Goo Goo Ga Ga: The 26-Year File on the Man in the Diaper

Wesley Worl jumped out of a truck in a diaper and a pacifier and asked two little girls to change him. Police in Tyler, Texas had been writing his name into reports since 1999. CRIMEHOWL pulled his individual jail records from the Smith County booking system, eight arrests and eight mugshots that no other outlet has published, and the documents read less like a single crime than like a slow-motion warning nobody managed to stop.

It was just before six in the evening on July 29 when the silver truck started keeping pace with the bicycles.

Two girls were riding through their Tyler neighborhood, one of them eleven years old, doing the ordinary thing children do on a summer evening in East Texas. Then they noticed the vehicle. It slowed when they slowed. It stopped when they stopped. According to the police report, it followed them the way a thing follows prey, matching their speed, closing the distance, until the girls turned toward home and saw the truck slide into the parking lot of Andy Woods Elementary School ahead of them.

The driver had gotten there first on purpose. "I guess he had seen her riding her bicycle and had pulled in to kind of get ahead of her into the parking lot of the school," Tyler Police public information officer Andy Erbaugh later told PEOPLE. The man inside was 45-year-old Wesley Worl. He was wearing nothing but a diaper. A pacifier hung from a string around his neck.

He stepped out of the truck. And then, in front of an empty elementary school in the long light of a Texas evening, he said the words that would put his mugshot on every news site in the country.

"Goo goo ga ga," he called out. "I need a diaper change."

According to the arrest affidavit, he also asked the girls a question, the kind of question that turns a stranger into a nightmare a child carries for years: "Will you change my diaper for me?"

The run for the garage

The girls did the right thing. They ran.

They pedaled away so hard and so fast that when they reached the next refuge they could find, a family's house where a man and his son were working in the garage, they were bleeding. The girls hit the driveway with enough panic to skin their knees. A "scary man" was chasing them, they said. The man had been following them. The man in the diaper had asked them to change him.

The son took off to go looking for the truck the girls had described. A woman inside the house tried to calm the children down while the search was on. It was not easy. The affidavit describes the girls as "visibly shaking" and "truly petrified." They were trembling so hard they could barely get the words out. One of the eleven-year-olds told officers, simply, that she had been shaking from fear.

The family knew the girls. That mattered. They got the parents on the phone, the parents came, and the police were called immediately. In the chaos one of the witnesses did the single most useful thing anyone can do in a moment like that: they wrote down a partial license plate. Police would also recover video of the truck.

"We got a description of him, and we put two and two together and looked, found it was Wesley Worl, got warrants on him and arrested him," Erbaugh said.

On August 7, officers picked Worl up at his place of work without incident and took him to the Tyler Police Department for questioning before booking him into the Smith County Jail. He was charged with criminal solicitation of a minor and, in a separate matter, criminal trespass. His bonds totaled $600,000.

The booking photograph taken the day of Worl's arrest, August 7, 2025. (Source: Smith County Jail)

Worl, in a green shirt and handcuffs, is led out by Tyler police officers after his arrest. (Source: Tyler Police Department arrest, Aug. 7, 2025)

Handcuffed behind his back, Worl is walked to a waiting vehicle by two officers. (Source: Tyler Police Department arrest, Aug. 7, 2025)

Worl is escorted down the ramp of the City of Tyler Police building. (Source: Tyler Police Department arrest, Aug. 7, 2025)

If the story ended there, it would be a grim but familiar local headline: a disturbed man, a frightening encounter, a fast arrest. It does not end there. The reason this case traveled so far beyond Tyler is buried in the affidavit, in the part that stops being about one July evening and starts being about a quarter of a century.

A file that opens in 1999

Investigators did not have to build a profile of Wesley Worl from scratch. They had one already. They had been adding to it since before the eleven-year-old he frightened was born.

The charging documents lay out a history of similar behavior stretching back more than 25 years. Read in order, it is not a rap sheet so much as a calendar of warnings, each one logged, each one apparently insufficient to stop the next.

September 1999. Worl is seen watching children at a daycare. When Tyler police question him, he offers an explanation he will return to again and again over the decades: he says he was only changing his diaper.

April 2002. He is spotted looking into apartment windows. Questioned again, he admits to police that he had been watching small children at a daycare.

