Join me to hear the heinous electronic true crime story of Catholic priest James Ward Jackson, the pious pedophile who amassed tens of thousands of pictures and videos of child porn. This is eCrimeBytes.com Season 3, Episode 1 – Catholic Priest James W. Jackson’s Child Porn – Act 1: 190 Children.
Sources:
- https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/61586140/united-states-v-jackson/
- https://www.boston.com/news/crime/2023/12/15/rhode-island-catholic-priest-sentenced-child-sexual-abuse-images/
- https://www.thenewportbuzz.com/rhode-island-priest-appears-in-federal-court-on-charges-of-distributing-receiving-child-pornography/33022 (Photo)
- https://www.ncregister.com/cna/fssp-priest-faces-new-federal-child-pornography-charges (Photo)
Transcript:
00:00:10:00 – 00:00:37:07
Keith
Hey ya crazy bastards! Welcome to eCrimeBytes. This is where I research the court documentation and roast the criminals so you don’t have to. This week, this is the first week of 2024. So we’re starting a new season. We’re starting season three, and this is episode one. Catholic priest James W Jackson’s child porn. Now, I know, I know.
00:00:37:07 – 00:00:59:58
Keith
Last season I said I don’t like to bring child porn episodes because it’s very hard to research. It’s very hard to talk about, but ends up being some of the more popular episodes that I’ve brought to you. It’s the most views and listens that I will have will be on this subject area, and it’s actually this child porn subject area.
00:00:59:59 – 00:01:21:26
Keith
It’s it’s the majority of the cases out there. So you’re going to see a couple of these I’m going to bring to you from now and again and I try to bring them when they have a twist. And the twist in this one is the criminal is a Catholic priest, which you would hope wouldn’t be the person viewing child porn, but is in this case.
00:01:21:30 – 00:01:53:28
Keith
So the criminal his name is James Ward Jackson. He’s a Catholic priest. The crime that he’s accused of and even pleads guilty to later on receipt and distribution of child porn, that’s actually two crimes. There’s the receipt and then there’s the distribution. He actually pleaded guilty to the receipt later on. The victims here, since the government, they do a lot of these cases and they’re able to look at these images and videos and figure out who the real victims are behind them.
00:01:53:32 – 00:02:26:58
Keith
They’re able to put this scenario together of how many people are represented in all the multimedia files that are watched, downloaded and distributed by the pedophiles. And in this case, it was 190 children that were victims. That was a mindblowing number. You’ll find out why later on. There’s an obscene amount of material that was found on one of his devices and then it’ll become clear why there’s 190 children.
00:02:27:03 – 00:02:50:13
Keith
Technology. In this case, I’m not going to make it do a lot of mental gymnastics. It’s going to be peer to peer file sharing. I’m not even talking about a specific service. We’re just going to talk about it generally, which is just taking files and moving them around from device device on the Internet. And it’s a method that pedophiles use to transfer child porn all the time.
00:02:50:17 – 00:03:20:12
Keith
So you see peer to peer file sharing in these cases almost all the time. We’re also going to talk about just very standard smartphones, laptops. We’re going to talk about a Microsoft Surface tablet later on. Nothing out of the ordinary, just very standard devices that everybody uses. So with that, let’s go ahead and get into Act one. This is the one that I I gave the name 190 children.
00:03:20:17 – 00:03:45:37
Keith
All right. So James Jackson, his picture is on the screen for you. Now, if you’re watching the video, the two upper pictures are screen captures of YouTube sermons from his church. So that’s you know, churches do this all the time where they’ll record their sermons and put it out there on YouTube. These are just public screen captures. Just to give you an idea of who he is and what he looks like.
00:03:45:41 – 00:04:08:56
Keith
The lower image is his mug shot. And if you’re just listening to the audio, I will say you’re not really missing a whole lot. You’re just looking at a guy that very much looks like a priest. He has gray hair, glasses, nothing flashy about him. He looks like a priest and an elderly gentleman at that.
00:04:08:56 – 00:04:31:39
Keith
So this story starts on September 4th, 2021. And the East Providence Police Department has this Internet crimes against children Task Force. And what they do is they go out there on the Internet and they look for child pornography, and then they try to identify who the individuals are out there sharing them or viewing them, and they try to arrest them.
00:04:31:44 – 00:05:00:36
Keith
So they found some child pornography being shared. And it came from this IP address, which is this numerical address that computers use to talk to each other on the Internet. This one is 72.80 2.20 1.56. So you can kind of think of that as like, you know, 101 main street except for a computer. Now, this IP address was sharing child pornography.
00:05:00:43 – 00:05:33:07
Keith
And when the detective went and grabbed one of those files, download it, took a look at it. Its file name was wanted dad and daughter dash one. All right. That’s that’s not the creepy part. The creepy part is coming up, it’s a video. 2 minutes, 32 seconds of a female child, a prepubescent female child performing oral sex on an adult male.
