Man pleads guilty to using daughter for child porn

TAMPA -- Brian Richard Wilcox looked off into the distance as a federal prosecutor detailed in court today the time Wilcox walked into his 11-year-old daughter's room and snapped photographs of her private parts while she slept.

The Tampa man barely blinked when the judge was told Wilcox uploaded the image to an album on the Web site Photobucket.

Once Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Kaiser finished laying out the allegations, Wilcox, 49, pleaded guilty to production of child pornography, possession of child pornography and transporting or shipping child pornography. The production and transporting felony charges each carry a minimum 15-year prison sentence.

Wilcox said little during court, except to answer yes or no questions from U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth A. Jenkins. U.S. District Judge James D. Whittemore will sentence Wilcox later.

Officials with Photobucket, a picture-sharing site, contacted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children when they found images depicting child pornography on the site, Kaiser said. The agency then contacted the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, which began its own investigation.

Sheriff's Office detectives found images of a young female, clothed and semiclothed, uploaded by the same e-mail address to Photobucket. They traced the e-mails to an online account with Bright House Networks and subpoenaed Bright House for the subscriber information.

With Wilcox's Beneva Drive address in hand, the Sheriff's Office got a search warrant for his home.

Wilcox admitted to investigators that he had taken the pictures of his daughter, Kaiser said.

Court documents say that detectives searched a computer at Wilcox's home and found at least 120 images of child pornography on it.

Kevin Graham, Times staff writer