Former Cameron High School Teacher Sentenced to 20 Years for Using Hidden Camera to Produce Child Pornography

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – A former Cameron, Missouri, high school teacher was sentenced in federal court today for secretly recording pornographic videos of three teenage victims in his bathroom.

William Derek Williams, 40, of Cameron, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Howard F. Sachs to 20 years in federal prison without parole. The court also sentenced Williams to 10 years of supervised release following incarceration. Williams formerly was a high school language arts teacher and more recently a part-time high school multimedia teacher at the time of the offense.

Williams pleaded guilty on Aug. 26, 2019, to one count of producing child pornography. Williams admitted that he secretly filmed three different victims over a five-year period from January 2013 to September 2018 while they were in the basement bathroom of his residence.

A then-15-year-old victim discovered a hidden camera, designed to look like a cell phone charger plug, on Sept. 6, 2018. The victim opened the device and retrieved a micro SD card, which he inserted into his cell phone in order to view its contents. The card included a secretly-recorded video of the victim.

The child victim turned the device over to investigators. On Sept. 8, 2018, investigators with the Clinton County, Mo., Sheriff’s Department executed a search warrant at Williams’s residence and seized a laptop computer and an SD card. Each of those devices contained pornographic videos of two more teenage victims who were secretly recorded in the basement bathroom. The laptop contained five distinct videos produced on five different days of a then-16-year-old victim. The laptop and the SD card contained several pornographic videos of a third victim who was then between 14 and 16 years old.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney David Luna. It was investigated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the Clinton County, Mo., Sheriff’s Department.

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