OSAGE BEACH, Mo. – Surveillance video shows a stranger in ballcap who used an Osage Beach hotel’s keys to enter rooms without authorization, culminating in one guest being sexually assaulted in her room.

The crime happened in April 2023 at the Quail’s Nest Hotel. The courts are protecting the woman’s name, identifying her as a confidential victim. FOX 2 spoke with her by phone.

“I would not wish this kind of trauma on anyone else,” she said. “I was afraid that he wouldn’t be held accountable, and that law enforcement wouldn’t believe me.”

Court records say she woke up and felt a person under her covers. She initially thought it was her boyfriend. When she saw her boyfriend laying next to her, she realized, to her horror, that it wasn’t him. The suspect ran off but left his ballcap behind.

“I knew I’d be able to identify the person who did this to me, but I wasn’t sure that he would be caught,” she said.

A second surveillance video shows the mystery man leaving the room. He’s no longer wearing the hat as he leaves the room.

The victim hired St. Louis attorney Ryan Krupp.

“The hat was key. The assailant had gone back a second time to attempt it on another victim,” Kupp said.

It failed the second time, because two women in the room had engaged the secondary lock. Those women apparently spotted the suspect’s plate number and police caught up with a suspect.

“They swabbed his DNA against a hat that he left on the floor the first time he was there and assaulted my client,” Kupp said. “And so, when those combination of things came together, there was no more denying.”

Krupp secured a $1 million settlement with the hotel, partly by establishing how easily accessible keys were. A picture taken by Krupp’s private investigator shows keys hanging within view behind the front desk.

“Frankly, if the person manning the front desk wasn’t there, anybody had access to any of those keys,” Krupp said.

In a probable cause statement, an Osage Beach police officer wrote that the suspect on video the night of the assault appeared to have “…a set of hotel keys which could be due to his family working for the hotel as housekeepers in the past but was unaware of any housekeeping keys being missing.”

Charles Matthew Talley Jr., 46, is charged with felony sodomy and is scheduled to stand trial in March 2025.

FOX 2 contacted the hotel owner, who declined to comment on camera. However, she’s just as disgusted by the case as you are. She said she’s cooperating with police and intends to testify in the upcoming trial. She said she’s also enhanced security by improving the key checkout policy and putting those keys behind a locked door.

The victim says she’s slowly healing.

“I’m definitely on the road to recovery from this, but it definitely changed me,” she said. “I’m just fortunate that law enforcement did what they did, and I was very fortunate my attorney did not give up and just kept going.”