A software engineer who helped develop early-stage video game technology used in popular games like Fortnite and Gears of War will spend the rest of his life in federal prison for holding a 16-year-old runaway girl as a sex slave in Florida for over six weeks.
U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor sentenced Timothy Frederick Murphy-Johnson, 40, of Gainesville, to life in prison plus 90 years in the case.
Murphy-Johnson pleaded guilty to enticing a teen in Corpus Christi, Texas, to run away from her family last summer and join him in Florida where he told her they would build a new life together. They first connected over Discord, an online chat service.
Instead, Murphy-Johnson took the girl to his trailer home located on a dirt road in the rural countryside about 10 miles northeast of the University of Florida campus. The trailer had a fence that hid it from the road and surveillance cameras mounted in trees, authorities said.
Sheriff’s investigators and agents with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said the teen had been stripped, tied to a bed for days at a time, cut with a knife and sexually assaulted by Murphy-Johnson and his then-girlfriend, Oliva Ashford Henn, 21, of Orlando. Inside the trailer, they found sex toys, handcuffs, condoms and Plan B pills, a form of contraceptive.
Investigators recovered Snapchat messages from Murphy-Johnson’s cellphone about plans to “break her and make her into a slave whose only goal is to please me,” according to court records. Another message described plans to chain the girl in a soundproof room.
In videos authorities introduced as evidence in the case, the teen was covered in bruises and cuts, weeping and whimpering at the camera during one assault on a bathroom floor, court records said. Twice, authorities said, they gave her so many narcotics that she overdosed and had to be resuscitated.
The U.S. attorney, Jason Coody, called the crimes “indescribable, and nothing short of horrific.” He said the rescued teen was returned to her family in Texas.
Murphy-Johnson was the founder of Artificial Studios and developer in the mid-2000s of the pioneering software Reality Engine, which coordinated how commands from video game players affected the fast-paced scenes they saw on screens. The technology revolutionized parts of the industry and especially popularized the genre of shooting games viewed from the player's perspective.
Authorities rescued the girl in July 2023 after her family in Texas reported her missing and found her cellphone which she had left behind. She was last seen outside a Wendy’s restaurant there. Murphy-Johnson found a driver on Craigslist willing to ferry her from Texas for $480, according to court records.
By the time authorities began searching for her, she had been gone for more than a month. Investigators traced activity on her social media accounts to Murphy-Johnson’s home in Florida and noticed that Murphy-Johnson was among her followers on Instagram.
After a judge approved a search warrant, they found Murphy-Johnson and the teen inside the trailer with ligature marks on her wrists and ankles, wearing only an oversized T-shirt and underwear. She was malnourished and suffering from a lack of sleep, authorities said.
Questioned that day by authorities, Murphy-Johnson said, “I’m not going to answer.”
Authorities said Murphy-Johnson and Henn had anticipated they would go to prison. Henn once texted him, “This is bad. We’re gonna go to jail,” and added, “She’s going to throw me immediately under the bus.”
Murphy-Johnson answered, “No dude. We will both go, I’ll go worst,” according to court records.
Winsor sentenced Murphy-Johnson on Tuesday to life plus 90 years on federal charges of coercion of a minor, selling or buying a child and sexually exploiting a child. The judge also ordered him to pay $56,000 to the teen.
The judge sentenced Henn to 23 years in federal prison and a lifetime of supervised release once she completes her time behind bars. She also was ordered to pay the victim $56,000.
“These sentences account for the defendants’ vile acts of depravity and send a strong message that those who exploit children will face justice,” Coody, the top federal prosecutor, said in a statement.
Henn suffered from mental health issues and a history of sexual violence, according to statements from friends and relatives in court filings. In late June 2023, neighbors reported hearing screams from the area of the trailer at about 5 a.m. Sheriff’s deputies who responded said Murphy-Johnson wouldn’t come outside and spoke to them only through an open window. They described him as paranoid and shaking.
Murphy-Johnson told deputies that Henn had suffered a psychiatric episode and left in an Uber. He called her for the deputies, and after warning her not to say anything incriminating, she lied to them on the phone that she had missed taking her medication and was going home, authorities said. She had met Murphy-Johnson over the Whisper dating service, she said.
Unbeknownst to the deputies at that moment, the runaway teen was hidden inside the trailer, outside their view.
Henn fled the trailer and the victimized teen for good in early July, weeks before agents rescued the girl. She said she didn’t want to talk to Murphy-Johnson again then blocked him and returned to central Florida, court records said. She was arrested in Orlando in August 2023.
Friends and relatives described Henn in letters to the judge as manipulated and victimized.
“Olivia needs extensive psychiatric care to unwind the years of abuse and assault,” wrote Carolyn Tringali of Melville, New York, a family friend. She called Henn “trusting and gullible, unable to judge other people’s motives.”
Murphy-Johnson's former father-in-law, Bob Gelman of Sunnyvale, California, blamed Murphy-Johnson for the death of his daughter, Molly, who was Murphy-Johnson's third wife, Gelman said. She died at 28 in December 2017 from what the coroner said was an overdose of Benadryl and trace amounts of fentanyl after a violent but brief marriage to Murphy-Johnson on the West Coast. There was no foul play, the coroner said.
When Gelman learned this week that Murphy-Johnson had been sentenced to life in federal prison in an unrelated case, he said, "Couldn't happen to a nastier person. He was not a good guy."
He confirmed that Murphy-Johnson had worked as a software engineer on video game technology in California before he moved to Florida after Molly's death.
The ground-breaking technology that Murphy-Johnson designed was licensed by Epic Games, a nationally recognized video game company popular for games that include Fortnite, Gears of War, Infinity Blade and Unreal.
Epic Games developed its Unreal Engine and briefly hired Murphy-Johnson. He was fired in a contentious dispute in civil court over his employment and stock options he said he had been promised in North Carolina in 2014.
Despite helping develop the video game software that generated millions of dollars in revenue, Murphy-Johnson was hardly wealthy.
In his financial affidavit for a public defender, he told a judge he earned $57,200 a year, had $400 in his bank account and owed at least $10,000 to creditors. In August 2022, he paid $80,000 for the single-wide trailer on five acres that became the scene of the crime.