Among top 10 sharers of child pornography in the entire country…
DEFENDANT HAD AMASSED FOR NEARLY ’50 YEAR TROVE’ OF CHILD PORN MATERIAL ACROSS PRINT AND ELECTRONIC FORMATS
JANUARY 31, 2023 – written by WADE QUEEN
ELDERLY SUPER CHILD SEX PORN CREEP: ADAM CHILDERS, 70, OF ASHLAND, KY., WAS FOUND GUILTY IN JUST UNDER ONE HOUR BY JURY IN FEDERAL TRIAL OF THE PERPETRATOR WHO HAD BEEN COLLECTING MASSIVE AMOUNT OF CHILD PORN SINCE THE 1970s.
An Ashland, Kentucky man was recently convicted by a federal jury in U.S. federal court in Ashland, KY., for charges related to child pornography earlier this month.
According to a press release from the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky, Adam F. Childers, 70, of Ashland, KY., was convicted of distributing and possessing child pornography, amassing the material on an industrial scale for over a continuous five different decades.
The decision came after a three-day trial and one hour of deliberations that ended on Friday the 13th (appropriately unlucky for an unlucky day).
After two days of detective testimony, startling imagery and an explanation from the accused himself, the three-day trial ended when a federal jury returned a guilty verdict on Friday, January 13.
Closing arguments on same Friday consisted of an impassioned defense and the unrelenting prosecuting evidence, yet the jury needed only approximately one hour to come with a guilty verdict in the case of Adam Childers.
In March 2020, Adam Childers was indicted by a federal grand jury via the United States Department of Justice; on charges of possessing and distributing thousands upon thousands of child sexual abuse materials.
According to U.S. attorneys, Childers didn’t just occasionally view and upload the graphic content, alleging that he had meticulously curated and organized a colossal collection, starting in the 1970s.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Erin Roth and Mary Melton outlined Childers’s offenses, navigating the jury through his journey beginning with magazines depicting nude children, which turned to printed materials that were categorized and organized into binders.
The child pornography content gathered by Adam Childers evolved from tangible printed mediums, then onto the digital world.
As the trial progressed, U.S. prosecutors began walking the jury through Adam Childers’s computer history, where he began downloading data onto CDs; hundreds of them containing child pornography; before he transitioned into early forms of online file-sharing programs.
All told, Adam Childers had collected a mountainous volume of child pornography, so much that after a team of four detectives from the Ashland Police Department spent weeks sorting through the material, and they were told to stop.
In October 2020, Ashland Police Lieutenant Adam Daniels, who was assigned to the Internet Crimes Against Children Unit (ICAC); as well as the FBI’s Violent Crimes Against Children Unit, offered testimony about the origins of the investigation into Adam Childers’s activity.
Lt. Daniels stated that an IP address in his jurisdiction was flagged among the top 10 sharers of child pornography in the entire country.
After issuing a subpoena for subscriber information from an internet provider, Childers was identified, and a search warrant was executed that uncovered Childers’s assortment of child sexual abuse materials.
Adam Childers’s attorney, Sebastian M. Joy, presented a defense despite the damning evidence against his client.
Mr. Joy stated it was all an accident, calling Adam Childers to testify in his own defense that he had accidentally scoured the internet in search of military memorabilia and was only guilty of being a “loner” and a “nerd”.
The defense based its argument on Adams Childers being a hoarder; and having the inability to throw things away; even items he didn’t want, like child porn.
Previous testimony from detectives and digital forensic experts showcased how difficult it was to “accidentally” run across child pornography.
The prosecution argued that even if he did “stumble” upon it, that defense didn’t begin to resolve the issue of Childers’s organization of said materials.
Detectives testified that the search warrant execution revealed child pornography catalogued based on the ages of victims, sexual acts performed and even the “names” of victims depicted.
Closing arguments in the criminal trial ceased just before 11 A.M. on Friday the 13th and, by 12:00 P.M., the jury returned with a unanimous guilty verdict.
Defense attorney Sebastian Joy elected to poll the jury, with each of the 12 responding jurors affirming “guilty”.
Despite being free on bond conditions since his arrest in March 2022, Adam Childers was denied freedom while awaiting his sentencing.
Adam Childers was remanded into custody of the U.S. Marshals and was booked into Boyd County Detention Center in Catlettsburg, KY., around 2 P.M. on that same Friday.
U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning penciled Childers’s official sentencing hearing to occur on Monday, May 8 at 10:00 A.M.
Judge Bunning stated that Adam Childers’s charges were considered violent ones, meaning he will serve no less than 10 years in a federal penitentiary; making Adam Childers 80 years old before he’s possibly released.
