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By FRANK LEWIS

PDT Staff Writer

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“Guilty on all counts,” was the statement read by Judge William T. Marshall to a hushed Scioto County Common Pleas courtroom Wednesday afternoon.

William R. Tackett Jr., 51, of Flatwoods, Ky., was convicted on 66 counts of pandering sexually oriented material involving a minor. Authorities say they found multiple videos depicting children in sexual acts with adults on the hard drives of his computer at Big Sandy Furniture warehouse in Wheelersburg.

The jury deliberated less than an hour and a half before returning the verdict.

Tackett was given the opportunity to speak before sentencing.

“I did not do this, I am a victim of a hacker or a co-worker at Big Sandy,” said Tackett.

His attorney, Aaron Triplett, asked Marshall for a separate sentencing hearing, but Marshall chose to go directly into that phase of the case.

Before sentencing was passed, Assistant Scioto County Prosecutor Pat Apel asked to be allowed to put Vicki Angelopoulos, senior special agent for the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, and member of the FBI Cyber Task Force, on the stand for the second time.

On the witness stand, Angelopoulos said she had sent five DVDs, burned from Tackett's computer, to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

“Thirty-eight of the images on those videos were matched with missing children found on their database,” she said. “The reports were then sent to the law enforcement agencies who are investigating those missing children,” said Angelopoulos.

Marshall spoke his mind on the case.

“In my 23 years as a lawyer and 11 years as a judge, I have never seen anything so reprehensible as what we have seen on those videos in this courtroom,” he said. “As a father of a 7-year-old girl, I am completely disgusted.”

Marshall then read the sentences.

“On count one, eight years. On count two, eight years, on count three, seven years, on count four, two years. On counts five through 66, four years each, with the first

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Marty V. Donini, Sheriff

Scioto County Sheriff's Office

1025 Sixteenth Street

Portsmouth, Ohio 45662

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four counts to run consecutively and counts five through 66 to run concurrently, for a total of 25 years to be served,” he said. “You have 30 days to file an appeal.”

Bailiff Beverly Pertuset then placed handcuffs on Tackett to take him into custody.

Earlier in the day, computer forensics took center stage.

Angelopoulos explained her involvement with the computer taken from Tackett's desk in the Big Sandy warehouse.

She said every computer needs an Internet service provider, and in this case, it was Verizon, based in North Carolina.

Apel said that gives the pornographic material across state lines.”

At BCI, Angelopoulos said she first made a duplicate of the hard drive itself so that she wasn't working with the original.

“I was told to look for child pornography, and I used a special forensic tool that lets you come in the back door of files so that you can see if anything has been deleted,” she said.

She then made a list of titles from the directories she found on the hard drives.

Computer expert for the defense Mike Duley, of Ashland, Ky., disagreed with Angelopoulos on a couple of issues.

One was a discrepancy in the dates some of the files were downloaded and that he found still photos and a virus, which Angelopoulos said she did not find during her examination of the hard drives.

At 12:43 p.m, Tackett took the stand and testified that he was in the habit of using a service called LimeWire for downloading music and said others in the electronics and appliances departments downloaded music.

Tackett said he had someone download the movie “The Jungle Book” for his grandchild but that when he saw it, it was pornography instead. He said he immediately deleted it, but also said from that point on he was constantly trying to delete pornographic material from his computer.

The jury was told to deliberate the case beginning at 2:20 p.m., and announced the verdict at about 3:50 p.m.

reasons.

FRANK LEWIS can be reached at (740) 353-3101, Ext.232.