Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Daycare Worker Kissed Little Girl on Lips 20+ Times: Cops

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

Christopher Helmer, 18, faces a long list of felony charges including Gross Sexual Imposition, Pandering Sexually Oriented Matter and Tampering with Evidence after police said he admitted to kissing a five-year-old girl on the lips more than 20 times. Helmer worked at a day care center in Clermont County, Ohio until the manager fired him and called police. Law&Crime's Angenette Levy goes through the disturbing case in this episode of Crime Fix —a daily show covering the biggest stories in crime.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW: Use code CRIMEFIX at https://jonesroadbeauty.com to get a Free Shimmer Face Oil with your first purchase! #JonesRoadBeauty #adHost:Angenette Levy  https://twitter.com/Angenette5Guest:Mark Weaver https://x.com/MarkRWeaverCRIME FIX PRODUCTION:Head of Social Media, YouTube - Bobby SzokeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinVideo Editing - Daniel CamachoGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

State is terrified if he was trying to adopt this child. A former daycare worker, a diaper fetish and allegations of kissing a little girl on the lips, I go through the case that has left even veteran prosecutors shaken. I'm Angela Levy, and this is crime fix. Before we get into this really icky, disturbing case, I want to tell you about something that I've been using that I really love. It's makeup called Jones Road Beauty. I'm on camera every day. So having makeup that makes my skin feel good and makes me feel good about myself is an absolute must.

And the only thing worse than heavy, cakey makeup is when it also takes a million steps to get ready on a busy morning. And who has time for that? I know my mornings are really hectic. Today's sponsor Jones Road Beauty really gets it. Their products are simple and nourishing, perfect for that your skin but better look. I love this miracle bomb. It's actually a highlighter, bronzer, blush, and lip tint, all in one. it's perfect for me. They also just launched their new lip recharge. It's a powerful lip treatment

with a cooling metal applicator that hydrates and smooth lines over time. So make your routine effortless with modern day makeup that's clean and multifunctional for a limited time. Get a free shimmer face oil on your first purchase when you go to jonesroadbeauty.com and use code crime fix. Christopher Helmer will celebrate his 19th birthday in May, but he'll be doing that behind bars. in jail because he's facing very serious sex crimes charges. And what he's accused of doing is just absolutely creepy. There's no other way to describe it. If you're a parent, what I'm going to tell you will absolutely make you shudder.

And it will make you think twice about who is watching your children. Helmer was an employee at the Jelly Bean Junction Daycare in Claremont County, Ohio, east of Cincinnati. It's a cute little place with buses. It's been around for a really long time. But detectives say Helmer became infatuated with a five-year-old little girl at the daycare. And the detectives say another employee at the daycare actually witnessed Helmer, kiss the little girl on the lips, and that employee reported it, thank God. An officer wrote in the complaint, on 326, 2026, I was dispatched to the Jelly Bean Junction

after the staff reported a possible sexual offense at the business. Once on scene I spoke with the manager who stated a staff member came forward after witnessing a male teacher Christopher Helmer kissing a child on the lips. The manager advised that they spoke with the defendant Christopher Helmer, who admitted to kissing the child on the lips two to three times. Jelly Bean Junction immediately terminated the defendant's employment. I responded to the defendant's address and interviewed him in person. The defendant admitted to kissing the juvenile multiple times, 20 billion. plus times on the lips and stated that he liked the child more than the others. The defendant also admitted to having photos of the juvenile victim on his phone, which he obtained from either social media

or photos taken from a tablet at the daycare facility. Now, if you're a detective or the parent of this child, your alarm bells, your radar, whatever you want to call it, has to be going off like crazy. Detective said they seized Helmer's cell phone. And what? what they found concerned them even more. The complaint goes on to say, after an analysis of the defendant's phone, it was determined that the defendant researched the victim's home address and obtained numerous photos of the juvenile. The defendant also attempted to gain access to the child by offering babysitting services outside of the daycare slash workplace to the victim's family. Based upon my analysis of the interview and the defendant's cell phone, I believe that the defendant had an

infatuation with the child. Helmer was booked into the Claremont County Jail on April 9th on charges of gross sexual imposition and tampering with evidence. Police said they charged Helmer with tampering with evidence because he admitted to having a sexual infatuation with the child and he believed his former employer was going to call the cops so he deleted photos from his phone. Helmer stood at the counter during the booking process and went through the same process that any inmate would go through. His belt was taken and his shoes and he was fingerprinted the whole nine yards. His photo was also taken. Helmer was later indicted on a long list of felony charges including gross sexual imposition, grooming, pandering sexually oriented matter and tampering with evidence.

