Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Man serving life for child rape pleads guilty to federal charges

- By Torsten Ove

For a decade, Eric Stull videotaped himself raping a young girl from the time she was a toddler until she was 11.

He admitted to doing it and is serving up to 680 years in state prison for the rapes.

On Tuesday in federal court he admitted to the crime again, this time pleading guilty to producing and possessing the videos and images as part of a federal child pornograph­y indictment brought against him in June.

He also admitted to distributi­ng other child porn, unrelated to the abuse, on the BitTorrent file-sharing network discovered by an undercover state trooper.

Stull, 48, of Morgan Township in Greene County, pleaded guilty to 41 child porn counts before U.S. District Judge Donetta Ambrose as his wife wept in the gallery and her grown children hugged her in an effort to ease her pain.

After Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica Smolar read a harrowing account of the rapes detailed in the video recordings, Judge Ambrose asked Stull if he agreed with the government’s descriptio­n of what he did. “Yes,” he said. When he pleaded guilty to the rapes in Greene County in October 2016, he had cried.

“I destroyed [her] innocence,” he said then. “I destroyed my family’s dreams. You’ve seen the videos. I was wrong.”

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette does not identify the victims of sex

crimes.

The abuse may never have been uncovered except for Stull’s sharing of other child porn on BitTorrent.

A trooper discovered the files and traced them to Stull’s address in the tiny village of Clarksvill­e. Police raided the place in April 2016. On his computers, they found the child porn he had been sharing on the network. Until that point, the case was a routine child porn investigat­ion.

But the search also turned up 39 recordings of Stull raping the girl from May 2006, when she was a year and 11 months old, until the date of the search, when she was 11 years old.

The 39 files he had on his computer correspond to counts 1 through 39 of the indictment handed up by a federal grand jury in June. Two other counts pertain to the other child porn he shared online.

Stull pleaded to it all and faces up to another 40 years.

Judge Ambrose set sentencing for Jan. 8, and U.S. marshals took him away.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States