Died: Harry Thomas, Cofounder of Creation Festival and Child Rapist

He died in prison serving an 18-year sentence for sexually assaulting four girls.

Harry Thomas, who launched the longest-running Christian music festival in the United States and who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting four small girls, died in prison at age 78.

There was no public announcement of his passing, nor a funeral or public memorial. According to the New Jersey Department of Corrections, the man once known as the “grandfather of Christian music festivals” died in April, with 13 years left on his sentence.

Thomas did not cofound the first Christian music festival, as his organization sometimes claimed, but Creation was by far the most successful. It attracted tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of teenagers to rural Pennsylvania every year to see the biggest acts in contemporary Christian music and commit themselves or recommit themselves to following Christ.

But in 2018, Thomas pleaded guilty to raping one girl who was under the age of 10, touching the genitals of three more, and exposing himself to a fifth. The sexual assaults spanned a 16-year period and only stopped when one of the victims told her mother what had happened to her.

A relative of one of the victims called him “a ravenous wolf” and “one of the greatest hypocrites—a child molester masquerading as a pastor.”

Another, looking across a New Jersey courtroom at the pastor and one-time Christian radio DJ, said, “Harry Thomas, you will surely rot in hell.”

Thomas wept as he was sentenced to 18 years in prison and said he was sorry for the pain he’d caused.

“I agree with the Scriptures,” he said. “It would be better for a millstone to be hung around my neck and be cast into the sea. That’s what I deserve.”

Before his arrest, Thomas was an ordained ...