Putnam man gets 4 years for child molesting

A Putnam County man who pleaded guilty in January to child molesting appeared in court for sentencing this week.

Thomas Jerry Hudson, 75, was sentenced by Senior Circuit Court Judge Diana LaViolette to serve four years with the Indiana Department of Correction after he admitted to molesting a female child in 2004.

The molestation sentence comes in addition to a two-year federal sentence that Hudson is serving for passport fraud.

According to police, Hudson falsified documents in order to obtain a passport and fled the United States in 2005, in an apparent attempt to avoid the child molesting charge.

A joint investigation by the Putnam County Prosecutor's Office, U.S. State Department's Diplomatic Security Service and U.S. Marshals Service led to Hudson being apprehended in October 2006 near the town of Merida, Venezuela.

According to the DSS, Hudson was located after business records showed that he began withdrawing funds from a military pension in Venezuela in August 2006. The following month, Hudson was indicted by a federal grand jury for passport fraud and later pleaded guilty.

He was being held in the Putnam County Jail this week, but Prosecutor Tim Bookwalter said he thought Hudson would be taken to a federal prison to serve out his passport fraud sentence, to be followed by his state sentence for child molesting.