April 2005. He is arrested for stalking his ex-girlfriend and sentenced to five years of probation.

August 2005. He is caught watching a woman near a pool. He is given a criminal trespass warning and sent on his way.

November 2005. He is found watching children from behind a tree. Another criminal trespass warning.

July 2006. He is reported walking around the Walmart on Broadway Avenue, looking at children and women with his hand inside his shorts. When officers confront him, he tells them he was checking to see whether he had soiled his diaper.

That stretch finally produced real consequences. Worl was prosecuted for the November 2005 and July 2006 incidents and sentenced to seven years in prison. For a while, the calendar goes quiet, because he was not free to fill it.

November 2012. Police receive a report that he exposed himself to a child at the Walmart on Troup Highway. Worl denies exposing himself. He admits, instead, to showing his diaper. He is given yet another criminal trespass warning.

October 2016. He is arrested for criminal trespass at Faulkner Park.

At some point along this timeline, the city of Tyler banned him from its parks entirely. By the affidavit's own summary, the documents describe a man with "a sexual fetish of wearing a diaper" and "a reputation of being a sexual predator toward children," specifically girls between the ages of 8 and 12.

The eleven-year-old on the bicycle fit the profile precisely. So did her friend.

The booking ledger: 20 years of mugshots nobody had assembled

The affidavit is a prosecutor's summary. It tells you a story. What it does not show you is the paper trail underneath that story, the individual arrests logged into a county computer, each with a date, a warrant number, a charge, and a photograph taken at the booking desk.

So we went and got them.

Using the Smith County online jail records, CRIMEHOWL assembled every booking filed against Wesley Steven Worl, all of them tied to the same sheriff's office identification number, SO# 127337, the digital thread that follows a single person through a county system no matter how many years pass between visits. The portal returns eight separate bookings stretching from 2005 to the present. Each one carries a mugshot. Read in order, top to bottom, they do something no single news photo can: they let you watch a man age across two decades inside the same jail, while the charges keep circling the same fixation.

These are public records. A booking is an arrest, not a conviction; where the records show how a case resolved, we have said so. Here is the ledger, in the order it happened.

April 21, 2005: Stalking

Booking #81865 · charge: STALKING WITH CONDITIONS · warrant 05-057-C · offense date Aug. 18, 2004 · arresting agency: Whitehouse Police Department · surety bond · released the next morning. Listed then as a white male, 5'8", 150 lbs, brown hair, hazel eyes.

The oldest photograph in the file shows a thinner, younger man with a full head of dark hair and wire-frame glasses. This is the stalking arrest the affidavit refers to obliquely, the one that ended in five years of probation. The victim was an ex-girlfriend. The warrant came out of neighboring Whitehouse, the small town just south of Tyler where Worl would still be living two decades later.

November 2, 2007: Stalking, probation revoked

Booking #115054 · charge: STALKING / PROBATION REVOCATION · warrant 114-174-06 · arresting agency: Tyler Police Department · booked in late on a Friday night and held nearly five months, until March 21, 2008, when he was "released to other agency."

This booking is not in any of the news write-ups, and it is one of the most important entries in the ledger. The warrant number begins with "114," the local district court, and the charge revokes the probation Worl had been given for the 2005 stalking case. "Released to other agency" is bureaucratic shorthand for the moment a county hands a prisoner up the chain, in this case toward state custody. The affidavit mentions a seven-year prison sentence only in passing; this is the booking that shows the door to prison swinging open, the hinge the news coverage left out.

January 6, 2009: Parole violation

Booking #143759 · charge: PAROLE VIOLATION · warrant 12-23-2008-07500351 · arresting agency: Tyler Police Department · held from Jan. 6 to Feb. 25, 2009, then again "released to other agency."

Another booking the news coverage missed entirely. Out on parole from the seven-year sentence, Worl was back in the Smith County jail inside a matter of months, picked up on a parole-violation warrant issued in December 2008. The mugshot shows the change that the next fifteen years would only deepen: the hairline retreating, the face filling out, the glasses gone.

December 11, 2012: Criminal trespass

Booking #290781 · charge: CRIMINAL TRESPASS · warrant R-12-603-M · offense date Nov. 10, 2012 · arresting agency: Tyler Police Department · surety bond · in and out the same afternoon, booked at 12:19 p.m. and released at 2:27 p.m.

