Jury finds ex-Tampa police sergeant guilty in child pornography case

TAMPA — A jury on Thursday evening convicted a former Tampa police sergeant who once led the city’s sex crimes squad on 100 charges of possession of child pornography.

After a three-day trial, the panel of three men and three women deliberated a little more than 3½ hours before finding Paul Leo Mumford guilty of having the materials, which were stored on an external computer hard drive.

Mumford, 63, gazed downward as a court clerk polled the jury. Moments later, he stood as a sheriff’s deputy placed him in handcuffs and led him away.

Hillsborough Circuit Judge Samantha Ward set a sentencing date for March. The individual charges each carry a maximum 15-year sentence, though it is unclear exactly how much prison time Mumford might receive.

“It’s disappointing,” said his defense attorney, Chip Purcell. “But it’s one step in the process. We’ll start to work on the appeal.”

Mumford worked 29 years with the Tampa Police Department, including about 18 months as the sergeant in charge of the sex crimes unit. He retired in 2015, but spent six more years as a reserve officer.

The trial gave the first detailed public accounting of a case that began after a chance encounter outside of Amalie Arena.

James Bowie, another former Tampa officer, was heading to a Tampa Bay Lightning game there in March 2021 and saw Mumford directing traffic outside the Pam Iorio Parking Garage.

The men knew each other. Mumford had been Bowie’s sergeant when they were assigned to the street crimes squad. They were still friendly.

Bowie had since gone to work as an information security officer for Tampa General Hospital and had extensive training in computers.

As Bowie stopped to say hello, Mumford asked for a favor. He mentioned a computer hard drive he had at home. It had stopped working. He wondered: Could he help him recover some files stored on the drive?

Bowie agreed to take a look. He later drove to Mumford’s Tampa home, picked up the hard drive and brought it back to his own home.

He took his time working with the device. He eventually managed to recover some of its files. He clicked a document and found a boat registration that bore Mumford’s name. He then clicked on a photo. What came up startled him: an image of a young girl engaging in sexual activity with a group of men.

He closed the file. He opened another. It, too, showed a child engaging in sexual activity.

He unplugged the device.

“I was angry,” Bowie said in court.

He mulled what to do. He couldn’t sleep that night. The next morning, he got up, phoned an attorney and explained what had happened.

In court, he was asked why he didn’t just call law enforcement. He said he worried they wouldn’t believe his explanation about where he got the hard drive.

“And my life would have taken a radical, bad turn,” Bowie said.

His attorney arranged a meeting with Tampa police to turn over the hard drive and have Bowie give a statement, he said.

He never talked to Mumford again. He denied having anything against his former sergeant.

“Were you trying to set Paul Mumford up in any way?” asked Assistant State Attorney Jessica Couvertier.

“No,” Bowie said.

A computer expert with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was able to create an exact copy of the hard drive. Amid heaps of data, an obscure file held 100 sexualized images of children, pornographic cartoons showing children and pictures of children involved in sex acts with adults and other kids.

In court Wednesday, each image was shown on a TV screen. Jurors shifted in their seats as they witnessed the appalling displays. One man looked away. A woman dabbed at her face with a tissue.

Even the prosecutor averted her eyes as she ran through a slideshow, asking a detective to explain why each picture was considered child pornography.

Detectives first confronted Mumford in February 2022 at his South Tampa home. He was with his grandchildren when they arrived with a search warrant. They seized all his family’s computers.

Mumford spoke with the detectives for an hour. When they mentioned the hard drive, he said it had stopped working and that he’d been “hacked.” When told about the images, he said he knew nothing about them.

Purcell, the defense attorney, emphasized that the hard drive was so badly corrupted it took special tools for investigators to access the data. He also asserted that Mumford was not the only person who had access to the device.

“What (the state has) done is pick a defendant and refused to look at anybody else,” Purcell told the jury. “Because they don’t like Paul Mumford, they picked Paul Mumford.”

Police also found 61 Microsoft Word documents whose contents, prosecutors said, included erotic and sexually explicit stories involving children. One was more than 500 pages long.

The literary tales featured descriptions of children engaging in sex acts. Some of them described acts similar to what was depicted in the images found on the hard drive, the prosecutor said.

A Tampa police detective, Benjamin Bors, read from the witness stand excerpts from one story. Written in the first-person, the story’s narrator described himself as an older man with gray hair, a retired cop who worked as a reserve officer at hockey games, twice married, whose wife had three sons — all details that matched Mumford.

Data stored on the document files bore Mumford’s name as the author.

Couvertier repeatedly quoted one line from the stories in arguments before the jury:

“Knowing that the evidence would be very damaging to him he took great care never to leave the images on his computer and he left the thumb drive where nobody could find it.”

“He gives parallels to his own realities,” Couvertier told the jury.

Purcell fought to bar the stories from being entered as evidence in the trial. He argued the stories were works of fiction with no connection to the images.

Judge Ward sided with prosecutors, finding that the stories were “inextricably intertwined” with the rest of the evidence.

The ruling spurred Mumford himself to take the witness stand.

He admitted he authored some, but not all, of the stories detectives found. But he claimed they were a kind of therapy.

From age 10 to 16, he said, he endured “extreme sexual abuse” from “a pedophile ring throughout the state of Florida.”

Some of the stories memorialized things he’d experienced as a kid, he said. Why did he write them?

“I believed it would help me get over the continued effects of that abuse,” he said.

Mumford denied knowing that the images were on the hard drive. He denied ever seeing them.

He detailed the layout of his family’s home and all the computers and other devices they owned. His external hard drive was always connected to the family laptop. He used it to store tax documents, receipts, recipes, family photos, police training materials and other items. Some of it dated back to the 1980s.

The password to access the computer hadn’t been changed in years. The whole family used it, he said. Whenever they logged in, it was under his name.

Mumford’s voice quavered during his testimony as he described his time leading the police department’s sex crimes unit.

He said he had no trouble reading reports about child sexual abuse. But when he became involved in an investigation where he had to view child pornography, it was too much, he said. He asked his supervisor not to make him do that again and soon left the unit.

“Have you ever possessed child pornography?” his defense attorney asked.

“Child pornography disgusts me,” Mumford said. “No.”

Image Credits and Reference: https://www.yahoo.com/news/jury-finds-ex-tampa-police-103000634.html