AIKEN COUNTY, S.C. _ A South Carolina sex offender with a documented foot fetish and a lengthy history of approaching women and girls in public has been arrested again, police say.
Joey Leaphart, 50, was arrested Thursday by the North Augusta Department of Public Safety on a charge of disturbing or interfering with adults or children, according to jail records. He remains in the Aiken County Detention Center.
North Augusta Public Safety officers received a call Thursday afternoon about a man taking pictures of a woman and her 4-year-old daughter, according to an incident report.
The 30-year-old mother told officers she and her daughter were leaving the Monterrey Mexican Restaurant on East Martintown Road when Leaphart approached them with his phone in his hand, according to the report. When she ignored him, Leaphart started running after them and yelling, "I just want to take pictures!"
The woman said Leaphart followed them to their vehicle and even followed the vehicle on foot as they left the parking lot, police wrote in the report.
Police later found Leaphart at a nearby Wendy's and arrested him.
It's not the first time police have been called after Leaphart approached a woman in public. He has an admitted food fetish that has been well-documented in media reports over the years.
In 2000, he pleaded guilty to an incident in which he sucked and licked the toes of an 11-year-old girl, and served five years in prison, the Aiken Standard reported in 2013, when Leaphart was arrested for failure to register as a sex offender.
He has been listed on the South Carolina Sex Offender Registry since that 2000 conviction.
In two separate 2012 incidents, Leaphart was not charged for approaching women at Walmart stores in Aiken and Grovetown, Ga., and asking to kiss or smell their feet, the Aiken Standard reported.
A North Augusta 17-year-old told police in 2010 that Leaphart asked her for money and she gave him $9 because she was scared, according to The Augusta Chronicle. He asked for her address to send her the money he borrowed, and she gave him her mother's cell number.
When the mother received a call from a man she believed to be Leaphart the next day, he told her he paid her daughter $40 to suck on her toes, the newspaper reported. The mother and daughter declined to prosecute Leaphart, who was issued a warning.
"I'm no bad person; I got a foot fetish," Leaphart told WRDW-TV during a 2013 interview.
Leaphart was featured on Investigation Discovery's "My Strange Criminal Addiction," during which he was candid about his love of feet. He even shared with the show his "foot book," a book filled with pictures Leaphart took of women's feet on his face or in his mouth.