The investigation into this massive child pornography case was conducted by the Ashland Police Department Cyber Crimes Unit, the Kentucky State Police and the FBI.
DAY ONE OF THE FEDERAL CHILD PORN TRIAL OF ADAM CHILDERS
The federal jury trial of Adam F. Childers for possessing massive amounts of child sexual abuse material began on Wednesday, January 11, 2023, in U.S. District Court in Ashland, KY.
Adam Childers sat quietly during the duration of jury selection and throughout two witness testimonies on Wednesday.
Jurors were warned that they could see startling imagery depicting children in sexual acts, but it was necessary in presenting the severity of Adam Childers’s alleged offenses.
Adam Childers’ defense attorney, Sebastian M. Joy, began his opening remarks with the questioning of the jury, which hinted at his possible strategies in rendering a not guilty verdict.
Mr. Joy had potential jurors recall the days of dial-up internet, computer downloading software such as LimeWire, and asked if any in the gallery were familiar with nudist or swinger clubs in the Ashland area.
U.S. Assistant Attorney Erin Roth presented the opening statement on behalf of the government in front of 14 jurors.
Ms. Roth said the case revolved around a man who was a “collector of many things”.
Assistant Attorney Roth stated that Adam Childers had put endless amounts of energy, care and precision in maintaining things he “valued.” But, according to Ms. Roth, it wasn’t books or memorabilia that Childers dedicated so much time to, she stated further alleging that Adam Childers’s collections consisted of mounds of child pornography.
According to the United States, Adam Childers’s curations began decades ago, leading up to a discovery of binders full of organized, printed materials, CDs, external hard drives, computer downloads and magazines.
“Thousands upon thousands of sexually explicit photos,” Ms. Roth said.
Assistant Attorney Roth elaborated that the materials had been categorized based upon the ages of the victims, sexual acts and even by specific children.
When law enforcement tracked the IP address downloading and distributing suspected child sexual abuse materials, a search warrant was issued on Adam Childers’ home, where, according to prosecutors, he admitted to investigators that they would find child sexual imagery on his computer.
Ahead of showing some of the imagery to the jury, Ms. Roth apologized, stating “it will be difficult, but we need you to see it.”
Defense attorney Sebastian Joy requested the jurors to return a not guilty verdict based on the government’s inability to prove Childers’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
“Adam Childers is a hoarder,” Joy said, going on to elaborate that Adam Childers accumulated mass amounts of everything, finding it difficult to part with any of his “collections”.
Defense attorney Joy said Adam Childers didn’t knowingly possess or distribute child sexual abuse materials.
Adam Childers grew up in Orlando, Florida, according to Mr. Joy, who told the jury that Adam Childers’s collections began early, when he would visit family in Kentucky with nothing else to do but accumulate things.
“As a kid he got hooked on military history and that sparked his interest in collecting,” Mr. Joy said, adding that witnesses would testify that after serving a search warrant in October 2020, they uncovered shelves full of military weaponry, binders full of collectable items and other hoarder-esque collections.
Defense attorney Joy admitted that among Adam Childers’s collections there was, in fact, nudity, stating his client had collected a fair amount of Playboy magazines, some of which dating back to the 1960s.
“Child porn makes us all uncomfortable,” Mr. Joy said during his opening statement, “and it’s not something Adam Childers likes.”
Defense attorney Joy also told the jury that while it’s a defendant’s right to not testify against oneself, Adam Childers was willing. “He will tell you where these items came from,” he said.
Defense attorney Joy closed his open statements by saying, “We all know hoarders that don’t even know what they have; Don’t make up your mind until every piece of evidence is presented”.
Detective John Sims of the electronic crime branch of Kentucky State Police took the witness stand on Wednesday afternoon.
Detective Sims gave a brief breakdown of his law enforcement background, his experience in investigations of exploitation of children and his involvement in electronic trainings for Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC).
Detective Sims explained to the jury the complex technicalities of online file sharing commonly used by those sharing and receiving child pornography.
Through guided questioning from Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary Melton, the detective testified how the investigation into Adam Childers began.
According to detective Sims, an inquiry was made by Ashland Police Department concerning of a user flagged for distributing child pornography. After running data through a law enforcement database, detective Sims compiled content onto a disc to send back to the Ashland Police Department
On cross-examination, defense attorney Sebastian Joy inquired about the data obtained, clarifying to the jury that the data didn’t showcase Adam Childers actively sharing child sexual abuse materials; only that his computer communicated with law enforcement-ran software.
