Odessa Man Sentenced to 15 Years for Child Porn

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Tammy Dickinson, United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, announced that an Odessa, Mo., man was sentenced in federal court today for attempting to receive child pornography over the Internet.

Anthony O. Terry, 37, of Odessa, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Gary A. Fenner to 15 years in federal prison without parole. The court also sentenced Terry to a lifetime of supervised release following incarceration.

On Sept. 16, 2014, Terry pleaded guilty to two counts of attempting to receive child pornography over the Internet.

On multiple occasions in December 2012 and January 2013 a law enforcement officer with the Nixa, Mo., Police Department identified Terry’s computer as making child pornography movies and images available for distribution through a peer-to-peer file-sharing network. Law enforcement officers executed a search warrant at Terry’s residence and seized several computers and hard drives.

Examiners found 300 images and two videos of child pornography on Terry’s computers. Also discovered were forensic artifacts indicating that video titles indicative of child pornography were at least partially downloaded onto one of Terry’s computers. An incomplete download of a video from a file-sharing program was recovered, which depicted a prepubescent girl with her mouth duct-taped being apparently kidnapped and taken to a bedroom where an adult male pulls down her pants.

According to court documents, Terry admitted to using multiple file-sharing programs over several years to obtain child pornography. He supplemented this peer-to-peer activity by using a photosharing option in Yahoo! Messenger to also obtain images of the sexual abuse of children.

There is evidence, say court documents, that Terry admitted to sending photos of underaged girls clothed or in bikinis, pretending to be one of the girls, to other underaged girls. Terry does not dispute that he created Yahoo! profiles of females to get males to chat with him online.

Court documents refer to numerous allegations involving the sexual abuse of his children and other children that have been reported to authorities. Terry’s parental rights were previously terminated.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Teresa A. Moore. It was investigated by the Nixa, Mo., Police Department, the Odessa, Mo., Police Department, the Benton County, Mo., Sheriff’s 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."