Newton County Sheriff Glenn Wheeler said in a press release Tuesday, Oct. 24, his office had a new sex offender register as a resident of the county on October 23rd. The offender has been assessed as a Level 4 offender, which is the most serious and most likely to reoffend. In the "Community Impact Risk" on his state assessment, Arkansas defines a Level 4 Sex Offender as a "Sexually Violent Predator."
Wheeler said Thomas Ray Wilson (a.k.a., Thomas Stipe) is a 50-year-old white male who is 6'1" and 250 pounds with brown hair and brown eyes. He listed his residence as #7 NC 3670, Harrison. That residence is located near Boat Mountain Road about one mile south of the Boone County line.
Sheriff Wheeler said the initial background information on Wilson is somewhat limited, but there are numerous indicators of multiple sexual assaults on children, mostly in the nine- to eleven-year-old range, both male and female. Some of those incidents involved violence. Wheeler said some of the offenses were in another state when Wilson was a juvenile, so those records are less available. Wheeler said, his office was just made aware of the move and Investigators are digging deeper into Wilson's history to learn more about him.