Dumpster divers lead police to suspected child sex offender in Queen Anne
Mar 24, 2025, 5:26 PM
Two dumpsters in Queen Anne. (Photo: Julia Dallas, MyNorthwest)
(Photo: Julia Dallas, MyNorthwest)
A 63-year-old Seattle man was arrested Friday with 14 binders of child pornography after two homeless people found some of the photos in a dumpster and reported it to 911, the Seattle Police Department said.
Just after midnight on March 2, the pair told dispatchers they found a notebook with photos of naked children in a dumpster on Queen Anne Avenue North. They directed officers to the dumpster, where police said they found loose papers and 14 more binders in total.
“It appeared to be meticulously catalogued, containing mostly pre-pubescent boys,” the investigating officer wrote in his report. “These papers appeared to have been printed off of websites, some with a ‘.RU’ address (indicating it was a Russian website) and seemed to be selling the children.”
Inside one of the same bags, police said they found doctor’s office paperwork linking to the 63-year-old suspect, Arthur Rickard. Over the course of nearly three weeks, investigators said they found usernames, a Yahoo account, fingerprints, and handwriting linking the materials to Rickard.
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On March 21, officers went to his apartment – just across from the same dumpsters where the materials were discovered – and arrested Rickard. During interviews with police, court documents said Rickard admitted to the binders being his – and having molested about 50 children before 1983.
“He stated that he started molesting children when he was a teenager and only stopped when two children reported him and he was arrested in 1983,” a detective wrote in the investigation report.
Police said the child pornography discovered, some printed off from a computer, ranged in dates from 1998 to 2013.
King County prosecutors charged Rickard on Monday with two counts of possession of depictions of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct.
He’s scheduled to be in court on April 7.
