Idaho Falls man charged with 10 felonies after detectives find graphic child porn on his computer
Published at
IDAHO FALLS – A 59-year-old man has been charged with 10 felonies after officers discovered dozens of images of graphic child pornography on his computer.
John Mcmurtrey was charged with 10 counts of possessing or accessing child sexually exploitative material.
On June 15, the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children contacted a Bonneville County Sheriff’s Office detective and assigned him a case involving 38 cyber tips regarding a man who uploaded images of child pornography to Microsoft Bing.
According to court documents, the man most likely uploaded images to BingImage search using the search box to get similar results to the original image.
Throughout the investigation, the detective found 184 images uploaded by the man to Microsoft BingImage.
Out of those, 38 of them were allegedly images of child sexual abuse material, according to court documents.
A subpoena was sent to Cableone/Sparklight by the Idaho ICAC Task Force, and the results identified that man as Mcmurtrey in Idaho Falls.
Detectives found that Mcmurtrey had been uploading these images between December 2022 and as recent as June 1, 2023.
On July 11, detectives received a report of 100 more images of child porn uploaded to a server from Mcmurtrey’s IP address.
On July 19 at 7:30 am, a search warrant was executed at Mcmurtrey’s home. He was taken aside by a detective who told him he would like to interview him at the sheriff’s office.
Mcmurtrey was taken to the interview, where he was asked why he thought he was there talking to detectives. Mcmurtrey reportedly replied, “probably because of pornography.”
He then admitted to using a desktop computer in his basement to look for “teen images of child sexual abuse,” according to probable cause documents.
He didn’t admit to using BingImage search, but the detective writes that he “kept saying over and over that he would just go online and images were everywhere.”
When the detective explained that images don’t just show up, Mcmurtrey replied that “once he clicked on something and then another thing, he would just find images.”
He told the detective that he would download and save these images of child sexual abuse material to a hard drive.
“The pictures were popping up and I started saving them,” Mcmurtrey allegedly said. He then said he has a pornography addiction, and when asked about the age of the children in the pornography, he said he saw “every age.”
Mcmurtrey appeared for an initial appearance on Thursday. He was booked into the Bonneville County Jail, and a bond has yet to be set.
He is expected to appear again for a preliminary hearing on Aug. 2. If convicted, he could face up to 100 years in prison.
Though Mcmurtrey has been charged with these crimes, it does not necessarily mean he committed them. Everyone is presumed innocent until they are proven guilty.