Editor’s note: This story contains sexually graphic subject matter involving young children and sexual torture. Read at your discretion.
Accused of keeping videos on his phone depicting the sexual torture of babies and toddlers, a Green River man who recently moved to Casper is facing up to 50 years in prison.
Casper police arrested Eric J. Evans, who is 27 this year, on Aug. 5 for felony drug possession after a traffic stop and they took charge of his cellphone, according to an evidentiary affidavit filed in Casper Circuit Court on Aug. 15.
Officer Matt White got a search warrant two days after Evans’ arrest and started sifting through the defendant’s phone, looking for evidence of illegal drug deals. But when White stumbled across a video showing a man committing sex acts on a female who appeared to be prepubescent, he put the phone down, says the affidavit.
White turned the phone over to the state's Internet Crimes Against Children team, including Special Agents Ryan Hieb and Colten Carpenter, and Homeland Security forensic analyst Caleb Forness.
The agents got a second search warrant, this time to search the phone for child pornography. Casper Circuit Court Judge Brian Christensen granted the warrant, and the agents went through the phone’s images gallery. It contained about 46 child pornography videos and about 2,045 images of child pornography. Some showed sadomasochism, sex acts against infants and toddlers, and bestiality, the affidavit says.
Crying And Screaming Throughout
The videos included a video showing an adult female wearing a mask, removing a diaper from a young female child, then rubbing the child’s genitalia with an ice cube until the child cried, the affidavit says. The woman also duct-taped the child’s mouth.
The video also allegedly showed the child hung upside down over a bed by her feet while the woman applied nipple clamps to the child and started slapping the child’s genitalia.
“Various other forms of torture” followed, including someone pouring hot wax on the child while she was tied up, screaming and crying, says the document.
In another video, the same masked woman performed various sex acts on a small child and urinated on the child’s face while the child cried, the affidavit says.
Another video shows a man sodomizing a child whose hands are chained to her ankles, neck is collared and whose eyes are blindfolded, the affidavit says.
Let’s Talk
Carpenter and Hieb met with Evans and the Natrona County Detention Center and delivered his Miranda rights.
Evans said he moved to Casper in December 2022 from the Green River/Rock Springs area. He was homeless and living with other people, he said, and he had recently relapsed into drug addiction in Casper, the affidavit relates.
But they weren’t there to talk about drugs, the agents informed Evans. They were there to talk about files they found in his phone.
Evans denied knowledge of the files and said other people had been using his phone.
As the interview progressed, he said he got onto the dark web to learn how to make “DMT, Acid and Anarchist Cookbook type stuff” – drugs.
“I am not trying to get that jacket,” he said. “I’m not a pedophile.”
An inmate’s “jacket” refers to the charges of which he’s convicted.
‘Couldn’t Erase It’
He kept looking for drug recipes, Evans continued.
“At one point downloading a file off the dark web, it was supposed to be a file for ways to make different types of drugs, but I downloaded the child pornography,” he said, according to the affidavit. “And some of them I couldn’t erase and it had to have a password and I just didn’t know what the f*** to do with it.”
Evans said he was “not into kids, but was into rape and stuff like that,” says the affidavit. “I never intentionally downloaded anything about kids from what I remember.”
Hieb countered.
“Here is the problem with that – “ began Hieb.
“OK, I did,” Evans allegedly interrupted. “I did, dude, this is so embarrassing. I’m trying not to have that jacket.”
No Clue
The affidavit says Evans said he first saw child pornography about fives months prior on the dark web browser while he was living in Casper.
“This is going to end up f***ing me so I go to prison for these charges, but I did it – you know what I mean?” he said, the affidavit relates.
He said he wanted help and wanted to go to rehab.
“I would rather be f***ing dead than going to prison for this shit, for real,” Evans told investigators.
Evans said there were between 10 and 20 child pornography files on his phone.
Hieb asked if Evans would be shocked if there were instead more than 100.
“It better not be,” Evans answered, adding that he was only interested in videos and not pictures, because the pictures are pointless, the affidavit says.
The document relates that Evans at first said the children were as young as 11, but later acknowledged that the subjects in the files ranged from infants to adults.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