During his arraignment, Helmer's lawyer entered not guilty pleas on his behalf and argued he should be released on bail. Once I became aware of the charges on April 9th, He actually had his father coming to pick him up to take him to the sheriff's department to be taken in and processed. So the reality is we know that from that third to the ninth, he was not a flight risk. He remained at home. He was aware that charges were coming and he still subjected himself to the jurisdiction of the state of Ohio. Now, as you can imagine, prosecutors, they see this case much differently and wanted Helmer held on a high bond. He had some photos from the daycare of children getting into cars, which is also concerning.

A phone extraction, or I'm sorry, phone examination done by detective, revealed that he had additionally, and this is a new information that we did not know at the time of the time of his evidence. Got his phone and revealed that he had Google search her address at least 27 times, and he then found out how long and how to get from his house to her house. at least 27 times, he was figuring out the route to get their house. That is why we're concerned. No, I do not believe it's a flight risk. I think that little girls everywhere are at risk if he is out.

Additionally, Your Honor, after the Plymouth County Sheriff's Office State Unit did a graphic download of his phone, they found hundreds of child sexual assault material, also known as CSAM, where girls around the age of five were being forced to have sex with grown adult men. So right there, we learn that the prosecutors are, saying that Helmer had been searching this child's home address 27 times routes to get to the house. They're worried he was going to kidnap this child. And the prosecutor went on to reveal that Helmer had a diaper fetish. Well, not illegal. She said it's really creepy and concerning. A diaper fetish. Seriously, the prosecutor said they found photos of kids in diapers on Helmer's

phone. But the main concern was for the safety and security of that five-year-old little girl. So I want to bring in Mark Weaver. He is a prosecutor based in Ohio. He has handled lots of sex crimes cases. Also, he works as a judge sometimes. He does a lot of stuff. So Mark, I thought of you, unfortunately, when this case came across my laptop because it's so disturbing and I knew you would have some really interesting comments on this. We have an 18-year-old guy working at a daycare center, accused. of becoming sexually infatuated with a little girl. First of all, your thoughts on that. This whole thing is creepy. The first word comes to mind is creepy. It's possible to be creepy and not criminal, but this appears to be creepy and criminal.

And my first thought was, does he understand what the rest of us understand about what's appropriate? I don't know. I can't tell from the charging documents whether he has a mental health issue or an emotional stability issue. None of that is a defense and none of that excuses it in my mind. But it just seems so odd that he doesn't quite understand.

It's working at a daycare where they know that there's cameras, yet repeatedly kissing a five-year-old on the mouth. Right. And like it's it wasn't just once. That would be bad enough, but it's worse than that. it's it's 20 times or so according to what we're reading in the documents 20 plus times that he has done this he was caught we know according to the documents at least once doing this thank god the employee you know reported it and didn't just let it go and say oh isn't that cute or something like that

so it goes deeper though because they they go and do an investigation and they say that he admits to being sexually infatuated with this child. I mean, what? You're 18 and you're infatuated with a little girl in a sexual way? Like, what on earth? This is warped. There's some other information that perhaps he has a diaper fetish of some sort. This is warped improper, deeply, deeply troubling behavior. and anybody who has images of this is fantasizing about this. And a decent number of those who fantasize about children, particularly young children, will eventually act on it. And we don't have that evidence now.

I'm pretty sure they said that there's no particular evidence that he was involved in inappropriate sexual conduct beyond the kissing. which under Ohio law could be gross sexual imposition. I think they've charged him, gross sexual imposition, which is essentially stimulating any erogenous zone. It doesn't have to be the ones that naturally come to mind for sexual purpose and sexual gratification. So it's unclear whether he's acted out in other ways,

but there's enough charges here for him to go to prison for a very long time. He might be 18 now. He could be in prison until his hair is. gray. Oh, God. I want to talk a little bit about the lengths that the prosecutor says and the detective say that this guy went to. They say that this Christopher Helmer was so infatuated with this child that he was taking photos of the child from the tablet at the daycare and secreting those away, like taking them off of there. Okay. And for anybody who maybe does, doesn't have a child in daycare or hasn't. A lot of times daycares will take photos of the children

during the day and they'll upload them to like a portal or like this little thing called the journal or something like that. So you can see your kids during the day and you know what they've been up to and it's really sweet and cute because, you know, moms and dads feel bad that they have to take their kids to daycare and it's nice to see what they're doing. So they're claiming he was abusing that. You know, what they do, a service they probably provide for the parents by taking those photos because he's so into this little girl that he's like taking these photos and hoarding them for himself. So that right there is, you know, also crossing a line, Mark, because he's abusing his access to the information that they gather there for the parents at the daycare.

