Counter Pedophilia Investigate Unit

The Maryland State Police Computer Crimes Unit arrested a Washington County, Md. man on the morning of April 22 in connection with the distribution and possession of child pornography. The accused is identified as Roger A. Repp III, 45, of the 600-block of Westwood Street, Hagerstown, Md.  He is charged with two counts each of distribution and possession of child pornography.  If convicted, Repp could be sentenced to up to 50 years in prison.

The Maryland State Police Computer Crimes Section began this investigation in March of this year after receiving information from a police detective in Canada.  The detective had located a computer on the Internet openly distributing child pornography.

A Maryland state trooper assigned to the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force was assigned the investigation and was able to trace the computer back to Repp’s residence.  On April 22, State Police investigators executed a search warrant at Repp’s home and recovered evidence that led to the charges being filed. (more…)

WESTMINSTER — Two married schoolteachers groomed a 17-year-old boy with booze, food, movies and trips to their hot tub before repeatedly having unlawful sex with him together and separately for several months, according to charges filed Wednesday by the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.

Daniel Alma Shepard, 62, of Huntington Beach and his wife, Gay Davidson-Shepard, 59, were arrested by Westminster police Wednesday and charged with several felonies. Their arraignment is set for Friday at the West Justice Center in Westminster. Both are being held in lieu of $150,000 bail.

At the time that prosecutors say the sex acts occurred, between April and December 2009 when the victim was a minor, Daniel Shepard was a biology teacher at Westminster High School and Davidson-Shepard was a teacher at Mesa View Middle School in Huntington Beach.

A news release from the District Attorney’s Office provided the following account, leading up to the prosecutors’ allegations:

Daniel Shepard met the teen while he was a student at Westminster High.

Beginning in March 2009, Shepard and his wife regularly invited the boy to their Huntington Beach home to drink alcohol, eat, play board games and watch movies, prosecutors say.

In April 2009, according to the prosecutors, the couple assaulted the boy for the first time.

The sexual activity continued weekly, prosecutors said.

Daniel Shepard is accused of sexually assaulting the boy until September 2009, and Gay Davidson-Shepard is accused of sexually assaulting the boy until December 2009.

The victim turned 18 in December 2009. Any sexual activity with the two teachers after that cannot be criminally charged.

Daniel Shepard also is accused of asking the boy to email him nude photos of himself and taking nude photographs of the teen and the illegal sex acts.

In March 2011, the teen disclosed the sexual assault to his mother, who contacted police.

Daniel Shepard has been charged with two felony counts of oral copulation of a minor, one felony count of sodomy with a person younger than 18, one felony count of possession and control of child pornography and one misdemeanor count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of five years in state prison.

Davidson-Shepard has been charged with three felony counts each of unlawful sexual intercourse, sodomy with a person younger than 18, oral copulation of a minor and one misdemeanor count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

She faces a maximum sentence of eight years and four months in state prison.

Anyone with additional information or who believes he or she has been a victim is encouraged to contact Westminster police detective Michael Nguyen at 714-548-3247 or Supervising District Attorney Investigator Lou Gutierrez at 714-347-8794.

Source: MSNBC

A man previously convicted of a child-sex crime was arrested Tuesday for allegedly downloading child pornography from his computer at The Seattle Times.

Richard Flores, 58, was booked into the King County Jail for investigation of sexual exploitation of a child. He was ordered held on probable cause after making his first appearance in King County District Court on Wednesday afternoon, said Dan Donohoe, spokesman for the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. His bail has been set at $500,000.

Flores, of Seattle, had been convicted under a different name in 1997 of communication with a minor for immoral purposes.

Flores worked as a clerk in the finance department at The Times. He was fired Tuesday after more than 10 years with the company, said Jill Mackie, spokeswoman for the newspaper. She said The Times cooperated with the police investigation.

“We do not routinely do across-the-board criminal background checks in pre-employment screening. As a result, we did not learn of his prior legal issues,” Mackie wrote in an email Wednesday.

Seattle police began the investigation after being contacted by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about a month ago regarding someone in the area downloading child pornography, Seattle police Detective Malinda Wilson wrote in a statement of probable cause that outlines the case.

Flores was allegedly using his personal Yahoo account to download images from Flickr, an online photo-sharing service, police said.

When Flores was arrested Tuesday, he told police that he is “addicted to child porn,” Wilson wrote in her report.

Once the photos were downloaded, Flores placed them on a thumb drive, police said. Investigators searched Flores’ home computer as well as his work computer, authorities said.

When he was convicted in 1997, Flores went by the name Richard F. Fortier. He had been charged with two counts of first-degree child molestation stemming from alleged assaults on relatives between 1993 and 1996, but later pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of communication with a minor for immoral purposes after the victims declined to testify, according to police and King County Superior Court records.

Flores was sentenced to six months in jail and two years of probation. According to police, he changed his last name in 2005.

