by Patrick H. Moore
One of the stranger and more disturbing cases in recent memory is the case of Geoffrey Portway, 40, of Worcester, Massachusetts. Portway, a pervert of the first order. Portway pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts in May to solicitation to commit a crime of violence — kidnapping of a child — and distribution and possession of child pornography. Based on the horrific nature of his scheme, he would normally be looking at around 20 years of Federal incarceration. But in the case of Portway, there’s more — much more.
John Zaremba of the Boston Herald has the story:
In their Federal Sentencing Memorandum, which the filed with the Court on Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz and Assistant United States Attorney Stacy Dawson Belf write:
“Portway has pled guilty to some of the most vile and heinous crimes known to our society, namely participating in the sexual exploitation of young children through the possession and distribution of child pornography and soliciting the kidnapping of a child for the purpose of killing and consuming that child.”
Reader, you are not hallucinating. Portway not only was conspiring to sexually exploit young children by kidnapping them for the purpose of producing child pornography; he was also planning on eating the victims. And it does not appear that, in this instance, the U.S. Attorneys office is exaggerating (which, of course, they are sometimes prone to doing).
No, in this instance, the Feds have Portway dead to rights. The Sentencing Memorandum includes excerpts from online chats with his alleged conspirators across the country — including the now-convicted Ronald Brown of Largo, Fla., a puppeteer who planned along with Portway to kidnap children he knew through his work with a local church.
According to the sentencing memorandum, Brown sent Portway a photo of one of the boys “with lines drawn on him to identify the different cuts of meat.” Brown and Portway’s plan was to spirit the child away to a rented house in the Everglades, mutilate him, eat his body over several weeks and feed the “leftovers” to the alligators.
In another chat, the perverts discuss eating another boy who, according to Portway, would have yielded “lots of meat.” Brown photographed this particular boy while visiting him at the hospital, where he was recovering from “extensive surgery.”
Based on this vile plan, Portway conceived the following scheme:
“just need to open a mortuary,” he writes. “any boy who is scheduled to be cremated, dissapears. (sic) fake ashes given.”
The Feds began targeting Portway in the summer of 2012 after identifying him as part of an online community obsessed with the cannibalization and rape of kidnapped children. When the investigators searched his home following his arrest, they discovered that he had built in his basement a soundproofed, double-locked room containing a “child-sized homemade coffin,” along with a 3-by-4-foot steel cage, freezers and disposable scalpels.
The investigation was spurred by the probe of a former hotel manager from Milford, Mass, Robert Diduca, 48, who pleaded guilty to charges of sexual exploitation of children, and possession and distribution of child pornography immediately following his November 2011 arrest. The fact that Diduca pleaded guilty immediately after getting picked up strongly suggests that he provided information concerning the twisted activities of the perverts he was associating with. Diduca was sentenced to 18 years in prison. The prosecutors stated that Diduca said that he joined an online forum to chat with other predators.
The Feds are suggesting that Portway receive a 27 year term of incarceration for his crimes. He will be sentenced next Tuesday and I anticipate that he will get every day of the requested 27 years.
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If any of you are of the “just let Bubba make mincemeat of him (not to mention other hideous things)” school of thought, prepare to be disappointed. Federal prisons are typically well-run affairs (with the exception of medical treatment which is notoriously weak). Prisoners at risk of reprisals such as serious sex offenders are typically segregated from the general population and are often housed together, sometimes in sex-offender treatment centers. You can go to a lot of group therapy sessions in 27 years.