A Hereford man indicted for multiple felonies stemming from the possession of hundreds of images of child pornography needs time to review a computer expert’s findings about the evidence in the case, a judge was advised Monday.
Lawrence Edward Legault faces decades in prison if convicted of all five Class 2 felony counts of sexual exploitation of children included in a Cochise County grand jury indictment. Under Arizona Revised Statute 13-3553, the possession, production, distribution, and transmission of child pornography is charged as sexual exploitation of children.
Legault, 61, has been ordered back to court March 21 for a pretrial conference in advance of a summer trial. He is also charged with two drug related felony offenses; a separate trial will likely be held on those counts after a trial on the sexual exploitation charges.
Court records show Legault was arrested in January 2021 following a joint investigation by the Sierra Vista Police Department and the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). The investigation was initiated a few months earlier when Google Inc. reported an illicit image had been uploaded to a cloud account by one of its users.
Google sent its report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which tracks child pornography images and videos, as well as the victims depicted. According to Google, its user’s screen name was “Larry Legault” and the Internet Protocol (IP) address associated with the uploads was in the Sierra Vista area.
NCMEC determined 301 images of child pornography were uploaded to the Google cloud account from November 2018 through May 2020. The determination was based on a limited visual review as well as the individual HASH values of the images.
A HASH value, according to SVPD Det. Thomas Ransford, is an alphanumeric value created by a digital algorithm to individualize a digital file, similar to DNA or a fingerprint.
The Arizona Internet Crimes Against Children taskforce was notified by NCMEC of its findings. Ransford then secured several court-authorized search warrants which further connected the uploads to a phone number and email address associated with a Lawrence Legault with a Hereford address south of Sierra Vista.
Ransford interviewed Legault on Jan. 7. 2021. In a post-Miranda interview, Legault reportedly admitted saving numerous sexually explicit images of children via a computer and a cellphone. Many of the images depicted the sexual assault of children under the age of 14, according to Ransford’s report.
In Arizona, such activity involving children of that age is designated as dangerous crimes against children, carrying severe mandatory minimum prison sentences. Sources familiar with the case say it appears Legault was not directly involved in sexual abuse against children. Instead, he is considered “a watcher.”
Legault was placed under arrest at his residence and booked into the Cochise County jail. A judge later released him from custody pending trial.