It's warped, but it makes sense, I suppose, from his warp perspective, he wouldn't be able to get photos of the child in another setting unless he went to the child's home or the backyard, whatever. So the only place he can obtain these photos is from the daycare. Or he took them himself with his phone, which would be really weird. All of this is so deeply weird. And as I've mentioned in previous discussions, you and I have had a long crime is the phone tells the tale. When you, are using the internet or social media or your devices to advance your illegal desires, there's almost always a phone record of it. And it's a rare sexual case, a sexual assault case,

where the detective that I'm working with doesn't come back and tell me that they found something additional on the phone, either something that would be a new charge or evidence of destruction of evidence, indications that they tried to delete things, which is a separate third-degree felony in Ohio. And I think the Claremont County prosecutor in this case is charging at least one count of that, tampering with evidence. And he tampered with evidence because they're saying in these documents that once he was fired, you know, the Jelly Bean Junction people, they go and talk to him.

And he's like, yeah, according to everything we're reading here, he was like, yeah, I kissed her on the lips two to three times. I like her more than the other kids. They're like, you're out, you're fired, bye-bye, sayanara. Like, don't let the door hit you on the, you know what, get out. He knows the cops are coming, so he deletes this stuff from his phone. So he's charged with tampering with evidence. So that makes it even worse because not only is he accused of doing this, but he's accused of then going to delete data, and then they go to retrieve all that stuff,

and they can find this stuff, and then they find even more stuff. They find child sex abuse material, according to what the prosecutor said. Yeah, I was in front of a grand jury last week, and they returned an indictment in a case that's a little bit like this, where it was a man who was found to have child sex abuse material on his phone, and when he was advised that the detectives were at his house asking about it, the evidence is that he tried to delete some of these images. And so the grand jury returned a tampering with evidence charge. One of the elements of tampering with evidence is that the defendant knew that an investigation was underway.

Simply deleting illegal photos is not a crime in itself, at least not in Ohio. Having them is a crime, but deleting them is only a crime if you know an investigation or should know. An investigation is underway. No doubt. What I find really disturbing about this, and I think that all parents or even non-parents should be aware of this, is the fact that this guy, this 18-year-old kid who's working at the Jelly Bean Junction Daycare Center, the cops are saying he was so infatuated with this little girl and he liked her so much that he wanted to gain access to her. He was trying to finesse this situation and work it so that he could gain access to her outside of the daycare so that he could be alone with her and that he had offered to her parents to babysit her.

Like he was looking at her on social media. That's how he got some of these photos probably off of her parents' accounts. And then also he was like, hey, all babysit or offering to babysit. What I find interesting about that is that I know the daycares that I've had my little guy in over the years, they had a strict thing in there that said you couldn't do that. You couldn't like ask people at the daycare center to babysit for you outside of the daycare. There was like a boundary there. I don't know if this place had that.

But I think that's a pretty good, that's a pretty good thing. You shouldn't be mixing kind of like business on this side with business on the outside. Do you have any thoughts on that, Mark? Because like I don't think, I don't think that I think that could be a red flag. Like it's not just about making maybe some extra cash. You shouldn't be like wanting to spend that much time with my kid. If you're with my kid like 30 or 40 hours a week. Sure.

Well, it's a pretty well-recognized pattern that sex offenders start by viewing what would some call mainstream adult porn. And then the most deviant ones start looking for younger and younger images, often of over 18-year-olds who look under 18. All that's available through mainstream sites, of course, sadly. And then they move towards illicit things that are illegal to have of children. and some of them, the worst of them, begin looking for ways to get with a child so they can do the things they've been fantasizing about. And these allegations that this man was trying to babysit these children suggest that he had moved from the gratifying himself by looking at these images to wanting to gratify himself by actually sexually interacting with a child.

another case I just recently picked up as a prosecutor involved, somebody who has numerous images. And I'm going to try to be careful with my words here, but numerous images and videos of the youngest children you can imagine being sexually assaulted in such a way that is painful to even consider. And so those are the worst of the worst, the ones who begin looking for that content, and then the ones who begin looking for a way to actually act out that content. That's horrible. I want to talk a little bit about the tampering with evidence charge that you brought up earlier. They talk about this, and they talk about how he was fired from his job, and this is all like an affidavit attached to the charges.

