Gladstone Man Sentenced to 12 Years for Producing Child Porn

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Tammy Dickinson, United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, announced that a Gladstone, Mo., man was sentenced in federal court today for producing child pornography.

Barry Alan Darlington, 74, of Gladstone, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Gary A. Fenner to 12 years in federal prison without parole.

On June 6, 2014, Darlington pleaded guilty to producing child pornography. Darlington also admitted that he engaged in a pattern of activity involving prohibited sexual conduct.

Based upon information received by the Western Missouri Cyber Crimes Task Force from two cybertips, law enforcement officers executed a search warrant at Darlington’s residence on July 18, 2013. They seized multiple electronic media, including a computer hard drive that contained multiple images of child pornography. The child victim portrayed in the images told investigators that Darlington took the sexually explicit photos of her when she visited his residence during the summer approximately 11 years earlier, when she was 10 years old.

According to court documents, Darlington actually exploited the child victim for a three-year period. Darlington knowingly distributed some of the images of his sexually explicit conduct with the child victim over the Internet.

Darlington had hundreds, if not thousands, of images and more than 100 videos of child pornography, according to court documents. The government believes that even these numbers understate Darlington’s true exploitation of children because Darlington willfully destroyed a hard drive between the time he was first approached by law enforcement in an initial child pornography investigation and the service of the search warrant at his residence.

Darlington’s Internet chat logs reveal his pedophilic tendencies and his thoughts of perpetrating against other children. In his chats, according to court documents, he says he’s been ogling a neighbor girl whom his victim had been playing with when she was in town. The girl was 13 years of age at the time of the chat. Darlington said he tried to see if the girl could spend the night at his house, but Darlington’s wife did not approve. In his chats, Darlington also says he trolls malls to look at teen girls and he ‘checks out the kids’ when he’s at the grocery store. Darlington also says in his chats that he is attracted to other children besides his victim, but didn’t abuse them because he feared they would disclose his molestation.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Katharine Fincham. It was investigated by the Gladstone, Mo., Police Department and the Western Missouri Cyber Crimes Task Force.

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."