Someone dies with child porn on their computer. What do the cops do?

Factual Questions
1

Someone I know recently died. A family member of theirs told me that (1) the dead guy’s computer had explicit pictures of the girls in their family in it, (2) they told the cops about it, and (3) the cops said to just delete the files, since they couldn’t prosecute the dead guy.

I believed this story, but a friend of mine thinks that the cops would want to obtain the drives for themselves to possibly track down other creeps. Does this story sound plausible, or do I need to examine the motives of the family member?

2

Not highly plausible. The police would want to look for evidence of a crime. They might not find it but telling someone to delete files containing possible evidence of a crime doesn’t make a lot of sense.

How did they tell the police about it, and what did the police then do?

3

Did they ‘formally’ report this to the police and were instructed to delete the images or was it was more along the lines of someone asking their cop friend what to do and he said it’s probably easier to quietly delete everything and move on?
On the one hand, I could understand someone (not just a cop) suggesting you delete everything since bringing this to light is likely to be pretty traumatic for everyone involved.

On the other hand, I think it makes sense to find out how these pictures were acquired and if they were sent to anyone else. The family needs to know if there are (still living) people involved in this as opposed to a couple creepy pictures he managed to take.

Personally, I think if it was formally reported to the police, the police would have taken the computer and done whatever they needed to do with it.

4

ETA: mostly ninja’ed by @Joey_P.

You would hope the police would be interested. But that’s no guarantee they are.

Kiddie porn is wrong, period, but there’s a difference between guy having pix of family members he took himself and guy having family pix plus pix he got off the internet. The former might have no connection to anyone else, but somebody downloading who’s also producing his own is a lot more likely to also be posting. Depending on how the family member explained their discovery to the cops they could easily have played down the risk enough that the one LEO dismissed it out of hand. Whether that department’s management would agree with that LEO’s decision is a different question.

ETA: There’s also the factor of “explicit pictures” is sorta in the eyes of the beholder. If the guy was posing his daughters imitating adult sex actors that’s one thing. But some prudes would consider a pic of a toddler in a soapy bathtub to be “child pornography.” Which is it?

5

We, and I assume the OP, don’t know the content of these pictures either. There’s a big difference between pictures of your 16 year old niece changing after she got out of the pool and pictures of your 2 year old daughter in the bathtub.
I could possibly see a cop, even in an official capacity, suggesting someone delete the pictures if they were non-sexual in nature.

ETA, @LSLGuy you just ninja’d me with that edit.

6

Tag, you’re it! :wink:

I’ve got nothing more to add. See ya in the next thread! :slight_smile:

7

I remember one fellow showing us family pics of his family camping vacation. It was a long time ago, so not surprising - one picture among dozens - was his 3 year old daughter full frontal naked eating an ice cream cone, absolutely covered from face to waist in dripping ice cream. The photo finishing place printed this picture along with all the others, and he did not see anything wrong in showing it to us. Times are different now.

So I would agree the question would be what the family considered explicit; the extent of the collection; plus, if there were also pictures of strangers, then that suggests the pictures were being traded. If the police were asked and it was described as “a bunch of pictures of the family children naked” or something that sounded more like accidental, incdental pictures than a deliberate explicit photoshoot, perhaps the police assumed it was just incidental family snapshots, or were not interested in the level of paperwork involved when there’s nobody to prosecute.

8

I’m thinking this needs to be investigated just to ensure that other family members or other people were not involved.

9

Yeah. There’s no way the police drop this without further inquiry unless they are being highly irresponsible or outright corrupt.

10

It might have no connection to anyone else. Or maybe it does. Even if he didn’t get those pictures from anyone else, did he send them to anyone else? There might well be evidence of that on the hard drives. And the police can’t tell unless they investigate, which they can’t if the drives are erased.

11

Don’t call it kiddie porn please what it is is child sexual abuse material. And yes open a criminal case for the benefit of the affected families. Who else among them is involved

12

Granted completely. If the police are thorough, they’ll want to do all that. We know the police (or at least one police person) did the opposite. The rest here is speculation as to why.

13

We don’t really know that. We know someone might have said that and we have sparse details.

