First TALIL M. VANN used Snapchat to manipulate an 11-year-old girl into sex, which he recorded on a phone. Then, while jailed for sexual battery on a child, Vann tried to hire a hitman to kill the victim, prosecutor and lead detective on his case in a bid to derail his trial. He got away with nothing and now faces multiple life sentences.
A Seminole County jury convicted Vann of two counts of capital sexual battery on a child under the age of 12, and one count of using a child in a sexual performance based on evidence presented by prosecutors Stewart Stone, Domenick Leo, and Martine McCarthy during a four-day trial that ended June 25. Prosecutors used evidence of the defendant’s solicitation to commit murder to demonstrate his consciousness of guilt in the underlying sexual battery charges.
SEXUAL BATTERY
The Casselberry man was arrested in May of 2024 after the victim told her mother that she had received Snapchat messages months earlier from someone who claimed to be a girl from her school. The person offered her money to help “catch her boyfriend cheating.”
The victim sent her Cash App account information in a message to the would-be classmate. Shortly afterward, Vann (playing the roles of the school aged-girl and her cheating boyfriend) arrived in the parking lot of the victim’s Altamonte Springs apartment complex. Unbeknownst to Vann, the girl took a photo of him while he was standing near the parking lot wearing plaid pajama pants. Once she was outside, Vann walked with her to a secluded area of the complex where he pressured her to have sex and perform sex acts while he took videos with a phone.
An Altamonte Springs Police detective ultimately connected the Snapchat accounts to Vann and recovered phone videos that showed the sexual battery. The man in the videos wore the same plaid pajama pants as the man the girl photographed outside her apartment.
At the time he committed those sex crimes in Seminole County, Vann was free on bond for lewd or lascivious battery of a child between the ages of 12 and 16 for an offense that occurred in nearby Osceola County.
SOLICITATION OF MURDER
While in the Seminole County jail, Vann hatched a plan to avoid trial: Hire a hit man – communicating through secret code – to kill his adolescent victim plus the lead prosecutor and the Altamonte Springs police detective on his case.
Vann asked a fellow inmate to arrange the attacks by someone on the outside, offering a BMW car he owned as payment. The detective would be taken out with a pipe bomb strapped to a remote-controlled car, according to Vann’s written directions.
But the killer Vann thought he had hired from inside the county jail turned out to be an undercover deputy from the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office, tipped off by a confidential informant.
Vann sent coded directions to the so-called hit man through the mail and jail email system. He provided his victim’s personal information including phone numbers, date of birth, address, school, and social media accounts, arrest records show. A search of Vann’s jail cell uncovered written plans and codes he had devised.
The State Attorney’s Office reassigned Vann’s cases to other senior prosecutors, who convicted him at trial.
Circuit Judge David Dugan scheduled Vann’s sentencing for July 27 at 10 a.m.