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From left: William and Zachary Zulock
William and Zachary Zulock were arrested in 2022 and pleaded guilty this year.
A judge in Georgia has sentenced a male couple to 100 years each in prison without parole for sexually abusing the children they had adopted.
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William and Zachary Zulock of Walton County, about 30 miles east of Atlanta, were arrested in 2022 after the Walton County Sheriff’s Office received a tip that another man was receiving pictures and videos from the couple that depicted child sexual abuse.
The Zulocks had adopted two young boys a few years earlier. When interviewed by investigators, “they both admitted to sexually abusing both boys over a period of time,” according to a press release from the Alcovy Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office.
In August of this year, William Zulock pleaded guilty to six counts of aggravated sodomy, three counts of aggravated child molestation, two counts of incest, and two counts of sexual exploitation of children.
In October, Zachary Zulock pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated sodomy, three counts of aggravated child molestation, two counts of sodomy, three counts of sexual exploitation of children, and two counts of pandering for a person under 18. He pleaded not guilty to two counts of incest, but Judge Jeffrey L. Foster found him guilty of those charges after a bench trial.
Foster sentenced both men December 19. “After hearing arguments from both the State and the defense, the Court essentially followed the State’s sentencing recommendation for both Defendants: 100 years in prison followed by life on probation,” the press release says. “Because of the nature of the offenses, the Defendants will not be eligible for parole for the entire 100 years.”
“It cannot be stressed enough how important it is for our society to have individuals willing to adopt children in need,” Alcovy Judicial Circuit DA Randy McGinley said in the release. “But anyone who does so and then abuses those children deserves extremely harsh consequences and decades in prison. The sentence imposed not only appropriately punishes these Defendants for their repeated selfish actions but also sends the message to the public that such actions will never be taken lightly.
“Those involved with the investigation and prosecution of this case will never forget what they had to see and hear in this case. These two Defendants truly created a house of horrors and put their extremely dark desires above everything and everyone else. However, the depth of the Defendants’ depravity, which is as deep as it gets, is not greater than the resolve of those that fought for justice and the strength of the victims in this case. The resolve I have seen from these two young victims over the last two years is truly inspiring.”
Most people who sexually abuse children, including men whose victims are boys, are heterosexual. "Abuse is about power and control and is not anchored by sexual orientation," notes the Zero Abuse Project of the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center.
“When researchers do use genuine scientific principles to explore LGBTQ families, they find consistently that growing up in households headed by same-sex parents does not raise overall risks for children [not just for abuse but any poor outcome], as found in scores of peer-reviewed studies collected by Cornell’s What We Know Project,” social scientist Nathaniel Frank told Reuters Fact Check in 2022.
