Details pulled five years ago by an investigator in France from a notorious series of obscene Internet photographs resulted in the imposition Tuesday of what is believed to be most severe sentence ever in a Connecticut child pornography prosecution.
A federal judge in Bridgeport sentenced truck driver William Oehne, who is 50 years old, to 45 years in prison for taking pornographic photographs of the 9-year-old daughter of a former girlfriend and using the Internet to distribute the images to pedophiles around the world. Specifically, U.S. District Judge Janet C. Hall sentenced Oehne to 30 years for the production of child pornography and a consecutive 15 years for distribution of child pornography.
In their argument for severity, federal prosecutors attacked the insidious nature of child pornography in the Internet age, describing it as a crime that makes children victims for life when pedophiles around the world continuously trade exploitive images of them.
"As a result, the heinous pictures he created have become some of the most-viewed images of child pornography available on the Internet today, ensuring that his victim will continue to be victimized by traders and viewers of child pornography for the rest of her life," U.S. Attorney David B. Fein said.
Oehne was accused of photographing the victim between 2004 and 2006, when he lived with the girl's mother in Fairfield County . When he was arrested in Virginia in 2009, he told a detective that the girl's mother invited him to move into her home after she noticed his profile on a computer dating network for single people.
Seizures of computer files by law enforcement agencies suggest that Oehne's photographs are being widely collected in the U.S. and abroad. In the U.S. alone, the photographic images have been found in computer libraries seized in 3,300 criminal investigations. Law enforcement officials have encountered only two or three other sets of pornographic images more frequently, authorities said.
Computer crime investigators have discovered Oehne's photographs so often that, before the victim was identified, authorities gave the images a name, the "T series," and used it for training purposes. It was the very popularity of the photographs that kept them before law enforcement. That popularity contributed to the identification of the victim and, ultimately, to Oehne's arrest, according to material filed in federal court.
An FBI agent discovered the photographs on the Internet in January 2006, after Oehne installed a file-sharing program on his computer that allowed the images to be distributed among pedophiles. Within days, law enforcement officers in Lyon, France, discovered the same images in Europe .
The European police agency INTERPOL developed the lead that identified the victim by magnifying two details found in the background of the photographs: a commemorative plate and a child's Mickey Mouse hat. The plate bore a girl's first name and what investigators then suspected was the girl's birth date. The same name had been stenciled on the hat, according to court records.
The name and birth date were distributed among U.S. police agencies in 2006. After three years and a frustrating series of investigative dead ends, FBI agents in New Haven concluded in March 2009 that the victim probably lived in Fairfield County, according to court records.
They discovered that, two years earlier, in 2007, Oehne's victim brought a sex-abuse complaint against him. An unidentified Connecticut agency investigated the complaint but dropped the matter when the victim, then about age 12, denied when interviewed that the abuse had taken place.
On March 30, 2009, the FBI interviewed the victim again. That time, she reported that Oehne began abusing and photographing her when he moved into her home. Connecticut agents also determined that Oehne was living outside of Richmond , Va., where he was free on bail after being charged with the sexual abuse of a 15-year-old girl.
Authorities in Connecticut reported the information the same day to a law enforcement computer crimes task force in Virginia. The information was assigned to a Virginia State Police detective who had reviewed, as part of his training, the pornographic photographs that Oehne had distributed on the Internet, according to court records.
While examining the photographs, the Virginia detective noticed that at least one contained the image of a man's hand with two rings on the fingers.
"I found a number of images," the Virginia detective testified in October during a hearing in Bridgeport on Oehne's case. "One image of a child and one image that there was an adult male visible with rings on his hand. From the waist down is all you can see of him."
The officer had enlargements made of the rings, which were found during a search of Oehne's possessions. He was arrested before the day was over.
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