Guilty plea in Willistown sex case

Lawrence Jamieson Jr. to be sentenced in January

PHILADELPHIA » The Willistown man accused of engineering a sexual triangle involving himself, a teenage girl, and a tire store employee has pleaded guilty to federal charges in the case, including the possession of hundreds of thousands of child porn images found in his home.

Lawrence “Larry” Jamieson Jr. entered his guilty plea on Sept. 6 in the case that grew out of an investigation by Willistown police into allegations that Jamieson and another man, John Christopher Brown of Norristown, shared a sexual relationship with a teenage girl.

He pleaded guilty to single counts of possession of child pornography and using an interstate commerce facility to entice a minor to engage in sexual conduct, and three counts of manufacturing child pornography. Based on federal sentencing guidelines laid out in a memorandum by Assistant Attorney General Michelle Rotella, Jamieson could be sentenced to life in a federal prison.

The guidelines call for a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison for the enticing charge.

Sentencing will occur in January.

Jamieson, 58, has been in custody since his arrest in August 2016. A private contractor, he’s a member of a well-known and respected Main Line family. His late father Larry Jamieson Sr., was a

successful insurance agent with Massachusetts Life Insurance Co. in Paoli, and once a member of Downingtown Borough Council. He died in 2010. His mother is Kathleen Casey Jamieson, the owner of a well-known interior design business in Haverford.

Brown, 26, also entered guilty pleas to similar charges, and will also be sentenced in 2018.

The victim in the case, who was 15 and 16 at the time of the illicit relationship with Jamieson and Brown, did not attend the hearing before U.S. District Judge Gene E.K. Pratter, although her mother, who had discovered the relationship, did.

Defense attorney Arthur Donato of Media, representing Jamieson, said he would now begin working towards securing a favorable sentence for his client. “Now that the plea has been entered and accepted, this becomes a sentencing case,” Donato said. “We will argue for a reasonable sentence under the circumstances.”

Rotella’s memorandum does not indicate what sentence her office will seek for Jamieson and Brown, although most observers say that a recommendation of a life sentence of consecutive terms is not out of the question.

In March, acting U.S. Attorney Louis D. Lappen, announced the unsealing of a 42-count indictment against Jamieson and Brown involving their alleged sexual abuse of the teenage girl, images of the girl having sex, and the discovery of a cache of child pornography in Jamieson’s home. They had previously been charged by Chester County authorities; the case against them in Common Pleas Court is on hold pending the outcome of the federal case.

Local authorities said in August that the men had conspired to lure a teenage girl that Jamieson knew into a sexual relationship with Brown, and then into a similar situation with himself. The men then exchanged sexually explicit videos and photos involving the girl. When Willistown investigators arrested Jamieson and searched his township home, they allegedly found a horde of child pornography that they said reached 14.4 million illegal images, including those of the victim.

According to the criminal complaints filed against the men by Willistown Detective Stephen Jones, Jamieson introduced the young girl to Brown in February 2015 when she was 15. Jamieson told the girl that Brown was only 17 years old, a high school student like her, even though he was 23 years old at the time. Authorities said Brown changed his appearance to make him seem much younger than he actually was.

When police interviewed the girl in 2016, she told them that she had been dating Brown for over a year, and that he was “everything she ever wanted in a boyfriend.”

The abuse of the girl allegedly took place on multiple occasions in Chester and Montgomery counties over more than 18 months, when she was aged between 15 and 17, and included the pair’s photographing, videotaping, and distributing images and videos of the girl in sexual situations.

Brown was also charged with taking sexually explicit photos of a second victim, an infant girl. Lastly, the indictment also charges Jamieson and Brown with maintaining collections of sexually explicit images of children taken from the internet.

The federal case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims.