” Whitney recalled.

“Then the mom had a moment where she kind of collapsed against the wall and her husband and I kind of caught her and helped her sit down. They were so distraught, worried about their daughter and it was a very emotional thing to be able to find her and to reunite her with her family.”

Williams, teen provide contrasting accounts to Dover police

Dover police took the 15-year-old to their headquarters, where she met with a victim’s advocate.

Officers took her to nearby Kent General Hospital, where she told doctors and nurses about the rapes, the complaint states.

Back at the police station, Williams gave a conflicting account of their time together, according to court records.

He told a detective he knew the girl’s age and that it was “bad” to have affection for a minor, but still “built a relationship through Snapchat” with her.

Williams also acknowledged that he picked her up the previous night and drove her to his home in Dover, even though he knew “it would ruin his life’’ if he was caught, court records state.

The only physical contact Williams acknowledged was a mutual hug when he picked her up, the federal complaint stated, adding that when she got in his car, “she seemed as though she did not want to be there.”

At his home, “Williams said they slept until he went to work,’’ the Delaware arrest warrant states.

The federal complaint stated Williams “would not answer questions related to any further physical contact with the victim.”

Williams also acknowledged the girl “thought he was going to hurt her and kill her,” the complaint stated.

The bottom line, the complaint states, was that Williams knew he was in serious trouble.

“Williams stated he was too much of a coward to take his own life,” the complaint states, “so he would not care if the consequence was the death penalty.”

‘The whole world can access your kids’

Dover police had heard enough.

They went to a Dover magistrate, who signed an arrest warrant that evening for second-degree rape against Williams, who was held at a Delaware prison in lieu of $120,000 cash bail.

Falls Township police also went to court that day, too, and charged Williams with unlawful sexual contact with a minor, corruption of a minor and related charges.

And on Aug. 28 — two days after interviewing the girl — the feds charged Williams too. He faces three federal felony counts: enticing a minor to engage in sexual activity, traveling across state lines to commit the sex crimes and transporting the girl across state lines to rape her. Williams was taken into federal custody on Sept. 3.

As she prepares to prosecute an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force in federal court, prosecutor Pare echoed Chief Whitney in cautioning parents about the dangers posed online by predators.

“It’s so important for parents to have open and continuing conversations about safe and appropriate online behavior, to educate themselves about the kinds of apps and websites kids are using and visiting,” Pare said. “And then also instituting age-appropriate privacy settings to restrict access to things kids should just not be looking at.

“The internet has so many benefits but the biggest downside is that the whole world can access your kids. That includes criminals who want to harm them.”