BOISE -- A 69-year-old Mountain Home man was sentenced Monday to 20 years in federal prison for receiving and possessing child pornography.
Lorrie Elmer Mecham was convicted by a federal jury in June after a four-day trial.
The U.S. Attorney's Office says the investigation began in August 2007, when Mecham’s wife became suspicious that he was using his computer to obtain child pornography from the Internet. After finding a cooler filled with hundreds of floppy discs and CDs hidden in the crawl space of their home, she contacted Mountain Home Police, who found sexually explicit images of children on one of the discs.
The case was originally charged in Elmore County, but after the two computers belonging to Mecham were examined and found to contain tens of thousands of child pornography images, federal authorities were contacted and the FBI joined the investigation.
FBI analysts examined more than 600 discs from the cooler and other discs found by Mountain Home Police during a search of the Mecham’s home, and found that many of the discs contained sexually explicit images of minors, ranging from toddlers to teens.
According to court documents, the FBI investigation showed that Mecham has a long history of child sexual exploitation, including a conviction for child molestation in Georgia in 1987, in which he admitted molesting two girls, ages seven and nine.
U.S. District Judge Edward J. Lodge noted that Mecham possessed more than 12,000 child pornography images, some of which depicted very young girls being sadistically abused. He also commented on Mecham’s pattern of activity molesting young girls, some of whom were in the courtroom to hear the sentence.
“You sentenced those victims to a lifetime of hurt, humiliation, sordid memories and fears . . . Your motive was nothing more than lust and greed,” said Lodge.
U.S. Attorney Tom Moss said, “The best way to stop this harmful and persistent crime of exploiting children is through excellent investigations and well deserved prison sentences.”
