David Montgomery Made 14 Child Porn Videos — Found Guilty, But How He Got Caught Is Astonishing
David Montgomery, 59, of Hagerstown, Maryland, was convicted Thursday on child sex abuse charges, he’s a broke, stupid man — and now he’s headed to prison for up to 10 years. He was caught due to an extraordinarily absent-minded mistake driven by a need for cash. After a short, one day trial on Thursday, Montgomery was convicted of sexually abusing a minor, as well as producing child pornography.
Montgomery, a truck driver currently on disability, faced 12 other counts, according to a report in the local Herald Mail newspaper, stemming from 14 homemade child porn videos all found on a recordable DVD and filmed by Montgomery on August 2, 2013.
The now-convicted child sex abuser got himself caught when he took his personal computer to an area pawn shop on September 10 of last year, WHAG-TV reported. But Montgomery couldn’t come up with the cash to get his computer out of hock, so on October 22 a clerk at the pawn shop got the computer ready to be sold.
When he noticed a disc in the DVD drive, he put it into another computer expecting that it contained music. But that’s not what it contained.
“After the expiration date went past, they went ahead to prepare [the laptop] for sale, popped open the tray and there was a DVD homemade,” said prosecutor Brett Wilson. “And unfortunately, it had what they believed was child porn and they were correct.”
In fact, the disc contained 14 videos, which investigators later said were shot over about a period of a few hours on August 2, 2014. The pawn shop clerk didn’t need to see all 14 to know that it was time to call the police.
The videos showed a naked, nine-year-old girl. On the recordings, David Montgomery orders the girl to undress and touch herself in a sexual manner.
Montgomery, who told police that he filmed the videos on a cell phone then burned them on to a disc and forgot about then, claimed that he never touched the nine-year-old girl, and that he never deliberately distributed of showed the videos to anyone else. The identity of the girl, and how Montgomery gained access to her, was not made public.
Montgomery also claimed, through his defense lawyer, that the DVD should not be allowed as evidence at his trial, because the clerk violated his “expectation of privacy” by playing it. But Circuit Judge Dana Wright rejected that argument.
Police later got a warrant to search his house where they found more recordings and images of child porn on Montgomery’s other computer.
David Montgomery reportedly told detectives that making the videos was “the worst mistake he has ever made and has regretted it since it happened.” On November 10, he will learn just how much he regrets it when Judge Wright hands down his sentence.
[Image: Washington County Sheriff’s Office]
