By Michael P. Rellahan | Reading Eagle

A Pennsylvania youth pastor who impregnated a teenage girl has now been charged with soliciting the murders of his senior pastor and the judge who sentenced him.

Jacob M. Malone 

Jacob M. Malone, 37, is charged with attempted murder, criminal solicitation, attempted aggravated assault and making terroristic threats.

At the time of the alleged murder-for-hire solicitation last year, Malone was imprisoned at Laurel Highlands state correctional institute in western Pennsylvania, serving three to six years after pleading guilty to charges of corruption of minors, institutional sexual assault and endangering the welfare of children.

He had been arrested in 2016 after a teenager gave birth to his child. The sexual relationship was reported to police by Harold Lee Wiggins, the senior pastor at Malone’s church.

The teenager told police in West Whiteland Township that Malone had been sexually assaulting her since she, at age 17, had moved with him and his family from Minnesota to Pennsylvania’s Chester County. She said he had befriended her when she was 12 or 13 and he was working at a church in Arizona.

When the accusations become public, Malone had resigned his church position and was traveling in Ecuador. He skipped out on his scheduled flight home, but eventually returned to the United States and was arrested.

His lawyer and the prosecutor negotiated a sentence of two to four years, with no rape charge, in exchange for a guilty plea. At the sentencing, Judge Jacqueline Carroll Cody surprised them by rejecting the deal as too lenient. She imposed a sentence of three to six years.

Wiggins and Cody were allegedly the targets of a murder-for-hire plot concocted by the imprisoned Malone. He had reportedly offered a fellow inmate $5,000 to kill the pastor and an unspecified additional fee for killing the judge.

Anthony Yerger, who had been Malone’s cellmate late last year, reportedly told State Trooper Patrick Hauser last week of Malone’s plot “to get revenge on people involved in this case.”

Hauser said Yerger’s account was consistent with that of another inmate, Angelo Tomeo, who in July 2019 had reported to a Chester County police detective that Malone was trying to arrange the murder of Wiggins and Cody.

Tomeo reportedly said Malone had offered him the same deal — $5,000 to kill Wiggins — and had given him a map of Calvary Fellowship, Wiggins’ church.

Malone, who was paroled late last year, was arrested Tuesday. According to court documents, he has been imprisoned at a state correctional unit in Montgomery County, but the circumstances of his incarceration there were not detailed.

The teenager whom he impregnated moved back to Arizona. She told officials Malone, whom she thought of as a father figure, had taken advantage of her mentally, physically and spiritually. She said she had come to realize that he was “something else when no one was watching.”

At the time of Malone’s sentencing, his lawyer, Evan Kelly, told People magazine that his client remained married to his wife and was “not going through any divorce proceedings.” The couple had three young children.

He said Malone’s post-prison plans were “to move back to Minnesota and help people, try to turn his life around and teach people how quickly you can fall.”