Join me to hear the story of Officer Timothy Horwath of California Highway Patrol who also happens to be a pedophile living on Data Drive. While I discuss that Officer Horwath was caught with child pornography, I try not to get into the subject material itself for those that may be sensitive to this subject. If you thought being caught with child pornography would be bad enough for Officer Horwath, you won’t believe what he does while he is out on bond before trial! This is eCrimeBytes Season 2 Episode 14 Act 1 – Officer Timothy Horwath Sentenced For Child Pornography – Act 1: The Investigation.
Sources:
- https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/former-chp-officer-sentenced-10-years-prison-receipt-child-pornography
- https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16565821/united-states-v-horwath/
Transcript:
00:00:10:01 – 00:00:35:12
Keith
Hey, welcome to E! Crime Bites Season two Episode 14 Timothy Horwath Sentenced for Child Pornography. Now, while I just said child pornography and we will be just saying those words throughout here, I do not plan to talk in depth about what it was in his images or videos or anything like that. We’re just going to be talking about what he did criminally and how he was caught and punished.
00:00:35:17 – 00:00:53:27
Keith
So I hope you stick with us. But if this subject material is a little too sensitive, I do understand it. And we have a ton of other episodes that are not child pornography related that you might enjoy with hacking and so forth. So do rewind and you’ll definitely find something I think you’ll like. Now, the reason why I picked this case is,
00:00:53:27 – 00:01:00:30
Keith
well, 75% plus of the cases that go across my radar of new cases tend to be child pornography.
00:01:00:35 – 00:01:23:57
Keith
I hate the subject material. It is also important to know that so many cases out there do involve this subject material. So every once in a while, I’ll pick a case like this where it’s a special case. And in this case I think it’s kind of special because it’s a police officer that was viewing the child pornography. And you would hope you could trust a police officer in any situation.
00:01:23:57 – 00:01:45:24
Keith
But in this case, it was bad. So with that, the technology in this case is Snapchat, WhatsApp and other communication based services. And the service itself doesn’t really matter. We’re not talking about hacking the service or anything particular to the two that service itself,
00:01:45:24 – 00:01:50:14
Keith
Officer Horwath here is using these services to communicate with under-aged
00:01:50:14 – 00:01:54:26
Keith
kids, basically. Okay. So the service itself is not important.
00:01:54:26 – 00:02:19:12
Keith
Just know that it’s some kind of communication medium over the Internet. That’s the technology here. The the crime is receipt of child pornography. And I will say I think he probably committed more crimes. You will hear him actually talking to underage people overseas. And I don’t think that actually falls into receipt of child pornography. And I think he probably did more stuff that they didn’t charge him for.
00:02:19:17 – 00:02:24:18
Keith
But that is the one that I found that he that the government charged him for in the end. So that’s one we’re going to stick with.
00:02:24:18 – 00:02:49:55
Keith
So Officer Timothy Horwath, he is a California Highway Patrol officer, and you will probably you may hear me say CHP or chips. I don’t know if chips is used all that often, but when I was a kid, there was a show on back in the seventies and eighties called Chips C, H, Little I, Big P, little S, and it was about motorcycle officers and California Highway Patrol.
00:02:50:00 – 00:03:00:55
Keith
Well, that was a good story. This is not going to be such a good story. So this is the same law enforcement unit that Officer Horwath belongs to.
00:03:00:55 – 00:03:11:45
Keith
Okay. So let’s just go ahead and talk about what we’re going to bring to you this week. Now, we only have three acts this week because I had five last week, and that was it was a lot of material last week and we needed them, but we had five.
00:03:11:45 – 00:03:35:58
Keith
So I want to give you a little bit of a break this week and only bring you three acts. So Act one, which is the one you’re watching today, that’s just the investigation. Okay. This is Monday, tomorrow and Tuesday, going to release act two, the balls and you’ll see why in that act. And I should say I’m as I’m kind of giggling, I’m laughing at Officer Horwath because I’m actually making fun of him here.
00:03:36:03 – 00:03:57:17
Keith
I’m not going to making fun of anybody else in this other than the criminal here because this is such a sensitive topic. So the third act, which is Wednesday, this is punishment. So we’ll get into what actually happened when the law caught up with him, just like we usually do on most of our episodes. So with that, let’s go ahead and get into Act One, the investigation.
00:03:57:17 – 00:04:25:55
Keith
So the investigation started in 2019. Okay. The investigators from the California Highway Patrol, CHP, Chip’s Computer Crimes Investigation Unit, were running an undercover operation. Now police officers all over the nation federally and state level and even the most local levels, they do this all the time where they look for predators out there looking for children on the Internet.
