(Part 2 of a series. In the previous installment: Court records show puzzling inconsistencies in the case against Larry Benedict.)
CANANDAIGUA, New York -- Larry Benedict's halcyon life as a soon-to-be husband, a senior engineer at Xerox and a computer-game buff abruptly ended on Feb. 10, 1995.
On that chilly winter evening, an armed squad of New York state police and postal inspectors broke through Benedict's patio door. Their search warrant cited violations of 18 U.S.C. 2252: the federal child pornography law.
In his application for a search warrant, veteran postal inspector Terrence Loftus wrote: "I do believe that there is evidence of the commission of a federal offense, contraband and the fruits of a violation of Title 18, United States Code ... at the residence of Lawrence Benedict."
Born in 1944, Loftus began his career as a postal inspector in 1971, and eventually became a specialist in cases involving marijuana shipments, obscenity and child pornography. As of February 1995, Loftus claimed to have investigated over 40 child porn cases and to have participated in dozens of raids on defendants' homes.
Loftus, then a Connecticut postal inspector, was extensively quoted in a March 1992 Hartford Courant article that said photo labs were being told to report suspected child porn activity.
"Loftus acknowledged that he will investigate photographs that are neither sexually explicit nor concrete evidence of a crime," Courant reporter Suzanne Sataline wrote. "Sometimes, he and others said, pictures hint at some other wrongdoing."
Loftus wrote in his affidavit for a search warrant that "most collectors seek to increase the size of their collections -- as do collectors of legal items such as coins, stamps or rare books -- so they retain these materials."
Loftus said there was probable cause to believe investigators would unearth "records, documents and materials" relating to child porn inside Benedict's home.
Some 40 minutes after the break-in, Benedict and his fiancée drove by to find the street jammed with police cars, lights ablaze. The trio -- accompanying them was his fiancée's young son from her first marriage -- were driving to Naples, New York, to see a priest about their upcoming wedding.
"We thought it was a gas leak, so we started running down," Benedict says.
Officers were lugging plastic postal bins, the kind usually used to carry heaps of envelopes, to a nearby Postal Service truck. They had confiscated all of Benedict's computers and 5.25-inch floppy disks -- and, for good measure, nabbed his Panasonic VCR, three printers, a joystick, manuals and even a Realistic SA-10 stereo amplifier and speakers.
A uniformed state trooper allowed Benedict to enter his home. Loftus, the postal inspector, says he told Benedict that it was a child porn raid -- but informed Benedict he was not under arrest.
Benedict told Loftus that he wanted an attorney, and his fiancée began scouring the Yellow Pages for a law office that might be open after 5 p.m. on a Friday. "Mr. Benedict had indicated that he wanted to talk to an attorney," state police inspector Robert Beswick testified at a pre-trial hearing. "The female companion with him told him that she would call an attorney and then she appeared to be looking up a name in the phone book."
What happened in the next few minutes has different versions.
Benedict says a burly policeman started to bump into him intentionally (his fiancée corroborated this allegation). Then, according to Benedict, postal inspector Loftus took him aside and threatened Benedict with the pry bar used to open the patio door -- telling him to reveal where he stashed his child porn collection, or else.
As soon as he was threatened, Benedict says, he fled back to the living room where his fiancée was still punching numbers into the phone.
Loftus tells a far different story. In his testimony that led a grand jury to indict Benedict, Loftus said that Benedict confessed to trafficking in child porn.
"I don't have it. I'm out of it. I burned it," Loftus quoted Benedict as saying during the conversation.
While some of the variances in Loftus' testimony can be attributed to expected memory lapses -- he testified about the February 1995 raid four years later -- other discrepancies are more difficult to explain.
According to a grand jury transcript, Loftus told the grand jury that a state police investigator, Robert Beswick, had accompanied Benedict to the lower level of the house -- at which point Benedict allegedly confessed to both of them.
"Now, was Investigator Beswick present when you had the conversation in the lower level with Mr. Benedict?" Benedict's defense attorney asked Loftus. Replied Loftus: "Yes, he was."
During his own appearance on the witness stand, Beswick insisted he never went downstairs and never heard any confession: "I do not recall being on the lower level at all with Mr. Benedict.... As I testified probably three times, I don't recall being on the lower level."
Beswick claims to have been with Benedict at all times while he was in the house.
According to the transcript and court documents, Loftus:
- Said Benedict admitted to burning his child porn stash in a barrel behind the house. But Loftus did not seize the barrel or its contents, which could have provided tangible evidence of a crime.
- Testified he didn't recall seeing a pry bar -- such as the one Benedict claims to have been threatened with -- at any point that evening. But the state police insist Loftus was the one who broke down the door, and a report prepared by the state police reads: "Point of Entry: South Side Porch. Mode of Entry: Forced open door by prying."
- Claimed he immediately read Benedict his Miranda rights. Benedict and his then-fiancée deny it, and no other law enforcement official heard it -- although at least one state trooper reports being in the room. If Benedict had asked for a lawyer because he thought he was under arrest, all interrogation by law needed to be halted at that point.
- Claimed he had never been "in the vicinity" of Benedict's home before the search -- even though his search warrant affidavit says he and a colleague "drove to the premises" the previous day and took two Polaroid photographs of the house.
- Expropriated Benedict's stereo system and speakers, even though the search warrant authorized police to seize only "equipment used to visually depict minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct."
Loftus has retired from his job as a postal inspector and could not be reached for comment.
After three hours of intensive searching, neither Loftus nor the state police were able to find any physical evidence of child porn in Benedict's home. They hauled away his computers for further analysis.
One of Benedict's hobbies was trading computer games with, he says, friends and casual acquaintances contacted through bulletin board systems and even word of mouth.
"After I got into the house, I thought it had to do with the computer games," Benedict says. "I thought they were going to seize my illegal copyrighted computer games."
If what he says now is accurate, that early guess wasn't far off.
What is undisputed is that Benedict occasionally traded disks of some kind with a San Diego man, Mikel Bolander, who had served a prison term for molesting an 11-year-old boy. Bolander had been paroled in 1992 and was living with his mother and stepfather.
The federal government says that instead of computer games, Benedict and Bolander were trading floppy disks and backup tapes that were overflowing with illicit images.
(In Part 3 of this series: Larry Benedict is accused of swapping digitized child porn with a recidivist pedophile.)
