ANADARKO – If his life prison sentence is not overturned, a former Apache emergency medical technician who pleaded no contest to multiple felony counts accusing him of sexually molesting three of his children when they were younger will probably spend the rest of his life in an Oklahoma prison.
Timothy Darien Clauson, 62, was charged in Caddo County District Court on Sept. 15, 2022, with 64 counts of child sexual abuse, 10 counts of rape by instrumentation, and two counts of first-degree rape. The crimes are alleged to have occurred between July 1, 2014, and March 1, 2020. The myriad charges read like a script from a hard-core pornography film.
Sixty-seven of the 76 charges were dismissed on March 26, but the other nine charges remained. Clauson pleaded no contest that day to three counts of sexual abuse of each of three of his then-minor children at some time between July 1, 2014, and March 1, 2022.
He was sentenced to six concurrent life sentences plus three terms of 20 years each, all nine prison sentences to run concurrently (simultaneously rather than consecutively, one after the other). Clauson also was assessed $2,250 in fines ($250 on all nine counts); was charged a $325 Caddo County jail incarceration fee; and was ordered to pay $75 to a district court revolving fund.
Clauson initially pleaded no contest to all 76 charges on Jan. 15, 2025. Nine days later he filed a motion to withdraw his plea but it was denied by District Judge Kory Kirkland. Clauson informed the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals on Feb. 21 that he intended to appeal the jurist’s decision.
However, Clauson’s attorney dismissed that motion on March 25 for a technical reason.
Since Clauson had not been sentenced at the time he filed his motion to withdraw his ‘nolo contendere’ plea, “his appeal of the denial of that plea was premature,” Oklahoma Indigent Defense attorney Michael D. Morehead told the Court of Criminal Appeals. The appellate court’s rules “require the pronouncement of the Judgment and Sentence as a prerequisite to withdrawing a plea of guilty or nolo contendere,” Morehead noted.
Since Clauson had not yet been sentenced, “there is no Judgment and Sentence, thus the motion to withdraw was untimely and invalid,” Morehead acknowledged.
Clauson was sentenced the next day. No new appeal had been filed on his behalf as of 7 p.m. March 28, records of the Oklahoma State Courts Network showed.
He remains in the Caddo County Jail, where he has been incarcerated since Nov. 21, 2024.
Clauson moved from Apache to Oregon in 2022 and was living in Astoria, Oregon. There he was arrested, tried and convicted on charges related to the sexual abuse of his five children during their childhoods.
A probable-cause affidavit filed by Caddo County Chief Deputy Chris Leal relates that he was contacted by Clatsop County, Oregon, Sheriff’s Detective Jeremy Humphrey on May 23, 2022, “in reference to a child sex abuse case he was working on.”
Humphrey told Leal that Clauson had been arrested for multiple counts of child sexual abuse, and said “there was probable cause to believe” that Clauson “also abused his victims while living in Apache, Oklahoma…” The children’s mother, who was residing in Chickasha, “came to Oregon and reported the crimes to their agency, initiating the investigation,” Humphrey said.
The mother took the children back to Oklahoma and the father, Clauson, was arrested “for multiple crimes related to” the sexual abuse of his five children. He was incarcerated in the Clatsop County Jail, Humphrey reported.
Clauson pleaded guilty in Clatsop County Circuit Court to sexual abuse in the first and second degrees, unlawful penetration in the first degree, and using a child in a display of sexually explicit content. The abuse spanned 20 years, investigators said.
Clauson was sentenced Aug. 1, 2024, to 12 years in an Oregon prison and 20 years of probation.