A Fairfax Station man was indicted Thursday on possession of child pornography after federal agents seized two computers from his residence containing over 9,000 images of child porn and other materials.
According to the documents filed in federal court in Alexandria, federal agents were investigating a criminal organization suspected of operating commercial child pornography Web sites.
In June 2007 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents identified Leland Fitzpatrick, 64, has having paid $79.95 for access to a Russian-based child porn site. Two months later, a search warrant executed in Fitzpatrick’s home led to the discovery of 3,658 pictures and 125 movies of child pornography on his computer, court records said. A second unit found in the home had 8,400 pictures and 200 movies.
A forensic examination of the pornography dated some of it back to 2005.
About 40 of the pictures were embedded with the logo “Nymphets Studio, www.nymphetsstudio.com,” the Web site Fitzpatrick was caught subscribing to, records said. Many of the images were of underage girls in sexually suggestive poses.
Fitzpatrick, who is an employee of CACI, Inc. Commercial, agreed to speak with an ICE agent and a Fairfax County detective. During their conversation, the law enforcement officials said Fitzpatrick told them he did not believe the images were child pornography.
In his opinion, Fitzpatrick said, child pornography consists of “people underage having sex.” An underage person by herself, he said, is not child pornography. Officials say Fitzpatrick admitted to subscribing to various Web sites that cost between $20 and $40 a month.
He told officials he didn’t actively look for the sites, but rather learned of them through junk e-mail, court records said. Fitzpatrick told the investigators he only accessed Web sites that said they were legal and that he’d been looking at the images for the past five years.
