Mecham gets 20 years for child porn

Lorrie Elmer Mecham

Lorrie Elmer Mecham, 69, of Mountain Home, was sentenced Monday in U.S. District Court to 20 years in prison, followed by ten years of supervised release, for receiving and possessing sexually explicit images of minors, the U.S. Attorney's Office announced.

Mecham was convicted by a federal jury in June after a four-day trial.

The investigation began in August 2007 when Mecham's wife became suspicious that he was using his computer to obtain child pornography from the Internet. After finding a cooler filled with hundreds of floppy discs and CDs hidden in the crawl space of their home, she contacted Mountain Home Police, who found sexually explicit images of children on one of the discs.

According to court documents, the FBI investigation showed that Mecham had a long history of child sexual exploitation, including a conviction for child molestation in Georgia in 1987, in which he admitted molesting two girls, ages seven and nine.

In imposing a 20-year sentence, U.S. District Judge Edward J. Lodge noted that Mecham possessed more than 12,000 child pornography images, some of which depicted very young girls being sadistically abused.

Lodge also commented on Mecham's pattern of activity molesting young girls, some of whom were in the courtroom to hear the sentence. "You sentenced those victims to a lifetime of hurt, humiliation, sordid memories and fears... Your motive was nothing more than lust and greed," said Lodge.

For more details see this Wednesday's Mountain Home News.