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United States Attorney’s Office ALEXANDRIA NEWPORT NEWS NORFOLK RICHMOND UNITED STATES ATTORNEY CHUCK ROSENBERG |
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Jim Rybicki
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July 30, 2007 |
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(Alexandria, VA) – William Edward Wilson, age 36, of Dover, Delaware, pled guilty today in United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, to attempting to entice a 12-year-old girl from Reston, Virginia, to engage in illicit sexual conduct and to receiving child pornography, via the Internet. Chuck Rosenberg, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and Colm F. Connolly, United States Attorney for the District of Delaware, made the announcement following Wilson’s guilty plea before United States District Judge James C. Cacheris.
Wilson, who will be sentenced on October 19, 2007, faces a mandatory minimum prison sentence of ten years and a maximum sentence of life on the child enticement charge. Wilson faces a mandatory minimum prison sentence of five years and a maximum sentence of twenty years on the child pornography charge. Upon his release from incarceration, Wilson will remain under Court supervision for a term of at least five years to life. Wilson also will be required to register as a sex offender in any jurisdiction in which he lives or works.
According to court documents, on February 22, 2007, Wilson posed as a 15-year-old boy and entered a teenage social networking website known as Popteen.us.com. On the Popteen website, Wilson targeted three minor girls with whom he subsequently made contact over the Internet. These girls were a 12-year-old girl who lives in Reston, Virginia; a 13-year-old girl who lives in New Jersey; and a 15-year-old girl who lives in Indiana.
Over a period of three months, Wilson engaged in cell phone calls and hundreds of e-mail messages with the 12-year-old girl from Reston. He engaged in similar conduct with the other girls. In late April 2007, after the Reston girl’s mother discovered Wilson’s messages to her daughter, a Child Exploitation Unit Detective from the Fairfax County Police Department assumed the girl’s online identity and continued communicating with Wilson. During those communications, Wilson sought to have the 12-year-old Reston girl take a Greyhound bus from
Reston to his residence in Dover, Delaware, where he planned to engage in illicit sexual conduct with her.
Working together as part of the Department of Justice’s Project Safe Childhood, federal, state and local law enforcement agents arrested Wilson and searched his Dover residence on May 2, 2007. Found in the residence was a computer containing thousands of images of graphic child pornography, depicting children ranging in age from infancy to about 15 years old. Also found were numerous printed images of child pornography and text stories concerning the rape, torture and murder of children.
This investigation was conducted by the FBI’s Washington Field Office and Dover, Delaware Resident Agency, and Innocent Images Initiative Task Force members from the Fairfax County Police Department and the Delaware State Police. This case is being prosecuted in the Eastern District of Virginia by Special Assistant United States Attorney Edward McAndrew, who is on detail from the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the Department of Justice. Prior to being transferred to the Eastern District of Virginia for purposes of today’s guilty plea, the child pornography portion of this case was prosecuted in the District of Delaware by Assistant United States Attorney Edmund Falgowski.