According to the agreed upon statement of facts, Geoffrey Portway, 40, of Worcester, engaged in numerous chats with many individuals about a mutual interest in abducting, raping, murdering and eating children. Many of these conversations were accompanied by the trading of child pornography. These chats also included images of children known to them, accompanied by discussions of the desire to sexually abuse, murder and cannibalize those children. Under the terms of the plea agreement, the court must sentence Portway to between 216 and 327 months in prison, a lifetime supervised release, restitution and forfeiture. He will also be required to register as a level three sex offender. Additionally, Portway is to be deported after serving his sentence.
As stated both in court filings and at the hearing today, through his online chats, Portway solicited several people for their help in abducting a child, predominately from Michael D. Arnett, 38, of Roeland Park, Kan.
At least as early as 2010, Portway utilized Skype and other programs to communicate with Arnett, trading child pornography including images of injured, mutilated and deceased children while chatting about the sexual abuse, rape, abduction, murder and cannibalism of children. Over months, Portway repeatedly solicited Arnett to kidnap a child for him, with the intent that Portway would ultimately rape, kill and eat that child.These solicitations for help abducting a child included discussing real children ? by name and photo ? that Arnett claimed to know and have access to.
In the chats, Portway and Arnett discuss different ways to kidnap children and the age range that Portway prefers. During the time that Portway was soliciting Arnett,Portway had been told that Arnett had helped others with such requests before and that Arnett had experience with the abduction and sexual abuse of children. Arnett has since pleaded guilty in Kansas to the sexual exploitation of a child for the purposes of producing child pornography.
According to additional court documents throughout the United States, Arnett was also communicating on the Internet with other child pornography suspects. The following have been arrested and charged as part of this international child pornography investigation; these suspects were communicating directly with Arnett via the Internet: Ronald Brown, 57, of Largo, Fla.; Robert Mucha, 56, of Newton, N.J.; Jason Scarcello, 42, of Anderson, Calif.; and Richard Dates, 67, of Grant, N.M.
HSI also arrested Robert Poe III, 38, of Kansas City, Kan., Aug. 10, 2012. Following the publicity of the Arnett arrest, Poe was identified in May 2012 after a victim came forward and reported that he and his brother were both sexually molested as minors by Poe and Arnett. Poe pleaded guilty Feb. 19.
