KC Man Sentenced to 15 Years for Child Porn

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Tammy Dickinson, United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, announced that a Kansas City, Mo., man was sentenced in federal court today for possessing child pornography while he was under court-ordered supervision for a prior conviction for receiving child pornography.

John T. Beyers, 46, of Kansas City, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Beth Phillips to 15 years in federal prison without parole. Today’s sentence includes 10 years for possessing child pornography and a consecutive five years for the revocation of his supervised release, which he was serving at the time of the offense for a prior child pornography conviction.

On Feb. 27, 2007, Beyers pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to receiving child pornography and was sentenced to seven years and four months in federal prison. He was released to a halfway house in Kansas City in May 2012. One of the conditions of Beyers’ supervised release was that Beyers could obtain only one computer, and that computer had to have monitoring software installed for supervision of his Internet activity by the probation officer.  Other conditions included that Beyers could not obtain any type of pornography, including adult pornography, and Beyers could not violate any state or federal laws.

The U.S. Probation Office conducted a search of Beyers’s apartment on May 17, 2013, and found three unauthorized and unmonitored computers, a thumb drive and an external hard drive. A probation officer also found a receipt for a $1,000 wire transfer. When asked about it, Beyers said a Russian national was extorting $5,000 from him to keep Beyers’s illicit Internet activities from being reported to U.S. authorities.

Investigators found more than 100 images of child pornography and several movies of child pornography on the computers, the thumb drive and the external hard drive. Internet history indicates that Beyers did the bulk of his viewing of child pornography in the cloud, which minimized the available record of his child pornography activity.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Catherine Connelly. It was investigated by U.S. Probation Office and the FBI.

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."