And they talk about how he admitted to having photos of the child that were taken at the daycare center and downloaded to his phone. But upon his termination, Christopher believed a law enforcement investigation was going to take place, and he deleted the photos. from his phone. And so he deleted the photos to destroy evidence that he was infatuated with this little girl, but they also, I guess, went and found more. And they then go on to say, you know, I believe the defendant had an infatuation with the victim. So it's just, it goes from like bad to worse. So they've already indicted this guy at the grand jury.

I mean, a lot of this information is coming from the initial charges that were filed where they arrested him on a complaint. Then they go to the grand jury and they indict him on additional things after they investigate a little further. So do you think they'll find more there there? Is it possible that, you know, there are other victims? Are there going to be more people that you think possibly? will come out of the woodwork and say, yeah, he was like wanting to hang out with my kid or he babysat my kid or things of that nature because I just think it's really weird. I've not seen a lot of, I haven't really seen male workers and I'm all for equal equality

and everything, but I've not really seen male workers at daycares. Yeah, it's not about an equal opportunity. Anybody can get whatever job they want to get. Women and men are different, news alert. women tend to be more nurturing with small children than men. There's always an exception, of course, which is why you see daycare and teachers of young children tend to be women. So there's nothing wrong with having a male daycare worker. It's just unusual. In most of these cases, when I sit down with the investigators and go through the evidence, what I say is,

job one is to make sure that this person is not actually molesting a child in real life. Let's find that out. Is there a child who needs to be protected? That's the first thing. Second thing is, in the past, have they actually made their own videos or images that are illegal? That's the next concern. And then after that, what images do they have? Almost always downloaded from the internet, trade it on dark websites, that sort of thing, or discord or other places.

And in that case, at least in my state, Ohio, where I prosecute, I can bring an individual felony count for every single image. and these creeps typically have dozens, hundreds in some cases of images. I can bring a count for each one of those, depending on the judge. If you have the right judge, a judge will sentence those charges consecutively. So I don't know that this prosecutor in the Claremont County prosecutor is very good, very experienced team down there. I know some of the folks down there, they do good work. They've got enough charges already to send this guy to prison for decades for a very long time if you get the right judge. interesting well we will certainly keep an eye on it because it's it's concerning to say the least

i think the good news here if there is some good news is that maybe this little girl will be young enough that she doesn't really remember this maybe she can get past it and doesn't remember this weird kissing stuff that was allegedly going on uh ick i hope she doesn't remember it I hope she just forgets it and it goes into like outer space wherever. Also that he was, if he's indeed guilty of this, and it's as bad as we think, that he was caught early. Yeah, I think it is a good thing. And kudos to the daycare workers. I'm not a child psychologist, obviously.

I've got a different background in education, but I have worked with lots of child sex victims. One is young as two years old. And I would encourage the parents to, this is not something you know, to talk to this particular child about and bring it up to her that it was a big old deal. It is a big old deal, but a five-year-old doesn't need to know that, and you probably don't need a five-year-old's testimony in order to get a conviction. First of all, five-year-olds are typically not competent in court, and second of all, if you have visual evidence of it.

So here's hoping the parents, the caregivers will let the child live a happy five-year-old's life and not have to let her know how deeply evil this was. Yeah, no doubt, because he's already a, according to them, he's admitted to it. So go with that. Mark Weaver, thank you so much. I appreciate your time. Thank you, Ingenet. The judge set Christopher Helmers bail at $800,000. If he is able to post that, he will have conditions attached to it. Again, Christopher Helmer has pleaded not guilty to these charges

and kudos to the daycare for reporting this immediately and terminating him. However, it does make you kind of wonder how he got this job in the first. place. And that's it for this episode of Crime Fix. I'm Ann Jeanette Levy. Thank you so much for being with me. Remember, you can watch and listen to us on YouTube at any time and also watch and listen to us on Spotify. I'll see you back here next time.