After a brief recess in which computer monitors were repositioned so that only content could be seen by court officials and the jury, Ashland Police Lieutenant Adam Daniels was called to testify.
According to Lt. Daniels, like KSP detective John Sims, he too is assigned to ICAC in addition to the FBI’s Violent Crimes Against Children Unit.
Lt. Daniels testified that an IP address located in his area of responsibility (such as example Boyd County) had been flagged associated with child sexual abuse materials.
According to Lt. Daniels, the particular IP address in question was among the “top 10” distributors of child pornography in the state of Kentucky.
After examining materials compiled on a disc from Detective Sims, Lt. Daniels said he then got a subpoena for subscriber information from internet providers who hand over who is associated with an IP address.
Once connecting the IP address to Adam Childers’s residence, Lt. Daniels stated his department conducted surveillance of sorts, determining that there was no public internet access, no other persons lived in the home or were attached to any utilities at the suspicious address.
Lt. Daniels explained to the jury that while reviewing the compiled data from KSP, the content revealed nude children under the age of 18, some of which involved in sexual acts.
Although the imagery was unavailable to those in the gallery, Lt. Daniels was instructed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Melton to explain for “the written record” what was depicted in the explicit content.
In one instance, Lt. Daniels describes two nude females, approximately between the ages of 11 and 14, performing oral sex and engaging with a “sex toy.”
After discussing the content in the video, Lt. Daniels testified that a search warrant was executed on Adam Childers’s home, where, according to testimony, Adam Childers told police they would find child imagery on his computer.
During the execution of the search warrant Lt. Daniels said seven external hard drives, electronics and “anything relevant” were “triaged.”
Lt. Daniels explained photographs of Childers’s home on the day of the search as they were entered into evidence.
Depicted in the photos as described by Lt. Daniels were bookshelves, an office area containing a desktop computer and a “camo wooden book with a hidden compartment.”
According to court testimony, within a removable spine of a book, investigators uncovered one of the seven external hard drives suspected of containing child pornography.
After each item of interest was forensically investigated, Lt. Daniels stated that some file names accessed on the day of the search included “Kinder Cutie,” and “Dad and Daughter.”
Of more than 700,000 downloaded images and videos, more than 52,000 contained nudity and 11,000 were suspected to contain child exploitation, according to Lt. Daniels.
Using additional law enforcement software to identify “hash values” or digital footprints of child sexual abuse materials identified in other investigations, 346 images were confirmed to have contained underage children, according to Lt. Daniels.
Lt. Daniels went on to testify concerning the organization tactics allegedly used by Adam Childers, stating that some file names contained words such as “pedo,” “1 y/o,” (years-old); “2 y/o” and onward up to “9 y/o,” telling the jury he believed that content was categorized by “years of age.”
Additional imagery was shown “rapid fire” style according to Assistant Attorney Melton, Lt. Daniels again explaining the images censored from public viewing.
Lt. Daniels stated that in one image a juvenile “maybe 5-9 years old” showcased her vagina and breasts.
When asked how he estimated the age of the victims, Lt. Daniels said he relied on facial features like noses, teeth and cheekbone development.
Members of the jury took a break from their screens of explicit content to study the face of Adam Childers, who kept a stoic demeanor as the images flashed across the screen in front of him.
Lieutenant Adam Daniels remained on the witness stands for hours Wednesday evening, while going slide by slide in a presentation, explaining the content of images and the technicalities behind file-sharing services.
The federal court trial of Adam Childers adjourned for the day around 5:00 P.M.
THE HEART OF THE 3-DAY CRIMINAL FEDERAL CHILD PORN CASE TRIAL
On Thursday, January 12, the second day of the trial’s proceedings, included additional testimony from detectives present during the execution of a search warrant at the home of Adam Childers.
Following the detectives’ time before the jury, Adam Childers himself took the stand before the conclusion of evidence presentation.
Adam Childers was indicted in March 2022 when he was accused by the United States Department Justice of possessing and distributing nearly a million images and videos depicting minors in sexually explicit activities.
After hearing nearly six hours of testimony from Ashland Police Lieutenant Adam Daniels that included technical explanations of file-sharing software and forensic investigations into internet crimes against children, Adam Childers’s attorney, Sebastian M. Joy, was given the opportunity to cross-examine the expert witness.
Defense attorney Joy alluded to his client’s unknowingness of the content he had mistakenly downloaded, uploaded and possessed.
Mr. Joy mentioned specific file names that were found on various storage devices and on a desktop computer in Childers’s home, that, according to Daniels’s testimony, included names and phrases synonymous with child sexual abuse materials.
