SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — A Springfield man was arrested after federal prosecutors submitted documents in which he admitted to sexually abusing multiple children over years.
Yevgeniy Dudko, 51, was charged last week with sexually exploiting a child to create pornography. Court documents say he is also facing several other allegations of abuse that occurred in multiple jurisdictions.
In a federal case, he faces a charge of sexual exploitation of children. If he is convicted, he faces a punishment between 15 years in prison with five years of supervised release and 30 years in prison with life on supervised release.
According to court documents, a Greene Country Sheriff’s Office deputy responded to a Springfield home on March 13 to respond to a report about someone finding photos of Dudko with a child, who was under the age of 18.
The photo was described as depicting the child asleep with Dudko’s exposed genitalia near their face. The report stated that the child’s mother confronted Dudko about the photo and he said he deleted it.
When deputies attempted to contact the child’s mother at her home, she denied that any form of abuse was occurring in the house and that she had not seen explicit photographs. In the incident report, investigators wrote that her responses made it seem she had been told what to say.
On March 14, it was found that the report was made by an adult woman who said that Dudko had sexually abused her and her siblings when they were minors. She told investigators that the person who found the explicit photo and contacted her about the issue and she then made the report.
Contact was made with Dudko, who agreed to an interview with investigators. During the interview, he told investigators that he got drunk before he took the photo and performed other acts on the child while they were sleeping. He also admitted to sexually assaulting three other people when he helped bathe them when they were minors.
While searching Dudko’s phone, investigators found images that depicted Dudko sexually assaulting the original minor, as well as numerous other photos. The date stamps of the photos were from a range of about 10 months stretching from 2021 to 2022.
