A Conway man arrested in August on accusations that he plied three boys with vodka and tried to sexually assault them at a Clinton auto garage is now charged in Van Buren County Circuit Court with repeatedly raping a 13-year-old boy over the past three years.
Prosecuting Attorney Carol Crews filed two felony informations Thursday against Matthew Wayne West, 41. One charges rape by forcible compulsion and second-degree sexual assault for an Aug. 4-5 incident at the Black Top Garage on U.S. Highway 65 South in Clinton. The other charges four counts of rape of a child under 14, one for each year from 2023 through this August. Rape is a Class Y felony carrying 10 to 40 years or life on each count.
Both affidavits were sworn Oct. 6 by Lt. Timothy Baker of the Clinton Police Department and list West as a habitual offender. Arrest warrants and no-contact orders were issued Thursday. West was booked into the Van Buren County jail Aug. 5 on sexual assault and furnishing alcohol to a minor, according to the sheriff’s booking record.
According to Baker’s affidavit, three boys from Conway, ages 15, 13 and 10, called 911 at 12:52 a.m. Aug. 5 from the Alon gas station in Choctaw. They told Officer Trevor Young they had been staying at the garage, where West worked and kept a bedroom off the office, because West had promised to take them out on his boat the next day and let them earn money detailing cars.
The boys said West bought Smirnoff vodka on the way to the shop, got angry when they would not drink it and made them drink and smoke cigarettes. They told Baker that West then sent them to the bedroom so “the cops” would not see them, pulled down his pants, exposed himself and said, “you all are giving it up tonight.”
West then drove two of the boys to two gas stations looking for lotion, the affidavit says. The clerk told Baker that West bought three vapes, asked whether the store sold lotion and left saying, “I guess I’m going to Walmart for lotion.” Back at the shop, the boys said, West pulled down the 10-year-old’s pants and touched him while thrusting against his leg, tried to pull down the other two boys’ pants while saying he wanted to perform oral sex on them, and told the 15-year-old he “owed him” for $400 West had given him for a trip.
The oldest boy told West they needed to go outside, and the three walked to the gas station, hid behind a truck and called 911 and the boys’ mother, the affidavit says. Text messages the mother gave police show one boy begging her not to contact West, writing “he was trying to f*** all three of us,” before she drove to Clinton. Breath tests at the police station confirmed two of the boys had been drinking.
Messages pulled from West’s phone show him texting the boys for more than an hour, telling them “the cops got me up” and “I’m out looking for you guys.” Surveillance video from the gas station shows him buying the vodka at 8:45 p.m. Aug. 4 and returning alone at 2:03 a.m. to ask the cashier whether he had seen “no kids walking around here.”
Police served a search warrant on the garage later that morning. West pulled up with two employees while officers were inside and was arrested. In an interview at the jail, West said he bought the vodka for himself, denied giving the boys alcohol, said “all they did was wrestle” and said he did not know why he would go looking for lotion because “neither one of them sells lotion, not even aloe vera.”
That afternoon, the affidavit says, the boys’ mother found a video on one of their phones showing a bald, nude man with a deer-head tattoo on his left arm, matching West’s, climbing on top of the shirtless 15-year-old on the garage couch and thrusting against him.
The investigation widened over the following two weeks. An 11-year-old brother of two of the boys told a forensic interviewer at a child advocacy center that West had reached into his pants at the garage about two months earlier. Another boy who often went to the shop described West “pantsing” the boys, stripping naked, grabbing him in the river during a swimming trip and stepping into the shower with him and saying “let me stroke it.”
On Aug. 20, a 13-year-old boy was interviewed at the Conway Children’s Advocacy Center. Asked why he was there, he said he could tell the interviewer what happened to him, then said, “he raped me.” The boy said West got him drunk on Smirnoff and raped him on the mattress in the garage office, that it had gone on for two or three years, that it also happened at a home in Conway, and that it began when he was 6 or 7, “before the first time Mr. West went to prison,” and resumed after West was released.
Baker wrote that he found a bed set up in the garage office during the search, matching the boy’s account. The boy said he went to Clinton with West almost every weekend and that West told the boys, “You are giving it up.”
A records check showed West is a registered violent offender in Montana from convictions that included aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, impersonating a peace officer and criminal endangerment, Baker wrote. Arkansas court records show no prior felony case under his name. The affidavit says West’s phone also held a large amount of gay pornography, including videos with “teen” and “twink” in the titles, and that the 15-year-old was saved in his contacts as “Big Daddy.”
West remains in Van Buren County Jail with a $1 million bond.
Arkansas Breaking News is not identifying the boys or their families.
The cases are State v. West, 71CR-26-92 and 71CR-26-93, in Van Buren County Circuit Court.
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