Posted on 03/27/2004 3:35:43 PM PST by Clive
CARY, N.C. (AP) - An international investigation into child pornography resulted in charges against a North Carolina man who authorities said physically and sexually abused a six-year-old girl and an infant boy to create images he posted on the Internet.
Brian Tod Schellenberger, 41, is scheduled for arraignment Monday in U.S. District Court in Raleigh, N.C., on four counts of sexual exploitation of children and one count of possessing child pornography, the News & Observer newspaper reported.
He has been in U.S. federal custody since his arrest Dec. 2 and was indicted by a federal grand jury Jan. 22 in Raleigh. FBI agents and federal prosecutors said they kept the case quiet until Friday in order to protect the victims' identities.
They said an investigation initiated by a special police unit in Toronto, Canada, has resulted in five children being taken into protective custody, search warrants being executed in five U.S. states and in Britain and at least five arrests.
This case "is probably the most horrific one I've seen," said FBI Supervisory Special Agent Doris Gardner, who leads the North Carolina Cyber Crimes Task Force.
Schellenberger, described by neighbours as a quiet, private family man, is also suspected of trying to hire a man in South Carolina to kill the child victim and her mother, said Chris Swecker, special agent in charge of the FBI in North Carolina.
Det. Sgt. Paul Gillespie of the Toronto police supervised the unit that found a North Carolina connection to a batch of gruesome images that started the investigation.
The images had been posted to a "shared secrets workspace" used by 15 law-enforcement agencies from several states and countries. Children in the images were physically and sexually abused.
"It was the largest collection of images that I had seen in this regard that basically just made me sick," Gillespie said Friday from Toronto.
Authorities said they found thousands of images on the home computer of Schellenberger, who worked for software company SAS Institute. Swecker said investigators made "a very, very tedious" examination of his computers and compact discs.
The material they turned up led to other arrests.
Kenda Henry of Dallas, Tex., is accused of trying to rent her daughter to people who would travel from other states and from abroad for sexual encounters. She was arrested in January and charged with three counts of trying to arrange for someone to have sex with one of her three children, one count of possession of child pornography and two counts of transmitting indecent material, said Special Agent Lori Bailey in the FBI's Dallas office.
Mark Spies, 44, of Lancaster, S.C., was arrested this month and charged with three counts of conspiracy to use a minor in production of child pornography, aiding and abetting in producing child pornography, and possession of child pornography, said Dean Eichelberger, assistant U.S. attorney in Columbia, S.C.
Related charges are pending against people in Maryland and Illinois, and two arrests occurred in England, said Gardner, who pioneered the FBI's Innocent Images National Initiative, the bureau's effort to combat child pornography, in the early 1990s.
Subject: Please Remove Image
Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2004 10:50:46 -0500
From: pensslin@ibsys.com
To: Webmaster@freerepublic.com
WRAL TV and WRAL.com demand that you remove the image of Mr. Schellenberger
in the URL below. If you had asked first and given us credit, we might have
allowed use of it. But you are breaking copyright law right now.
Thanks for your prompt attention to this matter.
Paul Ensslin,
Managing Editor, WRAL.com
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1106396/posts
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