January 29, 2015

Former Kansas City Man Sentenced for Producing Child Pornography, Possessing Thousands of Images

KANSAS CITY, MO—Tammy Dickinson, United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, announced that a former Kansas City, Mo., man who owned a massive collection of child pornography and who victimized one child whose images of sexual assault were shared online and have been identified in thousands of other child pornography cases across the country was sentenced in federal court today.

Paul Leslie Kannarr, 59, formerly of Kansas City, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Dean Whipple to 10 years in federal prison without parole. The court ordered the federal sentence to be served concurrently with Kannarr’s state sentences for two child pornography convictions.

On June 4, 2014, Kannarr pleaded guilty to six counts of producing child pornography, two counts of posting a notice online that offers to display or distribute child pornography, one count of transporting child pornography over the Internet and one count of possessing child pornography.

Kannarr admitted that he used a minor, identified as “Jane Doe,” to produce child pornography on six separate occasions between Dec. 19, 1999 and Sept. 23, 2000. Kannarr advertised the availability of some of those images in Internet newsgroups and distributed images of the victim over the Internet. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) confirmed that, as of June 2014, more than 55,000 images of Kannarr’s principle victim have been detected in almost 7,000 cases reported to NCMEC. Those photos are still being distributed on the Internet more than a decade after their production.

Kannarr also possessed thousands of pornographic images and videos of a multitude of additional child victims. The FBI forensic examination of Kannarr’s electronic media yielded approximately 65,000 images of child pornography unrelated to the principle victim.

According to court documents, Kannarr also admitted he had sexually exploited the principle minor victim when the child was 6 through 13 years of age. Kannarr apparently was preparing to use hypnosis to continue to persuade his victim to expose herself in photographs for him and to possibly engage in more intimate sexual contact. There was evidence that he considered programming his son and the son’s adolescent friends to engage in sexual activity for Kannarr’s photographic exploitation. Court documents also report that Kannarr secretly filmed another minor girl and her friend in the shower.

Missouri Cases: 01CR82152-01 and 7CR101000603

Kannarr is currently serving a 30-year sentence in state prison for two child pornography convictions.

On Jan. 24, 2001, Kannarr was discovered to have taken a small number of sexually explicit Polaroids of the same victim as in the federal case while residing in Platte County and in Clay County, Mo. A subsequent search of Kannarr’s living quarters resulted in the recovery of multiple electronic media containing additional images. On Feb. 21, 2001, Kannarr was charged by Clay County with production of several of the images of the principle victim taken in its jurisdiction. A month after that, Platte County charged Kannarr with the production of the Polaroid images of the principle victim taken in its jurisdiction.

On May 9, 2001, Kannarr pleaded guilty in Clay County to the production of two child pornography images taken in 1995. On June 21, Kannarr was sentenced to 14 years for these offenses. A few days later, on June 23, 2001, Kannarr pleaded guilty to the photos taken of his victim in 1998 in Platte County, and was sentenced on the same day to 30 years’ incarceration.

The Platte County sentence ran concurrently with the Clay County sentence; Kannarr thus received a total sentence of 30 years for two separate state cases in 2001. Kannarr had a state parole hearing in November 2008 (after serving less than one-fourth of his sentence) and another state parole hearing (which wasn’t held due to the federal case) scheduled for November 2014 (after having served less than half of his sentence).

The FBI’s investigation of all of the electronic media recovered from Kannarr’s residence began after Kannarr had been sentenced on his state cases.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Katharine Fincham. It was investigated by the Kansas City, Mo., Police Department and the FBI Cyber Crimes Task Force.

Project Safe Childhood

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the United States Attorneys’ Offices and the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.usdoj.gov/psc. For more information about Internet safety education, please visit www.usdoj.gov/psc and click on the tab “resources.”