By Emily Welker
Forum News Service
FARGO – A second woman has come forward to tell authorities she was a kidnapping and rape victim of the accused “vampire trucker” authorities arrested in November at a Moorhead truck stop.
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Timothy Jay Vafeades, 54, appeared Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Fargo on kidnapping, child pornography and transportation for illegal sex charges filed in Utah.
Kidnapping charges filed against him in Clay County District Court were dropped after the filing of federal charges.
According to the case filed against him in federal court, a second woman came forward after seeing news reports of Vafeades’ arrest in Minnesota. She contacted the FBI to say she had been kidnapped by Vafeades in April 2012.
She had agreed to go to dinner with Vafeades after meeting him at the Brothers truck stop in Salt Lake City, Utah, she said, and got into the cab of his truck.
Ten minutes into the drive, Vafeades told her she was going on the road with him for a week or more. She knew she couldn’t do anything, she told FBI Agent Elizabeth Green. Instead of going to dinner, she went with Vafeades to Texas to deliver a load.
There, she told Green, he forced her to engage in sex acts, and continued through threats and violence to rape her over the next three months through the states of Florida and Nebraska, and back to Texas and Utah.
The second woman alleged that Vafeades used similar terror tactics with her as he did with his first reported victim, a 19-year-old woman who was rescued Nov. 26 at the Moorhead truck stop on Interstate 94 after authorities noticed she was the subject of a protective order meant to keep Vafeades away from her.
Like the first woman, the second woman told authorities Vafeades cut her hair, filed down her teeth with a dremel tool, beat her regularly, kept her at work inside the truck doing paperwork and refused to give her any money.
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At one point, she told Green that Vafeades beat her black and blue, then strangled her to the point she nearly passed out. The first woman also told authorities he had strangled her, when she told him she would rather be in Florida than with him.
Unlike the first woman, a relative of Vafeades, the second woman said he forced her to marry him.
The first woman told police Vafeades wore dentures sharpened into fangs over his real teeth, part of his vampire obsession. The truck he allegedly kept her in was called the “Twilight Express.”
According to the federal complaint, both women alleged that Vafeades watched child pornography featuring what appeared to be 14-year-old girls while he held them prisoner.
The federal complaint says weigh station officers in Nebraska noticed bruises on the second woman, separated her from him and interviewed her about her injuries.
She told them about an assault by Vafeades in Florida for which Vafeades is facing charges in that state, the complaint says.
The complaint says FBI Agent Dan Horan searched external hard drives taken from Vafeades’ truck and found hundreds of photos of child pornography.
Fargo federal prosecutor Keith Reisenauer said Vafeades is being held without bond at the Cass County jail for further proceedings in Utah.