14

Thanks, everyone. I’m trying to avoid as much identifying information about this, but I probably need to add more detail about the other people in the story. The people involved (relations in Title Case are with respect to the dead guy):

  • dead guy, who committed suicide for reasons unknown
  • dead guy’s Older Son, his only child in contact with him
  • dead guy’s Younger Son
  • dead guy’s Niece and Nephew, my sister and me

Ginormous caveat: All of the information I have comes from (1) a conversation between Younger Son and Niece that I mostly overheard because Niece’s phone is loud, and (2) later conversations with Niece about the call. I don’t have Younger Son’s contact info, and Niece no longer wants to talk about it. This is what I remember Younger Son saying [my notes in brackets]:

Older Son was cleaning out Dead Guy’s house and found a bunch of Post-Its scatter around, presumably to hide the onset of Dead Guy’s dementia. [Nobody on our side of the family was aware of the dementia.]

One of the nots told him to delete some computer files/folders. Older Son got on Dead Guy’s PC and found files/folders in the Recycle Bin, neatly organized by subject name. He found CSAM of one of Dead Guy’s granddaughters, but not of Niece’s child – just a folder with hundreds of pictures of her devoted to pictures of the latter, including pictures of her in a bikini. [Are all the pictures shots of a roughly 5-year-old in a bikini? That was the impression I had (and probably was supposed to have), but I don’t know for sure.]

Older Son “went to” the police and told them about it. [I don’t remember the verb he used; it might have been “called.”] The police said, “Stop looking. You’re going to see something you can’t unsee.” [Big question: Could they have already had a copy of the drives from the suicide investigation? If so, would they have left the computer behind?]

My impression of the call is definitely colored by Younger Son flat-out calling Dead Guy a pedophile several times, so keep that in mind.

Timeline of communication:

  • Dead Guy dies
  • Older Son calls Brother (my father) to let him know
  • Older Son calls Brother and tells him there was some troubling stuff on Dead Guy’s PC (specifically in the Recycle Bin) – I forget the exact words, but it didn’t hint at CSAM
  • Younger Son calls Niece, also mentioning some other files with presumably consensual sex/drug stuff we hadn’t heard of before
  • Older Son doesn’t return Brother’s calls – Younger Son had mentioned that Older Son was going through some stuff (injuries, kid problems) and Older Son wouldn’t reply

My big question, which definitely veers into IMHO territory: How likely is it that Dead Guy’s sons are just lying to us to defame their father? Younger Son had had a huge falling out with Dead Guy, but Older Son seemed to be on good terms with him. I was hoping there would be some sort of contradiction in or confirmation of Younger Son’s story, but it doesn’t seem like it.

(Apologies if this is too much of a mess to read.)

15

If it matters, “delete” means marking the storage area as available for re-use. The pics are still on the disk and can be recovered by those with the necessary tools.

Not sure about the legal issues, but if you want them completely gone you’ll probably need extra software tools to render them unrecoverable.

16

It would still be obstruction. I don’t believe responsible police would suggest that.

17

And if your local police are saying to delete it, you might want to go to different police. Given the ease with which computer files can be shared across state lines, the FBI would probably have an interest.

18

Obstruction is deleting or attempting to delete/destroy something that you have good reason to believe may be evidence in a crime. I suppose if the police told X to delete it, reformat, whatever, then it makes it hard to argue he was hiding it by disposing of it.

Yes, the original deletion by the owner was also obstruction. Irrlevant now.

“Delete” marks the space as available and moves the contents to the Recycle Bin. This is obviously easy to recover. (And quicker and simpler and faster than Windows rewritng entire files as blank when deleteing them.)

“Empty Recycle” moves the contents to the Free Space queue which may get overwritten when any new material is written to disk. The more free space on the disk, the less likely the recently deleted will be completely overwritten in a short time. At this point, some simple disk recovery tools can find these items in the free space queue, and of course police can use these tools.

There are tools to re-write the free space queue to eliminate any existing data, “scrub” it with blank data. If X did not even empty recycle bin, obvious did not progress tothis step.

19

Being pedantic, that all applies if it is on an old spinning hard drive. It will be slightly different on an SSD. Once trash is empty, then at some point the SSD will probably go through a trim operation, where it will clear deleted files to make that portion of the drive ready to be written to again. How often this happens is going to depend on the operating system, drive, and filesystem. The interval can be anything from immediately upon deletion to never, with typical intervals being weekly or monthly (the default on Windows).

Of course, if the space occupied by the deleted files is needed for new files, then it will be cleared and re-written by the SSD when necessary.

Once the space has been trimmed, whether it is re-written or not, then it will be impossible to recover the old files.