St. Joseph Man Sentenced for Distributing Child Pornography

KANSAS CITY, MO—Matt J. Whitworth, Acting United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, announced that a St. Joseph, Mo., man was sentenced in federal court today for distributing child pornography over the Internet.

Eddie Dean Randall, 58, of St. Joseph, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Dean Whipple this afternoon to 13 years in federal prison without parole. The court also ordered Randall to forfeit to the government two desktop computers, a laptop computer, six computer hard drives, 119 CDs, 105 floppy diskettes, memory sticks and other media that were used to commit the offense.

Randall pleaded guilty on Jan. 21, 2009. Randall admitted that he downloaded child pornography from the Internet, using LimeWire and other file-sharing programs on his computer. Randall saved videos and images of child pornography in a shared folder that would allow other users of the LimeWire program to both access and download it onto their computer from Randall’s hard drive.

On May 5, 2006, an FBI special agent in Miami, Fla., who was conducting an undercover investigation using the LimeWire program, searched for files with file names that contained the term “pedo” or were cataloged with the term “pedo” – a term associated with images of child pornography. The FBI special agent received a response from Randall’s computer, and downloaded six videos from Randall’s hard drive. Four of those videos depicted child pornography.

Randall also used the file-sharing program Kazaa to download and share child pornography. When law enforcement officers executed a search warrant at Randall’s residence, he had images of child pornography in his Kazaa shared folder, which were available for sharing over the Internet to other individuals using the Kazaa program.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Matt Hiller. It was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.