A 67-year-old man is going to prison on child sexual abuse charges after a disturbing discovery by construction workers spurred an investigation in Missouri, federal officials say.
Harold Lloyd Blair Jr. , of Ava, was sentenced to 58 years in federal prison on June 20, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri.
McClatchy News reached out to an attorney representing Blair for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.
Located in the heart of the Ozarks , the town of Ava has a population of about 3,000 people and is a roughly 220-mile drive southeast from Kansas City.
Blair is accused of abusing multiple children over the course of years, but the investigation started shortly after he sold his house to Douglas County, officials said. County workers were in the process of tearing down the home in December 2022, when they came across a trove of photos stored in a filing cabinet, and what they saw prompted them to call police.
“The workers discovered a filing cabinet that contained numerous pages of images of a young girl engaged in sexual acts with an older man,” officials said, and Blair was taken in for questioning by the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department.
“Blair admitted that he was the man portrayed in the photos, which were taken in 2012 and 2013, when the two child victims each were approximately 11 to 12 years old,” according to officials.
The 52 photos, shot with a digital camera and printed using his home computer, were just a small portion of his collection — a handful that he’d forgotten about, officials said.
“Blair told investigators that, if he had remembered those photographs were in the house, he would have destroyed them,” officials said.
Investigators said they soon learned of a storage unit belonging to Blair and found more evidence. A total of 743 images of children, mostly featuring the same two victims, were found in the storage unit and the filing cabinet.
“Blair admitted that he sexually assaulted one of the child victims two to three times a day,” according to investigators. “Blair showed adult pornography to each of the child victims so they could imitate what was happening in the videos.”
During the investigation, deputies learned of two additional victims, one of whom told investigators she was assaulted by Blair when she was just 3 years old. The other was a 13-year-old girl who officials say Blair “moved from state to state in an attempt to find a state that would allow him to marry a minor without her parents’ consent.”
Blair’s sentencing comes months after he pleaded guilty in January to two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, officials said.
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