00:05:33:12 – 00:06:07:05
Keith
All right. Why do I tell you that? Because a lot of times I’ve had to do a lot of pornography investigations. Back in my day when I did investigations for computer forensics and sometimes people will argue, well, the porn was kind of close to adult porn. I didn’t know that difference. Well, I’m giving you the subject as as vanilla as I can to give you an idea that this is not a person that kind of looks like they might be just barely 18.
00:06:07:05 – 00:06:35:21
Keith
This is something that is very egregiously child porn. So when you see this video, just know it’s not even questionable. It’s not even questionable. And I say, see this video? Hopefully none of us will ever see this video. But when I talk about this video, this is what I mean. So this IP address. Okay, now the detective has this IP address, but he doesn’t have a person.
00:06:35:26 – 00:06:57:37
Keith
I say he. She may be a she, but this detective wants the person behind it so they can arrest them and, you know, put them in jail and make the child porn stop. So how do you go from that IP address to a person? Well there’s this court process, you can do that well, it’s a technical process with a court process.
00:06:57:41 – 00:07:17:23
Keith
The technical portion is you can do a couple of things. First, you can geo locate it, which they did in this case. And when they geolocated the IP address, it said this IP address shows up in Providence, Rhode Island. Okay. So that was the first thing they did. Second thing is you can then see who owns the IP address.
00:07:17:27 – 00:07:44:18
Keith
Corporate wise. Because these IP addresses are owned by somebody and you can basically run them through a service on the Internet and it says, in this case, a Verizon Fios owns it. Okay. So now they know that Verizon Fios owns it, but that’s not probably the person sharing the child porn. They want to know who’s the person behind a Verizon Fios router that might be sharing it.
00:07:44:18 – 00:08:09:26
Keith
And if I’m saying fios and you don’t know what this is, maybe I’m mispronouncing, I say fios. Other people say FiOS, just think cable modem. It’s how businesses and homes get on the internet all over the United States. And probably outside the United States too. It’s just like cable modems. So when they see that Verizon’s on there, they as detectives will go Verizon is probably not sharing child porn.
00:08:09:26 – 00:08:32:56
Keith
There’s probably somebody that rents a router from Verizon sharing child porn. And there’s a court process that they can do where they go to Verizon and say, hey, I have this IP address that you own and I need to know who you basically sub leased it to at this particular time because they did some bad shit. Otherwise we’re going to charge you.
00:08:33:01 – 00:08:50:50
Keith
That’s what it would come down to, right? Because they don’t know who it is. So there’s a whole legal process for this and Verizon goes through it with them. It happens all the time. This isn’t special. This happens all the time in almost any case out there. And Verizon comes back and says that IP address, yes, it’s rented from us.
00:08:50:50 – 00:09:32:59
Keith
And it belongs to Saint Mary’s Church of Providence, Rhode Island, on 538 Broadway flor one, Providence, Rhode Island. 02909 Crazy, right? Not not the address you would want to see associated with child porn. You don’t want to see any address, but especially not a church. Right? Because they probably have access to kids and so forth. So there’s not just this activity and this day there’s more activity and other days with this IP address, there’s two Sundays involved, one in September and one in October.
00:09:33:04 – 00:09:54:17
Keith
One of them was at 5:32 p.m., which actually coincides with the Sunday mass locally here. So I imagine they must have been on break or something or around a mass. Maybe their’s is a little earlier or a little later than ours. But you see what I’m saying? It’s like a Sunday and he’s accessing child porn on a Sunday evening.
00:09:54:22 – 00:09:59:45
Keith
And then there was a Friday in there that they also saw in October around 3:00 ish.
00:09:59:45 – 00:10:21:29
Keith
So they on these days, they went and looked at more. I say they as the detectives went and pulled down more of the child porn to verify why that indeed was child porn. There was this one file called the number seven, and then dot mp4 for like the video.
00:10:21:34 – 00:10:56:45
Keith
okay. I’m going to water this down as much as possible. It’s a 33 minute video, so know, this is not a short video. It’s not an accidental video. It’s a 33 minute video of a nude prepubescent female performing with toys. And I’m going to leave it at that. So, again, not accidental. It’s not it’s not a person that looks like it might be a 19 year old and you’re like, maybe they’re 17.
00:10:56:45 – 00:11:23:19
Keith
No, we’re talking prepubescent. This is definitely stuff that should not be out there on the Internet and it’s coming from a church IP address at this point. So the detectives have had enough. They go through their court process to get an authorized search warrant where they can go to the church and, you know, by force, if needed, search the church and figure out where this child porn is coming from, you know, because they don’t know.
