Experimental Farm curator jailed for storing child porn
A former curator of the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum, whose career ended in disgrace in 2013 for storing child pornography on his work computer, has been jailed for two years less a day.
Franz Klingender, 60, was sentenced Wednesday.
He had pleaded guilty last year to storing and distributing child pornography after police recovered at least 14,000 disturbing images and videos from the historian’s computers.
Ottawa detectives were tipped off about Klingender by police in Alaska after they got information in 2012 from Google. That tip and the ensuing investigation led police to an IP address of a computer at the Canada Museum of Science and Technology that was used by Klingender.
Ottawa police recovered thousands of child porn images after executing authorized search warrants on Klingender’s home and office computers in 2013.
Klingender admitted that he had been downloading and trading child-porn images for at least six years, and the prosecution filed 36 pages of emails between him and fellow child-porn criminals dating back to 2010. Crown attorney Mark Holmes told court that the images were distributed from an email account in Klingender’s name.
Klingender, now unemployed, used to give presentations to visitors at the agriculture museum, more commonly known as the Experimental Farm.
At the time of his arrest, museum officials said the Klingender didn’t have much interaction with children and said police told them there was no reason to believe visitors or employees at the museum were in danger.
Klingender was hired at the museum back in 1999 and fired in 2013 following an internal investigation weeks after his arrest.
The disgraced curator was arrested as he prepared to board a flight for the United Kingdom.
A doctor in the criminal case said Klingender is a low risk to re-offend and court heard he wants to serve his sentence at a mental-health facility, rather than regular jail.