The offense date here, November 10, 2012, lines up with the affidavit's account of Worl exposing himself, or as he told police "showing his diaper," to a child at the Walmart on Troup Highway that month. On the books it became a criminal trespass, and he bonded out within two hours.

August 16, 2013: Criminal trespass

Booking #304017 · charge: CRIMINAL TRESPASS (180 days, Smith County Jail) · warrant 003-80547-13 · arresting agency: Smith County Sheriff's Office · held from Aug. 16 to Oct. 13, 2013 · disposition: time served.

A fourth booking absent from the news timeline. This time the trespass carried a 180-day jail tag, and Worl served roughly two months before the disposition was logged as time served. The pattern is now visible in the records themselves: the conduct keeps coming back, and the system keeps reaching for the same low-level charge to answer it.

October 24, 2016: Criminal trespass

Booking #B16-04084 · charge: CRIMINAL TRESPASS · warrant: ONSIGHT · offense and arrest date Oct. 24, 2016 · arresting agency: Tyler Police Department · cash bond · released the next day.

This is the Faulkner Park arrest the affidavit cites. "ONSIGHT" means there was no warrant waiting; an officer saw him and arrested him on the spot. He posted a cash bond and was out within twenty-four hours.

March 31, 2017: Criminal trespass

Booking #B17-02178 · charge: CRIMINAL TRESPASS (60 days) · warrant 002-83416-16 · arresting agency: Smith County Sheriff's Office · fine and costs $239.00 · held from March 31 to April 20, 2017 · disposition: time served.

The orange-jumpsuit photograph. By 2017 the file is thick, the bookings are routine, and the answer the county keeps landing on is a few weeks in jail and a $239 bill. Worl served about three weeks and walked.

August 7, 2025: Solicitation and trespass

Booking #B25-05806 · two charges: SOLICITATION TO COMMIT INDECENCY WITH A CHILD / EXPOSES (warrant DG-080725-1, offense date July 29, 2025) and CRIMINAL TRESPASS (warrant DG-080725-2, offense date July 15, 2025) · arresting agency: Tyler Police Department · surety bond · still in custody. Listed at 5'11", 154 lbs, brown hair, hazel eyes.

The newest photograph, and the first time the charges break out of the trespass loop. The jail record is more precise than the news coverage was: the headline count is not a generic "solicitation of a minor" but solicitation to commit indecency with a child by exposure, tied to the July 29 encounter in the school parking lot. The second charge, criminal trespass, carries an offense date of July 15, two weeks earlier, matching the affidavit's note that Worl had been caught on Walmart surveillance on multiple dates that month before he ever pulled into the lot at Andy Woods Elementary.

What the records show that the affidavit did not

Laid end to end, the eight bookings do more than confirm the affidavit. They fill in its silences.

The seven-year prison sentence that the affidavit drops in a single clause turns out to have a paper spine: the November 2007 stalking and probation-revocation booking that sent him up, and the January 2009 parole-violation booking that pulled him back into the county jail less than two years later. Neither appeared in the wire stories. Both are sitting in the public record for anyone who thinks to look up SO# 127337.

The records also expose the rhythm the news coverage flattened. The affidavit lists incidents; the jail ledger shows what was actually done about them. Across twenty years the answer was strikingly consistent. A daycare contact, an apartment-window report, a man watching children from behind a tree: those produced field contacts and trespass warnings, not bookings. When bookings did happen, the charge was almost always the lightest tool on the belt, criminal trespass, answered with a same-day bond or a few weeks of time served. Only twice in two decades, the 2007 stalking revocation and the 2025 solicitation count, did the system reach for anything heavier.

There is even a small forensic wrinkle in the descriptions. The two earliest bookings list Worl at 5'8" and 150 pounds; from 2009 on he is recorded at 5'11" and 165, and in 2025 at 5'11" and 154. The height jump is almost certainly a booking-desk estimate rather than a growth spurt at thirty, the kind of discrepancy that lives in real records and never in a press release. What stays fixed across all eight cards is narrower and more useful: brown hair, hazel eyes, and the same five-figure ID number, the constant that let us prove these are one man and not eight.

The word "fetish" is doing a lot of work

It is worth pausing on the language, because the language is part of how a man stays loose for 26 years.

