Sex offender's trial gets under way

As she walked to her bus stop, the Waubonsie Valley High School student grew frightened of the stranger she encountered smoking a cigarette outside his apartment.

"He said that I was fine," the 16-year-old girl testified Tuesday. "He was looking me up and down, at my body. It made me nervous. I started walking really, really fast to try to get to the bus stop."

Days later, the teen said the same man propositioned her again as she walked home from school, trailing her in his van.

Her testimony and that of another Waubonsie Valley student came Tuesday in the trial of a convicted sex offender accused of soliciting both girls on Aurora's far east side.

Police arrested Lanny E. Williams, 41, on March 9, 2007, on indecent solicitation of a child charges after investigating both girls' complaints.

They testified Tuesday he made sexually explicit comments to them in separate incidents while they walked through their Chesapeake Landing apartment complex to their bus stop. Both girls said they later encountered Williams again, this time as he followed in his van and asked them to come closer.

"I told him I was only in the ninth grade; that I was 15," the second girl testified of her first encounter with him. "He said that I had a nice body and that I was really pretty. He was pacing back and forth and around me; looking at my body."

Both girls said they made it home safely and told their parents, who alerted police.

The trial before DuPage Circuit Judge Robert Anderson continues this afternoon in Wheaton. Williams opted to have the judge, rather than a jury, decide his fate.

Williams is a convicted sex offender who pleaded guilty Jan. 18, 2006, to forcibly sexually abusing a 16-year-old girl. He also was accused of failing to register as a sex offender in Kane County.

If convicted of the solicitation charges, he faces up to 10 years in prison. Williams is being held on a $200,000 bond in DuPage County jail.