Pastor of Texas church ‘knew it was wrong,’ but kept downloading child porn, feds say

The longtime pastor of a Texas baptist church was arrested on child porn charges after federal authorities said he downloaded and shared the explicit content — at times from the church.

David Lloyd Walther, the pastor at Faith Baptist Church in Round Rock, was charged with distribution, receipt, transportation and possession of child pornography, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas.

The church has disabled its Facebook page and set its Instagram account to private. But in a statement to the Austin American-Statesman, deacon David Clawson said church leaders “regret anything” that happened.

“The church will continue to move forward as God has led,” said Clawson, who told the American-Statesman that Walther had been a pastor at the church for 18 years.

McClatchy News has reached out to Walther’s attorney and is awaiting a response.

Walther, 56, downloaded the child porn from the peer-to-peer file sharing network BitTorrent, according to a criminal complaint. The network allows a person to download files, which in turn can be downloaded by others.

Investigators found Walther downloaded and shared BDSM and bestiality-related pornography images of children, some of whom were toddler-aged, the complaint states. He also allowed access to videos of young children engaged in sexual activity, according to court documents.

Walther downloaded the content from Faith Baptist Church as well as his own home in Georgetown, authorities said.

Investigators found a 4-terabyte hard drive in his home and 2-terabyte hard drive in his vehicle that contained “numerous deleted files with filenames consistent with child pornography,” an FBI agent said in the criminal complaint. He told an FBI agent he downloaded and saved the pornography to the hard drives, according to the court documents.

What the pastor told authorities

Interviewed at his Georgetown home on Wednesday, Nov. 9, Walther said he “had a pornography addiction” and admitted to seeking out and downloading the content involving children, the complaint states.

He said he did not know he was sharing the pornography with others through the BitTorrent network.

“(Walther stated) he would download child pornography files, but would often feel guilty and go through a ‘purging’ of files, i.e., deleting the images and associated files, because he knew it was wrong,” the FBI agent said.

Walther faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

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