A small-town Ohio mayor is facing voyeurism charges after a suspicious teenage girl set up a secret camera and caught him sniffing her dirty underwear, according to police.
Wesley Dingus, the mayor of rural Butler, Ohio, was busted after the girl — a relative in his care — hid a camera in her bedroom last month and allegedly caught him touching himself while smelling her dirty underwear, according to Richland Source.
After police received the creepy footage, they visited the girl at her high school the following day, where she told them that she set up the camera over suspicions that the 48-year-old mayor was going into her bedroom, according to a police report from the Richland County Sheriff’s Office.
She left her home around 7 a.m. Jan. 13 and got a notification of motion detected in her room just 15 minutes later. When she checked the footage, she saw Dingus enter the room and allegedly smell her undergarments, according to police.
The next day, she received another alert at 7:17 a.m., and the video showed Dingus again going into her room, smelling her worn underwear and “touching his groin area over his clothes,” according to the report.
Dingus — who was out on bond awaiting trial on separate felony charges from last year — declined to speak with investigators in the days after police learned of the videos.
Dingus has been the mayor of Butler, a town of less than 1,000 people in rural Ohio, since 2022. He was arrested on Feb. 13 and charged with two counts of voyeurism.
He appeared in Mansfield Municipal Court on Thursday and was released from custody after posting 10% of a $10,000 bond.
The judge ordered him to wear a GPS monitoring device and barred him from having any contact with the girl, whose relationship with him was not immediately clear.
Dingus was previously arrested in July 2025 when he spotted a man trying to flee police and ran the suspect over with his car to stop him from escaping, according to WKYC.
He pleaded not guilty in connection with that incident, and the man involved was expected to recover from his injuries.