A diaper and a pacifier read, at first glance, as bizarre rather than dangerous. They invite a certain reflex: he is strange, he is sick, he is a creep, but is he actually a threat? Worl appears to have understood that reflex and used it. Time and again, his explanation to police was not a denial of presence but a reframing of intent. He was not watching the daycare. He was changing his diaper. He was not lurking at Walmart with his hand in his shorts. He was checking whether he had soiled himself. He did not expose himself to a child. He showed his diaper.

Each explanation is built to convert a predator into an eccentric, to move the conduct out of the category of crime and into the category of embarrassment. And for a remarkably long time, on the record, it worked well enough to keep producing trespass warnings instead of charges. A trespass warning is a piece of paper that tells a person to leave and not come back. It is not a fence. It is not a sentence. It is a note in a file, and the file kept growing.

What changed in July 2025 was not the behavior. It was the audience. Two children, terrified but clear-eyed, ran for help instead of freezing. Adults who knew them believed them instantly. A witness caught a plate. A camera caught a truck. The reframing that had worked on so many adults over so many years did not get the chance to work on a frightened eleven-year-old's account, because she got to an adult who took her at her word and called the police that same evening.

The summer before the parking lot

The 2025 case did not arrive out of nowhere either. Tucked into the timeline is one more entry, and it suggests the July 29 encounter was an escalation that the system saw coming and still did not head off.

In July 2025, the same month as the elementary-school incident, Worl was caught on surveillance going to a Walmart on several different dates. The store's manager, according to the affidavit, expressed a desire to pursue criminal charges. The pattern that began at a Walmart on Broadway Avenue in 2006 and resurfaced at a Walmart on Troup Highway in 2012 was, by the summer of 2025, playing out on camera again.

A man with a documented, decades-long fixation, banned from the city's parks, with a prison term already behind him for this exact category of conduct, was back in the public places where children gather. Days later he was in a diaper in a school parking lot, calling out to little girls on bikes.

"History of this behavior since 1999"

When the story broke, the public reaction was immediate and almost uniformly one of disgust, with an undercurrent of disbelief that the timeline had been allowed to run so long.

On true-crime forums where the case spread, the recurring note was not shock at the strangeness of the diaper and the pacifier. It was anger at the calendar. "History of this behavior since 1999 and he's still terrorizing children," one commenter wrote. "I'll never understand." Another, reading the police account, landed on the only consolation available: relief that this time he had been "dumb / crazy enough to get caught." The kindest reactions were aimed at the girls. The harshest were aimed at the years of warnings that preceded them.

It is the correct instinct. The horror of the Wesley Worl file is not that one man dressed as an infant and frightened two children on a summer evening. It is that the documents describing him as a predator toward girls aged 8 to 12 were written, and read, and filed, across four presidential administrations, and that the most decisive action in the entire record was taken not by a court but by an eleven-year-old who knew to run and a neighbor who knew to dial.

Where it stands

Worl sits in the Smith County Jail, charged with criminal solicitation of a minor and criminal trespass, his bonds set at a combined $600,000. He has not been convicted in connection with the July 29 incident, and the charges remain allegations to be tested in court.

But the file is no longer a private thing, a box of warnings known only to the officers who wrote them. It is public now, in plain language, with dates attached. Whatever a jury eventually decides about a single evening in a school parking lot, the larger record is already legible to anyone willing to read it in order: a man who told police for 26 years that he was only changing his diaper, and a city that kept writing it down.

The girls got home. They were shaking, and their knees were scraped, and they will carry the man in the diaper with them for a long time. They also did the thing that finally turned a file into a charge. They ran, and they told, and someone believed them.

That, in the end, is the part of this story worth holding onto. Not the pacifier. Not the goo-goo-ga-ga. The two kids on bikes who refused to be talked out of what they saw.

Reporting drawn from the Tyler Police Department arrest affidavit as described in coverage by KLTV, CBS19 (Jude Ratcliff and Zak Wellerman), PEOPLE, and the New York Post, including on-record comments from Tyler PD public information officer Andy Erbaugh. The eight-booking arrest ledger and all eight mugshots were compiled independently by CRIMEHOWL from Smith County's public online jail records, indexed to sheriff's office number 127337. A booking is an arrest, not a conviction. All charges are allegations; Worl is presumed innocent unless and until convicted.