00:11:23:19 – 00:11:53:12
Keith
It could be somebody maybe, you know, surfing off of their wi fi. Who knows where it’s coming from? Well, spoiler alert, it’s going to get bad. It’s going to get real bad. So they do this search at Saint Mary’s Church in Rhode Island. And October 30th of 2021, James Jackson was there at church at the time. And like they probably do in any search, they went in and they gave him his Miranda rights where they say, hey, you have the right to remain silent.
00:11:53:22 – 00:12:15:35
Keith
You get to speak to a lawyer and all that kind of stuff that everybody knows when they watch and listen to these true crime podcasts and shows. Upon being told his rights, he said, Hey, I would like to speak with an attorney because he found out he was in the middle of a child pornography investigation.
00:12:15:35 – 00:12:18:21
Keith
Okay. So at the search, right.
00:12:18:26 – 00:12:43:36
Keith
They’re starting to find things and they find this two terabyte Western digital external hard drive. And it sounds like it wasn’t just sitting in the middle of church up on the, you know, the pew up there or anything. It was in an area that was specific to James Jackson. It was his office area of the rectory and adjoined his bedroom.
00:12:43:41 – 00:13:02:35
Keith
Okay. So agents have software and tools in order to do, you know, a real quick search on things to see if there if they need to address anything right away. You know, maybe there’s kid pictures that were there as altar boys or something. They need to figure that out. Right. So they do a real quick search on there with their tools.
00:13:02:35 – 00:13:24:17
Keith
And they said, my God, there’s a lot of child porn on here. And it’s not just child porn is child porn with bondage and bestiality and just a whole bunch of really sick shit. I’m sure that’s not what the FBI said technically, but I’m sure that somebody somebody thought that right.
00:13:24:17 – 00:13:34:26
Keith
So that precursory examination that they did on the spot at the church, they found child porn and they said, we got to take the rest of this shit back.
00:13:34:26 – 00:13:54:23
Keith
We got to look at it in our lab and we got to do a real thorough search, because if we’re finding it in a cursory search, who knows what we’re going to find when we really put time into this. So they did. They put time into this. And later on, the results showed 12,000 images on this, on the devices.
00:13:54:23 – 00:14:22:22
Keith
And I say devices and plural like, you know, hard drives, computers, all that stuff under that umbrella, 12,000 images, 1300 videos. And I thought for a second and I was like if someone told me I had to download 12,000 just regular porn images, right? Like, go out there on the Internet and give me 12,000 porn adult porn images.
00:14:22:27 – 00:14:50:09
Keith
How long will that take you? I, I mean myself, I program maybe you could write a program to automatically download porn in subject areas that you like. Maybe that’s a possibility, but there’s still some work involved there. This is not like two or three images that were found. This is 12,000 images. There were some time involved with this whole thing, and it definitely was not accidental.
00:14:50:13 – 00:15:18:13
Keith
So when they found that and I say they the detectives found that they went, holy shit, we need to arrest this guy. And they filed a criminal complaint on November 1st of 2021. There were only two counts on here. Count one was possession of child pornography, and count two was distribution of child pornography. I think technically they could have probably charged them with a lot more because he had 12,000 images and over a thousand videos.
00:15:18:13 – 00:15:46:30
Keith
And I think they could have said, you know, if they wanted to each one was a breach of the law. So in my opinion, only having two counts is very they’re being very conservative. They they’re going very lenient on him, in my opinion. Okay. So in this process, he’s arrested and then he’s allowed to be out on bond.
00:15:46:35 – 00:16:10:05
Keith
And this is the point where it hasn’t gone to trial. He’s not convicted, but he’s arrested. So there’s some restrictions in his movement on what he can do. But they can’t restrict him too much because he’s not convicted. So he’s allowed to move in with his sister. And his sister lives in Kansas. And if you’re not from the United States or you’re like me, geographically challenged.
00:16:10:10 – 00:16:32:22
Keith
These two states aren’t close to close to each other. They’re not Rhode Island and Connecticut, where you can get very quickly via a car between the two. He’s moving across the country pretty much to live with his sister. And then I thought, wow, his sister has some serious faith in him to move in. I hope she doesn’t give them access to her wi fi.
00:16:32:27 – 00:16:52:34
Keith
And then I found out his sister’s married and I thought, wha? Her husband’s got to have a lot of faith for him to move in there. I wonder if he’s going to let them use the wifi. It just seemed like a very tough situation to be in. Ah someone that’s being accused of pedophilia moving into your house.
00:16:52:34 – 00:17:16:13
Keith
I know you got to be supportive and stuff. If they’re not convicted and you don’t know right as a family, but you’ve got to be scared at the same time going, please don’t use my don’t view anything on my wifi please. Okay. So here’s another thing that that Jackson did. So when he is allowed on a bond, he’s restricted in the amount of devices he can use and what types of devices he can use.
