Largest known collector of child porn in Western Washington sentenced to prison

A Bellevue man who prosecutors say had the largest known collection of child pornography ever seized in Western Washington has been sentenced to nine years in prison.

Federal agents discovered more than 800,000 pictures and videos of children being sexually abused at the home of William Orr, 53, following a lengthy investigation.

But prosecutors say the staggering number is just a fraction of the man’s child pornography collection, and only catalogued half of the seven terabytes of sexually explicit materials stored on computers in his possession.

All told, Assistant U.S. Attorney Marci Ellsworth said in charging papers that Orr’s collection is akin to the Library of Congress, which would equate to approximately 10 terabytes of space if printed and scanned.

“Through the years, he amassed a massive collection of graphic and disturbing stories, images, and videos of child exploitation,” Ellsworth wrote. “Some of the rapes were incredibly violent, and the children can be heard screaming in pain,” the federal prosecutor continued.

Agents also discovered a “guide to pedophilia” and stories of child rape in Orr’s collection.

Prosecutors say Orr traded materials for years with others actively molesting children themselves, including a British woman who, along with her boyfriend, was sexually exploiting her 11- and 5-year-old daughters.

“Defendant did nothing to report the abuse or alert the authorities to the ongoing victimization of these children by their mother,” Ellsworth wrote. “The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) identified multiple known victims of child sexual exploitation in Defendant’s collection, all of whom are real children, someone’s son or daughter, a brother or sister, a nephew or niece, a grandchild. ”

The charging papers say Orr, who was sentenced Tuesday morning, has been obsessed with sexual exploitation of children for much of his life, first molesting a young family member as a teen.

Orr first drew the attention of law enforcement when a Homeland Security Investigations special agent in Delaware connected with him through a covert computer network, the Seattle PI reports.

Investigators ultimately traced him to his parents’ home in Bellevue in February 2011, where they seized the computers later found to contain his massive child pornography collection. He subsequently moved to Iowa, where prosecutors say he obtained another computer and continued collecting and trading child pornography until his arrest in May 2012 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

“The children portrayed in the videos and images (Orr) distributed and possessed suffer real, permanent, and lifelong damage. Not only did these children suffer physically at the hands of their rapists and molesters, they suffer emotionally each and every time their exploitation is shared over the Internet,” Ellsworth wrote in arguing for the nine year sentence.

“Too often we sanitize our references to the images and videos and forget that these are crime scene photographs of children being raped, sometimes violently and repeatedly,” Ellsworth said.

In addition to the nine year sentence handed down Tuesday, Orr will face 25 years of court supervision upon his release.