On an April night about six years ago, a Winchester, Tenn., police detective was monitoring the Internet and noticed something odd. Somebody from an IP address in South Pittsburg was downloading stills of child pornography.
Also a task force officer for a coalition designed to curb online sexual predators, Chris Layne subpoenaed records from the Internet service provider. He traced the downloads to an IP address that belonged to an “Emily” at a Marion County address. He consulted with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation about a search warrant. He prepared an affidavit, got the 12th District Attorney General’s Office to sign off, and landed a search warrant.
And on April 26, 2010, accompanied by Kenneth Mark Wilson, of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and Sgt. Danny Mantooth, of the Winchester Police Department, Layne executed that warrant and found a desktop computer and a laptop at the address, records show.
They also found David Hoschar, then a pastor of Kimball Baptist Church. They interviewed him, his two children, his wife. Nobody knew anything about the pornography.
So the agents shipped the equipment to TBI’s crime lab, which said neither computer contained child pornography. But when Layne and Wilson presented the case to a grand jury in December 2010, they knew that information but never shared it, according to Hoschar’s defense. The TBI could not be reached for comment Thursday.