Averill Park man gets 70 months for having child porn, trying to buy sex slave

PHOTOGRAPHER: Kathleen Moore

An Averill Park man was sentenced Friday for trying to buy foreign children to use as sex slaves, United States Attorney Richard S. Hartunian announced.

Lester Dutcher, 50, was sentenced to 70 months in prison, followed by supervised release for the rest of his life.

He pleaded guilty to receiving child pornography and attempting to import female aliens for prostitution.

State police searched Dutcher’s computers in August 2008, under the suspicion he had been sharing child pornography on the Internet. They found 100 movie files and several hundred sexually explicit pictures of minors.

Some of the minors were prepubescent, police said. Dutcher saved them in a special folder called “young.”

State police said he told them: “That’s what I’m into.”

Shortly after he started downloading images in 2006, he also began discussing the purchase of sex slaves, police said.

Forensic investigators found several chat conversations on his computer hard drive, in which they said he negotiated with people in Europe and Nigeria for sex slaves. Dutcher admitted in court that he tried to buy sex slaves.

He sent them $6,000 in money transfers, but never received a slave.

At one point, the chat record indicates he tried to create a business in which he and a Nigerian man would share the cost of the slave and use her as a prostitute here. Dutcher said johns would pay $200 an hour, and predicted four to six customers a day.

Investigators found Western Union receipts indicating Dutcher sent money for the girl, but Assistant U.S. Attorney Rick Belliss said no one ever arrived.

In 2007, Dutcher tried again, asking to buy two women, state police said.

First he negotiated for a “small young girl” with blond hair and green eyes for a man who wanted her for a month, he wrote.

A week later, he said he wanted a girl for himself.

“I am not looking for a wife,” he wrote, emphasizing that he wanted “someone to be my toy.”

He sent a wire transfer, but again did not get a girl, Belliss said.

When state police interviewed him, he told them he was trying to buy a girl from Nigeria to have sex with him and his wife. He admitted that was true when he pleaded guilty.