Cody man in custody on child porn charge

Posted 8/20/19

A Cody man has been arrested and charged on allegations that he redistributed child pornography on a social networking site last year.

Carl Watts, 35, is facing a felony count of sexual …

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Cody man in custody on child porn charge

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A Cody man has been arrested and charged on allegations that he redistributed child pornography on a social networking site last year.

Carl Watts, 35, is facing a felony count of sexual exploitation of a child. The charge alleges that he posted six images of young children in sexually explicit poses on his personal Tumblr blog in late August 2018.

A tearful Watts allegedly admitted to posting the images in an interview with the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) last October, though he wasn’t charged and arrested until last month. Court records indicate that, at the time of his July 15 arrest, he was working in Powell.

Watts is currently being held in the Park County Detention Center on a $15,000 cash bond as he awaits an Aug. 28 preliminary hearing in circuit court. At that hearing, a judge will determine whether there’s enough evidence for the case to proceed to district court and a trial.

DCI Special Agent Zac Lowndes laid out some of the evidence against Watts in an affidavit accompanying the charging documents.

Lowndes said the investigation began in September 2018, when officials at Tumblr contacted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Tumblr submitted 11 images that a user identified as “wattsram” had uploaded to the site from an IP address in the Cody area on Aug. 30, 2018. Lowndes was assigned the case in October, and he concluded that six of the uploaded photos constituted illicit child pornography. The images depicted two naked girls — each 9 or 10 years old — in sexually explicit positions, Lowndes wrote.

Working with Homeland Security Investigations, DCI quickly learned that the IP address tied to the uploads was associated with a TCT West account belonging to Watts.

DCI obtained a search warrant for Watts’ 29th Street apartment in mid-October, seizing two cellphones and a desktop computer. A search of the desktop PC would later yield “approximately 289 files related to the sexual exploitation of children,” Lowndes wrote, with seven images “being obvious child pornography.” The children ranged in age from 5 to 12 years old, the agent said.

Among the files, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children recognized 15 children who’d previously been identified as victims of sexual exploitation. Six of the pornographic images depicted children who had not yet been identified.

In an interview with DCI at his apartment, Watts allegedly admitted that he had reposted child pornography on his Tumblr account “at least 50 times,” and he began crying as he recalled the specifics of the images, Lowndes wrote.

If convicted of the count of receiving, distributing, reproducing, delivering or possessing child pornography with the intent to deliver, Watts would face a minimum sentence of five years in prison, with a maximum 12-year penalty.

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