Registered Sex Offender Admits Possessing Child Pornography

ST. LOUIS – A registered sex offender from Jefferson County, Missouri pleaded guilty Tuesday and admitted selling child pornography online.

Patrick Mayberry, 45, of High Ridge, pleaded guilty to a felony charge of possession of child pornography as a prior offender. Mayberry told investigators that he’d received over $2,000 by selling child pornography that he’d obtained on the dark web. Mayberry had multiple videos containing child sexual abuse material in his MEGA cloud-storage account.

Authorities were alerted by a cyber tipline report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) that Mayberry had uploaded 88 files containing child pornography to his Google account.

Mayberry was on probation at the time of the offense. In 2003, Mayberry was convicted of second-degree rape – victim under age 16 in Oklahoma. In 2008, he was convicted of one count of attempting to procure child pornography for seeking nude photographs of a nine-year-old. In 2021 in Jefferson County Circuit Court in Missouri, Mayberry was convicted of one count of failure to register as a sex offender.

Mayberry is scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 13, 2025. The charge is punishable by a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison and a maximum of 20 years, a $250,000 fine, or both.

The St. Louis County Police Department and the FBI investigated the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jillian Anderson is prosecuting the case.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and the Department of Justice Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.justice.gov/psc.