Mr. Joy pointed out that in Daniels’s testimony, the expert witness stated he suspected certain files to contain child pornography based on his experience and training in investigating such crimes that included names like “L.S. Models” and “Siberian Mouse.”
The defense pointed out that file names as such might not be as obvious to an ordinary citizen without a computer crime background; therefore, it could have been a mistaken download.
Two additional detectives from Ashland Police Department testified as well, describing videos, magazines, and binders organized with printed child sexual abuse materials found on the day the search warrant was executed.
While images of toddlers and young children’s genitals were presented to the jury, many looked away quickly, with one juror electing to stare at the ceiling as the graphic content was presented.
Defense attorney Joy also cross-examined those detectives, asking them to describe the “hoarder” conditions inside Adam Childers’s home, trying to drive home the point that Childers’s home consisted of a bunch of military memorabilia and other collectible items.
After a brief recess in the criminal trial, Adam Childers was called to the witness stand.
According to Adam Childers’s testimony, he became fascinated with collecting pieces associated with military history after an uncle who served in WWII sent back home items such as magazines, badges and all manners of WWII memorabilia.
In addition to Adam Childers’s sparked interest in military curations, he was intrigued by 1960s-era Playboy magazines.
Adam Childers said that while living in Florida he frequently visited “seedy” sections of town in Boca Raton, visiting adult shops in search of old Playboys; many of which were found in his home decades later.
According to Childers’s testimony, on one occasion he visited a store where the owner knew of his collection. Adam Childers stated the store was going out of business and the owner knew of a couple Playboys among three boxes of magazines and invited Adam Childers to purchase the lot and sort through them.
Adam Childers testified that after some time he sorted through the boxes and discovered nudist magazines that contained nude images of children but, like most things in his home, it was pushed into boxes and forgotten about.
On cross-examination, Assistant U.S. Attorney Erin Roth asked the defendant why he didn’t just toss them.
According to Adam Childers, he lived in an apartment complex at the time with shared garbage disposal; Childers said he was embarrassed at the idea of a neighbor discovering them, so he shoved them at the bottom of a box and forgot about them.
However, assistant U.S attorney Roth pointed out that the magazines were uncovered during the execution of a search warrant; sitting on a bookshelf.
Adam Childers had an answer, though, stating that after the boxes had made it through the move back to Kentucky, the boxes began to break down, so he moved them.
Adam Childers also testified in regard to the “treasure trove” of child porn discovered digitally in his home, stating that in the early ‘80s he picked up buying old computers to use chips for scrap in exchange for quick cash that he could put into his other hobby of Civil War reenactments.
According to court testimony, Adam Childers would pick up old PCs anywhere he could, including yard sales and flea markets.
Before removing the computer chips for their scrap value, Adam Childers stated he had the idea to remove the data from old computers and put them into an external drive-in case the original owners would want their old data.
Defense attorney Sebastian Joy also guided Adam Childers back in time to the days of dial-up internet, with him asking Adam Childers to explain how he previously searched the internet and downloaded everything he could find concerning military history.
Adam Childers said that due to the speed of downloading at the time, he never really monitored what he had downloaded and did it all in large batches and moved it into a “jumbo file,” implying that on some occasion’s pornography was unintentionally gathered.
Adam Childers said that due to the size of the file he never sorted through it correctly, fearing if he deleted items, he would get rid of something he actually wanted.
As technology increased, Adam Childers said he began printing off items as a way to keep the “jumbo file” a bit smaller to keep his computer running smoothly.
Adam Childers said he would print several files at a time to sort through later; sometimes discovering child pornography within the filings.
Adam Childers said that since he lived in Ashland city limits, burning wasn’t permitted, and he ran into the same fear of embarrassment if he disposed of them. So, he then stated he put them in binders.
The white, basic, office-style binder was held up by prosecuting attorneys for the jury; the binder is now wrapped in red evidence tape.
Adam Childers again explained that over time he evolved right along with technology, converting to file-sharing services.
Childers stated he was looking for military history, and on cross-examination Roth seemed to call his bluff.
“So, you were searching innocently … things that just so happen to be child pornography,” Assistant U.S. attorny Roth asked.
“Hell, I may have, but that was not my intention,” Adam Childers responded.
In regard to searching phrases like “L.S. Models” that detectives earlier testified is often times associated with child porn, Adm Childers said he was looking for airplane models.
Siberian Mouse was another frequently mentioned code word for child porn, but Childers said he was looking up Russian content, referencing railroad construction by Russians during WWII.
_____________
