Maryland Heights Police officer Gregory Ortlip was arrested yesterday at his own department for attempting to entice a child under the age of 15. Ortlip was busted due to an online predator sting in which an undercover detective chatted with Ortlip while posing as a 14 year old girl. When investigators questioned Ortlip he admitted that there are more victims. Ortlip has been with the Maryland Heights Police Department (MHPD) for over 20 years. The MHPD refused to comment on the case, but media reports indicate that Ortlip has resigned.
According to media reports of court documents, Ortlip began an online conversation on August 9th with a member of the Kentucky Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force who was undercover posing as a 14 year old girl. Ortlip brought up the topic of sex after she told him she was 14 years old. Transcripts of their conversation included the following:
Ortlip: Age?
Undercover officer: 14
Ortlip: Nice
Ortlip: Will you send me pictures of your naked body?
Undercover officer: like totally naked?
Ortlip: Yes, (expletive) and everything
Ortlip was finally busted on August 25th and admitted using his IPhone to communicate with underage girls online. He also admitted to receiving "a couple" of nude pictures from "a few" of them. It gets worse, Ortlip's phone records show that he was in close proximity to a cell tower near Ranken Jordan Pediatric Hospital where he was scheduled to work from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Ranken Jordan Pediatric Hospital describes themselves as " a pediatric bridge hospital" which "helps kids from birth to 21" (https://rankenjordan.org/about-us/).
According to public records, Gregory Gordon Ortlip is a 56 year old resident of Saint Charles, Missouri with the last known address of **REDACTED**, but media reports claim he is of O'Fallon. We had exempted that address from our usual courtesy of censoring home addresses of police officers because he is charged with a sex crime involving minors and has admitted to being a predatory sex offender, but we later received a link to a local property records site showing that the property was sold to someone else back in June.
Ortlip has a Facebook profile where we found the images of him used on this page (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008732078949). The images are apparently quite old. We also found information indicating that he made over $80,000 a year as a MHPD officer (https://govsalaries.com/ortlip-gregory-gordon-103346735).
UPDATE: We've updated this article to include a video featuring his mugshot embedded below.