Authorities Break Up Multistate Child Pornography Ring
Officials say videos depicted children being brutally beaten
By Lenny Savino
Originally published by Knight Ridder News Service, March 9, 2002
WASHINGTON — Postal inspectors, the FBI and Canadian authorities have broken up an underground network of adults who traded pornographic videos of children—sometimes their own—being brutally beaten.
Ten have been convicted and more arrests are expected in the ongoing investigation of what authorities described Friday as a unique case.
"We've seen organized networks of sadomasochistic beatings with adults before, but this is the first time we've seen it with children," said Raymond Smith, head of the Postal Service's child exploitation investigations.
The case began in December 1999 when Montreal police were tipped to a violent child porn videotape sent by a computer programmer in Dalton, Ga., to a school employee in a Montreal suburb. The computer programmer helped federal investigators set up a phony post office box in a sting that caught the other defendants.
One defendant, David Bradner, 38, a former auto parts store owner from Vanceburg, Ky., fired a shotgun into his computer hard drives when agents raided his 750-acre farm. Bradner has signed a plea agreement to serve 20 years for coercing minors to participate in the videos. He'll be sentenced formally March 22.
"It's a bizarre group of people obsessed with spanking children for sexual gratification," said Michael Galuppo, a postal inspector who participated in the raid.
Galuppo and other investigators said the child spanking club's members knew one another via various Internet chat rooms specializing in perverse forms of child discipline and through pornographic Web sites and newsletters such as Domestic Discipline Digest. Their encounters started as early as 1996, authorities said.
Copies of Bradner's own publication, The Spanking News Digest, were found in his home, said Galuppo, who covers the Southeast from the Postal Inspection Service's Charlotte, N.C., regional office.
Photographs found in another defendant's home depicted "spanking vacations" some of the families took together, investigators said. In the videos the children, some from the families of the defendants, were beaten with whips, hairbrushes, canes and wooden paddles. Sexual fondling occurs, but no intercourse. Twelve victims have been identified as either children or relatives of defendants.
They are David Wadsworth of Montreal; David Patterson and his former wife Shirley Blaney, of Dalton, Ga.; Jim Nain of Wisconsin Rapids, Wis.; Gordon Murray of Brewton, Ala.; Donald Fletcher of Fort Myers, Fla.; Richard Roll of Jamestown, N.Y.; John Francis McDonnell, of Mineola, N.Y.; George Kelly of Lombard, Ill., and Bradner.
All have pleaded guilty, authorities said, and most have drawn 10-year federal prison sentences.
At least one of the videotaped children suffered permanent disfigurement from beatings that investigators said went on for "years."
Nain was a railroad employee; Murray, a middle school teacher; Fletcher, a chauffeur; Roll, a nurse and former Boy Scout leader; McDonnell, a bank security guard; and Kelly, a former Sunday school teacher.
Patterson was a recruiter of new members for the group and bragged to other members that he planned to build an underground vault to hide his huge collection of child porn.
Among the videos Kelly made, investigators said, were porn scenes featuring anatomically explicit dolls that authorities use in interviews with children who may have been sexually abused.
No money was exchanged for the sado-pornographic materials, according to court papers.
Mark Wohlander, prosecutor in the Bradner case and a former child porn investigator for the FBI, said the Internet was making it easier for devotees of highly specialized fetishes to find one another and was expanding the trade.
The result may be to encourage perverse practices, said Eileen Jacob, an FBI agent in the bureau's Crimes Against Children Unit in Washington, which oversaw the investigation.
"When they hear from others involved in this type of behavior, it validates their actions," she said.
