Posted on 05/20/2008 7:42:45 AM PDT by SmithL
Dale E. Schreiber ran a prominent civil and environmental engineering firm in Johnson City when he wasn't parked at a local park perusing child pornography on his laptop computer.
Larry A. Hartmann, while acting as Great Smoky Mountains National Park chief, secretly filmed bathroom scenes of his 1-year-old adopted daughter at home and lusted over sadistic images of child rape at work.
Kevin Bruce Cooper developed subdivisions, molested teenage boys and snapped photographs of them to add to his sizeable stash of child pornography.
David Aaron Becker refereed high school sports, lured players into his home and raped them while thousands watched via his Internet Web cam. He even took abuse requests via instant message.
James L. Copeland served his country as a guardsman and served Knox County as a school resource officer. He served himself hundreds of images of child pornography downloaded from the Internet.
James Hobart Irwin Jr. vowed to protect and serve as a Jefferson County lawman. He raped his granddaughter and shared images and video of the attacks with Internet-based child pornography seekers.
Who would have thought any of these men - successful, seemingly stable and all at or approaching midlife - would harbor such dirty secrets?
The FBI, for one.
The agency with world-renowned skill in predicting the traits of serial killers also has a profile of the "typical" pedophiliac thrill-seeker: White male, late 20s to middle age, middle to upper class, skilled worker to professional and to some degree computer savvy.
FBI Supervisory Agent Rob Root, who heads the agency's Knoxville-based cybercrimes unit, quickly reels off the profile, which has proved remarkably consistent when it comes to assessing predators.
Root, however, acknowledges that perpetrators come from all walks. Those who hunt down people who make, peddle, trade or buy child pornography know there is no demographic cage in which to trap them.
"We've pretty much seen the entire spectrum," said FBI Supervisory Agent Matt Vilcek, who heads the agency's Innocent Images investigative unit in suburban Washington, D.C., and trains law enforcers from across the world in a global effort to combat the crime. "I've seen police chiefs arrested, clergy, schoolteachers, coaches. There's really no demographic. It spans the gamut."
Local child pornography purveyors and patrons are no exception.
"We've got everything from the grandpa types to female juvenile offenders," said Knoxville Police Department Sgt. Scott Shepherd.
Shepherd commands the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, a KPD initiative that employs five full-time officers and works jointly with local, state and federal authorities to handle cases across the state.
Secret lives behind public personas
Schreiber was a 52-year-old father of three who devoted hours to ministry work and aided causes such as the Boy Scouts and the Special Olympics. He downloaded and traded child pornography over the Internet and admitted some 50 sexual encounters with male strangers at adult pornographic video stores. ICAC Investigator Tom Evans helped nab him.
Hartmann was a 53-year-old married man and father of an adopted daughter with a penchant for child pornography so strong he even kept a stash on his U.S. Department of the Interior computer. The national park's chief of resource management and science, Hartmann served for time as park chief while the superintendent's job was vacant.
Hartmann cataloged 33,000 images in all, but a virus on his work computer ultimately led to the unveiling of his secret life. He later admitted surreptitiously recording on video his young adopted daughter and her friends in the bathroom of his home.
Cooper was 40 and a well-known Blount County contractor and developer who first ran afoul of the law when teenage boys accused him of getting them drunk, molesting them and taking photographs. A Blount County Sheriff's Department investigator launched a probe that would later draw in the FBI. Cooper eventually confessed to a slew of sexually deviant misdeeds including traveling to Thailand to have sex with a minor. He later fled to Mexico to try to avoid federal prison, but the U.S. Marshals Service tracked him down. He was living with a teenage boy.
Becker was a 54-year-old Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association referee who was using his position to lure teenage boys to abuse and videotape as part of a nationwide Internet-based venture in which members could order up via instant message specific sex acts to be performed live on Web cam. As it turned out, Becker was actually Ira Lustgarden, a twice-convicted sex offender allowed in Colorado to legally change his name after he served a prison term for molesting athletes there.
Copeland was 34 and well-respected in the community for both his work in the National Guard and his post as a school security officer in Knox County. Authorities would later discover hundreds of images of child pornography on his home computer.
Irwin was a 60-year-old grandfather who had spent years working as a lawman in Jefferson County, rising up the ranks from a patrol officer to a detective. He later took a job as a private investigator for a law firm. He repeatedly raped his 8-year-old granddaughter and shared images of the attacks over the Internet.
All six men racked up lengthy federal prison terms, ranging from Copeland's 51-month sentence for downloading child pornography to a life term for Becker for repeatedly molesting children to create and disseminate it.
'They don't normally stop'
Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Atchley prosecuted most of the East Tennessee men.
"In this district we try to focus on and aggressively prosecute the worst offenders, and because of that we've had success getting lengthy sentences," Atchley said. "Just in the years I've been here, I've seen them from all demographics, all socioeconomic backgrounds. They run the gamut from a person on Social Security disability living very modestly to Mr. Hartmann, who was acting superintendent at the National Park, had a very good job. We've prosecuted former law enforcement officers. We've prosecuted an orthopedic surgeon. It's not confined to a demographic."
Nearly all the cases Atchley has prosecuted involved images of young children, including babies and toddlers, and involved elements of sexual torture. Root said most child pornography suspects hoard thousands of images.
"It's at home," he said. "It's in the office. They don't normally stop. They're out (on bond) waiting to plead (guilty to an indictment), and they're (caught) doing it again."
Some suspects were once themselves child molestation victims, which is proof, Root says, of the continuing destruction that crimes against children wreaks.
Some cases are so egregious, Root can find only one explanation.
"Some of them are just plain evil," he said.
"Some of them are just plain evil,"They saved this for the last line.
This is what we have trees and rope for.
I’ll NEVER understand the deviant perverted sexual attraction of an adult towards a young child. It’s high up on the list of EVIL activites and should be crushed like a grape.
It’s high up on the list of EVIL activites and should be crushed like a grape.
Death penalty is theirs and our only relieve....
It truly is evil. A friend of mine who mediates work grievances has said that the child pornography issue has risen ten fold in the last few years. I saw a study that tracked these horrid beings and it found that there is no effective way to change this behavior (short of the rope method). It is alarming; not only is this activity increasing at extraordinary exponentials, we are not dealing with it effectively.
How many very young kids have to be scared for life before society defends them and makes the penalty of death fit this unbelievable crime?
That profile narrows it down to what, just 60 million or so?
I wondered why it would take so many FBI personnel to catch individuals who distribute videos of themselves committing sex crimes over the Internet.
Doesn’t such an act equate to “Here I am, doin’ the crime.”
Wouldn’t a skilled Internet expert do a better job of what is clearly a simple Internet tracking job? Or is such tracking a difficult thing to do?
Any FReepers know what is involved in tracking the source of an Internet video?
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