00:04:26:00 – 00:04:41:12
Keith
So, you know, when I’m telling you about this, this isn’t like a specialized thing where it’s focused on him. This is sort of like a dragnet thing that thing that law enforcement typically does from time to time in secrecy to catch a whole bunch of pedophiles.
00:04:41:12 – 00:04:48:39
Keith
So this unit was running an undercover operation looking for users of peer to peer software in the Redding, California area.
00:04:48:44 – 00:05:12:39
Keith
Now, peer to peer software is a way to share data directly with another individual without a third party involved, usually. And I’m saying this very general here, and I know probably a lot of technical people and those folks going, no, it’s not totally correct. I know. I’m just trying to say it generally. Okay. So in the child pornography realm, what would happen is people would get videos and images.
00:05:12:39 – 00:05:32:13
Keith
They would go on peer to peer sharing software, and they’d share these images and videos with other pedophiles out there. So this law enforcement unit is out there doing this investigation, looking for these type of individuals on the Internet, doing this sort of nefarious activity. Hope you are with me so far.
00:05:32:13 – 00:05:41:36
Keith
So in this investigation, the investigators noticed that there’s an IP address sharing over a hundred suspected child pornography files.
00:05:41:36 – 00:05:46:44
Keith
Further investigation shows that Timothy Horwath was
00:05:46:44 – 00:06:03:52
Keith
who was sharing those files. And when they did a little bit of digging into who Timothy Horwath was, they found out that he was also part of California Highway Patrol, which is the same law enforcement unit that is investigating this. So they probably went, holy shit, didn’t expect this. Right.
00:06:03:52 – 00:06:15:48
Keith
So I’m going to put a picture up of Officer Timothy Horwath here. This is the mugshot I found of him. I didn’t find too many other pictures in this. So this is the one I had to stick with for a thumbnail and so forth.
00:06:15:48 – 00:06:38:58
Keith
So armed with this information in October of 2019. Chips, they went out and they executed a search warrant at Horwath’s residence and his locker at this police officer station where he’s stationed at. So what did they find in the garage they found inside California Highway Patrol duty bag. So his work bag.
00:06:39:03 – 00:07:05:25
Keith
Investigators located a laptop computer that had been used secretly to traffic in visual depictions of children engaging in sexually explicit conduct, a.k.a child porn. So, again, if you’re closing your eyes trying to imagine this, they’re doing a search warrant at his house. They find a police officer bag that they open up and they find a laptop. And on the laptop there’s child porn on it.
00:07:05:25 – 00:07:07:05
Keith
So this is already starting
00:07:07:05 – 00:07:09:23
Keith
out with the crime all the way up front. Okay.
00:07:09:23 – 00:07:26:54
Keith
Now, they said when they did the examination, it wasn’t like when I say children, I’m not saying teenagers, which is already bad enough. We’re talking about children as young as three or four years old that were on his laptop being sexually abused.
00:07:26:54 – 00:07:27:14
Keith
All right,
00:07:27:14 – 00:07:43:55
Keith
what else did they find? They found a cell phone on Horwath himself, which contained thousands of child porn images. So if he wants to claim, this laptop somehow slipped, fell into my bag, I don’t know how it got in there.
00:07:44:00 – 00:07:49:25
Keith
He’s also got a phone on himself when the search happened that had child porn on it too.
00:07:49:25 – 00:08:11:03
Keith
So they did more of an investigation and what did they find out? Horwath has been sending money to females in the Philippines. Okay. Now he’s corresponding with females in the Philippines using just standard social media tools. One young female who ended up when they did investigation ended up being over the age of 18.
00:08:11:03 – 00:08:19:24
Keith
When he communicated with her, he would say things like, if you need some money, you can always send me more videos and I can send you a little
00:08:19:24 – 00:08:29:50
Keith
go slower in your videos, you move your hand too fast lol. I’m going to skip some more here because it gets very graphic. Something fun. That’s how he ends with.
00:08:29:50 – 00:08:30:45
Keith
So then
00:08:30:45 – 00:09:02:24
Keith
they did more investigation and they found there was another female he was communicating with. This female was in Brazil. She said, Hey, I’m 19 years old. It’s fine. But when they did a further investigation, they found out actually she was 16 years old. So again, they found communication from Officer Horwath to this female where he sent very explicit communication, just like I kind of danced around earlier with you telling her what to do on the videos and pictures.
