An actor who played Santa Claus and painted children’s faces was arrested on child sex charges early Thursday after an international manhunt, just the second time Interpol sought the public’s help to find a suspected pedophile.
Wayne Nelson Corliss, 58, was arrested Thursday morning in his Union City apartment. He is suspected of sexually abusing at least three boys from Southeast Asia thought to have been 6 to 10 years old, according to the international police agency.
Corliss is charged with producing child pornography and could face 10 to 20 years in federal prison if convicted, U.S. officials said.
Colleagues know Corliss, who acted under the stage name Casey Wayne, as a witty man who liked to write and eschewed 9-to-5 jobs in favor of acting and entertainment gigs — including painting faces and playing Santa Claus at parties, said Raven Squire, the superintendent of the apartment building where Corliss has lived for more than a decade.
“He’s a very amiable man, a great sense of wittiness,” Squire said. “He seemed very stable, always paid his rent.”
Two years of investigation had failed to determine the identity, whereabouts or even the nationality of a man shown engaged in sex with children in images associated with a Canadian child pornography investigation in 2005.