Source: SEATTLETIMES

Police in the New South Wales Hunter Valley are trying to identify the children depicted in thousands of child abuse images seized in a raid on a home.

A 62-year-old man has been charged with three counts of possessing child pornography after police raided his home at Rutherford yesterday afternoon.

Police say they found around 2,000 images of child abuse, as well as recording equipment.

The man was refused bail overnight to face Maitland Local Court today.

Anyone with information that may assist the police investigation is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.

Source: ABC

SKAGIT COUNTY, Wash. — A sex sting operation in Skagit County netted two men police said were trying to have sex with underage girls.One of the men volunteered at an Oak Harbor Elementary School.The parents of children at Hillcrest Elementary received an email from the superintendent, informing them about the arrest of a volunteer who spent a very limited amount of time at the school and didn’t have the opportunity to be alone with children.That man is accused of communication with a minor for immoral purposes, attempted rape of a child and commercial sexual abuse of a minor. (more…)

BRATTLEBORO — A Bellows Falls man was sentenced Thursday in the Windham Criminal Division of Vermont Superior Court to 25 years to life in prison for aggravated sexual assault.

Paul Thibodeau-O’Connor, 40, was first investigated by Bellows Falls police in July 2009. The juvenile victim estimated that around 20 nonconsensual acts occurred between 1996 and 2009, all in the greater Rockingham area, according to police documents.

“It has changed my life emotionally in many ways,” said the minor in an impact statement read aloud in court Thursday. The victim, who is now in her teens, was not present at the hearing.

“I don’t trust people anymore, because I always seem to think there is a hidden side to them,” she wrote in her statement. “… mentally I feel my childhood was taken from me. I have matured and grown up faster than I have wanted because of the sexual abuse I went through.” (more…)

Blenheim teenager Andrew Jack Sowman had more than 21,000 pictures and 2300 movies mostly showing young children being sexually abused, police say.

Police found the images on his computers and hard drives when they raided his home last year.

Judge Bruce Davidson refused to give Sowman permanent name suppression when the 18-year-old appeared in the Blenheim District Court yesterday to be sentenced on 21 charges of possessing objectionable material and one charge of distributing objectionable material.

Sowman had admitted the charges when he appeared last month.

His mother and father watched from the public gallery as the judge sentenced him to six months’ community detention, 180 hours’ community work and 18 months’ intensive supervision. His community detention involves a curfew from 7pm to 6am on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

Judge Davidson also banned Sowman from using any electronic device able to connect to the internet, except for education purposes, and ordered police to destroy the equipment they seized.

The sentence took into account Sowman’s guilty plea, his age, family support and commitment to counselling, the judge said. While he refused name suppression, he suppressed Sowman’s address. (more…)

York, PA – A 68-year-old Fawn Township man pleaded guilty Monday to rape and other sex crimes involving two teenage girls in a negotiated agreement for a sentence of 13 to 26 years in state prison.

Pennsylvania State Police said Paul Michael Pasqualone groomed a 14-year-old girl with “modeling aspirations” into posing in lingerie and nude in his home in 2010 and photographed and raped a 13-year-old girl in his home in 2008.
Pasqualone was being held in lieu of $500,000 bail following his arrest in October. He is scheduled for sentencing in May following a sexual offender assessment to determine if he is a sexually violent predator.

Evidence of the rape was discovered while police investigated allegations concerning the child pornography.

Trooper Barry Ritchey reported a 15-year-old boy told him the 14-year-old had confided in him that Pasqualone was taking pictures of her. The boy said the girl gave him some of the pictures, including at least one of her in a “zebra room” that Pasqualone had set up for the girl. (more…)

Parents who want to prevent their children from accessing pornographic material online normally only worry about traditional PCs, but what’s the use of installing filtering software now that kids can get porn on their phones? Internet-enabled smartphones can access any pornographic website, but mobile filtering software is limited or non-existent. And with the rise of sexting, children can even share their own indecent images.

A recent patent application by electronics giant Samsung could have the answer. The patent describes a system for parents to monitor their offspring’s mobile activity through their own handset. It scans incoming images – either from the web, or the phone’s internal camera – for pornographic content by searching for large regions of exposed skin. If the image looks suspect, the child is locked out from accessing it and a copy is sent to their parent’s phone, who can choose to allow access in the case of a false alarm, such as a cosmetics advert. (more…)

SICK images of children as young as two were discovered on a laptop computer and 31 DVDs when police raided a house in Hamble.

When questioned, Paul Bruce was “forthright” with the police about how he had downloaded and looked at the images, said prosecutor Simon Edwards. He told them: “I have never harmed children. I was the victim of a paedophile ring as a child.”

Bruce, 42, of Hamble Lane, admitted 25 charges of making indecent images and possessing them.

Jailing him for 12 months, Judge John Beashel told him: “The children here were all under 13 and some as young as two. You must have known when you saw those images, those innocent small children had been grossly sexually abused to give you perverted sexual pleasure. (more…)