00:09:02:29 – 00:09:14:28
Keith
And then he went on to have even more graphic requests from her. So if I pause here for a minute and we start doing a tally, we’ve got
00:09:14:28 – 00:09:29:03
Keith
a police officer bag with a laptop with child porn on it. We have a phone with child porn on it, and we have communication to at least two young females, one of which is verifiably under 18 years old.
00:09:29:03 – 00:10:03:18
Keith
And he’s talking sexually to both of them. That’s where we’re at in the story. When they did the examination of his computers and they pulled up the file names and so forth of these files that he had loaded on there, I’m not going to read you the file names, but I can tell you that just the three that I’m looking at right now as examples, they have the words four year old, six year old, seven year old, and they have some very incestuous terms and there like papa and daddy and so forth.
00:10:03:22 – 00:10:04:21
Keith
So
00:10:04:21 – 00:10:30:10
Keith
if a criminal were to argue, oops, I accidentally downloaded a file, didn’t know it was child porn, ended up being child porn. my God, These files were named things that looked like child porn. So before you even open them, they had child porn words in the title. Okay? That’s why I’m telling you the ages is because later on, if you try to deny it, it’s kind of hard to deny it when it has the names in the title.
00:10:30:10 – 00:10:43:09
Keith
So, okay, hopefully a lot of that. You’re with me. We did it together. We got through probably the toughest part because in December 5th of 2019, an indictment came out. And one of the things that they
00:10:43:09 – 00:10:57:35
Keith
asked for in this indictment is a forfeiture. So they specifically note noted three different devices, computing devices that they wanted to seize or have him forfeit.
00:10:57:40 – 00:11:13:17
Keith
One was a Toshiba laptop computer, one was a black LG cell phone, and another one is a black Alcatel TCL phone. And I’m not familiar with Alcatel, but it’s probably something like a track phone or I imagine like a burner type phone
00:11:13:17 – 00:11:32:23
Keith
in the indictment. They outline the possible penalties in here, maximum 20 years imprisonment. Now if you stuck with me on a lot of our previous episodes, you know that a lot of times I say, hey, this person that got away with it was not that much of a prison sentence.
00:11:32:23 – 00:11:32:40
Keith
Well,
00:11:32:40 – 00:11:47:57
Keith
We’re talking decades of years, usually when it comes to child pornography, which yeah, that’s definitely warranted in these cases, you know, ten, 20 years plus when you’re talking about children as victims.
00:11:47:57 – 00:12:09:52
Keith
So here it’s 20 years of imprisonment maximum. Minimum is five. And that would be real light, I would think maximum of a quarter million dollar fine, a minimum of five years supervised release, maximum supervised release of lifetime, which is probably warranted in a lot of these cases. I imagine.
00:12:09:52 – 00:12:32:05
Keith
And then they have some other stuff like special assessment is $5100, some forfeiture and some mandatory restitution to victims. Now pause on that. I’m going to come back to this because this is one of the points in the story I thought was very interesting. Law enforcement a lot of times are able to identify who the victims are and get restitution for them, which is great.
00:12:32:10 – 00:12:37:26
Keith
I think in these cases that a victim of this caliber would be able to get some restitution.
00:12:37:26 – 00:12:54:25
Keith
So now, with all this evidence on the table, Horwath he’s arrested,. You would imagine they found all this child porn on all these devices and that even like on his personal stuff, you know, he had it in a work bag, may have been a personal computer, but it was a work bag.
00:12:54:30 – 00:12:58:11
Keith
So we’re going to pause here. This is the end of act one. Okay.
00:12:58:11 – 00:13:13:39
Keith
In my opinion, this is probably we got through the toughest material. A lot of this other stuff is going to be where they catch and punish him. So if you got through that, hopefully the next two acts are going to be easier for you because the next act is act two, and that’s called the balls.
00:13:13:39 – 00:13:33:21
Keith
And you’re going to find out why. And Act two, because he didn’t just stop here. I read you some pretty egregious stuff, but he does worse. Okay. You’re going to need to come back and find out what it is. If there was anything in this act that you liked, please, like, subscribe, thumbs up, follow whatever it is on your application that you’re watching us and visit our website.
00:13:33:21 – 00:13:48:27
Keith
Please do its eCrimeBytes dot com. Bytes spelled the computer way y as in yellow milk. And with that, I do hope to see you back tomorrow on Act two the balls and you will find out what Timothy Horwath did. Thanks.
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