A Bucks County music teacher and serial molester of 18 boys sentenced to decades in prison

Over three decades, in music shop backrooms and, sometimes, his own home, Timothy Shay molested 18 boys whose parents trusted him to teach them piano and saxophone lessons.

On Tuesday, as Shay, 50, was sentenced to 18 to 54 years in state prison, Bucks County Court Judge Stephen Corr expressed outrage over his crimes.

“You stole from these boys their childhoods, you stole from them their love of music, you stole from them their ability to love, and you stole from them their adulthood, because they are still living with this,” Corr said.

“Quite frankly, if someone hadn’t spoken up and given these men the courage to speak up, you might still be out there perpetrating your crime on other victims,” he added.

Shay, of Middletown Township, pleaded no contest in September to corruption of minors and related crimes in connection with the assaults, which began in the late 1990s and ended only with his arrest in February 2025, prosecutors said. That arrest came after one victim, decades after his abuse occurred, filed a police report.

For years, Shay advertised himself as a piano and saxophone teacher based at music stores throughout Central Bucks County, including D-Town Guitars & Skateboards in Doylestown and Coyle’s in Richboro, according to First Assistant District Attorney Kristin McElroy.

During those lessons, she said, Shay groomed his young students. The 18 men who came forward described a similar pattern: Shay targeted them when they were preteens, and would start each lesson by massaging their wrists as a way of “warming them up” before gradually moving his hands toward other parts of their body.

In subsequent lessons, they said, Shay touched their genitals or performed sex acts. Some said Shay would use neurolinguistic programming to put them into a meditative state before groping them. Others said Shay touched them dozens of times.

One man who spoke in court Tuesday said the abuse ended only when he begged his parents to stop sending him to music lessons.

“Timothy Shay took his position of trust with me as a child, in a closed setting, to satisfy his own perversions,” he said. “Today marks a sense of closure I thought I’d never receive.”

Another man said his ability to form lasting relationships or be intimate with women was destroyed by Shay’s abuse. He struggled, he said, to trust even his family.

A third told the judge Shay was a friend of his family’s and molested him while serving as his babysitter. He dropped out of school, struggled with drug addiction, and isolated himself from his family, he said.

“Tim Shay stole my self-esteem, my libido, and my faith in God and left me with a head full of passive ideation about my death,” he said.

Shay’s manipulation extended to the boys’ parents, according to McElroy, the prosecutor. He would wait until their parents trusted him, and no longer attended the music lessons, before beginning to assault the boys.

“The families were literally paying this defendant to enrich their children’s lives through music, and he took it as an opportunity to abuse them,” she said. “It speaks to the level of cruelty he showed.”

And she noted that as county detectives were investigating Shay, they found a cache of child pornography on his cell phone.

Shay’s attorney, Stephanie Moyer, asked the judge for leniency, noting that Shay had been the victim of sexual abuse as a child.

But Corr was not swayed, and fashioned a prison sentence for Shay that took into account each victim.

“You don’t get a bulk discount for coming here with 18 victims,” Corr said. “We have to bring justice for each of these men.”