00:17:16:18 – 00:17:37:18
Keith
The devices have to be monitored by the government to make sure he’s not viewing child porn. Okay. So first of all, they said you can either be allowed a smartphone or a computer, you know, like laptop, tablet, that type of thing. Right. So you have to choose one of those two. So he started out with a smartphone and then
00:17:37:18 – 00:17:41:29
Keith
somewhere along the time here he goes
00:17:41:29 – 00:18:03:00
Keith
I want a laptop. I think it was when he was moving out to go see or go live with his sister to do that, the government doesn’t just give him a laptop, you know, free and says, use this one. This is the one we’re monitoring for you. He has to bring in his laptop, give it to them. They put the monitoring software on there.
00:18:03:05 – 00:18:27:29
Keith
They give the laptop back to him. And now they’re might be able to monitor that laptop remotely. I hope you follow me so far. So in that process, he’s got to bring them a laptop, right? He could go out. He could legitimately buy a brand new laptop off Best Buy shelf and walk in to the court and say, this is the laptop I want you to monitor me on.
00:18:27:34 – 00:19:10:11
Keith
And they would put their monitoring software on it and give it back. And he’d probably go about his day and move out to Kansas, except in this case, he gave him one of his old computers and on his old computer it sounded like there was a whole bunch of child porn sounding shit everywhere. There was phrases like Innocent Virgin and little Sister and Lolita, and there was there were indications on this device that there was adult pornography, child pornography and computer generated child pornography images.
00:19:10:11 – 00:19:36:54
Keith
And this is listen, I’m not into child pornography, as you can probably guess. So this is the first time I’m hearing about computer generated child pornography images. I didn’t even know this was a thing. Apparently, you can make synthetic child pornography images. And that’s what is passed around out there as well. Scary, right? So Jackson gives the government this laptop
00:19:36:54 – 00:19:57:57
Keith
and says this is the this is the laptop I want you to monitor me on. This is the one I’ve been using for a while. And they found all this shit on their that indicated that he probably used it for child porn at one time. And they didn’t have the full media files and stuff that they did when they did the other investigation.
00:19:58:01 – 00:20:27:48
Keith
They’re just seeing snippets. And if you’re not a computer forensic investigator, this might not make a lot of sense to you. But let me kind of water it down just to give you an idea. When computer data is scattered all over hard drives. When you delete things, new things that you put on your hard drives can either overwrite where stuff used to be fully or fully overwrites it, or only partially overwrites it.
00:20:27:48 – 00:20:59:13
Keith
Or maybe you didn’t put anything new in your hard drive at all, and the old file itself wasn’t fully deleted because what computers do is they don’t go through, they overwrite everything. They just say, I don’t want that anymore. And then they just mark it as deleted. The data is still there, and that works really well for investigations. Well, here what the investigators could see is there was data at one point on this laptop that probably had child porn based upon names and so forth of old files pointing to the data.
00:20:59:13 – 00:21:25:48
Keith
But they can’t see that that image. They can’t pull that image, they can’t pull that video and view the content like they could previously to definitively prove those child porn on the computer. But they’re pretty sure there was because there were they could tell there were files named the same and so forth that you would the only people viewing child porn probably have on their computer is what I’m saying.
00:21:25:48 – 00:21:55:27
Keith
Okay. I hope you stuck with me. That was a tough one with that was the end of act one. And don’t turn off yet because I have some instructions for you. Please. Even though the subject area was horrible, if you recognize the amount of research I put into these all these different episodes. And if you enjoy that part, you put enjoy the amount of work that I put into bringing these things to you.
00:21:55:32 – 00:22:26:51
Keith
Please like, subscribe, follow, thumbs up, whatever it is that you’re watching me on or listening to, whatever the positive affirmation is helps me out a ton. If you can reshare, it helps me even more because that introduces this podcast to other people that might not have seen it. And with that I put a pause here because as you go, Holy crap, this guy got busted for child porn and then he turned in a computer that looked like it probably had child porn.
00:22:26:51 – 00:22:50:19
Keith
I how could he be so dense as to do that? Well, guess what? In act two, which I titled Busted Again, he does even more stuff. Even more like worse investigatively like he gets himself into more trouble is what I’m trying to say. I got to choose my words carefully because he just looked at little child porn right.
00:22:50:24 – 00:23:13:31
Keith
And hopefully I don’t have to talk to a whole bunch more about the child porn subjects. But we do hear from we we hear victim impact statements. So to me, that was one of the more powerful things of the case. And I think you should stick around. That comes at the very end of act two and you’ll want to hear it right before Mr. Jackson is sentenced in this case.
00:23:13:31 – 00:23:21:31
Keith
So hope you come back tomorrow and join me at Act two, which is called Busted Again. Thanks, Bye.
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