2021-06-24

Appellant, Paul Cody Teague, appeals from a jury verdict finding him guilty of aggravated sexual assault, two counts of sexual assault, and one count of aggravated kidnapping. After appellant pled true to an enhancement allegation regarding a prior conviction for aggravated sexual assault, the trial court sentenced appellant to life imprisonment on all counts. Appellant challenges the sufficiency of the evidence supporting his convictions for aggravated sexual assault and one of the sexual assault counts. We affirm the trial court’s judgment.

Factual and Procedural Background

The victim1 in this case was informed by a friend that a “Dean Winters” might be able to help her obtain steady income and stable housing. Victim reached out to Winters online, informing him of her current circumstances. Winters offered Victim a place to stay in exchange for sex, but Victim declined. A couple of weeks later, Winters contacted Victim and offered to provide her a place to stay if she would work for a call service he operated out of his home. Victim agreed to this arrangement and Winters sent a cohort to pick up Victim. At some point, Victim became aware that “Winters” was actually appellant.

Appellant’s cohort took Victim to appellant’s trailer home located outside of Canyon on Sunday, October 15, 2017. Upon entering appellant’s home, the driver immediately stripped naked and began smoking methamphetamine in front of appellant, Victim, and another associate of appellant. Feeling that the entire situation was “very weird,” Victim walked out of appellant’s house, intending to leave, but appellant followed her out and convinced her to stay the night.

Over the course of the following day, appellant had Victim assist him with the call service, as she expected. However, soon thereafter, appellant accused Victim of breaking his headphones and demanded that she replace them. Victim replaced the headphones, but appellant insisted that this was not sufficient. He claimed that, by breaking his headphones, Victim had caused appellant to lose his job. To repay him, appellant demanded that Victim have sex with him. When Victim refused, appellant repeatedly shoved her to a back bedroom where he told her that she could not leave until she had sex with him. Victim succumbed to appellant’s demand. Even though appellant told Victim that he would take her home after she had sex with him, after she complied, he continued to refuse to let her leave.

Appellant confined Victim in a bedroom where he stripped her naked and told her that she was going to have sex with people appellant brought to the house in order to repay him for breaking his headphones and costing him his job. Appellant restricted Victim to this single room for a day, even posting “guards” at the door to the room. Appellant also instigated a fight between Victim and another woman that resulted in the other woman biting Victim’s ear. Victim, fearing that appellant intended to make good on his promise to force her into prostitution, attempted to escape by running out of the back door of the trailer. However, she was recaptured while running through an open field. Appellant choked Victim unconscious and dragged her back to the trailer. Once inside the trailer, appellant chained Victim to a toilet.

Over the next few days, Victim was sexually assaulted multiple times in varying ways. In one such incident, appellant hit Victim with his fists until she lost consciousness. Just before she lost consciousness, Victim saw another man, James Washburn, pull a phallic sex toy, commonly known as a dildo, from his backpack. Whenever Victim would regain consciousness during this period, appellant hit her until she would again lose consciousness. When she was finally allowed to awaken, Victim discovered that she was again chained by the neck and she felt like her “insides were just wounded, very wounded.” Appellant informed Victim that Washburn had penetrated her anus with the dildo. When he informed Victim of this, appellant also told Victim that “You’re a fighter, aren’t you?”

Later, appellant sexually assaulted Victim in the living room of the trailer in front of others. One of the other people at appellant’s trailer recognized that Victim needed medical attention and tried to convince appellant to take her to the hospital, but he refused. Victim lay on the floor barely able to move. Regardless, appellant forced Victim to have sex even though she was throwing up bile and told him that she could not have sex.

Finally, one of the people that had been at appellant’s trailer informed law enforcement that a woman had been kidnapped and was being held inside appellant’s trailer. As a result, an officer knocked on appellant’s door, but no one answered. At that time, Victim was locked in a closet and was barely able to move.

Following the visit by the police, appellant told Victim that she needed to leave but that she needed to be quiet because the police had just been by the trailer. Appellant suggested that Victim be dropped off at her grandmother’s house in Pampa. Victim, knowing that she needed immediate medical attention, convinced appellant to drop her off at the Pavilion in Amarillo. She told appellant that she would say that she was “crazy” and that she had made up the abduction. Appellant eventually agreed but made clear to Victim that she needed to “keep her mouth shut.” Victim was dropped off at the Pavilion at 6:33 p.m. on Thursday, October 19.

Victim was transferred to the hospital. While being evaluated, Victim told a sexual assault nurse examiner that, “I was grabbed and chained around the neck and left in a dirty bathtub. I was raped multiple times by three people. The men put their penises in my mouth, my anus[,] and my vagina.” She further explained that, “They beat me many times. One of the males used a dildo in my anus a lot. It hurt so much.”

he results of Victim’s medical evaluation revealed that her colon was beyond six inches from her sphincter, which means that the object that caused the injury had to have penetrated at least that far. Any object that penetrates that deeply can cause the injury sustained by Victim. The penetration caused a hole in Victim’s colon. This is a significantly dangerous injury because the hole can allow air and stool to leak out, which can cause infection and sepsis. The pain level that is expected from this injury would prevent most people from walking, let alone having sex.

Police officers returned to appellant’s trailer and, based on the information provided by Victim, placed appellant under arrest. Appellant was subsequently indicted for three counts of aggravated sexual assault and one count of aggravated kidnapping. The indictment included an enhancement allegation that appellant had previously been convicted of the felony offense of aggravated sexual assault. After a jury trial, appellant was found guilty of one count of aggravated sexual assault, two counts of the lesser- included offense of sexual assault, and one count of aggravated kidnapping. Appellant pled true to the enhancement allegation. After a very brief punishment hearing, the trial court sentenced appellant to life imprisonment on all counts. Appellant did not file a notice of appeal but sought an out-of-time appeal from the Court of Criminal Appeals, which was granted on January 29, 2020.